The Graceless Fall

Chapter 20

CATE

He came in fast that night. Through the door before I heard the stairs, down to the basement in the dark, and he stood a long time in front of the covered panel without touching it, reading the room the way he reads corners.

"Something moved through here," he said, finally. "It has already gone. It did not come in."

"The lights flickered," I said. "Whole window's worth. Probably the grid."

He looked at me for a moment. I did not mention the Post-it, and I told myself that a power flicker wasn't a term-one item, and I almost believed me.

He stayed between me and the basement door the rest of the night.

The next morning the strangeness had nowhere to live — the coffee was terrible, Donnie's television came through the ceiling, the world had its ordinary weight — and by Friday what was left was mostly this:

Living with him is a strange education in small things.

He makes the bed. Military-flat, corners like a diagram, every morning, before I'm done with my first thoughts — and then he stands looking at it for a second, and I have started to understand that the looking is the point.

He made a bed. In a house. Where he lives.

Some mornings I catch him touching things on his way through a room — the doorframe, the back of Nonna's chair, the St. Anthony magnet — one finger, light, the touch you use on something you're confirming is still there.

Friday I closed the studio early. The letters could keep. He'd said don't hurry, and for once in my working life I was taking the note.

"Come somewhere with me," he said, when the light started going.

"Where?"

"Up."

Being carried by him is nothing like being carried.

His arm came around my waist on the stoop, and he looked down at me with the streetlight in the burning blue, and his mouth did the eighth-of-an-inch thing.

"Hold on," he said, in the voice that isn't a suggestion.

"Wait — hold on for what—"

The ground excused itself.

The stoop dropped away. The front of my house poured past my face — my windows, my gutter, my roof, gone — and my stomach stayed somewhere around the second floor while the rest of me went up into the dark.

The sound that came out of me I will deny to my grave.

We came down on the Espositos' roofline like a thought landing.

One step. And then the roof edge was there and past, and we were over the gap — the alley below us, four stories of dark air and one astonished cat — and I did the only human thing there is to do at altitude in the grip of a fallen angel: I locked both arms around his neck and swore in two languages.

He laughed.

He laughed — I felt it happen in his chest, low, real, unbanked, a thing I could count on one hand — and the next roof took us and gave us up, and the next, and somewhere over the third block my body stopped filing objections and started paying attention.

Because it was — God forgive me — glorious.

The rhythm of it. Down soft as a held note, up like the ground was a suggestion he was declining.

Water tanks pouring past. Chimneys. A pigeon coop, a man's forgotten undershirt on a line, the el sliding its bright windows through the dark below us.

The whole borough turning over under me like a page, and his arms around me the entire time — iron holding porcelain.

The cold couldn't reach me. The fall couldn't reach me. Nothing in this world or under it could reach me.

I opened my eyes all the way, and I started to laugh.

I laughed over three blocks of Brooklyn rooftop, into the wind, like a lunatic, like a girl, and I felt him hold me a fraction tighter every time.

We landed on the warehouse roof.

"Again," I said, before my feet even settled. "At some point. Not now. But that's a thing we do now. I'm telling you, not asking."

"Noted." He set me down and kept one hand at my back until my knees signed off. And then, looking at me with the whole flight still in his face: "That's basically flying," he said.

My words. Handed back across the kitchen table, across the cold that had come down on them the first time.

"No," I said, careful, watching him.

"No," he agreed. And the grief was still in it, all the way down — but it wasn't only grief this time. I'd been laughing in his arms thirty seconds ago, and I let myself take the credit. "But it is the closest the word has come since the fall."

He set me on my feet and kept one hand at my back until my knees signed off.

The wind came up off the water, and I flexed my right hand against the ache without thinking about it — working the thumb, the end-of-day rub, the same one I do every night after a bench day.

He watched me do it.

"Give me your hands."

"What?"

"Your hands. Give them to me."

I gave them to him — cramped, cold already in the wind, the right one carrying that deep wire of ache along the thumb that is the tax of my whole trade — and he folded them both inside his, completely.

He went still for half a breath — somewhere else entirely; I felt it arrive and leave through his hands.

Then the warmth came.

Not skin-warmth. Warmth with intention — it poured down into the joints like something molten finding its channels, into the knuckles, along the wire of the ache.

And the ache didn't fade. It left, the way a cramp lets go all at once.

My whole right hand unclenched for the first time since Monday, and I heard myself make a sound like I'd put it in bathwater.

"What — what is that. What did you just do."

"Something all of us can do." He turned my hands over inside his, and the warmth kept working down into the wrists. "We could quiet a fever. Ease an ache. Put a child back to sleep."

"You didn't tell me this."

"We were reprimanded for it, when we were caught. The job was watching — only watching." His thumbs moved over my palms, once.

I didn't have anything to say to that that wouldn't have broken something, so I didn't say it.

"Look."

Brooklyn, from six stories, at the blue hour.

The lights coming on in their thousands, block by block, like the borough remembering itself.

The harbor a dark sheet with the ferries stitching it.

The Parachute Jump lit up red down at the water, and the el trains sliding their bright windows through the dark, And three blocks over, my roofline — I never would have found it.

He turned me by the shoulders and aimed me down a seam between two taller houses, and there, at the bottom of the notch, one small yellow light was burning. My kitchen. Left on.

He didn't have to search for the sightline. He knew exactly where it was.

"Oh," I said.

"Yes."

"This is what you see. This is — all those nights, this is what my window looks like."

"That is what your window looks like." He stood beside me, hands at his sides, and the wind came off the water and didn't touch him. "For a long while it was the only light on this roofline I had any use for."

I stood inside his watching. That's the only way I can say it.

All those weeks I had been the thing on the other end of this exact sightline — the woman in the yellow window, watched over and not knowing it.

Now I was up here inside the watching, looking down at my life.

And my life looked small and warm and worth guarding, and I understood something about him that no answer at any table had gotten to.

"You can see everything from here," I said.

"No." He said it quietly. "You can see everything from here that can be seen.

It is not the same thing. I stood on rooftops over this borough while your grandmother was a bride, Caterina.

I watched the neighborhood get built. I watched it fill and empty and fill again.

I have seen everything from up here." He looked down at the yellow window.

"I had never once been in any of it until you fed me eggs. "

I put my hand in his. His fingers closed around mine, careful, complete.

We stood there while the blue went to black, and the cold came up off the tar paper, and he shifted, just slightly, so that his body broke the wind before it reached me — not a gesture, not a move, just a fact quietly installed between me and the wind — and something in my chest turned over and lay down different.

And then I said it. Because it had been sitting in me since Sunday, since the plates, since the thought with the cold hands, and the roof felt like the one place high enough to hold it.

"I'm going to die."

He went completely still.

"Not — nothing's wrong. I'm fine. I mean the whole thing. The general fact." I kept my eyes on the harbor, because it was easier than his face. "I've been counting since Sunday — don't tell me not to. Gina's twelve. Nina and I were twelve. It goes fast, is my point. And you—"

I made myself turn and look up at him.

"You made a bed this morning and looked at it like it was a miracle.

And you've had forever, and I'm going to get, what.

Fifty more, if the Gowanus behaves? Sixty?

" My voice did something and I let it. "And then you're going to be up on some roof again.

Watching somebody else's window with nobody in it.

And I can't — I've been carrying that around all week. "

For a long time he didn't say anything. The trains went by below, bright and gone.

"Sar said it to me first," he said, finally. "On the boat. I did not tell you that part."

"He — Sar talked about me dying? Nice. Great pastry investment."

"He told me what it costs. To love one of you all the way to the end.

" His voice was level and there was nothing level under it.

"He watched brothers do it. He built his whole existence around never owing it himself.

And standing in his galley, which is the emptiest immaculate place I have ever stood, he told me that the ones who paid it — every one of them — would not have traded a single day back.

And that he saved nothing." He turned to face me, all the way.

"I have had a week to weigh his testimony, Caterina. Here is where I came out."

He took my face in both hands. On a dark roof, with all of Brooklyn burning below us and the wind going around us like we were a rock in a river — and this close, unbanked, the pull of him came off his skin like heat off August asphalt.

It is not charm. It is not anything he does.

It is what he is, the thing that made people fall down at annunciations, and it rolled over me whole, and I understood that every painting ever made of his kind was somebody's failed attempt to explain this exact gravity — and I leaned into it with my eyes open, because that is the only way I do anything now.

"And it's worse than dying," I said, because apparently my fear had one more thing it wanted to say, even with his hands on my face.

"I'm going to get old first. Feeble. Wrinkled.

Nonna-old — folded-over, forgetting-the-word-for-colander old.

And you're going to look exactly like this the whole time, forever, and you can't want—"

"Stop."

Not loud. Total. My mouth closed on the rest of it.

"You have seen what I am," he said. "Believe me about what I want.

Old is not less of you, Caterina. It is more of you — more years of you, written down where I can read them.

You think time is going to save you from being wanted?

" His thumbs moved, once, along my cheekbones.

"Nothing is going to save you from being wanted.

"You are going to die. And before that, you are going to live — and I am going to be in it, all of it, every ordinary hour, every Sunday, every terrible cup of coffee, all the way to the end and past it.

And when it is over, I will not stand on a roof and regret you.

I will stand wherever I stand and be the thing you made — a creature who was in the world once, because a woman on Fifth Avenue was worth coming down for. "

His thumbs moved once, along my cheekbones, and the blue was burning steady.

"I have spent the whole exile not looking at anything I could lose. It was not a life, Caterina. You are the life. I would rather have your fifty years than all the rest of forever without them."

"Sixty," I said, into whatever was left of my voice. "I said sixty if the Gowanus behaves."

"Sixty," he agreed, grave as a treaty.

And I went up on my toes and kissed him with the whole borough underneath us.

Raq

The cold never reached her.

I kept it off her — the wind, the tar-chill, the height — the whole time she stood at the parapet learning my sky, and she did not notice I was doing it, and that is the correct way for that work to be done.

And when I folded her hands in mine on the parapet, it came again. Hands, small, in water. The fragment, on its own schedule, grief with no address on it.

Except the hands were older this time.

Or they had always been older, and I had never once looked at the age of them.

Or they were a different pair of hands entirely — hers, sixty years from now, in some water I have not yet stood beside.

I do not know. That is what I carried down off the roof: I no longer know whether the grief in me is a memory or an appointment.

But I noticed what she gave me, and I will say it plainly: she stood on my post, in my watching, in the exact place my exile has been stationed for the length of her whole civilization — and she made it a place two people had been.

There is no roof in this borough I have not stood on.

As of tonight there is one I stood on with her. The difference is total.

And when she said the thing — I'm going to die — flat, brave, her chin up and her voice failing, naming the dangerous answer like I taught her, my whole existence came to a point, and I found that Sar's testimony had already finished its work in me somewhere over the week without my supervision, because there was no decision left to make. There was only the telling of it.

She kissed me with the borough underneath us, and her heart was going hard, and what came off her skin was not grief.

I took us home the fast way. She laughed the whole three blocks — that unguarded sound, the one that redraws my maps — and the laugh was still on her mouth when the door closed, and then it changed into something else, and neither of us reached for the lamp, and neither of us turned it off either.

Afterward she slept against my chest with one fist in the quilt, and the kitchen light we had left burning laid its small yellow line under the bedroom curtain, and I lay in the dark of a house I live in and held a mortal woman and weighed the price Sar told me no one regrets.

Fifty years. Sixty, if the Gowanus behaves.

I have stood longer watches than that over empty water, waiting for nothing.

This watch has her in it. I will not miss an hour.