Could've Been You

The first time

I got to the roof two hours early because I did not trust myself to do any of it fast.

The lights came in a box that said four hundred count, warm white, indoor outdoor. I had never strung a light on anything in my life. Fighters tape their hands and hit what is in front of them. We are not known for decorating. But I had a picture in my head and the picture was exact, and when a picture is exact you do not argue with it, you just start at one end of the roof and work your way around, clipping the line to the rail, to the vent pipes, to the old antenna nobody had bothered to take down since the school put it up sometime before I was born.

Twice the whole string came down. Once because I stepped on it, once because the clip by the stair door gave up out of pure spite. Both times I stood there in the wind off the bay with lights pooled around my boots like something drowned, and I understood I was going to be on that roof until I got it right, even if she came up the stairs and found me in the middle of the getting it right.

The vent pipe was where it had happened, five years before, and a man does not stand next to a thing like that without it standing up in him.

A young man had climbed those stairs straight up from the gym on the third floor with his hands still taped from training, wanting one cigarette and one minute of nobody needing anything from him, and come around the vent pipe to find three boys with a girl backed against the stair door, and her chin up, and her camera held in front of her like a shield she had already decided to die behind.

He had not been a hero. He wants the record clear on that. He had been annoyed. He had come up there to be alone, and the universe, which has never once respected a plan of mine, handed him a person instead.

"Hey," he said, the way you talk to weather. "Move."

They moved. Not because of the word. Because of everything standing behind the word, six feet of it and filling out monthly, with a reputation that had started in those hallways and never once been exaggerated by anyone.

She had looked at him then the way she looked at weather she intended to photograph.

"You smoke up here every day?" she asked, while the stairwell still echoed with boys becoming scarce.

"Most days."

"Then I will see you tomorrow," she said, and went down the stairs with her camera and her chin and her whole unkillable nerve, and he stood there holding a cigarette he had completely forgotten to smoke, understanding that something had just been scheduled.

She was eighteen, a senior, all nerve and camera. He was twenty-one. It took five more years, and everybody who knew us treating it like a weather event they had been forecasting the whole time, before either of us called it what it was. A date. This date. The one I was up on that roof stringing four hundred lights for, with a rookie's hands.

She almost did.

I heard the stair door at seven. My hands knew it before the rest of me did. They went still on the wire, the way they go still in the second before a bell, and then I was turning around with a string of warm white lights wrapped twice around my left forearm like I had been caught robbing Christmas.

Virginia stood in the doorway with her camera bag on one shoulder and both hands over her mouth.

She was laughing. She was also crying a little. With her those two things shared an apartment and neither one ever paid rent on time.

"You did the lights," she said.

"You said you liked lights."

"I said that one time. In February."

"I wrote it down."

She came across the roof slowly, the way people cross a room they are trying to memorize. Her camera came up before she reached me, the way it always did, like her hands needed to hold the world before her heart tried to. The flash went off. Me, on a roof, tangled in February's sentence.

"Evidence," she said. "In case you deny this later."

"I am not going to deny it."

"You deny everything. It is your whole system. Sebastian Seamless, human locked door."

"Then take another one."

She did. She took eleven. She took the vent pipe with the lights on it, and the stair door with the lights over it, and the rail, and the sky going orange over the water, and somewhere in the middle of all that professional documenting she finally looked at the table.

I had set the table up against the low wall where the wind could not sit on it. A board on two crates, her grandmother's cloth over it, the kind of cloth you do not borrow unless you have been fully briefed on what happens to you if it comes back stained. And on the cloth, in a row, in order, because I knew there was an order even before she ever told me there was one:

Chocolate strawberries. Strawberry bread. Macarons, the pink ones and the cream ones. A bowl of chocolate pudding with the skin still on it, the way she liked, because the skin was the best part and anyone who stirred it away was committing a crime she was prepared to report. And at the end of the row, nested in a pan of ice under the silver cover I had borrowed off a catering tray and sworn on my life to return, the baked Alaska — ice cream at the heart of all that cake and meringue, holding its cold like a secret, on a clock only I could hear.

She did not say anything for a while.

"That is all of them," she said at last.

"That is all of them."

"That is every dessert I have ever told you I love. In my whole life. Since I was twelve."

"Since you were twelve," I said. "I pay attention better than I talk. It is a known flaw."

She set her camera down like it was sleeping, and she crossed the last of the roof, and she put her forehead against my chest, right over the place where my heart was doing something no opponent had ever managed to make it do.

"You are in so much trouble," she said.

"I know."

"Years of it. You have no idea. A man does a thing like this once, he has to do it forever. That is the law now. I do not make the law."

"I will do it forever, then."

She pulled back and looked up at me, and her eyes were wet and entirely unbothered about it, blue as anything the sky had managed that evening, and she said the thing she said every single time she was happy enough that it scared her a little.

"Well. Feed me, then, Seamless. A girl could starve under all this romance."

But first she inspected the row, because Virginia Wimbly inspected everything the way other people prayed.

"The order, though," she said.

"There is an order?"

"There is absolutely an order. You almost had it." She walked the table like a general with one small delicious war to run. "Strawberries first. Always first, they are the hello. Bread second, it is soft, it settles a person. Macarons third, they are the fancy part, you do not waste the fancy part on a mouth that is not ready. Pudding fourth."

"Pudding is fourth," I said. "The skin goes first, though. Inside the fourth."

"The skin goes first inside the fourth," she said, with the gravity of a judge. "And the Alaska is last because the Alaska is on fire, and you do not start a meal with the fire, Sebastian. You build to the fire."

"I will write all of this down."

"You had better. There will be a test every year for the rest of your life."

She said it as a joke. We both heard it land as something else, and neither of us corrected it.

Later, with the pudding skinned and the macarons down to the cream ones, she lay back on the blanket I had not thought to bring until she produced it from her own bag, because one of us had to be an adult, and she told me about the piece she was writing. The paper had taken her last one, the one about the fights, the one she had spent three weekends shooting in a warehouse off the industrial end of the city, my face in half of it, blood on the canvas in the other half, and an editor who had wanted her to make it ugly, make it about animals. She had refused. She had written it about discipline instead. About what a man owes the part of himself that knows how to hurt people, which is control, and more control, and then, on the one night it is allowed, everything.

"They are going to say I am biased," she said to the sky.

"Are you biased?"

"I am extremely biased." She turned her head and looked at me with her whole face. "I have been biased since I was eighteen years old, and I have decided to stop being embarrassed about it in print."

I did not have a sentence for that. I had a hand, and I put it on the blanket between us, palm up, and after a while, without looking, like it was the most ordinary thing in the world, she put hers in it.

"You are going to get out of it clean, though," she said. "The fighting. I have decided that too. Say it back to me so it is on the record."

"I am going to get out of it clean."

"And I am going to photograph this city until I am a hundred." She lifted her camera one-handed and took a picture of the sky doing nothing at all, just being San Francisco at night, fog starting its slow opinion at the edges. "Starting with this roof. This roof is mine. I am going to shoot it every year until it falls down or I do."

One year later

I got to the roof two hours early because some things a man does not leave to the last minute, and her anniversary was the whole list.

The lights went up in forty minutes. Four hundred count, warm white, indoor outdoor. My hands knew the clips now. They knew the rail and the vent pipes and the old antenna, and if my hands went still once, at the stair door end, it was not nerves. It was respect. A roof like this one had seniority over both of us. We had been meeting on it since she was eighteen and I was twenty-one, and neither of us had the words yet for what we were to each other.

The school had been a school then. The building wore other names now, offices and studios and a gym on the third floor where I sometimes trained kids who thought underground meant a basement. But the roof had never been renovated, never been claimed. The city changed its mind about everything underneath us and left the top alone, and I have always thought that was the most honest thing San Francisco ever did.

I laid the cloth. Her grandmother's cloth, returned spotless the year before, borrowed again with a longer briefing. The row went down in order. Muscle memory. Devotion is mostly muscle memory that refused to quit.

Chocolate strawberries. Strawberry bread. Macarons, pink and cream. The pudding, skin on, unmolested. The Alaska under its silver cover, on its bed of ice, keeping its cold — a fresh pan this year, packed tighter, because the year before it had started to weep at the edges by the time we reached it and she had eaten it fast and laughing with it running down her spoon. A man fixes the leaks.

And because a year teaches a man the places where the ritual leaks, I had fixed the leaks. There was a second blanket this time, folded on the crate, for when the wind came off the water after dark and she pretended she was not cold until her teeth started filing a report. There was the thermos of tea she liked, the one with honey already in it. There were napkins that were not paper towels from the gym, a crime of the first year that had been entered into the permanent record.

I stood in the middle of all of it with my hands in my pockets and my knuckles healed clean, no fight within a month of that night in either direction, on purpose, by design, because some evenings deserve a man's whole face unmarked.

At seven in the evening, with my heart going exactly the way it had gone the year before, the stair door opened and she stopped in it with both hands over her mouth.

"You did the lights," she said.

"You said you liked lights."

"I said that one time. Last year. On this roof."

"I wrote it down."

She crossed to me slowly. The camera came up. Eleven photographs, maybe twelve this year, she was getting generous. The vent pipe. The rail. The sky doing its orange work over the bay. Then she saw the table, and the row, and the blanket folded on the crate, and the tea, and the napkins that were actual napkins, and she laughed the laugh that has lived in my ribs since I was twenty-one years old.

"Sebastian Seamless."

"Virginia Wimbly."

"You fixed the leaks."

"A man learns."

"A man pays attention better than he talks," she said. "It is a known flaw." And then her forehead was against my chest, and my arms were where a year had taught them to go, and the lights hummed their small warm hum all around us on the roof where we started, and she said, into my shirt, happy enough that it scared her a little:

"Feed me, Seamless. A girl could starve under all this romance."

So I fed her.

Strawberries first, because strawberries were always first, chocolate gone dark and snapping clean, and her eyes closed like a church door on the first bite, both years, the same. The bread next, soft and red-sweet all the way through. The macarons in their colors. The pudding, and she took the skin off the top in one piece and ate it first with the solemnity of a woman performing a sacrament she had invented and would defend. And last the Alaska, and I struck the match, and the flame went over the meringue in its blue wave, and she photographed the fire instead of eating it for one whole minute while I held the plate and said nothing, because a year had taught me that too: some things she has to hold in her hands before she can hold them in her heart.

"You know what this roof is?" she said, watching the flame settle.

"Tell me."

"It is the only place in this city that has never once asked us to be anything else."

"Sunday," she said, around the last of it, "my mother's. The whole circus. My father will burn something on the grill and call it technique, my brother will eat standing up, my sister will steal my bread off my plate like she has diplomatic immunity."

"And you will photograph all of it."

"And I will photograph all of it, and you will come this time." She pointed her spoon at me. "Not the emergency excuse. Not the gym. You. At the table. My mother has started asking if I invented you to avoid questions, and she is only half joking, and the half that is not joking is gaining ground."

"I will come," I said. "I will eat the burned technique. I will protect your bread with my life."

"With your whole fighting career, if necessary."

"If necessary."

My cousin had called that morning, from wherever cousins call from when they have already decided something about your life, and said: tell her the lights thing worked, we all know it worked, stop pretending the anniversary is a surprise, the woman keeps a calendar in her camera bag and a list in her head, she knew in March. He was my best friend and my blood and the only person alive who could say we about me without earning an argument, and he was right, and she had known, and knowing had not spoiled one second of it. That was the thing about her. Virginia could hold a thing she already knew the way she held a camera. Steady. Like it might still surprise her if she let it.

She ate her Alaska. The wind came off the water and she did not pretend, and I put the blanket around her shoulders and she leaned the whole weight of herself against my side, and the lights burned warm white against the dark coming down over San Francisco, and there was not one thing in the world, not one single thing, that either of us would have traded it for.

Question for you: What is the one place in your life that has never asked you to be anything else?