4

The summer camp where I met you had been less a camp, really, than a holding pen—just a broken-down old rec center a few towns beyond the city. We might have been at school, save for the absence of desks. Three times a day, we moped our way outside to the tangledchain swings, to goalposts without soccer balls. We swung from rusting parallel bars, our palms blooming with wet, cratered blisters. Inside, the mancala game was played with kidney beans, the marbles long since lost. We sang Fish and chips and vinegar, vinegar, vinegar! as we sat on stale tweed couches, the bottoms of our feet nowhere near the floor. When we got too loud, a counselor turned off the lights and put her finger to her lips. We were supposed to raise our hands in answer, to show that we understood. That year I wore thick glasses, and without them the world was underwater. I would take the glasses off and pretend to swim through a private ocean, cupping the air in broad, slow strokes until I ran into something, or a pale, face-shaped orb came into view and placed them back on, saying, in my mother’s voice, Keep your glasses on so you don’t fall down. At camp once, alone on the soccer field, I set my glasses down in the grass and swam away, leagues deep before I understood with a shock that I would have no way to find them again.

The night of your parents’ funeral, I dreamed of that place. You and I were in the soccer field, both of us wearing glasses now—four feet tall, eight years old again. The neglected grass came to our waists. But we were also us at twenty-two, and I was frantic; I wasn’t sure if you knew they were dead. If you didn’t, I wasn’t prepared to tell you. Next to the field was a swanky restaurant, its lighting tinted amber like those souvenir Gold Rush photos taken at the county fair. The waiter seated us at the only table left. There were two chairs, though the table was barely comfortable for one. Our knees smacked. Don’t bring us any meat, you said to the waiter accusingly. It’s gone bad. It was Christmas, suddenly, and so from everywhere came hackneyed carols sung in sped-up voices. We’re little again, I said. We have to do it all over, I guess. We accepted this glumly, looking at our hands. A plate of meat came. I’m sick, I said. Because we drank on the stoop after the funeral, you said. I smacked my forehead. Right! You remembered. You did know. I wouldn’t have to tell you.

I woke with a start on your parents’ sofa, beneath a blanket I hadn’t fallen asleep with. The cable box’s clock read 12:00. I blinked at it, and it blinked back. I sat up, sticky with sweat, and cleared my throat loudly. It was pouring rain, the water falling in sheets. The streetlights had gone black.

Power’s been in and out, you called from the kitchen. Because of the storm.

There was a pause.

You don’t have to stay, you said. The lawyer’s coming, plus I’ve got stuff to do.

The first part was true, about the lawyer. I don’t think you knew why, but you disliked him: you deleted his messages until it hit you that nobody else was going to take care of it, that nobody else could take care of it. You didn’t even know what “it” was—just that he was coming to tell you the surreal, formal things that you would now need to know.

But the second part was bullshit—you had nowhere to be, nothing you needed to do. The bookstore had told you to take as much time off as necessary. You called to tell them what had happened, and I could faintly hear the voice you spoke to. My God, what kind of accident? A car accident, you said. You used the same flat tone as the officer who had come to your door. By now, I knew the story in detail. On a rural highway, witnesses saw the car take a curve too fast and hit a patch of gravel. The fishtail marks meant your dad had tried to recover, but they had hit the guardrail. The momentum pushed the car up from behind. Here you paused, as whoever was on the line made a sympathetic noise. They didn’t yet know how the story ended. In a moment, when you told them, I knew they would reframe the conversation in light of the final revelation, wondering if their reactions had been hitherto appropriate. You continued. It might have been okay—maybe a busted eardrum from the airbag, bruises from whatever projectiles escaped the glove box. Worstcase scenario a punctured spleen from the seat belt. But they were driving along the edge of a wooded ravine. It was steep. When they rolled, they went over.

I imagined the reply: Oh my God, were they hurt badly?

They are dead, you said.

I heard you say they are instead of they’re, my skin tensing at the sound of your calm, android voice. You needed time off to make arrangements, you told them, though by then they had all been made. Of course, they understood completely. Whatever you needed. And then you just never went back. When they called, you erased their messages too. You cashed your last paycheck after they finally gave up and mailed it.

I came into the kitchen, finally. The way you looked at the paper, I knew you hadn’t read a word. You still wore your black dress. Your pin-straight red hair was rumpled in the back, your eyes raccooned with makeup. Every breath snapped inside me like a cracked knuckle.

Hung over? I whispered.

No, actually, I feel okay. You looked up. Relatively.

I poured some orange juice. Lucky you. The house smelled like cigarettes and the sink was full of lipsticked butts. You didn’t smoke, your parents hadn’t: the guests had left them. I feel chewed up and spit out, I said.

You don’t have to stay, you said again. You’ve missed enough class.

I told my student teaching supervisor I have the flu. It’s fine.

You gave me a tight, false smile. I know you’re probably needed elsewhere.

I set my glass down. I had a nasty remark ready without knowing why. So I held it there, like a sore on my tongue. You had every right to say it: I knew what would be waiting for me when I checked my messages.

I’m sorry, you said, smoothing the skirt of your dress. I had no right to put you in that position.

The light in the kitchen was clinical and sallow. You looked like a Halloween costume of yourself, like your face was on crooked. You looked like you had been up for hours. You probably had been. You probably woke up on your parents’ bed, dazed and ill, suffocating beneath your grief; the funeral over, all that remained were the beginnings of your life without them. You tossed me that pitiful apology and I imagined you fretting upstairs, certain that your hand on my leg had split things at the seam, that I had gone disgusted into the night. I stepped forward to tell you not to worry.

No, I said. No, don’t be sorry. You were drunk, it was a rough day. To say the least. I mean, for God’s sake ...

You glowered. I meant I’m sorry for making you stay with me for four days.

My fingers went numb. Fuck, I finally said.

I’m going to take a shower, you said, getting up. I’ll call you in a couple days.

You disappeared up the stairs, and I heard your footsteps above me. I pulled on my shoes, gathered my keys and wallet, and made for the door. I turned the knob, listening to the water starting in the upstairs shower. And then the humming flow of electricity died once more, taking with it the soft layer of noise you never hear until it’s gone. The room turned gray. I heard the water stop, the shower-curtain rings jingle. You were up there in the dark. I let go of the doorknob. Plastic cups were stacked on the coffee table, the stereo speakers, the lid of the fish tank. I gathered them, feeling the vague and pulling sense that I was expected somewhere else. But the dead clocks and the gray October sky made time a mystery, and I couldn’t tell what part of my life I was missing.

 

You came back in pajamas, startling at the sight of me.

Thought I’d tackle these dishes, I said.

Francis, you said, looking around the clean living room. You didn’t have to—

I’m not doing this for my health. I expect to be tipped.

You gave me a sleepy grin and walked into the kitchen to the refrigerator. I can offer you rotting casserole, rotting lasagna, rotting cold cuts ... You groaned softly. All of this is gonna go bad.

A knock came and you went to greet the lawyer, letting him shake your limp hand before you both sat in the dark. I lingered in the living room, standing helplessly. You curled your feet under you on the couch, and we caught a glimpse of each other. I smiled. You smiled back and I understood: all I had needed to do—all you had wanted me to do—was stay.

I left the room to wash the dishes and give you some privacy. He talked for a while, and over the water from the tap, I heard your answers. I can’t, you said.

I turned off the water and began pretending to dry.

Both. Either. Selling it or living here, you said.

So you have your own place, then? You and your boyfriend?

There was a pause.

I don’t have a boyfriend, you said.

Another pause.

And renting it ... just, the idea of somebody else living here ... You sat up. Aren’t there costs people have to pay when they own a house, even if they don’t have a mortgage? Special taxes, or something? You’ll have to explain this to me like I’m six years old, because I don’t know anything. Your voice broke. My dad does my taxes, I don’t even—

The lawyer cleared his throat. Ms. Lucas, he began, lowering his voice, your parents have bequeathed you a significant amount of money. If this produced a reaction in you, you said nothing to indicate it. A beat passed, his voice returning to normal volume. You need to understand that ownership means there’s no landlord to call when a pipe bursts, or the toilet overflows, or whatever else.

Okay, you said.

He gave you his card. It was hard to hear what he said before leaving, but I could guess. I’m sorry for your loss. Let me know if you need anything. Take care.

 

I came out and we sat by the window, watching the lawyer’s car wiggle tediously from a tight parking space, creeping to and fro in a sad, eight-point maneuver. Your face was lit by the weak sunlight as you said, I don’t know what to do. We watched someone walk down the street, shouting over his shoulder at no one.

You don’t have to decide today. Sleep on it. You’ve barely slept. My voice took on a pleading quality that surprised me. Go take a nap. I’ll get us some lunch.

I can’t live here, you said. Sleep in my old bed, like they’re just down the hall? You motioned toward the things in the room. Look at all this stuff.

I knew you were wondering how to even begin. How much strength would you have to muster to empty their closets, pile their toiletries into garbage bags, cancel their magazine subscriptions? Your dad’s golf clubs were propped against the wall in the foyer, mud from the course on the bag’s metal stand. Your mom’s cooking was still wrapped in foil in the rapidly warming fridge. Their fish swam placidly in the illuminated aquarium. Mail would come, the envelopes flitting through the slot in the door like dispensed candy. And it would all be up to you to deal with—only you who could see to these things.

Get me out of here, you said. You stood, grabbed my car keys, and held them out like an offering. We both looked at them, like they might answer for me.

Yeah, okay. You got it.

You ran upstairs to change into some of the ill-fitting old clothes from high school that remained in your dresser drawers. Any suggestion that you wanted me to leave was abandoned. You had no destination in mind. Neither did I.

 

But in the car you decided where we should go. At Fort Point, the structure beneath the bridge’s webbed underarch, there were tours you could take, and at the end they fired the old cannon. We both remembered the sound it made from our fourth-grade field trip there. I could still see the arc of the cannonball going into the water; I said so and you said you could too. Our class had run circles around the musty cots, spitting over the ledge into the bay. When the cannon went off we all jumped. After, our teacher walked us across the bridge—it was how field trips always ended in elementary school. You walk and walk through the German and Japanese tourists, irritated joggers and cyclists, and then by midspan everyone remembers how long the bridge really is and so you look out at the jutting city’s plump hills and sunlit steel, the bobbing boats in the marina, the blinking drone of the Alcatraz lighthouse, the pubic foliage surrounding Coit Tower. And then, because you’re cold no matter the season, and tired, and everyone else wants to, you walk back to the bus, defeated.

Seeing the fort again was one of those things we talked about doing but never did. But then there we were. The parking lot’s edge was a jetty of sharp, stacked rocks, and beyond them men in wet suits drifted in shadow, prone on their neon boards. The water frothed beneath them. We looked for dorsal fins. You wondered about the pile of cannonballs accumulated on the ocean floor. One day, you said, they’ll shoot one off and it’ll land at the top of the pyramid, it’ll nose right out of the water. Your voice was hoarse, your eyes drooped—you were worn down but excited. Imagine all the whales they’ve beaned, you said. I put the car in park as you shoved your purse under the passenger seat.

I’ll get the admission, I said.

Francis, you said, it’s free.

The power still wasn’t on in that part of the city, and it felt as though we had been plunged back in time. The tour was going on as usual, except the dark corridors of the barracks were shut off to visitors. We met up with the crowd, following the guide through the gray chill as he quizzed us on Civil War battlefields and sneezed into a stained handkerchief. It was evidently still a popular fieldtrip destination—names were tagged in correction fluid on the outer walls, an occasional knife intaglio set into the wooden door frames. This is boring, you whispered. One of the Golden Gate’s pillars loomed nearby, like a massive foot that had just missed us. We looked at the sun and pretended to be warm. Get to the cannon already, you said to no one. The air smelled like rot and salt, and I dug my nose into my sweatshirt to see if that was how I would smell once we left.

When the tour was almost over, everyone gathered around the cannon, the guide clearly getting excited. Dressed in his Union garb, he began his practiced speech. We could see the belly of the bridge, could hear the sustained rumble of the cars. Everything was covered in white bird shit, the gulls circling near the bridge’s underside. Ten thousand homeless in this city and I have three bedrooms, you said. I shoved my hands in my pockets. We were against the fort’s ledge, and you threw over a crumpled tissue from your pocket. The wind held it at eye level for a moment and then it dropped. I don’t have enough stuff to fill the one. People turned around to shush you with their eyes, but you had opened a door to something inside you. I want to lie in a hammock. I want to do a paint-by-numbers. You sniffed. I’m gonna need some pancakes. You kept going, listing things that wouldn’t, in the end, make any of this easier.

We watched the tour guide wipe out the cannon’s mouth. It was almost time. I tried to think of anything that wouldn’t sound like an empty recitation: Go with your gut, You’ll figure it out, Everything will be okay. You worried your lip with your teeth. First you swab the bore, the guide said. Behind us, the open ocean stretched out, as uninterrupted as prairie, the people around us taking pictures of all that horizon.

My dad took me here one time, you said.

I made sure you saw me listening with my whole face.

At night, you said. It was something you could do here. The cold had brought up the purple veins in your hands. But we didn’t go in.

The guide said, This is called ‘wadding.’ He balled up a piece of paper and shoved it down the cannon’s throat. You watched him with dead eyes. I remember I wanted to go to Mel’s Drive-In after. But I asked if we could and Dad said no.

How old were you? I asked.

The guide held up the fuse, explaining how far away to stand.

Old enough that I shouldn’t have whined about it. We rubbed our hands together, the sun behind a cloud. But I did, you said. Whine about it, I mean. I whined the whole ride back, and he didn’t answer me. The guide took questions, pointed at people with their hands raised.

I keep having dreams about them, where my mom says something thoughtless. You swallowed, buying yourself a moment. And then I wake up angry with her.

I’m sorry, I said.

This whole thing. You shook your head, and your face softened. It was this thing you could do. You walk around the fort with candles. My dad and I got to the parking lot and I cried and said I couldn’t go in because it was too dark. You started to say something else, but this guy next to us said, Oh, the candlelight tour? I’ve heard about that, how is it?

You gave me a look.

Mind your fucking business, I told him.

Your hand went to your mouth, and, behind it, you finally smiled.

 

As we watched the guide push blackened objects into the cannon, explaining everything in his pinched voice, I thought about the last time I saw your parents. It was New Year’s Day, ten months before. You had spent the night at their house, and I came to pick you up the next day. I drove beside the trees on Park Presidio, the jammed-together houses in Easter-egg colors, finally double-parking alongside your mom’s car. Your dad came to the window and waved, then disappeared behind the curtain. He came back holding up a bottle of wine, pointing at it with his eyebrows raised. But I didn’t want to get stuck there, explaining what I was up to nowadays, fielding questions about my idiot roommate, my little sister, the Giants’ prospects this year. When I waved no, your dad batted his hand in my direction, like, No problem—we’ll catch you next time! I saw him turn and speak, and your mom came to the window. She stuck her tongue out at me and laughed. I laughed too. You had a good mom and dad. When we graduated from high school, they sent me money in a tiny red envelope; when I came over for dinner they made things they knew I liked. One year, they gave me nudie playing cards for Christmas.

You met my parents only a handful of times, mostly at mediocre dinners celebrating my meager accomplishments: graduating junior high, growing one year older. You were unfailingly polite to them, though I could tell that you regarded them with puzzlement, as though they were of a subtly different species—a boorish genus not yet evolved toward self-awareness. After a birthday lunch of mine one year, standing outside a suburban Red Robin (I don’t recall how old I was turning, only that my deepening voice was unreliable during the proceedings), my mother spent ten minutes bitching at herself for lighting up around you, frantically waving away the smoke from her Camel instead of extinguishing it. My father said nothing—not just to you, but to any of us. Until, finally, someone mentioned his recent purchase of a puppy. Dad grunted. We had a puppy when Frankie was little, he said. It got a nasty case of the trots and sprayed shit all over the walls, at a full run, and howled all night. He spit into the bushes; one of his habits. Chewed through our plastic kiddie pool, bit a hole in the hose, ate the jack-o’-lantern. He gave me what was meant to be a playful slap on the back of the head. And I thought my kids were a pain in the ass. It was the sort of comment that, coupled with a slight indication of lightness, could almost pass for humor.

You gave him a nervous, school-picture smile, and I felt the sting of envy. Your family didn’t do the playful-teasing thing. Nor did they do the not-very-playful-teasing thing. They certainly never got piss-drunk and teary over some old record turned to full volume, bouncing a knee to an ancient guitar solo. And they never slammed their kid against a wall, picture frames rattling and then splintering on the wood floor. You never had to smell, in those moments, for booze on your father’s breath—you never had to find it absent and be shaken by that absence, and by what it meant: no easy answer, no method of prediction. Your parents asked you questions and you were happy to respond. Your parents protected you from the inevitable truth: that they were regular, fallible people. Mine were openly flawed, unapologetically inconsistent. My sister and I gathered, on our own and early on, that no adjustments ought to be expected from their end. And because you saw them only in public, on their best behavior (such as it was), you never knew what it was really like at my house.

Your ignorance only fueled the crush I already had on you. I fostered it all through high school, fiddling with it incessantly like a wound inside the mouth. I admitted it to no one. After a while, my feelings for you and the truth about my parents seemed connected, inextricable. That you knew none of it was a kind of guarantee that of all the reasons you cared for me, none were based in pity. You remained untainted by the dismal truth about me. It was one more reason to love you, among the many.

When the guide finally stopped speaking and all questions had been answered, he gathered his swab and his foil, saluted us, and walked away. A beat passed and we looked at each other. Hello? you said. I think we’re forgetting something? You checked your tour pamphlet, and we saw it for the first time: “See the cannon-loading demonstration.” Oh for fuck’s sake, you said. We stood there laughing, your long wisps of red hair whipping you in the face. I didn’t say so, but I was relieved. I had been dreading the sound.

I said, What do you want to do now?

You blew your nose and said, You know, I’m a little relieved? Above us a gull flew forward but was beaten back by the wind. It hovered there, flapping and stationary.

Yeah?

You nodded. I kind of hate loud things.

We walked toward the car. I still felt a kind of desperation each time I thought of you, still stole glances at you when you looked away. Looking at you was easy. Standing there at the edge of the Fort Point parking lot—and I wish I could say it better, but I’ll have to resort to this—you looked real, and alive, and I had a strange bout of tunnel vision suddenly, where my eyes almost watered at the sight of you.

Hey, I said. Let’s go to Mel’s.

 

When we pulled in, the neon sign was lit, the power on. You ordered pancakes and a chocolate milkshake. Bid your teeth farewell, I said. The 1950s jukeboxes at each booth blared music from the 1970s; children ate burgers out of paper Cadillacs. You grinned big as the waiter walked toward us, carrying your short stack. As he set it down—the moment after it touched the Formica table—the lights overhead died, the music distorting and then cutting out.

How about that, you said, lifting your fork.

 

We left Mel’s food-sick, so full we unbuttoned our pants. Their fridges were again losing their cool—the staff turning people away at the door. The day was a wash for everybody. Before we started the short walk to my car, you paused and fished around in your purse for a mint. Outside a little market on Geary stood a man in a bloody apron, his face somber. He lifted packages wrapped in white paper from where he had stacked them, six-deep beneath a parking meter.

What? you said, turning to look. The butcher lifted the packages and tossed them into a dumpster. The echo reverberated like weak thunder as the wasted meat hit the dumpster’s steel belly; first two, then three or four at a time, as the butcher hastened to finish the job.

I’m freezing, you said.

I pulled your coat tighter around you. You held my gaze, waiting for something, and exhaled. Your breath altered so slightly that I thought I had imagined it, until you inhaled again and your breath jumped along that same ragged catch, and the place we were headed became real to me: you were going to be mine, no matter who was waiting for me across town. I could push back pangs of guilt, or I could embrace this in a spasm of denial. But either way, it was going to happen. My hands were still gripping your button placket.

Let’s go for a walk, you said.

By the time we reached Golden Gate Park it was raining again. Beneath one of the gray stone archways, a man slept on the ground. You grabbed my arm as we passed him in the small tunnel. Francis, you said, but I ignored you. Having passed the man, you continued to hold my arm. Just beyond the archway a tourist ran toward us. How do you get to the bridge? he said. He held a waterlogged map out in front of him. You let go of my arm and gripped my hand as we stood there, getting drenched. The bridge, the golden one. His accent was gravel in his mouth. Behind him, a car full of nervous faces peered out at us. I looked down at our fingers, and then at the small orbs of water collecting on your eyelashes.

That way, you said to the man, pointing. It would have been easier to point with the hand I held, but you didn’t let go.

We walked back and got into my little white car, soaking the seats. I shifted with two fingers, the other three still clamped to yours.

Are we holding hands? I said.

How could we have thought that they fire cannonballs aimed at the city?

Into the marina, no less, I said. We’re idiots. I took the turnoff toward your house. Are you okay?

My feet are like blocks of ice, you said. I was hot, but I let go of your hand and turned the heater on full blast.

Can we do the just-feet one? you said.

I turned the heater on so it blew only on our feet. Such an ingenious invention, I said, feeling for your fingers again, and finding them.

Maybe you don’t remember all of this, the way I do.

That day at camp, when I lost my glasses out there in the soccer field, I sank to my knees and began feeling for them in the grass. I saw, gliding toward me, a white glow with a red top and a glint. These are yours, you said, and the glint twinkled as the lenses refracted sunlight. You were wearing them. I took them from your face and put them back on mine. You became crisp: a white cotton dress, dirty sandals. Your red hair was in a bun like a ballerina’s. Later, you came up to the pole and asked to play. My side, my way, I get first hit, I said: the tetherball mantra. You nodded, and then we were friends. Maybe you don’t remember that. Maybe you remember us becoming friends in high school, the circle of acquaintances that slowly brought us into the same social orbit. Or maybe you would say we really became friends in college, long after those acquaintances disappeared—after our exiles to different towns, when we set aside our adolescent self-consciousness and finally showed ourselves to each other. Maybe you don’t remember everything, but I keep those memories for the two of us, like valuables in a vault. If you need them, you can have them. And there are other things I keep—things I found out after it was too late to tell you. Like this: before a sound that loud would have incited panic, Fort Point used to fire blanks at the end of the demonstrations. They would put gunpowder in the cannon and set the fuse without any artillery: no cannonball, just sound. So maybe we did hear that colossal boom on our fourth-grade field trip. Maybe at least some of those memories were real. What I’m saying is that it’s possible. What I’m saying is that there’s a chance, Nora, that we didn’t just invent it all.