Page 15 of The Lies We Play

It’s a one-bedroom in a pre-war building on Sixty-Ninth Street. Eleventh floor. Two windows facing the park. One window facing the side of another building twenty feet away, close enough that if the neighbor across the gap sneezes, somehow I feel involved in his recovery.

The kitchen was redone, probably in the late eighties, by someone who loves oak more than any person should.

Bobby, my real estate agent, hates it with a sincerity I respect. He’s been showing me apartments in Midtown all month. Doormen who shake his hand. Buildings with gyms. Penthouses with views he can photograph for the team’s website. Places with white stone counters, glass walls, and a general personality of ‘please remove your shoes and your childhood before entering.’

I walk through six of them and feel nothing.

Then I walk into a Sixty-Ninth Street pre-war apartment, and I feel something.

I don’t have a word for it. Twenty-two-year-olds usually don’t have words for ‘this is home.’ We have words for contracts, ice time, hangovers, bad takeout, and the particular horror of realizing our mothers were right about laundry.

Not this.

Three weeks later, I find the roof.

The back stairs go up past the eleventh floor. I assume they lead to a maintenance level and stop. One night, I climb past my floor instead of stopping.

The stairs keep going.

At the top, there is a door, which, surprisingly, is never locked.

The roof is probably a thousand square feet, give or take, of tar paper, four chimneys, a low brick parapet, and a view of the Hudson, the park, and the lit grid of the Upper West Side that no one built for tourists. There is a folding chair against the wall by the door, left by someone decades ago who had the same idea and better boundaries than me.

I have been going up there most nights since.

Tonight is slightly different from the others. Maybe because it’s late September. Maybe because New York has finally given up pretending summer is still in charge. The air is cool enough to make the beer sweat slower in my hand, and the sky is clear enough to show four stars over the river instead of the one I usually get.

I come back from a long late skate at the facility. Shower. Make a sandwich with ham that might go bad by the end of the week. Or yesterday. Hard to say. I eat it standing at the counter like a man with a pension plan and absolutely no respect for deli meat.

Then I read fifteen pages of a novel my brother, Luther, sent me with a note that says, try this one, it’s bad for you.

The novel is Cloud Atlas.

Luther is twenty. He’s a hockey player like me. But he’s reading David Mitchell on purpose, which tells me either he is going to be insufferable when he reaches real adulthood, or he is going to be the most interesting person at the family table by Christmas.

Both are possible.

Both are, frankly, on brand for him.

The book is bad for me in the way books are bad for me, which is that I think about it when I should be thinking about defensive coverage.

I like it.

Around eleven, I take the book and a beer up the back stairs.

When I push the door open, I see her.

She is standing in the small flat space between the door and the parapet, wearing what might be pajama pants and a sweater too big for her, with her dark hair pulled into a loose knot at the back of her head.

She is small. Five-three, maybe. Curvy in a way that makes the too-large sweater look like a choice and a defense at the same time. Soft face. Dark brows. Wide eyes made darker by the night, by mascara she probably meant to remove and didn’t. Her mouth is full, almost smiling despite her best efforts, and there is an attitude sitting right at the corner of it, waiting for permission to become a joke.

Fuck.

Beautiful is the first word.

Gorgeous is the second.

Trouble is the smarter one.