The Gap in the Lights

The hillside is the kind people pay to get married on, groomed to look like it never needed grooming. Rows of grapevines contour the slope like the ribs of some benevolent giant, and beyond them the river unspools in a silver S, ferrying light instead of boats. I’m on the balcony above the reception lawn with a flute of seltzer that keeps fogging my fingers. The glass sweats more than I do. Through my sunglasses, the whole place is color-graded into a pretty lie—blues deeper, greens silkier, faces dewy with someone else’s good lighting.

From up here, it’s perfect. From up here, I’m a spectator with excellent seats.

Down on the grass, my sister—along with the man everyone decided was inevitable and therefore a miracle—has just kissed to general applause. The drone darts in a low circle like a wasp with a college degree. The string quartet mills into a pop cover, bright and slim, the kind of sound that’s all treble and no stomach. The bass speaker went out after the vows; a groomsman promised to “figure it out” and then got dragged into photos, smiling with his whole mouth and none of his eyes. When the wind shifts, I can smell rosemary and lemon from the catering line, a scent so precise I suspect it wasn’t born of plants at all.

I hold the glass away from me, like I’m checking if it’s cracked, and it occurs to me that this is how I’ve been holding everything lately: by the stem, at arm’s length, like a museum thing you admire without ever wanting to own.

“Good view,” Alex says, arriving beside me with the soft shoulder-bump he does when he’s not sure if I want a hand at the small of my back. He always offers a contactless option first. He’s good like that. He is good at a lot of things.

“Picture-perfect,” I say, because the truth (that it’s so perfect I feel a little erased by it) sounds rude out loud. He’s wearing the sunglasses I almost told him to buy. I didn’t. He bought them anyway, and they look better on him than they would have on me. There’s an unfairness to this that I can’t name.

He turns his head a degree, scanning the slopes, the tent, the tidy pergola like a jawline. “You’re doing that thing.”

“What thing.”

“Taking inventory. Like you’re shopping for a life.”

“I’m just watching.”

“Uh-huh.”

Aunt Rosa appears, small and lemon-printed, her hat brim trying to lift off her head. “There you two are,” she trills, and touches my elbow as if pressing the bell of me. “I just told your mother that balcony suits you. Very contemplative. Like a prince in exile.”

“Nothing like exile you can leave whenever you want,” I say.

“Ah, but do you?” Her smile is spiked with private meaning. “Come down and get some photos. The light is about to go.” She flutters off, magnetized by whoever is currently telling the best gossip in manageable sentences.

“I could jump,” I say after she’s gone, gesturing the two steps down to the stairs. “That counts as coming down.”

Alex looks at me through both our sunglasses. “You could also just step.”

“I haven’t decided what to do with my life yet,” I tell the seltzer bubbles. They rise anyway.

He doesn’t wince. “You don’t have to decide your whole life on a Saturday. You just have to decide if you want to split rent.”

There it is—the question, vague as a weather report until you put dates on it. He’d asked a week ago, after our third conversation about numbers and neighborhoods that ended with laughter we used like a lid. He’d asked in the good faith of a man who has built a quiet, sturdy universe between two people and is offering me the second key. I had said, “Let me think,” like thinking was a ritual that ends with a bell and a certificate.

“I’m thinking,” I say now, and even I don’t buy it. “It’s just—everything is so… sharp. Like if I touch anything today it’ll leave a thumbprint.”

“Thumbprints are proof you were there,” he says, and then his jaw works because that sounded like something a motivational water bottle would say. “Sorry. That was a little fridge-magnet.”

“I like your fridge magnets,” I say, because I do. He collects them from places he didn’t go to, gifts from friends who did. It’s like he refuses to let other people’s joy get too far from his kitchen.

On the lawn, the photographer lifts her hand, shaping the air, and we are coaxed toward the stairs by the tide of cousins and college friends. I hand my glass to Alex like I’m passing off something alive and step down one, two, onto grass that pretends it was always this even. Shoes find ground. The sky flips a switch from afternoon to hour-of-gold, and the river blushes like it’s been caught watching someone undress.

We do the pictures—choreographed laughter, various configurations. My mother presses her mouth against my cheek and murmurs, “You okay, baby?” like a question and a permission. I make a shape with my mouth that looks like okay. The drone hovers over the dance floor like an extra moon. I keep my sunglasses on until the photographer tips her chin at me. “Off,” she says, and I obey, and the world’s colors temperature-shift—less advertisement, more layer of air.

Something’s still off, but with the glasses in my hand I can tell the difference between curated and clean. The quartet restarts their pop cover with a plug-in lowest note, someone having fixed the bass. The music suddenly has ballast. The lawn stops floating.

We break for dinner and I slip away, as if curiosity wears a tux and someone has to check on it. The venue’s hillside path curls around the back of the vines, away from the lawn sounds until they’re textured and far. The path is lined with stones set in the dirt to keep tires (none) from erasing it. There’s a sign that says “Scenic Overlook” as if any inch of this place lacks the qualification. The overlook is just a bench with an opinion, but the view—okay, the view—unfolds the valley like a map you’re allowed to keep.

I sit. The wood gestures toward my spine. Out across the green: houses just enough apart to forgive each other; a water tower pretending it’s a rocket; a church steeple like an exclamation point nobody is anxious about. The sunset is in its “generous” phase, distributing soft light without counting. I remember being a kid, pressed to the backseat window on family road trips, letting landscapes scroll through me, saving favorite hills like postcards I never sent to anyone.

Back then I thought watching was practice for living. That I’d step into the view someday and it would step back. Lately it’s been the other way around.

A leaf skitters down the path like a mouse too proud to scurry. A grasshopper thrums its own mood off a stalk. From below, a burst of laughter carries and thins. The drone slices the air around the tent and, for a second, has all the presence of a dragonfly that learned geometry.

I’m holding the sunglasses by the arm, the whole black bar between my fingers, a little firm, like it might bolt. It’s dizzying how easy it is to hold a thing wrong and have it look right.

Alex finds me again, footfalls editing the silence into friendly. He doesn’t sit right away. He looks where I’m looking, a way of asking permission without adding words to a mouth already crowded. After a minute he settles beside me, leaving an inch between our thighs like a respect line.

“I tried to dance with your aunt,” he says. “She taught me a move that’s ninety percent wrist.”

“She made that move up in 1999 and has been trying to make it happen ever since,” I say. “She loves when people fall for it.”

He tilts his head, then, toward the view. “This is ridiculous,” he says with a reverence he only uses for very old things and very good croissants. “It’s like a movie said, ‘Go on, get some rest.’”

“I don’t know how to rest,” I say. “I only know how to pause.”

“Pause isn’t rest,” he says gently.

“The problem with pausing is you can do it forever. If you don’t hit play, nobody can say you chose the wrong movie.”

We sit with that until the bench shifts from seating to witness. The sun tucks itself behind the opposite hill in a move that always looks both intentional and earnest. In the space it leaves, the air cools just enough that the skin on my forearms notices it.

“When my sister asked me to be in the wedding," I say, "I told her I’d cry happy tears and then I practiced not crying at all.”

“How’d practice go?”

“Terribly. But the practicing kept me busy.”

“Busy is a costume,” he says, not as a reprimand but as if wondering out loud. “It looks like purpose, so people don’t ask who you are underneath.”

“And who am I underneath,” I say, half wanting to be told, half wanting to be left alone with the question.

“Someone who knows the shape of his own fear better than its size.”

“That’s not a compliment,” I say, but the way he says it makes it feel like one.

“What are you afraid of?” he asks, like a man who has learned how to make the question not a cliff but a curb.

“If I move in with you and it’s good,” I say. “And then it’s just… not. And then the whole apartment is a museum of ‘remember when we were brave.’”

“That’s the fear with teeth,” he agrees. “The other one?”

“If it’s good and it stays good,” I say. “And then I don’t get to look at the view anymore. Because I’ll be in it. And what if I can’t see myself there without the distance.”

We both laugh, not because it’s funny but because there’s relief in the confession sounding like a strange, small animal neither of us has to hunt. An actual small animal rustles in the brush—a rabbit with the gall to move in front of two people making a serious point. The sunset catches on its fur for a second and then the rabbit is grass again.

“Here’s what I know,” Alex says. “You already live in things. Sometimes you live in the worry so fully that the walls have smudges. You say you’re peeking through the keyhole of life, but your fingerprints are on the doorknob. You’re already here. You just keep pretending you’re not, so you can get the credit for entering dramatically later.”

“That’s unfair,” I say, and then, “Okay, but true.”

He doesn’t push further. He never drags the conversation like a piece of furniture. He lets it settle where it wants and then rearranges the art around it. The valley goes from gold to green-blue, the color you’d pick if someone asked you to draw “evening” for a child who’s never seen it.

From down the hill, the first slow song slinks out, velvety, crooning about a moon that doesn’t even look like it’s paying attention yet.

“We should go back,” I say, because my mother is the sort of person who will remember I wasn’t in a group photo three Thanksgivings from now.

“We should,” he agrees, but neither of us moves. A breeze runs its hand over the vines. Somewhere, the photographer yelps, not in pain but in an exasperated way that means something very human has failed in a very small way. My sister’s laugh cuts through in a high, bright line. I can picture the scene without turning: the drone finally clipping a string of lights, the string dipping like a jump rope, the bulb popping with the delicate drama of a soap bubble, the guests making the group sound of delighted, harmless disaster. The view is altered by exactly one bulb’s worth of imperfection. Something in me relaxes, one notch.

“You can say no, you know,” Alex says at last. “If you are reaching for no and pretending to reach for maybe, I don’t want to be the reward for your performance.”

“I’m not reaching for no,” I say, easy, surprised to hear that I can say something simple and precise. “I’m reaching for… a yes that’s not afraid to be out of frame.”

He smiles with his whole eyes this time. “I have crooked frames,” he says. “They’re a personal brand.”

“I know,” I say. “I like your brand.”

We stand. I tuck the sunglasses into my jacket pocket and let one arm of them stick out, a little messy, like proof. On the path back, the stones are uneven just enough to make me present. Halfway down, Aunt Rosa materializes from shrubbery like a fairy who lost her place in the script. She takes my hand and Alex’s wrist and says, “You two,” with the authority of a woman who has seen many weddings and knows that the most important thing is not the cake. “Dance like your shoes are too expensive to scuff, but your feet don’t know that yet.”

Back under the tent, the bulbless gap in the string lights is a missing tooth, charming in a way that spills relief through me like warm water. The drone has been grounded, sulking like a pet made to sit. The quartet surrenders the floor to a playlist that remembers bass like it’s a lost friend. My sister is crying now and not hiding it and not apologizing for doing it so beautifully.

We dance. At first the way people dance when they’re making a promise to attempt joy, and then the way people dance when joy surprises them by being true. My mother passes, tears on her face and lipstick on her teeth, and sings a line into my ear that reminds me exactly why I am my mother’s son. The night catches, then releases us again.

Later, after cake and speeches and the late arrivals who never learned time as a language, we sit on the grass with uncomfortable grace, shoes off, knees up. Alex is next to me, a shoulder I don’t have to earn. The sky has shifted to that clean, sharp black that makes you want to invent names for stars you’ll never see through the light bleed. There are crickets. There is a generator that isn’t invisible but might as well be part of the orchestra. Someone is laughing like they never learned to be embarrassed by joy. It all sounds like courage the size of a backyard.

“You don’t have to answer tonight,” Alex says, because he has a gift for not making clocks out of feelings.

“Ask me tomorrow,” I say. “Ask me when there’s no view to push me off my axis.”

He nods, a small bow between equals. “I can do that.”

A moth bounces dumbly against my shin and then, finding me too warm to be a lamp, leaves. The lawn feels slightly damp through my pants, and the dampness feels like permission to be human in clothes that were not made for grass. I take the sunglasses out of my pocket and set them on the ground beside me, lenses up, reflecting a tiny section of sky and the bulbless dark between two points of light. In the reflection, the gap looks like a doorway.

The bandstand is empty now. The valley breathes, a big animal settling into sleep. I am not in the view, not in the way the photos will suggest, but I am not outside it either. The summer of pretending I’m okay meets the night of saying I might be, and maybe those aren’t enemies. Maybe one is a bridge the other can actually use.

I reach for Alex’s hand without looking at him and he gives it to me like it was already there. We fit fingers the way some things fit not because they’re perfect but because they’re willing. The hill holds, the dark is kind, and out past the vines the river goes on saying the same thing over and over, which, when you really hear it, is not repetition but reassurance.