Hawks Below the Balcony

The house sat on the crest like it had wandered up during a windstorm and then decided to stop. You could rest your forearms on the balcony rail and look down on hawks that were already flying high. They circled with the shrug of creatures who trust their own physics. Below them a valley opened like a folded map. Far off, three points of light winked among the trees. They looked like spacecraft if you were in the mood for visitors. They looked like tin roofs if you were not.

Inside, the refrigerator hummed at a pitch that softened the air. Lisa was barefoot in the kitchen, tipping cold brew into a glass with a clatter of ice. She asked if I wanted some and I said yes even though I do not like coffee that tastes like bark and melted pennies. The morning was clean. We had slept in separate rooms because arriving late makes people polite and the house belonged to her mother, who had rules that lingered like perfume.

“Look,” I said, pointing out toward the ridgeline. “Those dots.”

“Farm roofs,” she said. “It catches at this hour. Then it goes away.”

“Spaceships would be nice.”

“If they took us somewhere with signal,” she said. “I still cannot get a bar in the living room.”

I was thinking about signals of a different kind. The kind you send without knowing, the kind you do not send because you cannot. Lisa moved like a person who had learned where to put each step in advance. She poured a second glass without asking and set it near my hand, then leaned her hip against the counter like she might stay or might not.

“We could drive down to the lake,” she said. “Swim if it is warm enough.”

“Let’s sit first,” I said. “The balcony is doing something to me.”

We brought the coffee outside. The boards underfoot had been sanded at some point, then remembered to splinter anyway. We stood with sleeves pushed up and watched the hawks draw circles in the same place where they had drawn them yesterday. Lisa put on sunglasses that turned the valley a little colder. I wanted her to step closer. I wanted some unconscious part of her to take over and cross that last scrap of distance, the part of a person that reaches before the person decides.

“This place makes me feel like I am standing on a roof,” I said.

“You are,” she said. “The whole mountain is a roof.”

We laughed. It was easy to laugh with her. It was less easy to relax. That surprised me. A week is a long time to discover that ease does not grow where you expect it.

She said, “What if those lights out there really were ships. Would you leave if they asked?”

“Maybe for lunch,” I said. “They could drop me back in the afternoon.”

She smiled thinly at that, like I had stepped on something only she could feel. A barn swallow shot past and wrote a diagram in the air. We watched the hawks drift lower as if they were considering us.

We swam after noon. The lake was a pocket of polished glass with water cold enough to wake some animal in the spine. On the drive back we passed a roadside stand with peaches in paper bags. Lisa did not slow down. I said nothing. When we were nearly at the house she asked how old I would be next month. I told her. Then I asked about her birthday in November. She tapped the wheel twice and looked at the road in a straight and neutral way.

“I do not like that question,” she said.

“Sorry,” I said. “We were just talking birthdays.”

“I know,” she said.

We did not speak for a mile. I tried to make the silence a good one. Then I tried to make it a small one. It did not shrink either way. When we got back she took her glass and her sunglasses and sat with her knees tucked up, in the chair that had the most room for knees. The afternoon heat pressed against the windows like someone checking the locks.

“I think I am a little old fashioned about age,” she said finally. “I like to keep some things where they belong.”

“I hear you,” I said. “I was only trying to place the month in my head.”

She nodded, but not to me. Later, she asked if I had the right number for her. She wanted me to text the one she had sent to make sure it worked. I did, and her phone made a sound on the counter.

“Good,” she said. “Use that one.”

“Do you have two phones,” I said, even though the second device was sitting face down on the bookshelf like a second tongue.

“One is for work,” she said. “One is for life.”

“Which am I,” I said. I made it sound like a joke.

“You are a person who asks good questions at bad times,” she said, gentle as a wool blanket. “Come on. There is light left.”

We walked. The path along the ridge trailed off into scrub, then returned out of nowhere, which is how paths do. I kept imagining the balcony behind us, two chairs waiting with an empty third. Lisa pointed out a kestrel on a wire. We did not speak about the hawks yet because they were not here.

Back at the house she chopped vegetables with a knife that had been sharpened more for threat than for cooking. She cut onions into transparent moons and swept them into a pan. We ate at the small table, without ceremony, like we were defending the food from intruders. I kept thinking I should touch her hand. I kept thinking about what would happen if I did.

“Tell me something you are proud of,” she said. She had a way of asking questions that established a goal post and invited me to run at it.

“I made a song once,” I said. “It was not even good. But I finished it and sang it alone in a room and cried.”

“That is good,” she said. “Crying in a room is underrated.”

She looked past me and toward the balcony. The glass door held the valley like a postcard. The three silver dots were back. They were brighter. I wondered how many roofs it takes to look like one ship. The radio in the kitchen muttered about air quality and a budget vote. It made the evening feel like a board game with missing pieces.

“Do you ever want to be scooped up by something bigger,” I said. “A wave, a story. Something that gives instructions.”

“Sometimes,” she said. “Then I remember that instructions tend to be written by whoever is holding the pen.”

We carried our plates to the sink and stood side by side while the water ran hot. I dried, she washed. We brushed shoulders but too lightly to count. I said good night and she said the same but also said my name. The sound of it in her mouth made something move in mine. I wanted to let it shape the dark however it wanted. I went to my room with that sound in my pocket and stared up into a ceiling where the knots were constellations. The future thumped the house two or three times that night, or maybe the wind did, or maybe the world was adjusting. It was hard to tell.

The next morning the hawks were back at work. The lights in the distance looked less like ships. By ten they were gone. We talked about driving to town for pastries and then did not go. Lisa opened a book and closed it after a paragraph. I paced the balcony in quiet little loops and thought about calibration. When a compass is off, a person can still walk with purpose. They just end up somewhere else. I did not know if my attraction was a compass error or a weather pattern. I did know that I wanted something I could not force.

“Can I ask you something,” I said.

“You can always ask,” she said, and opened the book again without reading.

“Do you ever want to be closer than you are,” I said. “Not in general. I mean here. With me.”

She let out a breath and set the book facedown. “I am trying to fit everything inside the time we were given,” she said. “I do not always know how much is the right amount.”

“What feels right right now,” I said.

She looked at my shoulder rather than my eyes. “The way the hawks never look bothered,” she said. “That seems right.”

I laughed and stopped myself. “I keep hoping that you will reach for me,” I said. “Without thinking. I keep hoping your body will tell your mouth what to say.”

“And if it does not,” she said.

“Then I learn something,” I said.

She stood up and came to the balcony rail and stood near me, close enough to smell her shampoo. Close enough to count the freckles she did not allow herself to mention. She put her hand on the rail with her fingers touching mine for a fraction of a second that felt like a novel with an index. Then she shifted half an inch away. It was a kind gesture. It was an absolute measure.

“Sometimes I feel like a museum,” she said. “People come in and want to touch the exhibits. There are signs that say do not. I watch everyone pretend they did not see the signs.”

“I do not want to be a museum visitor,” I said.

“Then be the guard,” she said, and smiled to take the bite out of it.

I thought about that for a long minute. My own face had been a museum more times than I liked. Behind us the refrigerator changed tones, as if remembering a song. Down in the valley a chain saw roared and then cut out. The silver dots were already fading. The air did a small trick. It smelled like rain and far away fires at the same time. I had the sense that something bigger than us had crossed a line and would not report back.

“Lisa,” I said. “Do you like me.”

“Yes,” she said.

“Do you want me,” I said, and hated how naked the sentence sounded.

She closed her eyes. “I want peace,” she said. “I want to want you, sometimes I think I almost do, and then I remember the part of me that hides. It is not about you. It is about the hiding.”

“Do you want me to wait,” I said.

“I do not want to ask you to wait,” she said. “That feels like a debt I cannot pay.”

We watched the hawks continue their old work. One of them tilted and made an adjustment with its tail that looked like a decision. In the kitchen the radio announced a test of an alert system, then went quiet. The house held still in the way houses do when people finally say a thing.

“Okay,” I said. “Thank you for telling me.”

She reached and took my hand. She did it slowly, like handing over a glass of water. We stood like that for a while. Her hand was warm and a little tense. Then she let go and the place where our palms had been felt like a shadow after lightning.

We went into town for pastries. I drove. She rolled the window down and let the wind turn her hair into a kind of map. We did not talk about birthdays or numbers. We talked about the bakery and the price of peaches and how some lakes are bottomless if you ask a cousin. She pointed at a dog and said that is the right size for a dog, which I took to mean a dozen other things I had no right to take. At the bakery she picked a cherry croissant and I took a plain one that did not know how to disappoint.

On the way back we took the long road. It switched back and showed us the valley from angles that made new mountains. High above the road a hawk rode a column of warm air and trembled without moving. The radio in the car gave us a buzzing tone I had never heard and then an official voice. There was a test of the system, it said. Do not be alarmed. If this were an actual emergency, you would be told where to go.

“Where would you go,” I said. “If it were real.”

“Down,” she said. “Always down.”

“Down to what,” I said.

“Something that does not move when you push on it,” she said.

Back at the house the lights in the distance were gone. The balcony looked newly built, the way rooms do after you take a breath and decide to use them differently. We spent the afternoon doing small things. I mended a loose button with a needle from a drawer that had a knot of rubber bands and three batteries. Lisa wrote a list on the back of an envelope in block letters. We walked the path and turned back sooner than we did the day before. We cooked again. We ate better.

That evening the air cupped the house like a hand. Lisa knocked on my door and asked to sit. We went to the balcony and brought blankets. The valley held on to the last light like a tug of war with nobody at the other end. A nighthawk stitched the dusk with a sound like a rubber band. Somewhere far off there were sirens that did not belong to us.

“I am sorry,” she said. “For not being something I wish I were.”

“You do not owe me a version of yourself,” I said. “I needed to ask. You needed to answer. That is all.”

“Do you still think those are ships,” she said, pointing to the place where the reflections had been.

“I think they are roofs that were trying on other work,” I said. “I think they liked it and then remembered what they were made for.”

She was quiet for a while. “I hope you find someone whose body runs toward you,” she said. “I hope it happens without thinking. I hope you do not have to ask.”

“Me too,” I said. “I hope you find peace.”

We sat until our legs went pins and needles. When we stood, we did it carefully. She put her hand on my shoulder, a pressure that meant thank you, and then there was air again. I slept well that night for the first time all week. Maybe the hawks carried something off. Maybe the house did. Maybe we did together without knowing it.

In the morning the wind shifted. Smoke from a fire far away made the valley look like the world had been dusted with wisdom. The hawks were already out, below us again, like they had punched their timecards in the dark. I watched them and tried to understand that height is not the same as clarity. You can be above a thing and still be inside it. You can be inside a thing and still see it clearly if someone stands close enough to share the view.

Lisa handed me a mug. Tea this time. She had found a packet in a drawer that smelled like the color green. She leaned against the rail and looked at the place where roofs had pretended to be ships.

“I will text you the town number,” she said. “The one I use most.”

“Okay,” I said. “Use whichever one feels right to you.”

She nodded and then surprised us both by stepping the last inch between us and putting her head on my shoulder. It lasted four seconds, maybe five. It was an honest gift. When she moved away she was not further than she had been before. She was exactly where she had been all along.

We packed. We cleaned. We made the beds the way we found them. On the way to the highway she pointed at a thunderhead shouldering up like a mountain that had ideas. We said the word beautiful at the same time and did not laugh about it. At the gas station she bought us bottled water and handed me one as if I had been doing something hard and deserved a prize. The radio promised heat and then cooler air and then heat again. There was a sense that the weather had gotten personal.

At the train station we stood with bags like regular travelers. A woman with a gold watch asked if we knew which platform went north. Lisa answered in a voice that made everyone near her calm down. I wanted to kiss her. I also wanted to go. Those urges met at a crossroads and shook hands without making a deal.

“Text me when you get in,” she said.

“I will,” I said. “You too.”

She hugged me. It was sturdy. We fit the way chairs in a dining set do, which is to say by design, which is not the same as love. She stepped back and waved once and then again in a smaller way. I watched her turn and join the stream of people moving toward a life that would continue to be mostly hers.

On the train I sat by the window and watched the valley pull itself together from a thousand angles. The hawks were there and then not. A new line of light caught a metal roof and flashed, then faded as the sun moved. Far off, something rumbled. It could have been weather. It could have been the future doing pushups. The alert system on my phone blooped a test message that did not need a reply. I put the phone face down and looked out again.

If this were an actual emergency, said a voice in my head, you would be told where to go. I did not believe that, not entirely. I thought about places where a person could stand when the air tries to change you. A balcony that is higher than hawks. A kitchen where cold brew tastes like bark and pennies. A car seat with the window down and hair moving like a map. A train. A body you do not have to ask to move toward you.

I took out a pen and wrote in the margin of a free magazine. I wrote that I would listen to the part of me that knows the difference between a signal and a wish. I wrote that I would wait for the person who steps forward without flinching. I wrote that I would leave room for ships that are roofs and roofs that are ships. I wrote that I would keep an eye on the hawks and not mistake their height for my own.

The pen tore the paper a little. The train rolled. A boy in the next row spelled his name out loud to someone on the phone. The world went on in the only way it knows. I closed the magazine and watched the line where the sky lowers itself into the land. There was a quiet in my chest that felt like the beginning of a song, and I let it be quiet.