Rain falling soft on the statue of Nathan Hale outside City Hall Park, rain like tears on his bronze face, always looking southward down Broadway. Rain falling as the sky goes from black to grey. Rain falling in 1975.
Rain glistening on her strawberry hair as she kissed him good morning in front of the statue, rain sparkling on the shoulders of his pea jacket. They walked east across the park and up the ramp onto the bridge, walking up into the fog and the clouds. Rain hissing on the grey river beneath them while they kissed in the middle of the bridge. Rain walking with them right up to the door of the little diner at sunrise.
She held her coffee mug in both hands and looked at him over the brim; he loved looking at her eyes through the steam. On the night when they'd first kissed, just a couple of weeks earlier, they'd stood looking into each others' eyes for more than an hour, still as bronze statues themselves, on a rooftop so close to the bridge that the traffic drowned out every other sound. He'd never felt anything like that before, and he never would again.
They finished their breakfast and walked back out into Thanksgiving morning in the rain.
An hour later in Prospect Park with the gravel crunching under their shoes on the hiking trail and the rain making the leaves shine like prayer flags from Atlantis. She takes out her journal and does a sketch of the polar bears' den, just a quick drawing before the page can get soaked. The bears are sleeping in their den; very new lovers are the only people who find a morning like this beautiful.
By noon they'd made it to Coney Island. No place left to walk to, but the foam and the sand still tossed and rolled just like they do in the summer. Only now they were the only ones watching. The rain was blowing out to the east, toward Jones Beach and Montauk and all those miles of waves and sky. They watched the back edge of the storm pass overhead and the sun broke through, turning the spray into glitter.
