I toss away my cigarette. “Want a hand?”
The girls blink up at me with fawnlike eyes, trailing garlands of golden hair that cling to their eyelashes and the matted fleece collars of their coats.
“These seats are really hard to get into,” I say, and my throat is unexpectedly tight.
Without waiting for permission, I scoop up the little one and slide her into the swing. Her chubby stockinged legs poke out the holes in the seat and she curls her hands around the chains.
“Swing me,” she says imperiously.
This time my smile feels more natural. I give her a nudge.
“Do you want me to push her, so you can swing, too?” I say to the older girl.
Soon both swings are in motion, squeaking gently, sending up rhythmic swirls of cool spring air as they pass. The sun peeks through the clouds and warms our faces. With my eyes closed, the park sounds like it did when I was a kid. Bird calls and rustling leaves underneath, bubbling with children’s voices on top.
And my mother, laughing, her eyes full of sky.
After a few minutes, the older girl lets her sneakers skid along the ground. She comes to a gradual stop, spins in place a few times by twisting the chains together and then letting go. The swing gains momentum and carries her hair like a banner in the sunshine.
Little sister thinks this is hilarious. She giggles and chortles, snorts, then breaks into a full-bellied baby laugh until I can’t help but join in. It feels strange to laugh, as if I’m tempting the gods. I stop laughing and listen to them instead.
Finally their amusement plays out and they go off to the slide. I resume my spot on the swing, shake out another cigarette and watch them while I smoke it. Big sister is pushing the little one up the slide. They keep tumbling down and having to start over.
When the girls get tired, they amble back across the street and go inside the house. The man comes out and stands in the driveway, hands on his hips. He’s looking at me.
I look back, rocking.
CHAPTER FOUR
The next day, I ride my bike into town to the small family games and craft store off Harbor Street, where an internet search told me I could find kits for making ships in bottles. The shop turns out to be a bright, trim little place run by a four-foot-tall Filipino who says his name is Ernie.
I point to the model in the window—a pirate ship in a fat glass bottle.
“Did you make that?”
He beams, inflating. “Yes.”
“How is it done?”
Ernie takes the bottle off the shelf and points a stubby finger at the glass. “You see? The masts are on hinges. You put the ship inside, pull the hinges to raise the masts.”
I’m disappointed. “I thought the ships were built inside the bottle.”
“You can do it that way, too.” He grins, his teeth flat and gray as paving stones. “Have to be patient. And careful.”
His expression says he doubts I could be either.
“What would I need to build a ship that way?” I say.
“You don’t want to do that. Model with the hinges, much easier.”
I look at him, unsmiling.
Sighing deeply, Ernie puts the bottle carefully in place on the shelf, then disappears through a curtain at the back of the store. He returns a minute or two later with a long flat box that he sets on the counter. Inside are the components of the ship, neatly bagged in clear plastic, along with several strange, long tools, and a black-and-white instruction manual. I take this out and open it.
“This is in German. Where are the English instructions?”
Ernie shrugs, palms up.
“Seriously?”
“No refunds.”
* * *
My clothes are damp when I hop off my bike and walk up the driveway to my home, a two-room bungalow lying pale as a trout’s belly against a tangle of claw-tipped pines and dense clumps of ivy and ferns. The property is isolated from its neighbors by a strip of untended forest on one side and twenty-five acres of grass crops on the other. It’s a perfect house for me, because the days are almost as quiet as the nights, but the town of Vashon is a short bike ride away.
And Jack Calabrese’s house is closer still.
The bungalow was crammed with the previous owner’s possessions when I bought it. The closet reeked of moth balls and that awful geriatric stink of age and poor health; the carpet was dotted with so many cigarette marks it’s a wonder the house never burned down. A tweed couch and rabbit-eared TV took up most of the living room, and the dresser in the bedroom was missing two drawers, giving it a crazed, gap-tooth appearance not unlike its previous owner.
After I bought it last fall, I hired a salvage company to clear the property, swap out the appliances and lay some new flooring. Then I painted the walls and began to fill the rooms with things I like. Now the living room is a riot of color and pattern: a leggy ottoman I recovered in a muted fruit pattern on sturdy twill, trimmed with a row of tiny chenille pom-poms; a low celadon couch, a jumble of down pillows and a striped blanket in yellow, red and dusty-blue. Over the couch is a collection of eight prints by an artist I admire, who creates abstract line drawings in one sitting, his pen never leaving the paper. Each of the drawings vaguely resembles a human eye, so the whole wall seems to stare me down every time I walk into the room. Several times I’ve taken the prints down, but I always end up rehanging them. They’re odd and uncomfortable. They make me feel aware.
I’m proud of this house. It’s a fortress that has not been breached.
I lay the box on the kitchen table and unpack it while a pot of coffee is brewing, sorting out the pieces according to the photos in the instruction booklet. Then, one piece at a time, I begin to assemble the ship.
It takes all night. The tools are hard to get used to, and I go through three different glues trying to find one that really works, but by eleven o’clock, I’ve assembled and painted the hull. I ease it through the neck of the bottle, then spend the rest of the night working systematically through the pieces—masts, rope-strings, other parts I can’t name but which correspond to the photo on the box—until at dawn, the sails unfurl at the end of my foot-long forceps.
My neck is cramped and twitchy, but the ship is perfect. I imagine it life-size, tossing on the sea, its prow carving a milk-white swath through the water.
I understand something about Jack Calabrese. He’s a patient man. Methodical, fastidious. And probably lonely.
Before I go to bed, I carry the model to the garbage can outside and let it fall to the bottom. There is a loud crash, glass on metal. The mast cracks, and the ship breaks free from its display stand inside the bottle and splinters in half.
I replace
