by Averil Dean
* * *
The gray house sits like a stump in the grass at the end of a long suburban street on the south side of the island, slightly apart from its neighbors and surrounded by a rusted chain-link fence and a tangle of weed-choked shrubs. The miniblinds in the front window are dented; the tumble of bricks in the side yard has not been moved. The house looks the same today as it did when my mother and I moved in a dozen years ago.
In the park across the street, I sit alone in a rubber swing, rocking idly forward and back, forward and back, an exhausted pendulum.
Sometimes I leave the park and walk through the neighborhood, past the small elementary school where Danny and his friends used to torment me, past the salon where my mom and I once got the two most awful haircuts, to the corner where the ice cream shop used to be. Ice cream was our Saturday ritual after my soccer practice. My mom liked to get a scoop of butterscotch and one of bubble gum, which seemed like an odd combination to me. But she always laughed and gnawed on the rock-hard nuggets of gum and said, “Don’t judge.” And she would dot the tip of my nose with ice cream and kiss it clean.
The ice cream shop was bought by Starbucks a few years ago, its pink candy-striped awnings replaced with ubiquitous green. On rainy days, I go inside and sit at the window with a caramel macchiato, which tastes a little like butterscotch if you try hard enough.
Sometimes, when no one’s home, I go up to the gray house and peek in the windows. The blinds are always closed. There is nothing to see. I don’t even know what I’m looking for.
The house didn’t feel so sinister when my mother lived there. True, it broke our hearts to leave Nana’s trailer after she died, but my mom had a new boyfriend who had invited us to live with him.
“I need the help, Alice,” she said. “If we stay here, I’ll have to go off-island to get a second job. And who will be with you?”
“I can stay by myself.”
“You’re nine. What if something happened?”
“I could go to Sarah’s...”
“Sarah’s mom hates me,” she said.
“But—”
She sat down on my bed. Her factory uniform was rumpled, name badge askew. The freckles across the bridge of her nose stood out so clearly against her pale skin that they looked as if they’d been stamped on, one by one.
“Trust me. This is going to work out, I promise. There’s a school right down the street, and Ray has a good job. You like him, right?”
Wrong, I thought. I didn’t like him at all. He was ugly and big, with hard, rough hands and a laugh so loud it hurt my ears. He left tracks in the toilet and distressing smells in the air.
“Sure,” I said, because there was nothing else to say.
We moved in with Ray the next week.
A Honda pulls up now at the gray house, and behind it a small U-Haul truck, which ambles past, angling, then reverses and backs slowly into the driveway. The door opens and a man climbs out. He zips up his jacket and waits in the driveway.
A woman gets out of the car, then two young girls. They line up along the fence, looking at the house. The older girl says something to her mother, receives a kiss on the top of her head. She takes her sister’s hand and the two of them cross the street to the park where I sit watching, while the man in the driveway opens the moving van and starts to unload it.
As the girls get closer, the younger one, a mop-headed bundle of about three, makes a beeline for the swings, careening forward on stubby legs with her sister in tow.
“Sissy, swing me,” she says. Her voice is a bell, chiming in the stillness.
The bucket seat is a stretch for the older girl, who is maybe nine or ten. She wraps a skinny arm around the toddler’s middle and tries to lift her into the swing.
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. I
t’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 the lid of the trash can and lock the door behind me.
* * *
When I was a little girl, Nana taught me to make shortbread.
“The trick,” she said, “is not to overwork the dough. As soon as it holds together, stop mixing.”
She showed me the way the dough was supposed to look, and explained all the things you could do with it. Jam cookies, sandies, bars covered in nuts and caramel, or just plain shortbread, which is how we both liked it best, cut into wedges and warm from the oven. We made it once a week, and sometimes my mom would come in to help.
She wasn’t as domestic as Nana, and probably not as smart, but it didn’t matter because she was so full of life. She’d enter a room in midconversation, sweeping everyone in like a child playing jacks, jostling us in her hand, then tossing us aside again when she left. There was a stillness I came to associate with her absence—a tense, hopeful waiting. I often imagined her across the Sound and walking among the strange tall buildings of the Seattle skyline, all light and glass. Who would she see, where was she going? I asked her sometimes but the answers were always unsatisfying.
“To work,” she’d say. Or, more often, simply, “Out.” Sometimes she’d give my nose a playful tweak, to let me know it was okay for me to ask, and also okay for her not to tell me. I am her age now and still don’t know where she worked when Nana was alive.
Other times, my mother was definitely “in.” She’d sleep all day, lazy and gruff, not eating or bothering to shower or brush her teeth. On those days, Nana would take me to the garden and show me how to tie up the runner beans or transplant the seedlings at just the right depth. We would work peacefully together for hours—or rather, she would work and I’d assemble props for my imaginary games, transforming a basket of vegetables into a cast of characters, the peppers doing battle with the evil eggplant. The world existed in my mind—the objects were only stand-ins to mark my place in the game.
If the weather was bad, Nana and I would read. We went once a week to the library and would come back with a sackful of books about magical places and characters who were more bold and fearless than I could ever be. That was the world I came to understand: out was where things happened, but it wasn’t a place to live.
But living in can be exhausting in its own way. I’ve forced my body into an unnatural circadian rhythm, dictated as much by my fear of the dark as a perverse desire not to be conquered by it. To cope, I’ve resorted to enormous cups of tea and slices of buttery shortbread that I bake in the middle of the night and eat right from the pan, perched on the counter next to the warm oven with one foot propped on a cabinet door, pushing it forward and back as I stare into the impenetrable forest behind my house between swipes at the latest draft of my book.
I’m sitting like that now in a tank top and a pair of men’s white briefs, with a notebook in my lap and a mug of coffee on the windowsill. I’m working through a rewrite of the fifth book in my series, and I’m behind schedule. My agent, Gus Shiroff, has been sending patient emails designed to keep me on track without freaking me out—he’s a paternal sort of guy—but from their increasing frequency I know I need to get a move on. Which means lots of coffee and long hot showers.
As I finish a long passage of dialogue and settle back at my perch with a fresh cup of coffee, I see a pale shape moving at the tree line.
Because of the island’s laid-back population and the fact that the property behind my house is vacant and heavily wooded, I have never covered my back windows with anything more than sheer cotton panels, which are usually left open to take advantage of any meager beam of sunlight that filters through the trees. Until now I’ve never stopped to consider that someone might be looking into my fishbowl the way I have looked into others.
There is no doubt in my mind that the movement is that of a person. The shape is too upright, the motion too familiar. Someone is in my backyard.
I squint through my own lamp-lit reflection into the gloom outside. It takes a minute for my eyes to adjust. Then I see him.
A man. In a gray hooded sweatshirt. He’s standing at the tree line, hands in his pockets. Looking right at me.
I jump, half falling off the counter. The coffee cup lands with a heavy clatter in the sink and splashes hot as blood across my chest and bare legs.
The man doesn’t move. He makes no effort to hide and he doesn’t look away. A spark of fear lights at the base of my spine and rushes upward to the nape of my neck. My mind leaps ahead as I catalog my vulnerabilities: my phone is in the bedroom, I’m in my underwear and there are large holes in the walls between us, covered only with fabric and sheets of glass. I feel like a bird in a cage.
Without taking my eyes off the figure outside, I reach behind me and draw a long, narrow knife from the butcher’s block. My fist closes around the handle. I ease down the length of the kitchen to the sliding glass door and check to see that it’s locked. My eyes dart to the clock— 4:17 a.m.—and catalog that, too, as if the time of day will explain the stranger’s presence here. Maybe he’s a neighbor. A farmer from the property next door. But this man is too still, too focused. An innocent motive would have him moving along, especially since he has to know I’m scared out of my mind.
For s
everal seconds, we face each other through the glass and the darkness. My reflection lies between us, as though I’m looking through my own ghost at the man who will murder me. Then he takes a few steps forward, stops again at the edge of the porch light and pulls back his hood so I can see his face.
Jack Calabrese.
My breath seizes, then resumes with a whoosh. The familiarity is a comfort only for a few seconds, until I remember the cold anger in his face when the closet door opened. The huge expanse of his chest. His fist, clenched at his side, the outline of the hammer against the wall. And I was rude to him when we met at the coffee shop. He has every reason to be angry.
His face is expressionless now. He crosses the yard and mounts the steps to the back porch. The wood creaks under his weight. I feel the vibration of his feet on the floor.
He’s right there. On the other side of the glass, his head tilted a little to one side. The shadows obscure his eyes. But I feel his stare. The tips of my breasts crinkle under the thin cotton of my tank top, and I am painfully aware that I’m standing here in nothing but my underwear. A prickling heat suffuses my neck and face. My limbs seem simultaneously weightless and clumsy.
I want to tell him to get the hell off my porch before I call the police. But my lips are frozen and my throat is clamped with fear.
He reaches for the door. Pulls, finds it locked. He smiles slowly.
I back away. My fingers tighten around the handle of the knife. A chill races up my arms, followed by a coursing tremor that rattles my teeth.
“You started it,” he says. Through the glass, his voice sounds warped, as though we’re underwater. He turns and walks away, loose and easy down the steps, through a shaft of hazy window light like a still from a film noir.
The forest closes behind him and he is gone.
* * *
In my bedroom closet is an old peacoat. I reach into the pocket, take out a wedge of papers, unfold the pages and spread them out across my bed.
This is Jack Calabrese’s life story. I know all about him—what he’s done and what he might be capable of doing. He has the sort of mindset I know I can exploit.