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. 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