The Seal Wife - Kathryn Harrison [71]
“Marry me!” he says again, loud enough that anyone passing by could hear his words.
BIGELOW SPENDS A DAY, and then another, at his desk, doing the math, pages of calculations to determine the advantages of an equilateral over a right triangle, and then, having settled on equilateral, pages more to decide the placement of the keel spar, the optimal distance between the two cells. He gives the ground floor of the station house over to the building of small-scale test models, for which he uses newsprint rather than fabric lifting surfaces, the entire room littered with bits of string and sticks and paper—paper everywhere, some pieces filled with notations, others snipped into shapes, stuck with glue to the surface of his table, his floor, the soles of his boots.
It’s just a matter of time, he thinks, before she opens her door to his knock. Before she takes a gift from his hands and invites him inside.
Each afternoon, he makes a detour past her house. He stops and he knocks, he waits and he listens, he leaves a rabbit on the step and goes around to her window and peers through. Sometimes she looks at him; sometimes she doesn’t.
But she accepts his gifts; or at least she doesn’t leave them lying on the ground. She doesn’t clean the marks left by his hands, his forehead, and even his mouth, from the spotless glass pane.
And on the day she sees a kite in his hands, a model ready to test on the bluff, she gets out of the chair. She comes closer to get a better look.
Bigelow steps back, away from the window. He lets a little of the line out, and the kite sails over his head. She watches, close enough now to press her cheek to the glass. Then she comes around to the door; he hears the latch as it gives.
The kite is ten yards out, flying over the street, and he offers her the line. He takes her hand and closes her fingers around it.
“This is nothing,” he tells her.
She watches it with one eye closed against the glare. Bright enough on this spring afternoon that ice thaws underfoot. Minutes before, as he walked to her house, puddles were dull, gray, still slushy. Now they mirror the sky. The difference of one degree.
“Just wait until I take you with me,” he says. “Up the bluff, with a real kite. A big one.”
He stands behind her as she flies the model, reaches around to loosen her hold, let it out a few more feet.
When she lets him in, he sets the kite down, but it doesn’t stay put. A draft blows in from under the door, and it slides along the planks with a whisper. Bigelow has to use a chair to trap it in the corner, far enough from the stove that he needn’t worry. He can leave it and follow her to bed.
Unbutton his trousers and push up her skirt, anxious to be inside her, afraid of wasting even a minute on foreplay. Because what if she changes her mind?
JUNE 21. Solstice. The sun will never set on this warm day.
She lets him take her hand as they walk up the hill. Flowers break underfoot. He listens as their steps fall in and out of rhythm.
In a lifetime, only a handful of days like this one. The sky unfolds, and the wind cooperates. And the new kite—a hundred times prettier than the one he lost. Seams perfect, because she has sewn them.
He looks at her, standing by the shed, her face tipped up, loose strands blowing from her braid. She puts her hands up to shade her eyes.
With him she sees how it is: the leap into the heavens, the sun striking the white cells, the inlet’s water spread like a glittering endless cape.
The kite scatters a flock of swallows, climbing.
What will he show her from a perspective of four or five thousand feet, from the vantage of the clouds?
A grid of houses, and hers among them. His station and his flags. The shed on the bluff, and next to it the reel. The bays of Cook Inlet. The scribbled path of the creek.
Three tattooed lines.
Two bodies in a bed.
A man walking track.
A rain of blue-and-white china.
The trumpet