From the height of the gull that circles the deck, Martin is not noticeably flawed, he is not unfit or aged. His tan is uniform, his birthmarks few, shoulders still broad and forearms still thick, extended for a drink. His face too distant for detail, and so by default handsome, he thinks. No waver to his gait, no hunch—from the bird’s view. From the man’s, the gull looks dovelike.
        He pulls a beach towel over his naked lap and scans the shore, has heard a voice. No one there. The beach pristine. He alone. Just him and Brigitte, alone together. He drops the towel and faces the water, wind on the torso, gull on the wind, and sees a dark spot bobbing in the waves again. A different bird perhaps, cormorant or scoter.
        Brigitte, in bed since dawn, has briefly fallen asleep. She wakes to sound outside. A voice, a call, the clink of glass on coaster. Father. The sun is setting. She rises, nightgown fluttering, walks to the window and sees something in the surf.
       Why the gull circles is clear to Martin—the gull desires—but he will not remove the dishes from the table, will let the bones and pits pile up and blow. It is summer. Outside he eats and reads, aims his stream into the dune and watches beach-walkers. In the shade beneath the deck he makes his cairns. Only when his drink is gone does he stand, wrap his towel, cross the deck and go inside where the liquor stays cool.
        Brigitte hears the heavy sound of glass doors opening, the swifter sound of screen doors opening and shutting. The crushing ice, the cabinet closing. From her bedroom window the deck is not visible. She has known her father long enough, has summered with him at this house enough to know to stay indoors.
        Martin sips, sees the gull land. More gulls come. He walks to the doorway of his daughter’s bedroom, stands a moment, nods at her—she nods—then leaves again between the sliding screens, says, “Hey girls,” to the gulls, who lift at once.
        Then the spot in the water lengthens, rises, rides a wave to shore, stands on sand, lifts a huge bright thing, a surfboard, he realizes, and carries it up the beach. Minutes later, another rises tall and does the same.
        Just two young boys, he thinks.
        Brigitte pours a drink. The tide is getting high. They might come in a little ways, come a little closer to the house and take their sleek black wetsuits off, reveal bright trunks beneath.
        Now one is crouching on his board, posing, showing something to the other. The one is the more experienced surfer, Martin thinks—an older boy, perhaps the bigger brother.
        They are hunching, they are getting cold, Brigitte thinks. It’s early in the season, the water hasn’t warmed yet and the colder night is coming. Or maybe they are smoking, keeping embers from the wind.
        Now the bigger boy is pointing at something down the beach.
        The smaller one is running in the direction of the bigger one’s pointing.
        The smaller one is kneeling down, lifting something from the sand.
        The bigger one seems to be yelling, but the smaller one is walking towards him and it is in the smaller one’s hands.  
        Why this way, why coming so close to the house?
        “Dad,” Brigitte shouts through the kitchen window. “Someone’s coming up the beach.”
        “Cover up,” she shouts.
        She sets her drink and goes outside, nightgown to the coming night.
        “It’s a she!” Martin says, tightening his towel as a girl ascends the steps that lead up from the beach.
        “The little one,” he says, “in fact a little sister.” 
        “Ahoy,” he says.
        He has waited years for this: an unannounced deck visitor, a girl other than his daughter.
        “Excuse me,” the girl says, the taller boy behind.
        In the dimness, at this distance, it is hard to see what the girl holds close. Something large, light, fragile—loved, Martin thinks.
        “Come up, come up,” he says.
        Brigitte shakes her head. “This is private property.”
        “We have an emergency,” the girl says, moving towards them on the deck.
        She is holding in her arms an injured gull.


        Jeep, shark or seal. Or psycho. We can’t help a seagull, Brigitte thinks, especially one so far beyond help at all.
        “Poor thing,” she says. “There’s not much to do for birds.”
        “Don’t you have a box to lay him in?” the girl says. “Something soft to wrap him in.”
        Martin raises his eyebrows, points to his skirted towel.
        “Dad,” Brigitte says.
        “Why don’t you just leave it here,” she says. “We’ll figure something out.”
        “Good idea,” the boy says to the girl. “Let’s leave him and go.”
        “I’d feel too bad,” the girl says. 
        “Sorry,” says Brigitte. “Goodbye.”
        “Not so fast,” Martin says. “I know a thing or two about bird parts. I can, perhaps, attempt some surgery.”
        “You know how?” the girl says.
        “If my daughter doesn’t obstruct us,” he says, turning on the deck lights, pushing aside the dishes.
        “Brigitte, go inside and get some safety pins, a rubber band, maybe a few paper clips,” he says.
        “We’ll need to transfer the bird from your arms to mine,” he says to the girl, and extends his arms as though to embrace her, feels wet fabric, feathers, cold little hands. He lays the gull down on the table.
        It’s just a bird, nothing too complicated, far less exotic than the humans on his deck.
        “You,” he says to the boy. “You’ll be my assistant.” 
        Brigitte knows the feeling, has been accomplice to her father’s projects all her life. Buddy, navigator, little girl in a room of men, daughter to show off.
        She gathers items from her father’s desk. He has not given this much attention to a child—not a child of his, at least—in years.
        “Needle and thread,” he yells from outside.
        She arranges the items neatly on an antique silver platter and brings them out.
        “Hey, man, I don’t know,” the boy says. “We left our stuff down on the beach, the tide is coming in.”
        “Be a sport about this,” Martin says. “You’re not squeamish, are you? Don’t you want to make this young lady happy?”
        Brigitte knows he likes to ask for help, will not allow himself to be turned down
        “I think his wing is broken,” the girl says. “And his neck, maybe.”
        “Let doctor be the judge of that,” Martin says.
        “I can show you where,” the girl says, moving towards the gull.
        Martin shields the gull with his hands. “Don’t be silly. Your suit is wet. Aren’t you cold?”
        The girl looks at Brigitte as if in camaraderie with another girl, then Brigitte stops the thought—she is no girl.
        “I’m a little cold,” the girls says. “If I can’t help, then let me wait inside.”
        “Our house is not what I’d call kid-friendly,” Brigitte says.
        “A load of shit,” Martin says. “Take her in. Light a fire. Draw a bath.”


        Brigitte cannot remember the last time they had a visitor—would it do them good to have some guests? Fresh blood, young flesh? This was once their place for leisure
        If she allows the girl in, will her father follow?
        If the boy comes in, he could be dirty, rude. What order will he upset?
        The girl is shivering. What would other women do? Be motherly, she tells herself. Be a host.
        She gestures to the girl and slides the door.


        “You seem smart,” Martin says to the boy, opening a diagram of a bird skeleton on his phone. “What do you think?”
        “I’m not exactly into science,” the boy says.
        “You don’t have the stomach?”
        “I don’t have the time.”
        “Busy catching waves? I get it,” Martin says. “Now, it seems to me there’s a fracture on her wing bone. A puncture wound here on her breast, beneath the neck, maybe a shattered leg. Hold her wing out straight for me.”
        He plays a video of an owl surgery, follows along, inserts two pins into the wing bone.
        The gull does not move, does not protest. 
        “Did you know her bones are hollow?”
        “No,” the boy says.
        The gull weakly flaps its good wing.
        Martin instructs the boy to straighten the paper clips and attach them perpendicularly to each pin with a rubber band.
        “Excellent work,” he says, patting the boy on the back. “The little girl is going to be thrilled. Now for her hospital bed,” he says and takes a large cardboard wine box from the recycling, lays the gull in it.


        “Don’t mind my dad,” Brigitte says. “He’ll fix the bird. Then you can go.”
        She finishes her drink, thinks of something she could offer to the girl. “Do you like hot chocolate?”
        “Yes,” the girl says.
        She boils water, pours a pack of powdered chocolate in a mug.
        “Two packets please,” the girl says.
        She leads the girl to the living room and sits her down, pale bare feet on the plush white rug, thin suited legs on the suede white couch, beaded lampshades shaking, nervous cubist painting watching, as she begins to build a fire.
        “Just don’t spill that anywhere,” she says, and lights the kindling.
        A little flame grows on the wood.
        “Good day for surfing?”
        “No,” the girl says. “It’s totally calm here, all the time.”
        “We get some stormy days,” Brigitte says. “Some big swell. Not too often.”
        “I wish this was California,” the girl says, “where the waves are deadly.”
        Brigitte pokes the fire, lays the stick against the marble.
        She pats the piano bench beside the fireplace.
        “You can take it off now,” she says
        The girl unzips her wetsuit, peels it from her flesh and lays it flat on the bench.
        Then she stands before the flames in her bright white string bikini.


        What do you think of me now that I’ve fixed you? Martin wonders, peering in the box. Even at such close range, even if the gull’s wet eyes were open, in this darkness, in this chaos, the gull could not discern his pride.
        He wipes his bloodied hands on the towel he wears.
        “Now run inside and tell your sweet little sister that everything will be fine,” he says to the boy.
        “Girlfriend,” the boy says.
        “I have a collection of vintage clothing,” Brigitte says, “if you’d like to put something on.”
        “That might be weird,” the girl says, sipping. “I’m fine like this.”
        “Maybe you would like to see my pressed flowers?” Brigitte says, picking up an album from the driftwood coffee table.
        “These were from my wedding,” she says.
        She flips through pages of dried and crushed pinks and yellows.
        “I was married once,” Brigitte says, “believe it or not.”
        “I’m not really into girly stuff,” the girl says. “But my mom is. She even has a dress like yours.”
        The girl eyes the nightgown’s pineapples, pink telephones and pink lace fringe.
        Brigitte laughs. “This is lingerie.”
        “We can get out of here,” the boy says, coming in. “Bird’s fine.”
        “Do you think he can fly?” the girl says.
        “I don’t know. He’s sleeping,” the boy says. “Let’s go.”
        “How are you getting home?” Brigitte says. “I’m guessing you can’t drive.”
        “I’m a great driver,” the boy says. “Just not legal yet.”
        “My father could drive you,” Brigitte says.
        “Our boards wouldn’t fit in his car,” the boy says. “We’ll walk.”
        Martin enters, streaks of blood on his pale blue towel, red handprint on his chest. “Walk, carrying those things?” he says. “It’s a very long walk to anywhere, out here on the point.”
        “I want to stay,” the girl says, “for the seagull. I have a few hours until curfew.”
        “I concur,” Martin says. “Do you like marijuana? You must.”
        “You guys smoke?” the boy says.
        “Dad,” Brigitte says. “I’m sure they’re not interested.”
        “Don’t be shy,” Martin says. “I know where you keep it. Shallow top drawer of your dresser with the lace things. Share it.”
        “I’d stay for a bowl,” the boy says.
        “See? Don’t make me go in there and get it myself,” Martin says, and Brigitte gets up, walks down the hall. The boy sits down.
        “But not on my couch in that soaking wetsuit,” Martin says. “Take it off and lay it to dry on the piano bench. Right next to your girlfriend’s.”
        “I should go get my clothes on the beach,” the boy says.
        “Don’t trouble yourself,” Martin says. “I have an extra towel or two you can wear.”
        “Brigitte,” he calls. “A towel also, please! A velvety white one—to match his lady’s bathing suit.”


        In his towel the boy looks brave and ancient, a warrior who has performed surgery on a small, suffering creature in low light. The boy is scrawny, bird-boned, so many of those local bay boys are, subsisting on clams and wild blueberries. The hair on his head curls, flips breezily, hair always mimicking the waves boys ride on. He might be tired, looks a little hesitant, Brigitte thinks, but it’s hard to tell with boys, their thinking always clouded by hunger.
        “Your eyes are the color of the ocean,” Brigitte says, passing him the joint.
        “That’s so corny,” the girl says, laughing.
        “I was thinking they were more the color of absinthe,” Martin says, and pours four glasses of absinthe from the bottle on the piano, distributes one each to daughter, girl and boy.
        “Welcome home,” Martin says. “Welcome to our home, I mean.”
        He wipes the absinthe from his chin.
        “Have you ever seen a disco ball up close?” he says.
        The children shake their heads.
        “Would you like to?”
        They nod.
        “It’s upstairs.”
        He looks through the door to the kitchen where Brigitte, in her low-cut nightgown—no bra, Martin knows all women sleep without—bends down at the oven, puts a frozen pizza in.
        “How about a tour on the way?” he says. “You don’t need to join us, Brigitte. You’ve seen the ball a hundred times. Stay, watch the pizza.”




        Now is the hour when the gulls go quiet. They have ceased their circling. They have settled in the dune grass—is that where they nest? or do they sleep beneath the waves? do they sleep above the clouds? or do they sleep in the sand caves, dug along the shore by children? Most nights, the gulls asleep, Martin feels alone on the tip of the peninsula, where all is dark except the ships, perhaps a neighbor’s porch light on the weekends, or sometimes, very late at night, the headlights of a speeding teen.
        But not tonight. Tonight the chandelier reflects in the sleek mahogany dining room table. Tonight his chrome telescope gleams. Behold his clean mosaics and polished ornamental trims and art in bronze frames behind glass, the sparkling gold detailing of his rare books. The dolls’ eyes brighten in the unused bedrooms where children slept so long ago in summer.
        Martin points to a window in the upstairs hall. His Porsche, built the year he was born, glows in the driveway.
        “Is that your car?” the boy says. “It’s pretty sick.”
        “You have good taste,” Martin says, patting the boy’s back. “Sick indeed. It’s no surf buggy, of course. But imagine gunning it to eighty as the ocean flies by. Brigitte will never know the thrill,” he says, shaking his head. “She didn’t learn how to drive.”
        “I’ve never met anyone who lived in one of these mansions out here,” the girl says.
        “We always thought it was only celebrities,” the boy says.
        “Who says we’re not celebrities?” Martin says.
        “You guys are cool,” the girl says.
        “How old are you?” Martin says.
        “Fifteen,” the boy says.
        “Fourteen,” says the girl.
        “Would you believe that my own child is nearly forty?” Martin says.


        In the kitchen, Brigitte cuts pizza into squares, stops short of blotting grease with a napkin as she does when she makes it for herself, a habit she learned from her mother.
        She thinks about the girl, puts the pizza on the table, looks outside.


        “The disco ball,” Martin says, “is in my bedroom. You don’t mind coming in, do you?”
        “We go into other people’s bedrooms,” the girl says.
        “I’m sure you do,” Martin says. “You’re not children anymore.”
        He opens the door. The room is simple, linens white—regularly laundered by Brigitte—blonde bedframe, blonde record player cabinet beside the bed, white modern chair in the corner, half-full bottle of absinthe resting on the comforter.
        “You’d never expect to find a disco ball here, would you? Have a seat on the bed.”
        They sit, the girl finishes her absinthe, drinks fast for a girl. She places the empty glass on the night table and, to Martin’s delight, fully reclines.
        He opens his closet and removes the mirrored ball.
        “It’s genuine,” he says. “Fifty-inch circumference. 1977. San Francisco.”


        Brigitte opens the sliding doors, goes out, steps carefully—it is slick now on the deck. Fog, smell of salt, sting of sand, irregular cry of a single bird. The wine box sits on the table, garbage aglow, open flaps blowing slightly, image of a raven on the cardboard gleaming in the deck lights, blood soaked through.
        Brigitte thinks of the girl. Her great love of creatures has brought them all together.
        She thinks of what the girl would want if she were old enough to know.
        If she were young enough to be the girl again, what would Brigitte want?
        What boys want—what men—doesn’t matter. They are not the ones who know creatures best. House of strangers, love of a bird. She thinks of the risks she took as a girl, the risks that all young women take in their little white swimsuits.
        The girl must know what Martin is thinking: the same thing the boy has been thinking since he’s known the girl—
        Just four easy white bowties. Left hip, right hip, upper back, nape of neck.
        Then all falls to the floor like a bride’s bouquet.


        “Drink up,” Martin says, pouring more. “I have to apologize for the absinthe. It’s not nearly as good as it used to be. Nothing like what it was when I lived in Europe in the eighties.”
        “Can we shine some light on the ball?” the boy says.
        “Yes, but excuse me, the light is under your head,” Martin says to the girl, and reaches beneath the clean white pillow and pulls out a heavy silver flashlight.
        “Shine it,” he says. “Wherever you like.”
        He opens the record cabinet, places the needle gently.
        “Some say if you look into a disco ball, you can see your future,” he says.


        Her father may be acting like the hero tonight, Brigitte thinks, but she has always been the merciful one: putting dishes out for cats, unhooking fish, throwing conchs back to the waves. It was her father always saying not to interfere with nature.
        Brigitte can hear him laughing, hear the music.
        She can hear the girl, the boy.
        It is her job, she thinks, it is her duty.
        What the gull wants is not a question.
        She spreads the flaps of the wine box, sees the stained hulk of feathers, gaping beak, curled feet. Glint of metal, improvised splint. She puts her fingers to the feathers, gasps.


        “What do you see?” the girl says.
        “I won the surfing championships,” the boy says.
        “What about me?”
        “You won the one for girls.”
        Martin strokes the mirrored facets, sees his broken face, wonders if this image simulates gull vision, if this could be what she sees when she flies—no, a bird is not a spider, does not see kaleidoscopically—but perhaps an injured bird, beak ajar? A knock on the head, seeing stars?
        “Brigitte was practically raised at the discotheque,” he says. “Maybe that explains how she came to be such an excellent dancer.”
        “Brigitte, come dance for us,” he yells.
        “She used to strip,” he whispers.


        Brigitte has touched pure bone, a rib or breast bone, slop beneath, whatever it is that cases a heart.
        The gull does not move, calls meekly.
        Moths float to the deck lights. Through the glass she can see the fire thrashing, she can hear her father yelling. They could be down at any moment, drenched in sweat.
        She looks around the deck.
        A terra-cotta pot, a plate.
        Scissors, knives inside.
        Sharp shells, sharp bones, dry dune grass thick as a blade.
        Strangling would be gruesome.
        Piece of driftwood. Heavy rock.
        Her father’s cairns below the deck. They do not weather there, do not erode, protected from wind, hidden from walkers, tall as a man—they have been his best friends—tight and hard to topple.
        She picks the biggest, sharpest rock.
        This is not about him, Brigitte thinks.
        It is my purpose. I do this for women.
        The girl will never know but will be grateful still.
        She hears the rapid beat, the synth, the swelling strings of disco.





        The wetsuits are dry. Any belongings the children left on the shore have been stolen by the waves. The girl and boy eat squares of pizza standing up, one on each side of the fire, facing father and daughter. The boy is sunburnt. The freckles on the girl’s chest and thighs come into focus. The scar on her knee is the shape of a sword. Isn’t the young woman’s shining body, Brigitte thinks, something of a painted mirror, a scrying glass?
        The boy finishes his crust, pours absinthe into a mug of cold hot chocolate, sits on the loveseat. The girl, drink in hand, comes stumbling across the living room, bright flash past the dying fire, reaches the loveseat—Brigitte sees, Martin sees—and sits clumsily next to the boy, though not touching, no, they know they are watched.
        “Too much time in the sun,” Martin says, chuckling.
        “It’s midnight,” Brigitte says. “Should we—?”
        “You don’t mean to suggest—” Martin says. “Let sleepy birds lay.”

        When she was the girl’s age, Brigitte was with Martin—even then, with Father. They traveled the world, she in high boots and a short dress, Martin in white shorts and glossy loafers. Walking beaches with hot sand, walking beaches with cold sand. In hotels, father flexing his arms behind her as she caked the blush, the eye shadow. “Daughter or girlfriend?” people asked, her hair billowing on a terrace, a man or men slowly approaching in the orange light. Child? Lover? It flattered them both, and she was more than a little thrilled to lie. She would still lie now.


        “Can any of you kids,” Martin says, “remember the name of the novel this reminds me of?”
        The boy, eyes closed, laughs a little.
        “It had ‘seagull’ in the title,” Martin says.
        “I’m going to say no,” the boy says.
        “It was very popular. Perhaps the two of you are no longer of the generation,” Martin says. “Baby Brigitte loved it. ‘Daddy, daddy, the one about the bird.’”
        “Isn’t that a play?” the girl says.
        “Nice try,” Martin says. “But I never read Brigitte any plays.”
        The girl looks out the window, starts to stand.
        “There’s a little left, if this is what you’re looking for,” Martin says, reaching for the stubbed-out joint on the coffee table.
        “I’m going to go see how he’s doing out there,” the girl says.
        “Now just a minute,” Martin says. “Please help me remember it first. You seem very literate. Blurry silhouette of a bird on the cover, wings spread wide.”
        “Reading it right here by this very fireplace,” Brigitte says.
        “Brigitte and her favorite book, me and my drink. ‘A little drop of absinthe from your tiny pinky, daddy.’ My daughter, always wanting.”
        “Hugging your thigh while you read,” Brigitte says.
        “That’s a creepy detail to mention,” Martin says. “But you always had a very active imagination.”


        Then the boy sits up, touches his sunburn.
        The girl sets her drink on the arm of the couch, starts towards the doorway.
        The boy’s blister opens, oozes, the boy looks up, looks ill.
        The boy rises, the drink spills, green on white.
        The girl is walking towards the kitchen and the boy is walking very quickly down the hall.


        “Look what you’ve done, Brigitte,” Martin says, gesturing to the spill, then the boy, the girl, “with that inappropriate comment. What kind of host are you? Haven’t left the house in how many months, but can’t even show hospitality?” and Martin is up, and Brigitte is up, and Martin says, “Show him to the bathroom like a good girl. You wanted a son once,” and Martin is laughing, walks after the girl, stops briefly, yells down the hall in the direction of the boy Brigitte is walking after, “Don’t mind my daughter, she’s a heathen!” and then back in the direction of the girl, says, “She doesn’t scare you, does she? I promise she’s not usually such a weirdo,” and then he is saying, “Stop,” and the girl is walking faster, towards the sliding doors, “Don’t go yet,” he is saying, and he is seizing a heavy glass paperweight from the piano, walking towards the kitchen, raising, wielding, catching up to the girl, paperweight held at pitching-height—


        “Stop,” he says, “Stop.”
        The girl turns around, sees glass.
        The girl blocks her face with her arms.
        “Wait,” he says.
        “I’m sorry—you didn’t think—” he laughs.
        He holds the glass gently with both hands, low and non-threateningly, at the height of her breasts.
        “You must have a lot of anxiety,” he says. “I only wanted to show you this.” 


        Infinity image.
        Reflection of a reflection.
        All walls in the bathroom are mirrored floor-to-ceiling like a ballet studio.
        A boy on the rim of the tub faces the open toilet, waiting to puke.
        A woman kneels behind him in the mirror in the mirror, rubs cold gel on a boy’s hot burn.
        The boy shifts his legs, crosses, uncrosses, a hundred legs in the mirror, adjusts his towel and the woman knows that embarrassed effort to conceal. Is she blinking too much, are her eyes lingering, does she look away too conspicuously?


        “Let me just show it to you,” Martin says, and still the girl backs towards the door.
        “I promise we can see the bird after,” he says.
        The girl shakes her head.
        “Be a nice girl. Don’t you want to know what this is? Can’t a man just explain?”
        “Just touch this for a minute. You’ll like it,” he says, “You’ll see,” and he is so close that his towel fibers brush her skin.
        The girl takes the glass.
        “Thank you,” he says. “Thank you. Now listen. This is a deck prism. They used to put these in the decks of old wooden sailing ships to bring light to the cabin below. It was very dark in those cabins. And all those lonely sailors were going blind from seeing only the sea all day, from seeing nothing but the same old quarters of their ship. They saw their shipmates, yes, a whale here or there. But they were getting a little bit psycho,” he says, sipping his drink, putting his drink in the girl’s free hand, “from all that wave-watching. And so the prisms, bringing color and movement, bringing fairies and flowers to their walls, were their saviors. But there was one shape they were waiting desperately for in the refracted splendor. One shape that came calling upon only the luckiest, the most blessed of the men. Can you guess what shape that was?”
        “A heart,” the girl says.
        “So close,” he says. “Think about what a sailor does all day, who he does it with. Months and months, years and years, just a sailor and his sailors out there on the sea, in their tight little bunks, on their hard little mattresses. Think about what a sailor doesn’t do, not at sea at least, what he doesn’t have.”
        The girl is backed against the wall.
        He puts his palm to her warm shoulder, quickly removes it.
        She looks at her shoulder, looks at him. Absinthe sloshes to her wrist.
        “Yes,” Martin says. “Yes, you’re right. That’s the one shape he longs to see spreading before him, close enough to touch. Winged, rippled, open, like a moth.”
        “The piano,” he says, “was my wife’s. Can you play?”


        “I have a question,” the boy says.
        Hot chocolate on the lips of a boy.
        Breath of chocolate, anise, sweet fennel.
        Brigitte feels suddenly sorry for him, wonders, briefly, of his actual mother, too naïve perhaps to know the young are hypnotizing, that being beautiful is an act of coercion, that there are women who fear what might happen to another woman’s son if those women do not bite their tongues and sit on their hands. Compared to the girl’s, her chest heaves and bounces and the boy has not learned not to stare.
        “Tell me your question,” Brigitte says.
        “Do you think a lap dance counts as cheating?” the boy says.
        Martin dips his pinky in the drink she holds, brings it to the light, observes the fruit fly drowning in the drop upon his fingertip.
        “If you can’t play, play it anyway,” he says, and frees her hands.
        The girl sits down on her wetsuit and presses a key with one finger.
        “Play with all ten of them,” he says.
        She is playing tonal clusters. He is singing beneath his breath.
        “Glory looking day, glory day, glory looking day.”
        “Brigitte,” he yells, “will you dance for us now?”
        “Make an old man happy,” he says.
        “It’s all glory told a simple way.”
        “Play louder,” he says.
        “Behold it if you may.”
        “We’re as good as Neil Diamond,” he whispers.
        The girl stops playing.
        “I’m going to go check on the seagull,” she says.
        “Infirm little Jonathan Livingston? Are you sure?”
        She rises, faces him, last lick of fire shrinking into smoke.
        “Yes,” she says.
        “But I can’t bear to find out,” he says. “What if—?” and he stumbles into the leg of the piano bench, trips, spills his drink down the girl’s chest, big splash on her little suit, drink dripping down her nearly concave abdomen and she is shocked, has stopped, tries to catch it as it trickles.
        Like a tern in an oil spill, Martin thinks.
        “May I?” he says.
        He takes the bottom corner of his bloody towel and wipes her dry.
        “We will check on her together,” he says.


        “I could at least do some pirouettes and battements for you,” Brigitte says to the boy. “Will that suffice?”
        She grips the towel bar in one hand, hitches her nightgown, and reaches for the sky with her free hand. She extends her leg.
        She still practices sometimes, mornings in her bedroom, watching the waves, with an inkling of the joy of her earliest ballet lessons. She can feel flesh touch flesh where it didn’t in her youth. But she is not so inflexible yet, still limber.
        “My girlfriend can almost do that on her board,” the boy says.
        “Do you want to marry her?”
        “Someday.”
        “A mother would grieve to give you up.”
        “My mom can hardly wait.”
        “I imagine you and your mother walking together on your wedding day,” she says, “among pale flowers.”
        She lifts a leg as she lifts a leg in the mirror in the mirror.
        “Where’s your mom?” the boy says.
        Brigitte laughs quietly.
        “She just wasn’t cut out for us,” she says.





        The waves are calm. No beetles buzz, no moths thump against the glass. No birds, not even lonely, mournful nightbirds. Just the girl’s chattering teeth. Beyond the house there are no lights aside from stars.
        Martin gently parts the folds of the damp box, puts his finger forward, strokes once.
        “Oh,” he says.
        He reaches for the girl.
        “Don’t cry,” he says. 
        He points up.
        “Seagulls give their wings to angels when they die.”
        Her face is slick with fragrant tears.
        “Hold out both hands,” he says, and puts the box in her hands.
        “The cairns await her burial,” he says.
        “I know you’re very sad,” he says.
        He pulls her close.
        “Can we walk like this, as I used to do with Brigitte?”


        In the mirror in the mirror, a boy. Brave but hurt. Not what a grown mother wants in a son: brave, hurt. But what girl doesn’t pine after the wounded hero? A hot rod crashed. A surfboard snapped. She cannot deny these joys to the girl.
        In the mirror in the mirror, the boy wipes his sweating brow. Brigitte stands, adjusts her nightgown, wipes her sweating hands on the fabric.
        She opens the mirror above the sink, slips four pills from an orange bottle, and crushes them with a lipstick tube. Then she sprinkles the powder in her glass and pours another.
        “Your wedding day is just around the corner,” she says.
        There is a light, rapid knocking on the bathroom door.
        Then the girl’s voice, trembling, quiet.
        “He wants us in the living room,” she says.


        Martin stands in front of the fireplace, his hands together at his chest, as though in prayer.
        “A drink, Daddy?” Brigitte says, offering him her glass.
        “You can be so sweet on occasion,” he says.
        He tilts his head back and swallows it all.
        “Family, I have tragic news,” he says. “Despite my best efforts, despite the boy’s—our winged friend has passed. We won’t die of broken hearts, not my daughter and I. Out here—most places really—there is always another gull.”
       “She may have been just a bird,” Martin says. “But from up there where she flew, she thought we were very beautiful. Seductive, even. The girl and I buried her under the deck.”
        The girl puts her hand to her breast as though to check her heart.
        The boy pats her clumsily. The girl does not seem to notice. Brigitte wonders how long it takes for boys—for men—to learn to console. 
        “Let’s all close our eyes for a moment,” Martin says. “A guided meditation. To assist in processing our grief.”
        He sits down on the floor, in lotus position, and closes his eyes. He rests his hands on the bloody towel that still covers his knees. The knot has come a little loose.
        “I’d like to lead it,” Brigitte says, “if you don’t mind.”
        “You?” he says. He chuckles. “You were never particularly good at controlling your thoughts. But go ahead. Give it a try.”


        Brigitte takes a deep breath.
        “Inhale slowly,” she says. “Exhale slowly. Breathe deep. Try to visualize it.”
        “Now imagine,” Brigitte says, “we’re in California. The waves are huge. The weather is beautiful.”
        “And pretend,” Brigitte says, “I’m a dolphin. Sleek and young. Dancing gracefully in the waves. And Daddy is a big, feathery parrot. Sitting on a branch above us. Sleepy in the mid-afternoon sun. And you,” she says to the girl and the boy, “are a pair of newlywed tourists. Walking along the beach after a perfect day of surfing. She’s wearing a diamond.”
        “Reflecting in the diamond, you see paradise,” Martin says, voice a fading slur. “A thousand parrot’s eyes.”
        “I’m the guide,” Brigitte says. “No interruptions, please.”
        “Now,” she says, “you’re standing at the edge of the water. Picture clouds of butterflies, protecting their pupae in the cracks of the glittering cliffs, drinking nectar from the flowers, flying out of the center of the pink rose, can you smell it? Can you taste the fruit? The waves are massive, emerald, hurling themselves at the sand. Can you feel the cresting dorsal fin, the sleepy beak fallen open? Can you see the twinkling ships beyond the waves, the ice cream stand? Ignore the screaming of the gulls.”
        “And look,” Brigitte says. “Turtles are coming in on the waves, thickening the shallow waters of the tidal pools, like stones to dance upon.”
        “Stare into the spirals on the turtle’s shell,” she says.


        “Are you staring?” she says. “Daddy?”
        His head hangs heavier.
        She turns to the children.
        “Grab onto the dolphin,” Brigitte whispers.
        She takes the boy’s hand, the girl’s.
        “And be very quiet,” she says. “Because there is a parrot above us that may easily wake.”
        She leads them out of the room.
        “I know you can’t technically breathe under water,” she says.
        And she hands the boy the keys to the Porsche.
        “But surfers are brave,” she says, “and good at holding their breath.”
        She presses the button that unlocks the gate at the end of the driveway, opens the front door. They step onto the porch. In bathing suit and towel, girl and boy face the silver car glowing in the floodlights.
        There is the sound, a thud, in the living room.
        “Swim fast,” she says.