PEIRCE ISLAND

Pilot and I drive to the spit of land where she loves to race the birds, out beyond the Fisherman’s Co-op. She races. I walk the length of the small island and stand at a semicircle of rocks overlooking the dogleg of the river. A breeze lifts from the river. Looking west, I see the Memorial Bridge, the Sarah Long Bridge, and in the distance my bridge, the arch rising over I-95.

Across the river, cranes at the Navy Yard lift at an angle to the sky. If I stayed till sunset I’d hear the bugle call. Not Taps. But in my mind I can hear Luke whistling it for my grandmother, and I can imagine the notes coming across the river from the shipyard sound system. The memory of the sound fills me, and I see Luke at the window, whistling the notes to the words I always add.

Day is done,

Gone the sun,

From the hills, from the lakes, from the skies.

All is well,

Safely rest,

God is nigh.

The notes press on my heart.

“He will chase the ghost,” Yiey had said. “He help Srey Pov. He need time to take care himself.”

I look out over the rocks. Sometimes I see seals even in winter. They could be rocks until I see their eyes staring back. Souls of the drowned. Luke had hope in the seals and their mysteries, imagining how a living creature can transform and endure.

I call Pilot. She is busy, her licorice tail pointing, her right paw lifted, as she finds me a bird. I call again. She releases. We race with the wind round the curve of the land.

Rosa catches up with us, and we walk in the pebbles down on the beach before I go in to work. It’s mid March, and already the air’s different. It doesn’t cut into my skin.

“I missed your opening at the Press Room,” I say.

“I was breathtaking,” Rosa says. “I’m officially a country western star. I wore boots with five-inch heels.”

Rosa has small Mickey Mouses painted on her fingernails over coral-pink polish. Her hair is down today and curled around her face.

“I did come to your birthday,” she says.

“Thank you,” I say.

“How is seventeen?”

I will remember seventeen as the year that I found it easy to slide into Maggie Cassidy and grasp a gun in my hand. And fire it into the Atlantic Ocean. And I loved a soldier.

“Seventeen,” I say. “I was a Spanish dancer.”