Gabe had built the first set of wings out of lacquered cheesecloth stretched over a bamboo frame. When that didn’t work, he tried wicker — a weave of willow bark and madrone twigs — but each of those creations proved too heavy. Another set he made out of aluminum wire and gauze, which sent Gabe spiraling into a panicky nosedive after he launched himself off the roof of the shed.
Gabe dragged himself back into the woodshop, bleeding from the mouth and glad that only Henry, and neither my mother nor I, had witnessed that test flight. “Failure number four,” Gabe muttered, and he tossed the broken wings onto the growing trash pile in the corner of the shop. In doing so, he disturbed a bat living in the rafters of the woodshop. He followed the bat as it made its way outside, and when Gabe saw the bat’s wings beat against the night sky, Gabe realized he’d been looking for inspiration in the wrong place. He also decided he had to catch that bat.
“We need your mother’s colander,” Gabe said to Henry. “And a large supply of beetles, mosquitoes, flies, and — moths. Like that one!” Gabe reached out and grabbed a brown-winged insect in midflight. He carried it into the kitchen and placed it in an empty coffee can, the fluttery drum of its wings echoing against the tin sides. He dug through the cupboards until he found the colander. In the living room, he thumbed through the books on birds he received by mail order years before until he found what he was looking for: a short section on bats included in the back of one.
From a second-floor window, my mother watched Henry in the yard snatch moths out of the air.
Viviane suddenly recalled the day Jack left for college. She remembered the glass jar he presented her, and then watching as he made his way back down the hill, and the look of the taillights of his father’s Coupe.
There was a dragonfly inside the jar. Viviane had never seen one so close before — its green iridescent wings looked far too fragile to be capable of flight.
Wilhelmina later told Viviane the superstition about dragonflies. “It’s a saying so old I don’t think anyone knows where it came from anymore,” she said.
“How does it go?” Viviane asked.
Wilhelmina’s eyes twinkled. “Catch a dragonfly, wed within the year.”
Viviane’s dragonfly had died within the week.
Downstairs she asked Gabe, “What’s Henry doing?”
“Bats and birds share a similar wing-beat pattern,” Gabe read from the book in his hands. He looked up at Viviane excitedly. “I’m going to catch a bat. Henry’s catching bugs to feed it.”
“Why not just catch a bird?” Viviane asked Gabe. “You can do that in the daylight.”
Gabe glanced up from his book. “I can’t replicate the feathers. I tried.”
It took three nights to catch the bat. In the end, the little mammal made its own way into an ancient rusted birdcage Gabe had found in the basement crusted with old crow and dove feathers. Every night after dinner, Henry fed insects to the bat through the bars and Gabe worked on a new set of wings.
I HAD BEEN ASLEEP when I heard the tap of Cardigan’s finger against the windowpane. She’d climbed up the cherry tree outside my bedroom window and breathlessly confirmed what we had both assumed since the day she had kneed Jeremiah in the groin.
“One of ’em looks like a fig — a pink shriveled-up fig,” she said.
“Yuck.” After letting her in, I climbed back into bed and wrapped my wings around me like a security blanket. “What’s it supposed to look like?”
Cardigan shrugged. “Not like that.”
My bedroom was typical of the late 1950s. There were stacks of fashion magazines on the floor and a vanity with a lace ruffle. A full-length mirror stood opposite my twin bed, which was covered in pillows and a quilt patterned with colored triangles. There was nothing about it that would indicate I was anything but a normal teenage girl. But there wasn’t a pink princess phone for late-night conversations or a pair of saddle shoes, soles worn from doing the hand jive at high-school dances. I had little connection with the outside world; there wasn’t any need for such things. Instead, there was a window where I spent my nights looking out at Salmon Bay and watching the ships drift by. And there were piles of feathers, which gathered mysteriously in my room’s lonely corners.
“So, are you and Jeremiah still an item?” I asked.
“God, no.” Cardigan pulled a tube of lipstick from her coat pocket. She slicked the gloss across her lips then tossed it to me. “Here, try it on. I snagged it from my mom.” But I placed it on my bedside table. Cardigan smiled at her pretty blond reflection in my mirror and wiped the red stain from her teeth with the side of her finger.
I had long dark hair like my grandmother, but whereas Emilienne tied hers in a severe chignon at the base of her neck, I wore mine in a high ponytail tied with a black ribbon. According to Cardigan, the ribbon was the perfect accessory for me.
“You gotta accentuate what you got,” Cardigan said. “And you, girl, have got whimsical beauty.” She flicked my wingtips with her finger. “You gotta admit, it’s definitely a strange kind of attractiveness.”
A sharp ping reverberated on my window. Cardigan flung open the window and made a wild gesture with her hands.
“I told my brother to meet me here,” Cardigan said.
Rowe Cooper was seventeen. He drove the delivery truck for my grandmother’s bakery and had already received a full scholarship from Boston University for his unusual capacity for astronomical facts and figures. Most of his belongings were already packed and labeled in cardboard boxes. Rowe wasn’t nearly as popular as his sister. He was tall and lanky, with a thick mop of curly black hair, and he always wore an old peacoat from his father’s navy days, even during Seattle’s summer months. He also stuttered. He was handsome, though, with deep-blue eyes and a quick smile.
Not that I’d noticed.
Cardigan threw her legs over the side of the open window. “A bunch of kids are going to the reservoir tonight,” she said to me.
Like every other batch of teenagers, those who lived near Pinnacle Lane had a spot where ridiculous and foolhardy acts occurred. Instead of a drive-in movie theater or soda shop, the town reservoir — with its moonlit water and shadowy edges — was the perfect place for such imperative nonsense. By this time, the old caretaker and his wife had grown cantankerous but deaf, so the kids knew they only had to be quiet when they passed by the little white house. I, of course, had never been there. But I’d heard so many stories, I believed I could see the lights from the caretaker’s house, could count the number of beer cans left on the reservoir’s edge, could hear the kids’ drunken laughter.
I found it ironic that I should be blessed with wings and yet feel so constrained, so trapped. It was because of my condition, I believe, that I noticed life’s ironies a bit more often than the average person. I collected them: how love arrived when you least expected it, how someone who said he didn’t want to hurt you eventually would.
When we were younger, my grandmother kept a small flock of chickens in a hutch Gabe built beside the workshop. I liked to watch them peck about the yard, flightless birds moving in nervous groups and scratching the ground with reptilian feet. I named them after places I would never visit: Pisa, Aiea, Nepal, Vermont.