Read Online The Seal Wife by Kathryn Harrison - Free Book Online Page A

bottom corners of the aft cell. Mismatched, they work well enough, each held with a cotter pin that he can easily remove.
    The kite jerks Bigelow away from the platform and onto the bluff, pulling his feet out from under him. He struggles to keep it on the ground to double-check the leads, the angle the harness presents to the wind. But why bother to consider physics? Without encouragement, the air takes the kite from his hands. He’s looking around for the best point from which to release the counterweight and pace out a few yards of line, when it sails up as if enchanted, carrying seventeen pounds of ballast with it.
    The clumsy windlass unwinds; the boards of the platform creak; oily, lumpy gut slithers through his guiding hands—they must be hurting, but Bigelow doesn’t feel them, consumed by the ecstatic rise of the kite. So graceful, so assured and swift. Watching it, he forgets to make note of line length, doesn’t bother to measure angles.
    What is it that tugs at him, as if it were his heart itself un-spooling? One minute the kite is before his face, large enough to blot out the rest of creation; the next it is far, far away. A handful of sticks, a shroud of white linen, the conceit of altitude. Flight.
    Up in the sky, all the line played out, it appears as a little house: white and perfect. The sun ignites one of the faces of the forward cell, makes it so burningly bright that he can’t look at it for long, can’t watch it fly the way he wants to. Yet neither can he look away.
    Bigelow touches the line to feel it again, the tremble—unlike anything else—the pull on the end of the line. Alive.
    Amazing that this thing he built should fly so perfectly, so absolutely horizontal and steady, resting on an invisible current of air.
    But why is he surprised? He has pages of calculations relating lift to the sine of the angle of incidence, pages more on the ratio of inertia to viscous forces. He’s plotted everything out on paper with variable dihedrals, going a half degree at a time from thirty-two to thirty-eight degrees—and graphs of drag coefficients, of lift coefficients, of laminar versus turbulent wake. It isn’t magic, after all, it’s science.
    So how to explain the effect on him of the one white face, so bright, like sunlight on the surface of the sea, throwing spangles into the air? How to explain the catch in his chest, the sudden spill of tears?
    THIS TIME, when Bigelow pushes his way into her house, he sees that a silvery-green patina of lichen has spread over the surface of her door, and pretty as this is, the sight makes him desperate, it marks the passage of time. How long has she been gone? No longer weeks or even months: a season. So he is all the more surprised by the warm air inside the house, by the sight of a stove where hers had always been, a table, a chair, a bed piled with furs. Tea and tobacco on the shelf, a glass of water on the table, half full, grease fogging its surface. At last, she has come back!
    He picks the water up, remembering the sheen on the woman’s mouth as she ate. Is it because she never spoke that such details have assumed importance? Bigelow slowly tips the glass so that the water rolls up to its lip, then rights it. The grease hangs on its side before slipping back down. He drinks the water and replaces the empty glass on the table, sits in the chair to await the woman’s return, imagining the errands that might occupy her.
    The longer she is gone, the more he is tempted to go out and find her, but small as the town is, they might miss each other, so he waits. He sits, he paces, and at last decides to lie down on the bed, a presumption he hopes won’t offend her, but he is suddenly so tired—it must be an effect of excitement—he can’t hold himself upright in her straight-backed chair.
    She has a new skin, a wolf, and the bed frame is new as well. She must have traded the old one with its creaks and groans, its one short leg.
    The force of desire, the