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the boat with her third eldest, Manny. And in vain were her protests when Manny, his own chin still soft with baby-down, yet his heart broader than his burly frame and sorrowing for this fatherless youngster, buttoned him inside an oilskin coat that fell below his knees, and hove him aboard his punt. Tying a length of twine with a jigger around Sylvanus’s pudgy hands, he shoved off from shore, heading for the fishing grounds. Now, as Sylvanus filled her doorway, grinning foolishly over the suit he held before her, his glut of coarse, dark hair and brows exaggerating a stubbornness fossilized since birth, she merely ambled past him, pulling on her gardening gloves.
    Hooking his suit to a notch below the mantel, Sylvanus left the house and sauntered down to his father’s stage, untouched since the day of his drowning, and wriggled open the door. It was darkish inside and murky, the air sharp with brine. Filling his lungs, he stood, waiting, watching, as his eyes adjusted, giving shape to the bulks and bundles strewn around him.

CHAPTER TWO
    COCKLESHELLS AND TOMMYCOD
    T HE SUIT NETTED him far more than a confirmation certificate. For if it hadn’t shamed him to leave such a fine garment hanging on his door, he never would’ve donned it, now a perfect fit, that Saturday evening four years later and motored in his new thirty-foot, four-horsepower motorboat over to Ragged Rock and the dance Eb Rice was holding in the new addition he was building on his house. Inside was already full of people when he got there, and the door was barred.
    Elbowing his way through the boys bunching around a window, he peered in through the paint-smeared glass, and that’s when he saw her. She was standing, leaning against the opposite wall, watching others either milling about or dancing to a jig being keyed out on an accordion. Tiny, she was, and pale; yet the whiteness of her skin appeared to usurp the light in the room, enhancing her luminescence and leaving all else as moving shadows of grey.
    Despite her being off to herself, she wasn’t without attention, he noted, seeing others casting curious glances toward her. Nor was she without conceit, for each time she encountered the eyes of another in the flickering lamplight, she raised her chin, haughtily drawing her gaze away, eclipsing the poor, offending souls once more into shades of grey. And she was proud; he saw that when Rubert Baldwin let his hand graze the roundedness of her arm as he reached past her for his tumbler of brew. Swatted him, she did, and turned her back to him, her face twisting with displeasure as he laughed. Folding her arms protectively beneath the curve of her breasts, she flounced away from him, and upon encountering the chiding looks of some of the dancers, she swung her slender hips exaggeratedly. As though sensing the looks of disapproval following her, she sauntered toward the window Sylvanus was clinging to and smiled, a smile as cool as it was deliberate, yet one that Sylvanus melted into as did Icarus’s wings into the sun.
    It were as if he had been entombed in a pit and her single ray of light had split him apart, raising him from himself. Others tried to elbow him aside but he held stubbornly to his spot, watching as she was finally persuaded to dance, his eyes clinging to the green, swinging silkiness of her dress as she cavorted into the foxtrot, and then waltzed into his dreams during the night, her siren’s song wrestling low the arm trying to jerk his jiggers come morning, taunting him with her dance upon the water, her skin radiant with light and sparkling in the sun. How blue the sea whilst she sashayed, how sweet the pine. And the breeze a gentle fanning for the heat of his brow.
    “Syllie, jeezes, what’re you gone mental?” cried his brother Manny as Sylvanus leaned against his stage door later that morning, gazing at the sky, a silly grin twisting his face. He shook himself awake and feigned fiddling with the door latch as Manny let