Dahlia peers out to the horizon where a tiny sailboat hovers. Her throat tightens when she imagines it speeding away and disappearing from sight, wishes she could pluck it from the sea, cradle it in her cupped palms. But of course the boat is not really tiny, it’s just time and distance playing with her mind, taking her back to her ten-year-old son and the miniature sailboat in a bottle that sat on his bookshelf along with the Goosebumps and Harry Potter books he’d feast on late into the night when he was supposed to be sleeping. She remembers how the bottle fell to the floor and when she heard the sound of tinkling glass, she ran in to tell him it was ok, but he said he was happy the little boat was free so he could play with it now. How the next day the boy’s father typhooned out of the house in one of his rages, never to return. How the boy asked if it was his fault because he’d broken the souvenir his father brought back from a trip to Portland, but no matter how many times Dahlia said it wasn’t his fault, she’d hear him weeping at night, nothing seeming to console him anymore except when he took the boat into the bath, and he’d kick up a small torrent of waves for it to bob on. How he stopped playing with it as he grew, but even at eighteen gave it a central spot on the shelf. How the first thing she noticed when she entered his room that morning was the empty space, a small, sailboat-shaped mark all that was left. Now, squinting into the misty distance, Dahlia sees that the boat has shifted direction and is tacking towards shore, its sails ballooning. She feels the wind pick up, her beach wrap billowing, hair sticky with brine from the ocean wind that will soon bring the boat to shore. She’ll run barefoot, leaving prints in the sand, the craft growing bigger as she wades into the water to greet it, to greet him, as if he’s never even been away.
