Seam Wax and Synth Waves

I'd been on the ship for eleven weeks when I decided I was done pretending the passenger lounge was my scene. Eden Carr, forty-eight years old, yoga instructor, recently divorced from a career as a people pleaser, standing there with a drink I didn't even want while two different women flirted with me on two different nights in the same week.

The first one, Marla, was forty-seven like half the people aboard, and she was nice, genuinely nice, and we had dinner in the main dining room and she laughed at my jokes and I laughed at hers and when she put her hand on my knee under the table I felt absolutely nothing. Not distaste, not nerves, just nothing, the way you feel about a chair. We said goodnight at her door and she kissed my cheek and I walked back to my cabin thinking, well, that's that, and I didn't even feel bad about it.

The second one was two nights later, a woman named Cherise, forty-three, and the same thing happened again except this time I was the one who leaned in for the goodnight kiss and spent the whole elevator ride down wondering why I'd done it, because it felt like signing a form. My hands did the thing my hands are supposed to do and my heart stayed exactly where it was, flat and quiet, like a lake at dawn.

So I stopped going to the lounge. I started taking my coffee in the maintenance corridor instead, which sounds grim, but the corridor has a long window on the starboard side and the ship was docked at Nový Bor for the day, and the valley beyond the window is all green folds and a river running silver through the middle of it. I like a window. Windows are honest. A mirror will flatter you and a person will flatter you faster, but a window just shows you what's there.

That's how I first really noticed Bobbie Hardy.

She was thirty-six, I learned later, and she'd been working boats since she was twenty-two, and she sat near that window every morning waxing seams on tarpaulins with a brush she held the way other people hold pens. She didn't look up when people came through. She didn't look up when people left. She had this way of being entirely where she was, which is a thing I teach in my classes and have never once managed in my actual life.

"Morning," I said the first time, because I'm friendly, it's my whole deal, I get paid to be welcoming.

She glanced up. "Morning." Back to the seam.

That comprised the entire conversation on the first day. The second day I said the weather was kind and she said yeah, kind, and kept working, and I swear I walked away from that exchange feeling like I'd been handed back my own small talk with the corners trimmed off. It was refreshing, honestly. Nobody had treated me like a nonentity in twenty years, not since before the yoga certification, and I found it almost restful, like sitting down after a long flight.

The problem, if you want to call it a problem, is that I wanted her to look at me. Not flirt. Just look. See me the way she saw a seam, with that flat honest attention, and decide whether I held together.

So when the announcement came over the crew channel that the ship's calibration lab needed runners for a sample delivery, I volunteered before I'd finished hearing the sentence.

The lab was in a converted garage at the end of the pier road, which surprised me, because I'd imagined something gleaming. Instead it was a long low building with a roller door and, inside, rows of fume hoods and autoclaves humming away like a room full of contented bees, and down the far end a workbench with what looked like a huge painted canvas flat leaning against the wall, split clean down the middle into two panels.

A man in his fifties was standing at a computer terminal with his hands hovering over the keyboard like the keys were hot. He was heavyset, balding in a way that suggested he'd made peace with it years ago, and he wore a wedding band that had that thin worn look of a very old habit.

"You from the ship?" he said without turning around.

"Eden Carr, staff wellness, I volunteered to run samples." I set the insulated case on the bench. "Looks like you've got a situation."

"Fred Holt." He turned and shook my hand with a grip like a firm handshake should be, no more no less. "IT systems coordinator, and as of eight this morning, a man watching thirty years of vendor records turn into alphabet soup. The inventory database corrupted overnight. Sample tracking, reorder numbers, all of it, gone or scrambled, I can't tell which yet."

"That's bad?"

"That's very bad." He rubbed his eyes with the heel of his hand. "Ryan Heller runs the synthesis side of this place, he's thirty-five and he expects his calibration shipment sealed and logged by end of day, and I cannot log a single item because the system that tells me what anything is has decided to become modern art."

"Can't you rebuild it?"

"From what? The backups sync to the same corrupted index." He gestured at the screen. "It's like keeping your diary in a language you've forgotten."

I laughed before I could stop myself and he gave me a small tired smile, the smile of a man who'd been married three decades and knew exactly when a stranger was laughing with him.

That's when I saw her.

Bobbie came in through the side door carrying a rolled tarpaulin over one shoulder like it weighed nothing, and maybe it didn't weigh anything to her, she had forearms that suggested fourteen years of rope and canvas and weather. She was in coveralls with the sleeves cut off and she unrolled the tarpaulin across the long workbench with a smooth deliberate motion, and I mean deliberate, each foot of it laid down flat, smoothed, checked, before the next foot followed. No hurry anywhere in her body.

"Bob," Fred said, "tell me you brought wax, because if that hold cover tears in transit Heller will have my head."

"Brought wax." She set a tin down on the bench and looked at me then, finally, one clean appraising look, head to boots and back up. "You're the yoga fella."

"Guilty."

"Ship sent a yoga fella to run calibration samples."

"They were short on volunteers," I said. "Turns out most people on a cruise ship consider a garage at the end of a pier an optional destination."

Something happened at the corner of her mouth. It wasn't quite a smile but it lived on the same street, and I counted it a victory and tried not to show that I was counting, because I'd learned by then that she could probably smell an agenda the way a dog smells rain.

She picked up her brush and started working a seam with slow even strokes, and I stood there like a man with nothing better to do, which I was, because my samples were delivered and Fred was despairing at his terminal and the morning had nowhere it needed me to be.

"How's it going, Fred?" Bobbie asked, not looking up.

"Thirty years of records, Bob. Thirty years." He leaned back in his chair. "You want to know the one thing in this building that still works right?"

"What?"

"The canvas flat." He nodded down the wall at the big split panels. "Was here before I was. Theater company sold it to the founder for scrap and it's outlasted three roofs. Doesn't corrupt, doesn't sync, doesn't need a password."

Bobbie looked at it the way she looked at everything, flat and honest, and then she looked at the tarpaulin under her brush, and then she said a thing I didn't understand yet but would, before the day was out.

"Then maybe," she said, working the wax into the seam, "you write your list on the thing that doesn't lie."

Fred turned his chair around to face us both, and I could see the exact moment the idea went from a joke to a plan in his head, it moved across his face like weather coming over water. "Write the list on it," he said. "Write the list on it."

"That's what I said," Bobbie said, and worked her brush into another foot of seam like the fate of the vendor database was none of her business, which to be fair it wasn't.

Fred got up and crossed to the two big canvas panels leaning against the wall, and he put his hand flat on the painted surface the way you'd check a horse's flank. "This thing's been sitting here since before I transferred out of the engine office, and nobody ever told me what it was for. Previous manager stored it, said keep it dry, never said why. Now it turns out the one indestructible object on this whole pier is a piece of scenery from some theater company that folded before the wall got repainted." He knocked on it with a knuckle. "Canvas over a wooden frame, older than me, and it doesn't need a reboot."

"So you'd write the inventory on the back," I said. "In pencil, or marker, whatever."

"In whatever survives. And here's the part that actually matters." He turned around, and for a heavyset man in his fifties he moved quick when he had a reason to. "The flat is split. Two panels. One stays here at the lab, one goes back to the ship with you, Eden, and gets mounted somewhere the purser's office can see it. Every sample that leaves this lab gets logged on both panels, same line, same number, and every sample that comes back gets checked off. Paper and canvas, no network, no sync, nothing to corrupt. The panels are the backup of each other."

Bobbie looked up from her seam for exactly as long as it took to say, "Split it evenly. Nobody respects a lopsided ledger." Then she went back to work.

"Is that the entire plan?" I asked.

"That is the entire plan," Fred said, his voice carrying a quality almost peaceful, as though he had spent eight hours drowning and had just felt bottom under his boots. "Heller will hate it because it isn't digital, and then he'll accept it because it works, and by end of day I'll have a database made of paint and wood and one very tired IT coordinator's handwriting. I need to make some calls. Eden, can you stay, I'll need hands carrying panels and I'd rather not ask Bob, she's got two hundred feet of seam and a tide table to beat."

"I've got nowhere else," I said, which was true, and Bobbie made a small sound through her nose that might have been agreement or might have been a comment on people who had nowhere else, it was hard to tell with her.

Fred dialed the phone on the bench and started talking to somebody about freight weights, and I drifted over to where the two panels stood, because I'd been eyeing them since I walked in and now I had a professional excuse. They were big, taller than me by a good foot, painted with what had once been a street scene, lampposts and rooftops and a sky gone the soft gray-brown that old paint goes, and the split ran right down the middle like the scene had been cut in half and separated from itself for forty years. When Fred got off the phone I asked him what the two halves were originally.

"Ask Bob, her father painted scenery for forty years, she grew up in scene shops." Fred said it easy, like it was just a fact, and then his phone rang again and he was gone.

I looked over at the bench. Bobbie was working a seam with her whole arm, steady as a metronome, and I decided I'd rather ask her a question and get a flat answer than not ask her anything at all, which told me something about myself I filed away for later.

"Your father painted flats?" I asked.

She finished the stroke she was on before she answered. "Since he was twenty-one. Theater scenery, carnival backdrops, anything big and flat and painted. I waxed canvas before I waxed tarps, I was carrying a brush before I could reach the top rail without a box." She moved down the seam. "He'd have known what this one's from. I don't."

"Does it matter?"

"Everything matters or nothing does. Depends on the day."

I picked up one edge of the nearer panel just to feel the weight, and it was heavier than it looked, old wood and old paint and forty years of whatever the air in a garage becomes. I set it back down and something in my shoulders and hips did the math on its own, the way they do, and before my brain caught up I'd already folded down into a low lunge beside the panel, just to test my range against it, heel down, hips square, hands light on the frame.

"What in the world are you doing," Bobbie said. It wasn't quite a question, it was more like she was reading aloud something strange she'd found.

"Checking the lift. If we're hauling these on and off a tender all day, you want to move from the hips, not the back." I held the lunge and breathed. "Also I've been standing around for an hour and my body starts making noise if I do that."

"Your body makes noise."

"Everybody's does. Most people just don't listen."

She set the brush down in the tin and turned around on her stool, first full turn she'd given me all day, arms crossed over the cutoff sleeves, and she looked at me folded down there on the garage floor next to a forty-year-old theater flat, and I watched her decide whether to laugh at me or interrogate me. Her lips did the thing again, the not-quite-smile, the twitch at one corner like a hooked fish testing the line. "You're gonna tell me yoga can help track samples next."

"It can," I said, and I hadn't planned to say it, it just came out, because I was forty-eight years old and recently divorced from a career as a people pleaser and I'd promised myself I'd stop performing, and then I performed. "Not directly. But the panels weigh what they weigh, and the people moving them are going to be lifting wrong by noon, and by two o'clock somebody's back is