The Seahorse Signal

The first note showed up under the seahorse dome in the exhibit hall, which was already strange, because the seahorse dome sits inside a locked case that only I open. I was doing my Thursday walkthrough of the Pinos Altos Maritime Research Center, forty-four years old, curator, boss of exactly nothing, when I spotted a folded scrap of yellow paper wedged between the dome's base and the felt lining.

Inside was a pencil sketch. A roof, drawn with real skill, the kind of roof nobody around here has, all copper panels running in long straight lines down a steep pitch. Next to it, a ferris wheel. Under both, in block letters: TICKET FOR TWO. And below that, a smiley face, which sounds dumb but wasn't. The guy could draw a smiley face that felt like a dare.

I stood there holding it like it was radioactive and trying to figure out who'd been in my locked case. Then it clicked. We had the annex going up next door, the maritime museum expansion, and for three weeks a copper roofer had been up there on the scaffolding, catching sun off his own roof. Silas. Forty-nine, forearms like rope, and every afternoon he came down to fill his water bottle at the center's outside spigot and made some remark about the "boats" we kept in the desert.

I didn't answer the note. Not right away. What I did was walk out to the drill rig, which is the big seafloor drill mounted on our submersible research vessel, docked permanent at the pier, and I found there was a gap where the rig's wall panel didn't quite meet the deck housing. About four inches wide. Wide enough for a piece of paper, anyway, and the scaffolding for the annex runs right past it, because the annex juts over the water on stilts like it's showing off.

So the next morning I left him a dried seahorse. Actual specimen, from our surplus drawer, nothing the feds would miss. I put it in the gap on a folded card that said, "This one escaped the case. Curious how that happened."

Two days later there was a card waiting in the same gap. He'd drawn the seahorse back to me in ink, better than the photo in our own brochure, and under it he'd written, "Your case lock has a bad temper. I have a ladder and free time. R."

R. Not Silas, not hey you. Just R, like we were doing letters from prison.

After that it was a month of it. I left a torn corner of an old pier map, and he sent back the missing corner, which meant he'd been in the archive room, which meant I should have fired him and instead I laughed out loud at my desk. I left a bolt from the rig's spare parts bin and he returned it drilled through with a hole shaped like a heart, which is the most romantic thing a roofer has ever done in the history of metalwork. His notes got bolder. Mine got worse, honestly. I wrote things on cards that a director of a research center has no business writing to a contractor on scaffolding, things I will not repeat here, but he kept every one, I know because he quoted my own filth back at me two weeks later like he was citing scripture.

The thing about notes is they make promises. And the thing about promises is eventually somebody has to show up and pay on them.

So Thursday, around dusk, when the center emptied out and Charlie the docent clocked off and the parking lot went down to my Corolla and Silas's dented white F-150, I took the ferry ticket out of my desk drawer and locked up behind me.

The ticket was my idea, and it was a con, and I want to walk you through it because the con matters. There's a kiosk at the end of our pier, wind-beaten, painted three colors of failure, that sells ferry tickets to nowhere. That's the actual product. There is no water route to anywhere from Pinos Altos. Tourists buy them as jokes. The kiosk prints two kinds: Pier 3, which is our pier, and Pier 6, which is a dead pier half a mile down the shore that hasn't seen a boat since the eighties. Nobody checks. It's a gag ticket.

But I'd bought a Pier 6 one, because Pier 6 is fenced, forgotten, and nobody goes there, and the rig's gangplank, I'd noticed, could be walked to from the beach path behind Pier 6's fence if you knew the gap in the chain-link, which I did, because I'm the one who mows back there.

The ticket said FERRY TO NOWHERE, PIER 6, VALID THURSDAY DUSK, in fake official lettering. I'd left it for him that morning in the gap, with a card: "Boarding at sundown. Wear something you can ruin."

He was already there. That was the first surprise. I came around the beach path expecting to wait, feeling like an idiot in my work slacks, and there he was at the bottom of the gangplank, work boots planted, tool belt gone but his hands still copper-stained at the fingertips the way they always were by end of day. And he was holding something up between two fingers, turning it so it caught the last light.

A tiny glass dome. Same as the one I'd left in the gap a week ago, the little replacement dome for the exhibit case, three inches across, the kind of thing a curator notices missing and a roofer shouldn't know the value of.

"You stole my dome," I said.

"You left it in the gap," he said. "In my line of work that's a delivery."

"That's theft of museum property, R."

"That's restitution. I gave you a heart-shaped hole in a bolt. You gave me glass." He turned the dome once more and put it in his shirt pocket. "I figured we were trading."

I stopped a few feet from him on the sand. He smelled like copper and cut lumber, and I'd spent a month imagining exactly that and it was better in person, which annoyed me.

"You read the ticket?" I asked.

"Front to back." He held it up. He'd folded it into his chest pocket next to the dome. "You want to tell me why a grown woman bought me a ferry to Pier 6?"

"Because Pier 3's kiosk guy works till eight and asks questions."

"No. Try again. There's fine print." He flattened the ticket against his thigh and read it out loud, slow, enjoying himself. "Valid only at Pier 6. Pier 3 departures not honored. Not valid for travel. Non-refundable." He looked up. "Non-refundable, Roz. You bought me a ticket to a pier with no ferry, from a pier that doesn't run, on a night the ferry doesn't sail. That's not a ferry ticket. That's an invitation with a dress code."

"You caught me."

"Course I caught you. I roof for a living. I read contracts before I sign, and I read the ones I don't sign twice as hard." He put the ticket away and looked at the gangplank, then at me. "So we're not sailing anywhere."

"Nope."

"Then what's up the plank?"

"The rig. Control room's got heat. Bunk cabin's got a door that locks. And I've got," and here I made myself say it out loud, because a month of notes deserved one plain sentence, "a month of things I wrote down that I meant."

He didn't move right away. He looked at the drill rig the way he probably looked at a roof pitch before climbing it, measuring, deciding it would hold.

"You know the last time I did anything like this I was twenty-five," he said. "Girl I worked with, roofer too. She took a job in Alaska and I let her."

"That's a bad trade. Alaska's cold and I'm right here."

"Yeah," he said, and started up the gangplank. "Well. Show me the door that locks."

I followed him up, ticket crumpled in my fist like proof of passage, and the whole rig hummed under our boots the way it does when the tide pumps are running, and I remember thinking the seahorse dome sketch had a ferris wheel in it and I still didn't know what that meant, and then I stopped thinking about sketches at all.

The control room smelled like machine oil and warm steel, and the pumps kept up their low hum the whole time, like the rig was breathing around us. Silas stood in the doorway a second, taking it in. Cramped, all dials and cables, one steel table bolted down in the middle of everything.

"Cozy," he said. "You bring all your dates up here?"

"Only the ones who owe me restitution."

He shut the door and put his palm flat on it and slid the bolt, and that sound went through me worse than anything he'd said on the sand. Then he turned around and we just looked at each other for a second, two adults, forty-four and forty-nine, standing in a machine room in work clothes like a couple of idiots.

"So these things you wrote down," he said. "The ones you meant."

"Meant. Every word."

"Then I guess you better show me instead of tell me. I'm a hands-on learner."

He crossed the room in three steps and put his hands on my hips, and I pulled my own shirt over my head before he could do it slow, because slow was not what I'd promised myself in the notes. His palms were rough, calloused in the places a roofer's hands are calloused, and they traced up my sides like he was checking a seam for leaks. My breath caught when he got to the bottom of my bra and I heard him chuckle low.

"That noise," he said. "That the one from the notes?"

"Shut up and take your shirt off."

He did, and I got my first look at the chest that went with those forearms, broad and sunburned across the shoulders, a white line of a scar near his