I make the left turn and head down the hallway, which is almost dark but for a light coming through a doorway down the hall on the right. I’m about to go right past it to the bathroom door, but just as I get to the slice of light coming from the room, something on a shelf catches my eye.
I pause in front of the half-open door, not wanting to be nosy, and then glance over my shoulder to make sure Colton’s not coming in too, which makes me feel even more guilty. But when I see nothing but the closed door that leads to the garage, curiosity gets the best of me and I push the door open gently.
I gasp.
Lining every wall of the room are shelves that hold bottles of every size and shape, and each of them contains a ship, floating in the glass. The one I saw from the hall is the biggest, like a large, clear vase on its side, with one of those tall-masted ships with sail after sail billowed out in the invisible wind. In others are smaller ships, sailboats, and other vessels whose names I don’t know. Some bottles are rounded and perfectly clear; others are square, or made of thick glass, hazy with bubbles so that the ships inside have a softer, almost dreamy quality to them.
I can’t help myself. I step fully into the room and pick up one of the smaller bottles. Inside this one is a pirate-looking ship, with torn dark sails that look like they’re whipping around in the wind. I turn the bottle in my hands, then lift it above my head, inspecting the bottom to see if I can tell how the ship was put in.
“That one’s the Essex,” Colton says from behind. His voice sends a jolt right through me. I open my mouth to say something, fumble with the bottle in my hands, and then put it back on the shelf quickly, guilty, guilty, guilty. He takes it gently from the shelf and holds it between us.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “I wasn’t trying to be nosy. I was on my way to the bathroom, but then I saw the ships through the doorway, and I couldn’t— Is this your room?”
Colton laughs, then sets down the bottle and scans the walls, with all their ships and bottles. “Yeah,” he says.
I look around too, not just at the walls of ships, but at the desk, clean but for a few framed pictures of his family and one of those lamps on an extendable arm. Next to it, his bed is made neatly with a simple blue comforter. Above the headboard, painted on the wall in old-fashioned-looking script, is a quote that seems vaguely familiar to me: A ship in the harbor is safe, but that is not what ships are built for.
My eyes travel down to his nightstand, on which sit a bottle of water, a stack of books, and two rows of orange prescription bottles. I look away from those, knowing he wouldn’t want me to see them, back up to the walls of ships. “You collect these?”
Colton clears his throat, nervous or maybe a little embarrassed, I can’t tell which. “Sort of. I mean, I made them.”
“You made them?” There must be hundreds of them, stacked four levels high on all four walls of his room. “All of these? Wow.”
“Yeah, I don’t usually tell people that.” He smiles, but his eyes don’t meet mine. They’re looking over all the bottles too. “It’s kind of an old-man hobby.”
I can’t help but laugh. “It’s not an old-man hobby,” I say, but it doesn’t sound convincing. Probably because it seems like it is.
Colton turns to me now. “No, it really is. My grandpa taught me how to make them a few years back.” He pauses, runs his eyes over the walls of ships encased in glass. “He called them ‘patience bottles.’ Old sailors used to make them out of whatever they could find around their ships when they were stuck out at sea for months at a time. Kind of a way to pass the days.”
I watch him look at them, watch the smile slip the tiniest bit from his face, and the things he says start to connect in my mind—“a few years back,” “patience bottles.”
“I used to have a lot of time on my hands,” he fills in, “and I guess he figured it was a good way to pass it. He brought a set over one day and put it down on the desk, and we worked on it together until it was finished.” He looks at the one in his hands, and now he smiles again. “You picked up the first one I ever made.”
“Can I?” I ask, reaching for the bottle again.
He hands it to me, and I take a closer look at the ship with its tiny sails. “How do you get them inside?”
“Magic,” he says.
I bump his shoulder with mine, and the contact sends a little flutter through me. “No, really.” I try to sound serious. “How do you do it?”
Colton turns to face me and gently puts his hands over mine on the bottle so that we’re holding it together, in the small space between us. He looks at me over the curve of the glass, hands warm on top of mine. “You build the ship outside the bottle so it collapses flat. And then you put it in, and you hope you did everything right, and you pull the string to raise the mast and sails, and if you’re lucky, it is magic, and they stand up and come to life.”
He pauses and looks down through the thick glass at the ship, but I can’t take my eyes off him. I can see him sitting here in this room with his grandpa, pale and thin like he was in the pictures, patiently building each tiny ship while he waited for his own form of magic. For the thing that would let him stand up and come to life again.
“It’s not complicated,” he says after a long moment. “Just fragile.”
Fragile.
The word catches me, brings me back to what that ER nurse said about Colton’s heart. “They’re beautiful,” I say. “Do you still make them?”
His eyes flicker away for a second, then come back to mine, and he smiles. “Not really. That was . . .” He pauses, seems to catch himself. “No point in building tiny ships that’ll never see the ocean when you can be out in the real thing every day.”
He smiles, a switch flips, and I can feel that we’re done with this conversation. Done here in this room. “Speaking of being out in the ocean,” he says, “we should get going so we don’t miss the fireworks.”
“Okay,” I say, not ready to be done here yet. “I just need a minute to change.”
Instead of leaving, though, I pause—reach out to him, to his chest. Lightly. Carefully.