Talia grabbed my hand, tugging me toward her backyard. Her slap bracelet rubbed against my wrist like a secret code. Sarah skipped alongside, as excited as her sister, singing a song she was clearly making up. Something about the sun, surprises, and me. I was among the few on the block who could tell the two apart, who didn’t call them “the twins” but by their names.
Sarah pointed when we rounded the corner: there it was. Her dad’s new boat, shiny and white, its mast rising like a flagpole. I had never been on a boat. Our town wasn’t near any bodies of water, so having a sailboat in one’s yard seemed like a real luxury for such a land-locked place. The few trampolines I’d been on paled in comparison.
We climbed aboard. At eleven, I was five years older than Talia and Sarah, and the coolest person they knew. They craved time with me, eager to show off whatever they thought might hold my attention. I felt famous in their presence, adult even. The way they pulled on my arms, their sticky-sweet adoration, how they looked at me as if I was a person with some sway—I loved it.
“And here’s the steering wheel!” Sarah fanned out her hands.
“You can sit here, Haley,” Talia tapped a bench seat.
Mr. Wasserman stepped on board, his footsteps felt by all. “You better not be stealing my boat!” he laughed.
Mr. Wasserman’s face was boyish, according to my mom. He wore his hair like he was still in high school, according to my dad. I didn’t know how to notice these intricacies in adults. He seemed nice, like everyone else.
“I like your boat,” I said.
“She’s a beaut, ain’t she? I always wanted a boat. Maybe now I can finally be a real pirate.” His laugh bounced off the deck, the mast, the twins’ ready faces.
“Arghh you sure?” Sarah giggled. Talia pulled my arm and led me down a short staircase into the belly of the boat.
“It’s a fort!” she told me. “Our fort.” She tried to give me her slap bracelet, but I told her I couldn’t take it. I had eyed it in the sun, glistening, and she’d noticed, but I was trying to play it cool. I didn’t want to take from a kid. Instead we played Food Court, a game I’d recently made up. Talia cooked up imaginary burgers and shakes, and I ate everything.
+
On Saturday, my brother came home from college for spring break. Every time I saw him, he looked transformed. Today Owen’s face was scruffy. His hair hung low, covering the majority of his eyes. It was mid-afternoon and he was shoveling cereal into his mouth.
“What are you doing today?” I asked.
He grunted. “Laundry. Stat homework.”
“I know something we can do.”
“Of course you do,” he said. “But I’m busy.” Owen scratched his hair like there was something in it.
“You have to let me show you this. It won’t take long.”
He dropped his bowl into the sink. “Maybe,” he said, shuffling back to his room.
My parents said boredom was a good thing, a necessity for new thinking, but I was unconvinced. Boredom was a drag. They were always telling me things that didn’t make sense, insisting I’d get it when I was older. I was tired of waiting, of poor explanations. I pulled out construction paper and cardboard with the idea of making my own slap bracelet, but without any real plan, I was just cutting paper snakes and throwing them in the trash.
An hour later, Owen kicked my chair. “All right, show me your thing, Hale.” I dropped the craft scissors and led him to the door.
We walked over to the Wasserman’s backyard and unlatched their gate. Mr. Wasserman had told me I was welcome any time. Owen followed without question, climbing the ladder onto the boat.
“This is cool,” he said, dragging his hand along the steering wheel. I watched him eye the ropes and the thick, rolled-up sail. He was imagining himself somewhere else, and I wondered where. Was I there with him? I closed my eyes and tried to enter his vision, but had none of my own.
We both turned toward each other when we heard glass breaking. I wondered if something happened underneath us, but Owen looked toward the Wassermans’ house. I heard yelling then another crack, glass or porcelain, something nice in pieces.
The back door flung open and Owen pulled me down into the hull. We crouched in darkness. Mrs. Wasserman was pacing in the yard, talking to herself. Owen placed his hands over my ears, but I could still hear her cursing, her words like knives.
She kicked the side of the boat twice, saying something about men and something about babies. Owen’s eyes darted around, but his body stayed still, next to mine.
We heard the back door open and slam. There was more yelling inside, then nothing but the wind whistling through the trees. After five minutes, Owen said we should go. I looked up at the house as we slipped out of the gate, and saw one of the twins looking down. For once, I didn’t know which it was.
The rest of the week Owen was busy. He went out with friends and barricaded himself in the basement with homework and video games. My mom told me he was an adult now, and wouldn’t always have time to play with me. But I didn’t want to play. I wanted to talk. For someone, for once, to explain.
+
Years passed and the thing I’d always longed for came true: I became an adult. I graduated high school and college, then got a job on a cruise ship, an exciting venture promising fun, growth, and gratuity pay (according to the cruise ship reps that came to my school). I didn’t know what I wanted to do after graduation, where I should go. It only took a month on the cruise ship to know I definitely did not want to be there. At the end of my contract eleven months later, I moved to Chicago, taking a job in HR at an accounting firm. My boss Delia put me in charge of sorting through resumes, setting up interviews and stepping out of the conversation as soon as money came up. I wasn’t supposed to know too much.
I worked at Delia’s side. One day, when I couldn’t hold back anymore, I asked her about her name.
“I was named for my great-aunt,” she said. “Why?”
“Do you remember the stores? Delia’s? They sold bracelets and earrings, girly things like that.”
“Never heard of it,” she said.
When the pandemic hit, we packed our laptops and chargers into our bags. It may be as much as a month, Delia told everyone. My new desk set-up became me in my bed, balancing my laptop between my knees and my stomach. I felt like I was back on the cruise ship. Most of the staff had been aimless young people, looking for direction. I spent my free time alone in my bunk, away from their gossip and gripes, trying to pretend I wasn’t exactly like them. I didn’t mind being alone, the cozy quiet, the quiet ease. Only the loneliness was too much.
In May, a flood of resumes came in. I sorted them by experience, emailing Delia the most promising ones. The pile included retail managers, health admins, small business owners and a personal chef with “nothing to lose.” People were growing desperate, applying wherever they could. That’s when I saw Mr. Wasserman’s name.
+
A few weeks after Owen and I hid on the Wassermans’ boat, Mrs. Wasserman and the twins moved out. They must have changed districts because I never saw them again. I hoped to catch them on the block, but no such visit ever happened, at least not in the time I spent staring out the living room windows. I felt silly for missing them, for being friends with little kids, for thinking people can’t just vanish like the sun in a storm.
Mr. Wasserman stayed in the house for two more years. The boat collected rain and sticks until one day we saw him drive it down the street. He stuck his head out the window, a golden retriever on the way to the vet. The boat, once so massive to me, bobbed like a bath toy down the block. My mom told me later that Mr. Wasserman moved up north. My dad said things like this happen, as if that explained anything.
I moved Mr. Wasserman’s resume to the next stage. He actually had accounting experience. Normally I’d alert Delia, but nothing about seeing his name felt normal. What it felt like was a small door creaking open. Maybe I could get a glimpse of the past, or a past that could’ve been.
I used Delia’s email address to set up a phone screen for ten a.m. the next day. This way he wouldn’t know it was me. I could say I was Delia, deepen my voice, name myself head of recruiting. This was the one perk to being on the bottom of an organization—access to the top.
+
I wrote a list of questions for Mr. Wasserman. I knew what I couldn’t legally ask, Delia was always clear about that, but I wanted to see what I could get close to, what information I might be able to glean. There was so much I wanted to know.
Minutes before the interview, my list hovering at three questions, Owen called. We’d gotten closer as I’d gotten older, as I entered into his grown-up world. It was not as grown as I’d assumed.
“Hey, I can’t talk right now,” I said as a hello. “I have a call with a candidate.”
“You know you don’t have to pick up.”
“Actually,” I said. “It’s someone from the block.”
“Really? Who?” I could always count on Owen’s curiosity.
“Remember Mr. Wasserman?”
“Oh right, he was an accountant. I haven’t seen him since he brought over doughnuts that day.”
“Doughnuts?”
“It must’ve been his move out day. He bought doughnuts for the movers, but they didn’t want any so he was going door to door. Must’ve had two dozen.”
“What did you think of him? Back then?”
“I thought he was fun, a good time drunk.”
“He drank?”
“You were too young to notice, but their recycling bin was always full of bottles. He was a mess.”
“I think about Talia and Sarah sometimes.”
“Yeah. They’re probably in college,” Owen said. He must’ve heard something in my voice, a note of worry. “I’m sure they’re fine.”
I nodded, even though it was a phone call, even though I wasn’t so certain.
+
I opened my work calendar to find Mr. Wasserman’s number and realized a critical error. Delia had found the invite. Because of course she did, I sent it from her email and never hid it from calendar view, giving her plenty of time to look it over, hit edit and add a Zoom link. She was joining, cameras on. My stealth investigation, masked as a real interview, was now a real interview, and I was demoted to notetaker on mute. I got out of bed and rearranged myself at my desk, straightening the front side of my hair. The meeting notification went off like a bell conking me in the skull. I clicked join.
+
Mr. Wasserman appeared on my screen, a changed man. His hair had thinned, the ends curled and limp. A short, brown-gray beard covered his face. Gone was his old mustache, his tanned skin. But his mouth wrapped into that same warm smile, and I felt eleven. Then again maybe a part of me always felt eleven.
“Thanks for chatting with us,” Delia said. “We have an open staff accountant role and think you could be a good fit.”
“The pleasure is mine. This is my first time using Zoom, though. I’m not too zoomed in, am I?” Mr. Wasserman laughed, seemingly to himself. He was the exact same.
“All good,” Delia said. “Now tell us about your accounting experience. My associate will be taking notes, so don’t mind her.”
Amazingly, Mr. Wasserman didn’t mind me. He was looking at his own face, the way everyone did, telling stories for his ears as much as ours. I typed what he said into an empty doc. When I shifted back to Zoom, I saw someone in his background and knew immediately it was Talia. She was rifling through a closet behind her dad, searching for a coat or something. She was the type of skinny that scared me and made me jealous.
“I’ve been a CPA for twenty years now. Did some brokerage work for a while, substitute taught, some light consulting, but otherwise it’s been this.”
“What kind of consulting?” Delia asked.
“Helped a theater company with lighting. I’m kidding! It was general business. But it was for a theater group.”
Delia gave her usual indecipherable nod. I wondered if she was angry I hadn’t notified her of the call, or if she assumed she’d missed something, or some third option I was never getting the hang of.
“I’m all about effort,” Mr. Wasserman said. “You can accomplish anything if you show up and do it. I really believe that. Tell my girls all the time.”
“Isn’t that the truth,” Delia said. Her mouth eased into a smile, and I realized she might actually want to hire him.
“Absolutely. I haven’t had the straightest path. But it’s those experiences that make me. You know, my parents were immigrants.”
“Oh?”
“Tailors. Both of ‘em. Good with their hands. Not so much with kids. I worked with them until I was twenty. You gotta stay curious, you know. Stay young.”
Talia rolled her eyes. I was on camera, so I only blinked.
“And what about account reconciliation? What’s your experience with that?”
“Learned that in the tailor shop. Numbers are solid—it’s people you gotta watch, the little mistakes they make. They’re not always little. Or mistakes.”
Mr. Wasserman launched into a story about a missing suit, impersonating his parents and two customers. Talia was pixelated and my eyes were dry, but that’s when I saw her find what she’d been looking for. Her hand palmed an orange prescription bottle for half a second, then another, then both were gone, blocked by bad angles and baggy clothes.
Delia started to wrap the interview, giving the standard facts about our hiring process, when Mr. Wasserman cut her off. “I have to ask. Your name sounds familiar. Did you used to live on Cypress Street?”
“No,” Delia said.
“I think he means me,” I said, slipping off mute for the first time. “Yes. We were neighbors.”
“I thought so! How ‘bout that? You look just like yourself.”
Talia turned to stare at her dad’s screen. Did he have one of those giant monitors, large enough for her to see the shake in my grin?
Delia coughed. “You know each other?”
“Oh yes. Haley used to play with my girls. She was over all the time. Tal! You remember Haley? From next door?”
“Not really,” she mumbled.
“Isn’t that something,” Delia looked at me, or where I assumed I was on her screen, but Mr. Wasserman kept talking.
“So generous. Haley was always out on the block, keeping up with Tal and Sarah. It was like free babysitting.”
“Small world,” Delia said. I saw Talia slip out of the room, typing on her phone. I assumed she was texting Sarah, then realized it could’ve been anyone. A boyfriend, a girlfriend, a world-famous clown—I didn’t know her anymore. I didn’t know anything. Getting older had cleared none of the confusion of childhood. It only clarified how much I didn’t know.
“We’re almost at time, so let’s talk compensation,” Delia said. “Haley, I’ll regroup with you later.”
That was my cue. I waved to my screen and hit the red button in the corner, the one that said leave.
+
My bed looked sad and empty. I left my laptop on my desk and slunk under the covers, pulling them over my head. I did this sometimes, pretended my bed was a boat, and I was deep in its hull. I pictured a tide sloshing my bed frame from one side of the room to the other, my body fixed in place, secure in its center. I could hear notifications dinging on my laptop, new messages, tasks, requests. Some guy named Dave had been pestering me all morning for an insurance addendum I’d never heard of. And I couldn’t bear to think what Delia would say to me later. All I wanted was stillness, but I knew from my time on the cruise ship that beyond one stretch of sea lies another, and water does what it wants. That job had been my first time on a boat on water, a boat doing what it’s supposed to do. I got so sick in the first week that I had to go to the medical center. The doctor assured me I’d be fine, that it was just my inner ear. Isn’t my inner ear me, though? I asked. You’re funny, she said, and stuck an injection in my arm.
My computer dinged again, and I imagined prepping Mr. Wasserman’s new hire paperwork, our awkward small chat before explaining the employee reimbursement program. I crunched my knees to my chest. Owen texted, and I pulled my hand out to reach for the sound.
Remember why I called earlier, the text said. Need my bucket back.
I no longer knew where Owen’s bucket was, or why I’d borrowed it, or why he needed it now—why does anyone need a bucket?—but it seemed as good a reason as any to pull myself out from the covers and go look.
+++
Brooke Randel is a writer, editor and associate creative director in Chicago. Her memoir ALSO HERE is forthcoming in December from Tortoise Books. Her writing has been published in Hippocampus, Hypertext Magazine, Jewish Fiction, SmokeLong Quarterly, and elsewhere. Find more of her work at brookerandel.com.