the furnace ran night and day, and so the term “hot shop” was something of an understatement. Jason called it the Belly of Hell. Jason had built the hot shop for Claire because there was no glass studio on the island. He’d started out reluctantly. One expensive hobby, he called it. They spent tens of thousands of dollars on the pot furnace, the glory hole, the punties, the benches, the molds, the shaping tools, the colored frit, the annealer. A small fortune. Eventually, however, Jason became fascinated with the construction of the hot shop. He was building the only glassblowing studio on the island. For his wife, who was trained in the craft; she had a degree from RISD! She could make things—vases and goblets and sculpture—and sell them. Now the hot shop had paid for itself, and Claire had made enough money from the whims of her kooky patrons to pay off the car and plump the kids’ college funds.
She could not believe she was doing this. She glanced back at the house, stealthily, feeling like a criminal as she unlocked the heavy metal door. But why? There was nothing wrong with blowing glass again. Pan would take care of Zack, and the other kids were at school all day, so . . . why not? But there was guilt. It had to do with her fall. Claire should never have subjected herself to the heat when she was so far along in her pregnancy. She should have been drinking more water. The doctor had warned her! And it was Zack who had paid the price. There’s something wrong with him.
Still, she stepped inside. She was an alcoholic opening the liquor cabinet; she was a junkie visiting her dealer. But that was ridiculous! She had, after all, come into the hot shop plenty of times in the past year—to get tools, to go over her books with the accountants, to show Pan the pieces she’d made as a beginner—but Claire had never come in with the intention of starting up again. When she turned off the heat, she did so in the name of her family. She had four kids, a husband, and a home that needed her.
Claire stood in the center of the shop and looked around. Just admit it! She was dying to get back in there.
Claire’s attraction to molten glass was atavistic; it was coded somewhere on her DNA. She was drawn to the flame, to the unsafe temperatures, to the blinding light. A blob of molten glass on the end of a blowpipe contained her life’s meaning, even though it was hot and dangerous. She had burned herself and cut herself too many times to remember; she had scars with stories she’d forgotten. But she loved working with glass the way she loved her children—unconditionally, and despite the real possibility of failure. Molten glass fell to the floor, she marvered incorrectly and came out with something lopsided, she blew a piece too thin, she necked incorrectly and could not transfer the piece to the punty, she cooled a piece too quickly and it shattered in the annealer. There was nothing about glass that was forgiving; it was a craft, but also a science. It took precision, concentration, practice.
She found a half-empty sketchbook on her worktable. Museum-quality piece? The piece at the Whitney was a sculpture of thinly blown-out spheres—so thinly blown that they had to be placed in a soundproof room—all of which held hints of prismatic color and interlocked like soap bubbles. The sculpture was called Bubbles III. (Bubbles I and II were housed in the private galleries of Chick and Caroline Klaussen and Chick Klaussen sat on the board of the Whitney.) The Yankee Ingenuity Museum displayed a set of nesting vases with differently shaped openings. When you looked down into the vases, it was like looking into a kaleidoscope. Claire had done the vases in sea colors—turquoise, cobalt, jade, celadon. Claire and Jason and the kids had traveled to Vermont to see the vases on display. The vases were lovely and well displayed in the small, rustic museum, though they didn’t compare to the Bubbles at the Whitney. Claire couldn’t do another in the Bubbles series for the auction; that would be like Leonardo repainting the Mona Lisa. But Claire could possibly create another set of nesting vases. Would they be worth fifty thousand dollars?
The door opened and the room filled with breeze. Claire turned. Pan stood in the doorway. Claire felt