Chapter 7
B rody had booked a room at the oceanfront Doubletree.
The hotel was located at the opposite end of Atlantic Beach from Fortunate Harbor and his boss.
Normally Brody stayed in whatever guesthouse they took for the crew.
It was always nice enough, not luxurious but so large everyone had their own room.
The socializing elements between ocean trials was crucial to a well-functioning team.
But given the uncertainty over his future, the next-to-last thing Brody wanted was to show up there.
And the very last was to go home. Spend the holidays with his dad. Not in a million years.
When he rose at daybreak, his sister had already texted. There was none of Olivia’s normal warmth or welcoming cheer. My place. Nine o’clock. We’re going to Mom’s. You’re driving. And you’re talking. O.
Brody used the room’s coffee maker and drank it black, eating a power bar for breakfast. It reminded him of so many great mornings, preparing for another day on the open water, charts spread out of the dining table, joking with his team as they drank bad coffee.
He drove up the central highway, his thoughts bouncing back and forth between the coming confrontation with Olivia and the previous night.
Rae had astonished him. Brody had always avoided confrontation and conflict.
It was a habit so ingrained it might as well have been part of his genetic structure.
He recalled sitting at the table and watching Rae handle his boss.
Looking back, it felt like he had been in the presence of a karate master, deflecting blows, redirecting the force, winning.
When she resumed her seat, Rae had looked calmly satisfied.
Like it was nothing. Like she feasted on power players every day of her working week.
Olivia was standing outside her Morehead City home when he pulled up.
Her arms were wrapped around her middle, her face set.
Like she was waiting to give one of her kids a very hard time.
She had always been there for him. He had disappointed her.
Brody rose from the car, walked around, held her door, wished her a good morning.
He deserved what was coming next. No question.
But once they were underway, all she said was, “I’m waiting.”
Soon as he read her text, he knew revealing secrets would define his day. He could not redo the past. But he could try and do a better job with this moment. And apologize. If she decided to give him that chance. “You remember Uncle Travis.”
“Mom’s brother. Of course I do.” Not so much angry as sullen. Sad. “You two were very close.”
“He was a great boss, as long as you met his expectations. Travis was the kindest man …” His throat clenched shut.
The memories of Travis teaching him how to sail were suddenly as vivid as the road ahead.
His smile, the way he watched Brody, knowing and understanding.
No need for either man to speak a single word.
There for him. Brody’s first true friend.
The marina had possessed a seedy lived-in atmosphere and smelled of wet canvas and fuel and fishing gear and salt.
A world removed from the rigid confines of Brody’s home.
After he turned fourteen, Travis somehow arranged it so Brody could spend weekends in the ratty upstairs apartment.
Those nights of quiet solitude, falling asleep to the whisper of ocean winds and lines rattling against masts, were his first taste of heaven.
For years after he bade the Outer Banks a bitter farewell, his finest and hardest dreams always began with that nighttime melody.
Brody gradually refocused on the here and now when Olivia shifted position so as to watch him. She leaned against the side door, observing him with unblinking intensity. He offered, “Sorry.”
Olivia did not respond.
“It was the summer before I left for college,” he began.
“Travis called me in after work. I thought, you know, I had done something wrong, he was so serious. He locked the door with us inside. Settled in his pilot’s chair and just launched straight in.
How he’d been married twice and jailed four times.
Booze wrecked his life and ended his career in the navy. He washed up here a broken man.”
Olivia said softly, “I don’t understand.”
“Neither did I. Travis said that he wasn’t one for telling me how to live my life. But he had a question he wanted to pose. One he thought I should consider. I told him, sure. I wasn’t certain I wanted to hear, but something about the way he revealed himself—”
“You trusted him.”
Brody nodded. “He told me soon after he started working at the marina, his father died. A hard and bitter man, was how Travis described him. A lot of dark shadows that formed barriers between him and the world. A lot of reasons for how his only son took any chance he could to self-destruct.”
Olivia said, “He could be talking about Dad.”
“Exactly what I thought,” Brody recalled.
“Why was he telling you this?”
“He never said. He was a lot like our mom, his sister, using silence as a part of any conversation.”
“I remember that, too,” Olivia said.
“I think he wanted me to know up front, if I chose to ignore what he was going to say, he wouldn’t hold it against me. Not then, not ever.”
Olivia asked, “What did he tell you?”
“Travis said I’d done a good job of building my idea of a perfect existence. He’d been watching me, and he was fairly certain I was strong enough to make a good island life for myself.” Brody glanced over. “He said he was proud of me. I’d never had a man say that to me before.”
Olivia remained still. Silent. Involved.
“But he reminded me that time does not stand still. Seasons change. I might’ve thought that summer season and the high life it brought me was permanent, but the experiences I loved might not always hold me like they did then.”
Travis was there in the car with them. Riding east on 70, part of everything. Not just the memory. The here and now. It hit Brody hard as a blow to the heart, how so much of what he faced was a repeat of those earlier moments. Like today’s crisis was what Travis had been talking about all along.
Brody glanced over, grateful for Olivia’s patience. “He asked if this was enough. Not just for the one season, but for life. I needed to answer the question, before the season changed and the choice was made for me.”
Olivia breathed. But did not speak.
“He said there was still time to do more, grow beyond where I was, change into a different person. And what I needed to figure out was, beyond the passion and the pleasure, whether my father was the one holding me in place.”
Olivia was with him now. “Did you want more out of life?”
“Was I trapped in my good times like Travis had become caught up in the bad. Could I do what was necessary to break free, and did I want to.”
“It makes sense now, his confession,” Olivia said. When Brody did not respond, she added, “Mom needs to hear all this. Today.”
Brody nodded, filled with an overwhelming desire to wind back the clock, to have this conversation years ago. Glad it was happening now.
Aching over all the lost time.
Olivia’s incessant demand for answers was eventually satisfied. The longer they spoke, the more she accepted that he would reveal the hidden components of his life’s story at his own pace.
But her sadness remained.
She glanced at her watch and said she needed to be back in time for her older daughter’s recital that evening.
Brody said he was glad to hear the little girl was holding to her passion for dance.
Olivia asked where he was staying. He told her about the hotel room and a desire to distance himself from the crew.
But he did not explain why, and she did not press.
That part of the story would wait until their mother could hear it as well.
Olivia did not ask if he had seen their father.
The drive from Atlantic Beach to Oriental was a journey from shoulder to wrist, traveling around a crooked elbow.
By air the distance was less than thirty miles.
But the journey by car took well over an hour, first heading inland on 70 all the way to New Bern, then back east again on the smaller county highway 55.
The distance in terms of place and epoch was even further.
One small town after another came and went, shuttling the traveler through decades of quiet stability.
Brody and Olivia gave in to the simple pleasure of belonging.
Their silence was part and parcel of life in these down-east hamlets.
The homes and shops fronting the highway were little more than anchors to what lay hidden down lanes branching out north and south, back to where dark waters rested in forested creeks that had remained unchanged for centuries.
Atlantic Beach and the surrounding oceanfront growth, New Bern and its vibrant energy, all that was lost now.
The ancient ribbed road framed by Spanish moss, the quiet orderly yards and the flags hanging from so many porches, all spoke of a different realm.
This was his mother’s world. Her family hailed from Swansboro, a waterfront town set between Morehead and Jacksonville.
Her parents were true down-easters, molded by generations beyond count.
The original settlers hailed from northern Germany.
Three centuries earlier they had traded frigid North Sea waters for the Outer Banks’ inland reaches.
They fished, they farmed, they held to traditions the outside world thought lost and gone forever.