26. Adam
Chapter twenty-six
Adam
Y eah, no way I can get to sleep after that. Once in my hotel room, I change into basketball shorts and get ready for bed, even though I feel jittery, like I just drank three cups of coffee. Is it weird to be celebrating something as innocent as holding hands? It doesn’t feel innocent. It feels … monumental. It feels like the most important thing that’s ever happened to me. The start, I hope, of something amazing.
I wonder how Nicole is feeling. Is she overthinking tonight, second-guessing even this small step? Personally, I could have blown through at least two more steps tonight, but I don’t want to push her too much, too soon. But I’m second-guessing, too. Should I have kissed her? A kiss good night would have been a logical progression, but it feels like it would have been forward, almost, to do so when, despite all the time we’ve spent together, all the little moments, we’ve never been on a proper date.
But I felt a shift between us tonight. The air changed around us, the energy between us. Maybe she’s starting to think of me the way I think of her, the way I’ve thought of her since the first moment we met. An incredulous laugh bursts out of me. I shake my head, amazed that it could be true.
As has often happened in the last five years, this experience of high emotion brings my father to mind. To think of the many emotions and experiences he’s already missed, and the ones yet to come in my life that he will miss, is almost unbearable.
Grief is sneaky. Once the first few months of numbing pain passed, I continue to think of my dad every day. But in the hubbub and structure of the day to day, the thoughts don’t hurt. I remember he’s gone, of course, but it’s a dull remembrance, a phantasm off in the distance. When I sit in the memories, though, dwell on the holes in my life he used to fill, the pain returns, fresh as the moment my mom first called me to break the news.
I was in my mid-twenties at the time, a full-grown adult by any account, but with so much still to experience in life that I will need my dad to help me navigate. Love. Parenting. Aging. It was a heart attack, sudden and unexpected, so it wasn’t like he could have written me letters with words of advice in envelopes marked with specific occasions in my life. On the day of your wedding . On the birth of your first child . What I wouldn’t give for his thoughts, encouragement, and advice documented like that for me to read and reread whenever I want. I try to scrabble together as much as I can remember from things he told me while he was alive, but I’m afraid I tuned him out much too often.
My brain hooks onto an old memory and calls it forward. I was maybe fourteen and my dad took me out on the Gulf for deep sea fishing. This trip wasn’t our first or our last, just one deep sea fishing trip in the many we took together. It was summer—the best time of year for fishing in the Gulf of Mexico and also convenient since I didn’t have school. My dad’s buddy, Cliff, had a forty-foot power catamaran, and we’d tag along with him on days he went out. We went so often that we had our own fishing gear, and then we’d pack a cooler with food, water, and sodas, staying on the water all day.
This particular trip, we were anchored in, bottom fishing, but not doing much catching. Cliff and Dad didn’t mind much; they were enjoying being outside on the water and “shooting the breeze” as they would say. But I was restless and kept reeling in my line and then casting it out again, just to keep busy.
“You won’t catch anything doing that!” Dad called over to me from across the boat.
“We’re not catching anything now,” I grumbled.
Cliff laughed. “Patience!” he said.
And sure enough, soon Dad and Cliff’s lines were pulling taut, and they started reeling in some decent-sized snapper. Once I stopped fooling around, I caught a couple too, in rapid succession.
Then Cliff, with his eyes trained on the water, shouted, “Bob! Chicken dolphins!”
I turned to look and saw the flashes of neon blue and green that were the telltale sign that a school of mahi mahi was swimming up. Cliff grabbed some sardines and dropped them along the chum line, giving the mahi mahi incentive to stick around. Then, he pulled his line from the water and replaced his live bait with a gotcha plug.
I watched Cliff drop his line again and almost immediately get a hit. He fought for several minutes to reel it in, his brown skin damp with sweat and glinting in the summer sun. When he had the fish above the water, we shouted when we saw a mahi mahi that looked to be at least fifteen pounds. Cliff dropped him back in the water, still on the line.
When he saw my questioning gaze, he explained, “If we keep him on the line, the rest of the school will stay nearby, and maybe we can catch a couple more.”
“Do you want to try?” my dad asked me.
I agreed eagerly. We fixed my line up with a banana jig, and I dropped it in the water. Dad did the same with his line on the other side of the boat.
Soon, Dad was wrestling with a chicken dolphin on the end of his line, tugging and reeling as the fish jumped out of the water and then crashed back down. Finally, he got it in, and we left this second mahi mahi on the line in the water while Cliff brought in his original one.
Finally, a few minutes later, my line pulled, the rod bending sharply toward the water. With Dad and Cliff cheering me on, I fought the mahi for fifteen grueling minutes. The fish yanked my wiry teenage body forward and backward as I reeled with all my strength. When it jumped out of the water, I saw it was huge! At least twenty pounds. The rod dipped down, and I pulled it back up, over and over. Suddenly, I tumbled back onto the floor of the boat, bruising my elbows. The line had snapped and the mahi mahi got away.
In the flood of my disappointment, I forgot how to breathe. I fought back tears, determined not to cry in front of my dad and Cliff. As Cliff steered us home, my dad sat next to me on the bench. Lifting his arm to casually rest across my shoulders, he slowly asked, “You know why I like fishing?”
“Why?” I asked. At the moment, I was pretty sure I hated fishing. Would never go again if I could help it.
“I always learn about life.”
“What do you mean?”
“Like fishing, accomplishing anything worthwhile in life requires patience, persistence, and a willingness to face uncertainty.” He smiles. “Like in love and relationships. You may not care too much about that now, but someday you will. With fishing, you might wait hours for a catch, just like in life it may take time, more than you’d hoped, to find the right person, or once you find them, for a relationship to develop.
“Both love and fishing involve moments of disappointment and frustration, but also the thrill of a big catch or a meaningful connection. They both require dedication and commitment. But most of all, you need to understand that it’s the experience itself that holds value, no matter how it turns out.”
He was right that, at the time, I didn’t much care for his advice about life and love. And it definitely didn’t make me feel better about losing the mahi, but I’m glad the memory has stuck with me. It’s bittersweet to pull his words back now from the recesses of my mind. Thinking back on the last six months, his advice seems more relevant than ever.
Not that I’m “catching” Nicole. Trying to be a meaningful part of her life is taking all my emotional strength, but at the same time, building it up and heightening my resilience. For sure, walking with her tonight, hand in hand, was the thrill of my life.
I prop the pillows up against the headboard and sit on the bed, reclining back. I close my eyes and heave out a sigh. Nope, still not tired. Between the leftover nervous energy from the presentation this afternoon, the excitement of my evening with Nicole, and the slow ache of remembering my father, I’m not sure how I’ll settle down enough to fall asleep.
I swing my legs around to climb out of bed. Setting up my laptop on the little hotel desk, I launch a computer game. All the stress of the day, both good and bad, drops out of focus as I take turn after turn in the game and get lost in the fictional world. I don’t emerge until the early hours of the morning, when I finally crawl into bed and spend the few hours that remain in a soft, dreamless sleep.