Chapter 30
CHAPTER THIRTY
Eli
Ihave a page in the back of my notebook that nobody has ever seen.
It’s a list of Reese’s calls, race by race, with what I thought she was going to do written beside each one. I started it to learn the boat and kept it because I was wrong often enough that the page turned out to be teaching me about her instead.
Nothing on it accounts for five fingermarks coming up on her arm, or Jackson sitting in three seat with the left side of his face swelling by the minute.
Fifty meters off the dock I stop thinking about the notebook, because the boat is checking badly enough to ignore everything else. Every recovery throws me half an inch toward the stern, and instead of running out beneath us the shell sits down in the water.
Power isn’t the problem. We have more of it than we’ve had all season. The problem is that eight men are hurling themselves up the slide because it’s the only thing they’re allowed to hurl anywhere this morning.
I have about a stroke and a half to work out how to say that without sounding like I’m presenting findings.
I don’t have to.
“Way enough,” Reese says.
Eight blades come off the water and the shell glides. We’re less than fifteen minutes from the start of a national championship heat, and our coxswain has just stopped us in open water where every crew on the lake can watch.
“Reese,” Gray says.
“Ratio’s gone. All of you. You’re coming up the slide before the run’s finished and stopping the boat with your own body weight.
” Her voice comes through the speaker beside my knee, flat and controlled.
“You’re rowing like you want to hurt somebody.
Understandable, but it’s costing us about four seconds. ”
Four is generous. I’d have said five and a half.
Nobody argues.
“Bo. Half pressure, quarter slide. Eyes closed.”
“Eyes closed?”
“You’ve been staring at my arm since the trailers. Close them.”
Five seats up, Bo goes still for a moment before he does it.
“Everybody,” Reese says. “Half pressure, quarter slide, eyes shut. Listen to the boat instead of looking at each other. Ready. Row.”
I don’t want to.
Watching is how I understand things. It’s how I know Jackson’s shoulders went wrong at the trailer line and Zane hasn’t made a joke in ninety minutes. Take away my eyes and I lose most of what I use to make sense of a boat.
I close them anyway.
The first ten strokes are awful, and hearing it without seeing it makes it worse. Eight catches land across maybe a tenth of a second, and beneath them the hull makes a dragging sound that sets my teeth on edge.
Then Tyler’s blade goes in clean.
His hands have always known what to do before the rest of him catches up.
I find his catch three seats ahead through sound alone and put mine with it, and Cameron finds me a stroke later.
Whatever the three of us are doing starts moving through the boat, and by the fifteenth stroke the dragging is gone.
Reese takes us to half slide, then three-quarter, then full, still light. Somewhere in there the shell starts running beneath us again, and I feel the difference through the seat before I hear it.
“There it is,” she says. “That’s the boat. Remember it.”
“Eyes?” Beckett asks.
“Open them. Don’t look at me.”
We paddle toward the start with a few minutes in hand.
Six lanes. We’re in four. Hampton Hills is in three.
I saw the heat sheet at ten past six this morning, outside the hotel breakfast room with a cup of coffee I never drank.
I’ve known for more than two hours that Jackson would spend this race rowing beside the crew he left, and I haven’t mentioned it, because there isn’t a sentence I can give him that makes it easier.
He’s known since last night anyway. I can tell from his back. Three years of looking at that back has taught me more about him than most of our conversations.
Cameron reaches past me and locks our bow into the block while the official comes down the line with the megaphone, checking each lane.
“Sable Ridge.”
He pauses.
It’s barely two seconds, but I see his eyes move from Reese’s arm to Jackson’s face before he looks back at his clipboard and carries on to lane five.
I add him to the count without meaning to. Two volunteers, one deputy, one reporter, and now an official who looked twice and decided not to have seen anything.
The cox box clicks.
“Two minutes,” Reese says. “Short version. There’s a man in a car somewhere on the county road. There’s a video on a reporter’s phone. Jackson has a bruise on his face and I have five fingerprints on my arm. None of those things are in this boat.”
Gray’s shoulders come down.
“Everything you want to do about it, you can’t. Not today and not with your hands. You can do it here. This is the only place today where being furious is useful, and it’s only useful if you’re long.”
“Long,” Bo says.
“Long. If you shorten up, I will bring the rate down in a final and you will hate me.” She gives us half a beat. “Bow pair, half a stroke to port.”
Cameron and I take one light stroke and put her point where she wants it.
“Sable Ridge, are you ready?” the starter calls.
“Attention.”
The boat goes still around me. Somewhere to port a bird comes off the water. I hear my own heart and the small movement of water against the hull, and then the horn blasts.
“Row!”
The first stroke is the biggest thing I’ve ever been part of. Eight men who have spent the entire morning holding themselves back put all of it into one catch, and the shell comes off the block hard enough that I feel it in my teeth.
Four strokes are perfect. On the fifth, the rate climbs.
“Lengthen. Lengthen it out. Settle in two. One. Two. Settle.”
The rate comes down and steadies. I count it against my breathing, which is a habit I’ve never told anybody about.
Thirty-seven. Two beats high.
If the notebook were open in front of me, I know what I’d write. Leave it. A crew two beats high off the settle can get away with it, and correcting now means asking eight furious men to watch another boat move away and trust that it comes back. I’d take the four or five seconds later.
“Down two,” Reese says. “In two. One, two.”
She takes the rate off us in a national championship heat while Hampton Hills is already a canvas up.
We drop to thirty-five and immediately lose half a seat. Somebody in the middle of the boat makes a sound that isn’t quite a word.
“I know,” Reese says. “Hold it. Run the boat.”
So we do.
So another crew moves away from us half a seat at a time, and every instinct in my body screams to answer, and I don’t, because the woman looking straight at me said not yet.
The first five hundred goes by. Reese doesn’t tell us where we are. She tells us what the boat is doing.
“Puddles are clean. Blades are square. Tyler, that’s beautiful. Bo, one more inch at the catch and I’ll give you the world.”
At seven hundred she takes a ten for the legs, and the shell lifts under us. At nine hundred she takes nothing, because nine hundred is a trap and everybody in lane three is about to find that out.
Hampton Hills goes at eleven hundred.
I hear it before I see anything. Their coxswain is screaming from the next lane over, loud enough that the shape of the call carries even when the words don’t. Every man in our boat wants to answer.
So do I, and I’m the one who knows what answering this early costs.
“No,” Reese says. “Nobody move. We’re at thirty-five, we’re staying at thirty-five, and they’re going to come back to us in four hundred meters.”
Jackson’s back doesn’t change.
His old crew is walking through us and he doesn’t shorten by an inch. He doesn’t rush the slide or muscle the finish. He gives them nothing, not one stroke, not one sign that anybody in that boat knows his name. I know what those people cost him, and he leaves all of it out of the shell.
Hampton Hills takes a length.
“Fifteen hundred. That’s the trap. Bo, breathe. Zane, breathe. We’re going in five.”
They start coming back at sixteen hundred, exactly the way Reese said they would. Hampton Hills bought speed early and the bill is due.
“Now. Sprint. Rate up two, in two. One. Two.”
What happens next is harder to quantify.
There’s a point in an eight when everybody makes the same decision at once. Nobody drags the rest of the boat there and nobody comes a stroke late. The rate changes, but that isn’t the important part. The run gets longer, the check disappears, and the hull lifts and stays there.
For forty strokes there’s nothing to fix.
We go through Hampton Hills at eighteen hundred. Reese doesn’t tell us, because she knows somebody would look.
At nineteen hundred, something happens to the bond.
I feel it the way you feel a stair that should be there and isn’t. It’s been behind my sternum from the night she let me put my mouth against the side of her neck, steady enough that I stopped noticing it weeks ago.
Then it scatters. For two strokes it isn’t one bond. It’s eight separate things hitting me out of order, none of them fitting where they should, and underneath all of it is Reese, stretched thin in a way I’ve never felt from her before.
The rudder slips at almost the same time. Not by much. Our point walks maybe six inches to starboard before she brings it back, and at this rate the whole thing lasts under four seconds.
Then the bond settles, and her voice comes through the speaker as if nothing happened.
“Ten strokes. Ten. Nine. Eight.”
Gray takes the rate up without being asked.
“Three. Two. One. Through.”
The horn goes above us.
We win by three-quarters of a length. The announcer reads a time I don’t hear, because Zane is howling something directly into the back of Tyler’s head.
“Way enough. Let it run. Breathe.”
Eight men fold over their oars.
I come upright before most of them and look down the boat at her. She has one hand on the rudder line and her chin level, and she looks fine.
Maybe she is.