Chapter 30 #2
Nobody else reacts. They weren’t counting seconds or watching the point of the shell with four hundred meters left, and if anything registered, they’ve already put it down to the sprint.
I say nothing. There’s a semifinal tomorrow, and Jackson has spent the day holding himself together with half his face turning purple.
I decide I’ll ask her about it in the morning, and once the decision is made I can leave it alone.
Bennett meets us at the dock. He doesn’t mention anything that happened this morning.
He says, “Semifinal’s tomorrow at eleven-forty, and that was the best steered race I’ve seen in thirty years,” and then he walks toward the officials’ tent before anybody can answer, which I’ve come to understand is how Bennett handles saying something he means too much.
Jackson climbs out and stands on the dock with his hands on his knees for almost a minute. When he straightens, the left side of his face is purple and one eye is wet.
He’s grinning.
I’ve been in love with that man in some fashion for three years. We agreed the terms of it before either of us could ask too many questions, and we’ve never once revisited them.
I have never seen him look like that.
At nine that night I stand outside Reese’s hotel room without my laptop.
I noticed in the elevator. I carry the thing the way other people carry a wallet, and tonight it’s closed on the desk in the room I’m sharing with Tyler. Both of my hands are empty and I keep almost reaching for something that isn’t there.
Reese opens the door and looks at my hands before she looks at me.
“You don’t have a plan.”
“No.”
“You always have a plan.”
“I had one.” I stay in the doorway. “I wrote out four things I was going to say on the drive to the course this morning. Then Quinton put his hand on you, and I spent the rest of the day watching Jackson somehow not fall apart. It’s nine o’clock and I don’t have any of the right words anymore.”
She waits.
“May I come in anyway?”
Reese steps back.
I sit on the end of the bed, which appears to be where everyone sits when they come to this room, and rest my hands between my knees.
“I don’t know how to do this part.”
“I know.”
“I plan everything. My week. My degree. Conversations I’ll probably never have.” I look down at my hands. “When Jackson and I started whatever it is we have, I worked out the terms before anything happened. Three years and neither of us has broken them.”
“And?”
I look at her. “I have no idea what happens next.”
She doesn’t rescue me from it.
“This morning Quinton grabbed you and Jackson moved before anybody else could. There was nothing useful left for me to do, so do you know what I did? I counted the volunteers.” Her eyebrows pull together.
“Everybody close enough to see it, so I’d know how many witnesses there were.
You were being grabbed and I was standing there doing arithmetic. ”
Reese sits beside me.
“You want me to tell you that was bad.”
“I want you to tell me it wasn’t.” I rub my thumb across my palm. “I’m not sure you can.”
“I’m not going to tell you either one.” She reaches over and takes my hand, because apparently we both know I’m not going to take hers first. “You counted witnesses. That’s why there’s a deputy’s report tonight with four names on it instead of Jackson’s word against Quinton’s.”
“That isn’t the same as reaching for you.”
“No. It isn’t.” Her hand tightens around mine. “But Jackson reached for me. You did the thing he couldn’t, because he was busy trying not to kill somebody. You’re allowed to be the one who counts, Eli. Somebody has to be, it mattered today, and I’d take that over useless and heroic every time.”
We sit there for a while with her hand around mine.
Then I say, “I keep a page on you.”
Her head turns. “You what?”
“In the back of my notebook. Before you make a call, I write down what I think you’re going to do. I wanted to learn how you ran the boat.” I make myself finish it. “Then I kept being wrong. About sixty percent. Closer to seventy.”
Reese laughs, and some of the pressure that’s been sitting between my ribs all day finally shifts.
“Today I had you leaving us at thirty-seven,” I tell her. “You took us to thirty-five with Hampton Hills a canvas up.”
“And?”
“And I was wrong again.”
“Good.”
“That isn’t usually the preferred outcome.”
“It is when I’m the coxswain.” She’s quiet for a second. “Keep the page. You’ve spent months working out how I think, and not so you could beat me to the call. You wanted to know why I made it.” She looks at me. “And you were never going to tell me.”
“No.”
“I know.”
There’s a version of this conversation where I tell her what happened at nineteen hundred. I have the duration and the rudder movement and exactly what the bond felt like, organized and ready to hand over.
She also has a semifinal at eleven-forty tomorrow.
“May I stay?”
I hear the question after I’ve said it. I don’t ask things the way the others do, and even now I need to know the terms.
Reese doesn’t tease me for it.
“Yes.”
We lie down on top of the covers with our shoes off. I’m on my back with one arm over my eyes and she’s beside me, close enough that our shoulders touch, and we don’t talk for a long time.
The arithmetic doesn’t stop. I know how many hours until the semifinal, and that Jackson’s face will look worse tomorrow before it looks better, and that something happened to all eight bonds at nineteen hundred meters that I still don’t understand.
The numbers just move further off. They stop asking me to do anything about them.
Around eleven I say into the dark, “I don’t know what happens next.”
“Semifinal at eleven-forty. Lane assignment posts at eight.”
I turn my head toward her. “That’s not what I meant.”
“I know.”
There’s enough light through the gap in the curtains to see her face. I planned this conversation once, months ago. There was a walk afterward if the weather cooperated, and several sentences I’d revised until they no longer sounded like anything a person would say.
None of them are here now.
“I’ve been in love with you since the morning you split the boat into pairs and sent Cameron and me off first,” I say. “I had a plan for telling you. It involved a restaurant.”
“Eli.”
“It was a good restaurant.”
She smiles and reaches for me. “Come here.”
So I do.
Her hand settles into my hair and mine rests between her shoulder blades, and I lie there with my ear over her heart, eleven hours from a national semifinal, while everything I usually keep track of goes on happening somewhere without me.