Chapter 33
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
Reese
They throw me in the water.
Zane counts to three. Beckett counts differently on purpose, so I go in sideways with my mouth open.
It’s the second time this has happened to me. The first time, I came up out of a lake doing arithmetic about how many hours of suppressant I had left and whether anybody had smelled anything. Today I come up laughing so hard I take in another mouthful.
The lake is filthy and about nine degrees colder than it looks.
Bo puts a hand down and hauls me out one-armed, and Jackson gets a towel around me before I’m upright. Somebody’s mother is crying near the boat racks, and it isn’t mine.
The medals are cheap. They’re always cheap. Mine goes over my head, and Gray’s hand comes down flat on the top of my skull for one second. It’s the least romantic gesture available to a man and it makes my whole chest hurt.
For about forty minutes, it’s the best day of my life. Whatever comes after, that part was real and it came first. I’m keeping it.
The press area is a folding table under a tent. Bennett does most of the talking. Gray does the part about the crew, and he does it well, and he doesn’t mention his father once.
A man in a US Rowing polo waits until they’re done and then comes over to me.
“Callahan? Russell Webb. We met at your boathouse in April.”
“I remember.”
“Best-coxed final I’ve watched in six years.” He hands me a card. “Development camp runs three weeks in July. It’s invitation only, and I’d like you there. There’s a pathway through it to the under-23 squad, and coxswains who go through it tend to stay in the sport.”
Behind him, Okonkwo is talking to Gray and Bo with his hands moving. I look down at the card and think about the exact wording of a bylaw.
The bar runs one full season, and it’s a competition bar. Development camp isn’t competition. July isn’t the season. There’s a version of this where I say yes and find out in five weeks whether the conference agrees with my reading.
“Can I call you next week?”
“Please do.”
Webb rejoins Okonkwo over by the boat racks. I put the card in my pocket, and it stays there for the rest of the afternoon like a stone.
Tyler finds out at twelve minutes to four.
We’re at the trailer. Half the boat is still in racing kit, Zane has produced a bag of gummy worms from somewhere, and Beckett is telling a story about the last five hundred that already isn’t true when Tyler’s phone makes a sound.
He’s had conference bulletins pushed to that phone since February. He set it up himself and has told me more than once that he’d rather find out about our lives from a database than from a person, since databases don’t manage him.
I watch him open it and read.
Every bit of color leaves his face.
“Ty?” Zane says.
Tyler doesn’t answer. He turns the phone around and looks at me across four feet of gravel, and the sound the trailer makes when eight men stop talking at once is one I’ll be hearing for years.
“There’s a finding.”
I put my hand out. “Tyler.”
“Posted at nine o’clock this morning.” He’s reading it now.
He can’t stop himself, and I watch him hate every word.
“Public bulletin. Competition bar, one full season from the date of the finding, effective immediately. Sable Ridge University, women’s designation registration, coxswain of record.
” He finally looks up. “It has your name on it.”
Bo stares at him. “What?”
“She’s barred. For a year. Starting today.”
Beckett laughs. It’s the wrong noise and everybody hears it, including him, since it dies almost immediately.
Then Cameron speaks from the back. “You knew.”
He isn’t asking, and he isn’t talking to Tyler.
“Yes.”
All eight of them look at me.
I’d planned this for tonight. I’d had the whole evening arranged in my head: hotel room, everybody sitting down, everybody fed.
It occurs to me now that I planned it exactly as my father would have, and that the reason I wanted them fed and sitting down was that I thought I could make it go smoothly.
So I stand in a gravel lot with wet hair and tell them badly, which is probably how it should have gone all along.
“Carmine called yesterday at four-fifty. I’m cleared for this weekend and barred for next season, and next season is my senior year. It isn’t appealable on the facts. It’s a strict liability bylaw. It doesn’t matter that I didn’t file it.”
“Yesterday?” Zane asks.
“Yesterday.”
“You knew yesterday and you raced today and you didn’t say anything?”
“That’s right.”
“Reese.” Bo’s voice has gone somewhere I’ve never heard it go. “You sat in that lobby and played cards.”
“I did.”
“You told me it was paperwork.”
“I lied to you.” There’s no version of this that isn’t that sentence, so I don’t try to soften it. “I lied to all of you, deliberately, for twenty-two hours. I’d do it again, and I need you to hear the second part before you decide about the first.”
Jackson has both hands on the back of his neck. Eli has gone completely still, and Beckett’s face has nothing on it at all, which from Beckett is a scream.
“Then give us the second part,” Cameron says.
“If I’d told you last night, not one of you sleeps.
If I’d told you this morning, that final is about me.
You’d have rowed it angry. You’d have rowed it for me.
” I look around at all of them. “We would’ve gone out in the first thousand, and I would’ve spent the rest of my life knowing I did that to you. ”
“You don’t get to make that call,” Bo says.
“I know.”
“No, you don’t know, or you wouldn’t have made it.”
“Bo.”
“I’m not finished.” He isn’t shouting. That’s the worst part. “You spent nine days telling us you weren’t going to be handled. That we didn’t get to decide things about you in rooms you weren’t in. Then you got a phone call and decided something about all of us in a parking lot by yourself.”
I don’t have an answer to that. He’s right, and pretending otherwise would only make it worse.
“She’s not the only one,” Gray says.
Every head turns toward him. He’s standing at the end of the trailer with his hands at his sides, looking exactly as he did yesterday when I asked him to give me until tonight.
“I knew something was wrong yesterday,” he says. “I watched her take the call through the lobby window. I didn’t hear it and she didn’t tell me what it was, but I knew it was bad. She asked me to give her until tonight, and I did.” He looks at Bo. “So it’s two of us.”
The silence after that feels different. Less like everybody is waiting for me to explain myself and more like nobody knows who they’re angry with anymore.
Tyler is the one who breaks it, and he doesn’t say what I expect.
“I set up the alerts in February so we’d never get blindsided by a filing again.” He’s looking at his phone like it bit him. “It went off in the middle of the best day of your life. I built that.”
“Tyler.”
“It’s a stupid thing to be upset about.”
“It isn’t.” I wait until he looks at me. “It really isn’t.”
Bennett comes over about ten minutes later, when it’s gone quiet and nobody is looking at anybody. His face is hard but not angry, just resigned.
“I’m going to say my piece, and then I’m going to deal with the trailer hitch, since I’ve been putting that off all week and there isn’t going to be a better afternoon.”
Nobody says anything, so he goes on.
“I signed a roster certification a week and a half ago that I knew was going to cost me. Two donors and a member of the athletic board have made their position clear. I’ve been given the opportunity to retire at the end of the academic year, and I’ve accepted it.
” He looks down the length of the trailer at all of us. “Today was the last race I will coach.”
Zane makes a sound.
“Don’t.” Bennett holds up a hand. “I’m sixty-one years old. I’ve had a good run, and I’m not standing in a parking lot while you people thank me. I want two things said, and then I want to talk about the hitch.”
He turns to me.
“First, you aren’t the reason. A grown man signed his own name to his own form, and he’d do it again. If anybody in this crew lets her carry that, they’ll answer to me while I’ve still got the title.”
He waits until I nod.
“Second, Callahan, next season you’ll be on the bank with me. You can’t race. Nobody said a word about you coaching. I’ll be around town, and I’m going to want something to do with my mornings.”
I open my mouth, but nothing useful comes out.
“Think about it,” Bennett says. Then he puts his cap back on. “The hitch is bent. Zane, come hold a light.”
He walks off, and Zane goes with him. Beckett watches them for a second before following.
My father is standing at the end of the row of trailers.
He’s been there since the medals. I’ve known it for the last ten minutes and have been letting myself not deal with it, but now there’s nowhere else to look.
I walk down to him.
He isn’t in the suit anymore. He’s wearing a polo shirt with a marina logo on the chest, bought somewhere local and a size wrong across the shoulders. My father has never in his life worn a shirt that didn’t fit him.
“That was the finest thing I’ve ever seen you do,” he says.
“You saw the whole race?”
“West bank. You were right about the view.” He puts his hands in his pockets. “I’d like to tell you I understood what I was watching. I didn’t. Around fifteen hundred meters, the man next to me started shouting about your steering, so I decided to shout too.”
Something in me comes loose.
“Mom didn’t come.”
“No.” He doesn’t dress it up. He never does.
“Your mother is going to file next month. She’s already spoken to Whitmore’s firm about representation, which I think is meant to be a message, and it is one.
” He looks toward the water. “She’ll say it’s the statement I gave.
It isn’t. It’s that I gave it after she asked me not to. ”
“She asked you not to?”
“Twice.”
For a few seconds, neither of us says anything. Somebody’s trailer chain rattles three rows over.
“I got a letter from the state bar,” he says. “Grievance panel in August. My firm has moved me off two matters and put out a statement about cooperating fully. Both of those things are theater, and both of them are the correct theater.”
“Are you going to lose your license?”
“No.” There’s no satisfaction in the answer. “I’m going to get a private reprimand and a great deal of unpleasantness, and in three years nobody will remember. That’s what happens to men like me.”
I stand there with a medal in one pocket, a business card next to it, and my father in front of me.
I don’t thank him. I still can’t. He falsified a document about a sixteen-year-old girl and then spent one afternoon undoing it. That arithmetic doesn’t balance, and we both know it.
What I say is, “There’s a development camp in July.”
He goes still. “They want you.”
“They want me. I don’t know yet whether the bar covers it. It might.”
“Send me the bylaw.”
“Dad.”
“I’m not asking to handle it.” His jaw sets in the same shape mine does.
“I’m asking you to send me the language and let me tell you what I think it means.
Then you’ll do whatever you want with that, since you’re better at this than I’ve ever given you credit for.
” He takes a breath. “That’s the offer. It’s smaller than the one I’d like to make. ”
Behind me, somebody drops a rigger bolt on the gravel and Bo starts laughing.
“I’ll send it tonight.”
My father nods once. Then he reaches out and puts his hand flat on the top of my head, exactly where Gray put his an hour ago, and holds it there for about two seconds.
I have no preparation for it at all.
Then he takes his hand back and goes to find his car.
When I get to the trailer, the hitch is fixed, the boat is loaded, and eight men are standing around in the last of the light waiting for me.
Bo comes forward first.
“I’m still angry.”
“You should be.”
“I’m going to stay angry about it, and I’m going to be angry in your general direction, and none of it means what you think it means.” He puts his hand on the side of my neck. “You didn’t have to do it alone.”
“I know that now.”
“No, you don’t.” He almost smiles. “But you’re going to.”