Chapter 8
Slack and Turn
Amos took the peapod out on the last of the dark, and she went the way she always went, sweet and quiet under sail, the one thing in his life that had never once failed to carry him away from a place that had started to cost too much.
He didn't look back. That was the whole art of it, the art he'd spent six years perfecting: you didn't look back, because looking back was how a place got its hooks in you, and once a place had its hooks in you it could hurt you, and Amos Kean had made himself a man that no place could hurt because he was always already gone.
He'd rigged her in the dark by feel. He'd stowed his gear.
He'd left the mended pound holding its thousand pounds and the co-op with its dead ice and its live truck and the whole doomed harbor sleeping, and he'd cast off the peapod's lines with hands that knew the knots too well to need light, and he'd sailed her out into the gray toward the point, toward the open water, toward the next harbor and the next and the next, world without end, a man with no name on his boat because a nameless thing you can always leave.
The grief came up around the third mooring can.
He'd expected it. He let it come. It came the way it always came, not as tears — Amos didn't have tears, hadn't had them since Digby, they'd dried up in him along with everything else — but as a kind of pressure, a weight settling over the whole chest, the specific ballast of leaving a thing you'd let yourself want.
He knew this weight. He'd carried it out of a dozen harbors.
It got lighter. That was the mercy and the horror of it both: it always, always got lighter, the farther out you went, until by the time you made the next port you couldn't rightly remember why the last one had felt like it might be the one you stayed in.
It'll get lighter, he told the pressure in his chest, sailing for the point. Give it a week. It always gets lighter.
But it wasn't getting lighter. That was the thing.
He was doing everything right, all the old right things, and the weight was sitting on him heavier with every boat-length he put between himself and the sleeping town, heavier instead of lighter, wrong, all wrong, as if the boat were sailing him the wrong way through his own life.
He knew what was behind him and he made himself not name it and it named itself anyway, the way a hurt does.
The pound, holding its thousand pounds, the first thing he'd built with his hands in six years that mattered to anybody.
The fleet that had learned his name and started nodding to him on the ramp.
Dee's chowder and Gil's grudging grunt and the Levesque kid asking him where the crib went, taking his answer for gospel.
And the man. The big warm ruined man asleep in a too-empty house, or awake at a desk with a pen, the man who'd fed him the first night and fixed his boat in the dark and asked nothing, the man who'd let himself be given to at last and slept a whole night through in Amos's arms like the drowned coming up for air.
Amos was sailing away from the only place in six years that had felt like the word home meant something you could stand on.
And he was doing it because that same place had, for four nights, made him a man who could be broken again — and being a man who could be broken was the one thing Amos Kean had sworn on his father's grave he would never be twice.
That was the arithmetic that had kept him alive, and kept him alone, and he'd never once found the flaw in it in six years of running, because there wasn't one — the arithmetic was sound.
It was only that being right about it had cost him every warm thing he'd ever put a hand to, and he was too far gone this morning, too wrung out, to call up why being right had ever seemed worth the whole rest of a life.
So he sailed on toward the point with the sound arithmetic in his head and the wrong-way weight on his chest, and did not turn back, because turning back was the one maneuver his whole body had forgotten how to make.
He'd near made the point when he saw the skiff.
***
It came off the Cyr and Mercer float low and quiet and unhurried, one man at the oars, pulling out to cut the peapod's line to the point as easy as if he'd known the course Amos would take before Amos knew it himself — which, Amos understood, watching him come, he probably had.
Roan Mercer shipped his oars a length off and let the skiff coast, and sat there rocking in the gray with his forearms on his knees, and looked at Amos over the water the way he'd looked at him that first day off the second ledge, level and knowing, a man reading his own face in a window.
"Wind's fair for leaving," Roan said. Easy. Almost friendly. "I'll give you that. She'd carry you clear to Nova Scotia on a morning like this, that little boat. Straight back where you came from and nobody the wiser." He tipped his head. "That the plan?"
"That's the plan." Amos kept his hand on the tiller. "You out here to talk me out of it?"
"God, no." Roan almost smiled. "Man can't be talked out of leaving.
I know that better than most. You can only be talked out of it by yourself, and even then it don't take the first ten times.
" He let the skiff rock. "I came out because I wanted to see it.
That's all. Wanted to see a man do the thing I did off this exact point two summers back, so I could find out whether it looks as stupid from the outside as it felt from the in.
" He looked at the peapod, at the gear stowed, at the nameless bow.
"Yep. Looks about that stupid. Good to know. "
"You don't know a thing about it."
"I know you sailed in here half-dead and broke and this harbor fed you and put you to work and let you be some use, and you found yourself a man, and the two of you fixed a thing everybody else had given up for dead, and for about three weeks you were the most alive I've seen a person be.
" Roan's voice stayed easy but his eyes didn't. "And then the man did something that scared you, and now you're running for open water at first light with your gear stowed, telling yourself it's because you can't watch him make a mistake. That about the shape of it?"
Amos said nothing. The peapod ghosted. The point stood off his bow, and past it the open gray.
"Here's the part nobody tells you," Roan said, quieter now, the charm gone out of it, just a man talking to a man over cold water.
"It was never about the harbor. Mine wasn't either.
I told myself I was leaving because a man named Corliss was going to take the boatyard and I couldn't stop him and I couldn't stand to watch.
Noble as anything. Total horseshit. I was leaving because Hollis Cyr had gone and made me matter to him, and mattering to somebody means you can be lost, and I'd already been lost enough for three lifetimes and I'd sooner have drowned than sign up for one more helping.
" He held Amos's eyes. "You're not running from watching Gus sign a bad deal.
You could stay and fight that; you're the only one who knows how.
You're running from the fact that that man kept you.
Four nights he kept you, and you slept like the dead, and you woke up and it was the best you'd felt since your father, and it scared the living hell out of you — because if you let yourself be kept, you can be un-kept, and you've decided somewhere down deep you'd rather leave every good thing on earth standing on a dock than survive watching one more of them go under. " He let that sit. "How'm I doing."
"You don't know me."
"I know your boat's got no name and mine came in half-sunk, and those are two ways of saying the same thing, which is don't get attached, this won't last, I'm only passing through.
" Roan shrugged, easy. "I flew that flag eleven years.
Sailed into more harbors than you've seen and never once let one keep me, and I called it freedom, right up until a big quiet man made me a cup of coffee I didn't ask for and I realized I'd been so busy making sure nothing could ever hurt me that I'd made good and sure nothing could ever reach me either.
Same thing. Turns out they're the exact same thing.
" He rocked in the skiff. "You want to know what freedom actually got me, all those years?
A whole lot of harbors I can't remember and nobody in a single one of them who'd have noticed if I sailed back out.
That's what your open water's selling you, Amos.
Not freedom. Just a guarantee that when you go, it won't hurt anybody, because you never let it matter enough to. Including you."
Amos looked at the point. Looked at the open gray past it.
"And I'll tell you the other thing," Roan said, "the one that took me longest. You keep saying you break what you hold.
Like it's a law. Like it's weather. But you didn't break your father, Amos.
Halyard broke your father. A company with a hundred lawyers broke a tired honest man who signed because he was scared and cornered, and you were a boy who ran the numbers wrong trying to save him, same as Gus ran them wrong trying to save this place — and you've spent six years calling that I break what I hold because it's easier to be a curse than to be a kid who couldn't save his dad.
I know. I did the same math on myself for a decade.
It's a lie, and it's a lie that's about to cost you the one thing you've wanted since you got here, and I'm not going to sit in this skiff and watch you believe it. "
Amos didn't answer. Couldn't. The point stood off his bow and the words sat in him like ballast shifting.
Amos's hand had gone white on the tiller.