Chapter 7
Torren
The system stalled.
That's what it did — it sat off Cuba and turned into a broad slow wet nothing that wouldn't leave, and the forecast went from forty-eight hours to we'll see, and every working boat in the Lower Keys crawled into a hole and shut its engine off.
Our hole was a mangrove cut on the back side of an island with no name on the chart, four feet of tea-colored water under the keel and green walls on both sides so close you could touch them from the rail.
Junho took Pop in on the skiff Tuesday morning — Pop had an appointment, and Junho drove him to it, and neither of them said a word about that arrangement to me or to anybody, and I've thought about that a lot since.
I helped Pop into the skiff.
He let me, which was new. Six weeks earlier he'd have taken my hand off at the wrist for offering. Now he put his forearm on mine and went down into the boat in three careful movements and sat in the bow with his cane across his knees like an oar.
"Vale."
"Yeah."
"You're going to be here after."
It wasn't a question and it wasn't about the weather.
"Yeah," I said.
"Good." He looked out at the green wall. "She's going to do the thing where she doesn't ask anybody for anything for about four years. That's her father in her. He did it too, and it killed him about eleven years before it was supposed to."
"I know."
"You don't know. You've been here six weeks."
"I know the shape," I said.
Pop looked at me for a second, and something in his face relaxed about a quarter of an inch.
"Yeah," he said. "All right. You know the shape."
Junho started the outboard, and then killed it, and then leaned out around the console and said, to me, at full volume:
"IF SOMETHING HAPPENS TO THIS BOAT WHILE WE'RE GONE — "
"Nothing's going to happen to the boat."
"— I'M SAYING IF."
"Junho," Nerissa called from the wheelhouse, "go to the doctor."
"IT'S HIS DOCTOR."
"GO TO HIS DOCTOR."
The outboard caught. They went out through the cut and the sound of them faded into the leaves, and then there was rain and nothing else.
Which left the boat.
Which left two days.
"So the good news," Nerissa said, "is that we have propane."
"That's good."
"The bad news is that we have propane and eleven eggs and a bag of rice and something in the cold locker that I believe used to be a chicken and now identifies as a concept."
"Throw it out."
"I'm not throwing out protein in a financial climate like this."
"Nerissa."
"Fine. It's going over the side. It's going to make some crab very briefly happy and then very confused."
Rain on the deck. That's the whole soundtrack for two days. Rain on the deck, rain on the mangroves, which is a completely different sound, and a hundred thousand leaves doing it at once.
She cooked. I want to be fair to her: she cooked with total confidence.
"What's that."
"Rice."
"It's gray."
"It's cooking."
"Rice doesn't go through gray."
"You don't know that."
"I've made rice."
"You've made Boat," she said. "I don't take culinary notes from a man who named a vessel Boat."
I took the pan off her.
"Oh, okay," she said, and sat up on the counter, and swung her heels, and watched me. "Okay. So the biker cooks."
"The biker eats. This is upstream of that."
"Where'd you learn?"
"Mama Odette."
"Who is that? You've said that name four times."
"She runs the kitchen at the clubhouse."
"That's a job?"
"It's the job," I said. "Everything else is a hobby."
Nerissa laughed. She had her hair down, which she basically never does, and it was doing something insane in the humidity, and she'd stolen my shirt at some point on Monday night in a way I have never been able to reconstruct.
"Tell me about her," she said.
So I told her about Mama Odette, and then about Amos and the crossword, and then about Ghost, and then about Cade, and then — because two days in a mangrove cut in the rain does something to a person — about the garage, and about eleven years, and about a table in a back room where nine men had all made a very specific effort not to look at me for two years.
She listened.
That's a real skill and almost nobody has it, and the person who has it least in the world is Nerissa Kwon, and she did it anyway, for an hour, with her chin on her hand.
"They love you," she said, at the end.
"Yeah."
"That's why it was unbearable."
"Yeah."
"Yeah," she said. "That's how it works. Nobody warns you."
She got down off the counter and took the pan off me and ate directly out of it, standing up, which is a thing she does that I have never been able to break.
"Your turn," I said.
"For what."
"Tell me about him."
"About who?"
"Your father."
She chewed for a while.
"He was a good sailor and a bad businessman and a worse patient," she said. "He could put this boat anywhere. I mean anywhere. I watched him back her into a slip in a cross-wind in Islamorada with a dead bow thruster and two people screaming at him and he did it like he was parking a chair."
"And the business."
"He gave things away." She put the pan down.
"That was the whole disease. Somebody's engine died, he towed them for free.
Somebody's kid needed a summer job, we had a summer job.
Marguerite's husband got sick in 2011 and my father fueled that boat out of his own pocket for nine months and never told her and never told me and I found it in the ledger after he died, on page four, in his handwriting, marked 'misc. '"
"Forty-one thousand of misc."
"Forty-one thousand of misc," she said. "And here's the thing I've never said to a living person.
When I found that page, I was furious. Not sad.
Furious. Because he was generous with money that was going to be mine, and being angry about that made me a horrible person, and I've had three years to get over it and I've had exactly no success. "
"You're not a horrible person."
"You've known me six weeks."
"I know the shape," I said.
She looked at me for a second, and I watched her decide not to make a joke, which for her is a physical effort you can actually see.
"Yeah," she said. "Okay."
The rain came harder Tuesday afternoon and the boat went dark and green and warm, and we didn't come up on deck again until Wednesday.
I'm not going to write down all of it.
Some of it, though, because she'd want it in the record, and because the record so far is mostly about a dead man and a lawsuit.
The berth in the Halcyon's forepeak is built for one person of average size, and there are two of us, and one of us is not average.
"This isn't going to work," I said.
"It's absolutely going to work."
"There's a — Nerissa, there's a beam."
"That's a stringer."
"I've hit it twice."
"Yes, I heard both. Loudly. The mangroves heard both." She got a hand flat on my chest and pushed me down into the bunk, which worked entirely because I let it. "Lie down and stop being tall at me."
"That's not something I'm doing."
"It's very aggressive," she said, and got a knee over.
Here's what I'd forgotten about two days.
You can't rush anything. There's nowhere to be. The whole world is four feet of brown water and a wall of leaves, and the phone has no bars, and the only clock is the rain getting louder or softer.
So you go slow, and you laugh a lot, and you find out what somebody's like when there's no job on.
She was ticklish behind the left knee and denied it under direct questioning.
She had a scar across her ribs from a winch handle at fifteen and told me the story twice with two different endings and I believe neither.
She fell asleep at some point in the afternoon with her hand flat on my sternum, and woke up forty minutes later mid-sentence, continuing a thought about diesel filters that she had not started out loud.
"— and that's why you don't buy the off-brand."
"You were asleep."
"I was processing."
"You said 'and that's why.'"
"That's how conclusions work, Torren. You don't get to see the middle. Nobody gets to see the middle."
Then she went quiet, and drew something on my chest with one finger, and said, in a completely different voice:
"Can I say a thing and you not make it a whole event?"
"Yeah."
"I've had exactly two serious relationships and both of them ended when the guy figured out that the boat wasn't a phase.
" Her finger kept going. "That's it. That's the whole pattern.
They think it's a thing I'm doing until I get a real job.
And it takes them about fourteen months to work out that this is the real job, and that it doesn't pay, and that I'm not sad about it. "
"That's their failure."
"It's a completely reasonable failure! It's forty-one thousand dollars of debt and a knock since March! I don't blame them, I just — " She stopped. "I'd like to skip that part this time. I'd like to just do it now instead of in fourteen months. So."
"So."
"So I'm going to say it and you're going to say something back and we're not going to do an event." She propped up on an elbow. "The boat's not a phase."
"I know."
"You've been here six weeks."
"Nerissa. I sold every piece of gear I owned two years ago and then bought all of it back one item at a time and put it in a footlocker I never opened.
" I looked at her. "You're talking to somebody who has never once in his life been able to leave a thing alone.
The boat's not a phase for you. Water's not a phase for me.
Neither of us gets to be normal about this. "
She lay back down.
"Okay," she said, to the deckhead. "That was an event."
"You started it."
"I started it, I didn't want it finished."
She talked. Of course she talked.
"Okay, so, logistically — "
"Nerissa."
"No, this is important, there's a bilge cycle every eleven minutes and it's going to sound like a — "
"I know what it sounds like."
"— like a bear, and I don't want you to think it's the engine, is all I'm saying, because if you think it's the engine you'll get up, and I very much don't want you to get up."
"I'm not getting up."
"Good."
"Ever," I said.