16. Silas #2
“You absolutely are. You’re treating the water like you’re trying to reposition it.”
“The water doesn’t have a position.”
“Then why are you arguing with it?”
Another pull sends us sideways again and her laughter deepens, open and completely unrestrained. My chest loosens despite the embarrassment.
It takes four or five more strokes before the rhythm comes back. Once it does, the boat eases forward cleanly, the oars pulling through the water with growing competence.
Norah relaxes back into the seat. “Okay,” she says. “That’s better.”
“I told you.”
“You told me to have faith, different from telling me it would be better.”
“The outcome is the same.”
“The journey from faith to better was dicey.”
She’s sitting across from me with her legs angled to one side, the hem of her shorts riding up enough that I catch myself tracking the line of her thigh more than I’m tracking the oars.
The boat rocks slightly with every pull and her legs shift with it, unconsciously, and I think about reaching out with my foot and hooking it under the hem just to see what she’d do.
I don’t do that.
I do think about it for several strokes longer than I should.
The wolf has been fixated on her bare legs in a rowboat since the moment she sat down, a fixation I am actively not entertaining, except that I am, in the inconvenient way that has been happening since the bookshop.
I can feel the heat radiating off her skin from here—not imagination, not exaggeration, an actual fact of proximity and a body that runs warmer than mine has any business running. I focus on the oars.
It does not entirely work.
We move out across the water, away from the dock and the rental shack and the sound of the road, until the lake is the only thing around us.
The light shimmers on the surface, the occasional sound of a bird somewhere in the trees along the shore, the soft rush of the oars through the water.
The city feels very far away from here. The warehouse, the presses, the map with its pins, my father’s window looking out over the dock…
all of it recedes. So distant we might as well be in another world.
Norah opens the basket. She pulls things out with the careful attention she brings to everything, taking in each item with the interest of someone reading a text rather than unpacking a meal. The sandwiches, the fruit, the lemonade. She sets each thing aside with a small, approving nod.
Then her hand finds the book.
She lifts it out and turns it over, reading the cover. Then she looks up at me, amused and curious in equal measure.
“You packed poetry,” she says.
The back of my neck is warm. “It was on the shelf.”
“It was on your shelf.”
“That’s what I said.”
“You said the shelf,” she says, “which implies a shelf in general, as if it could have been any shelf. But you’re busted because your name is inside the cover and there are passages you’ve highlighted.”
She is flipping through the pages like a kid with a pop-up book.
“You’re assuming it wasn’t a pre-owned book when I bought it.”
“I’m fact-finding and calling you out on it at the same time,” she says. She stops at a dog-eared page and skims it, her attention moving between the words.
“You’re secretly sentimental,” she says.
“That’s a dangerous accusation.”
“I have evidence.” She holds up the book slightly.
“You have a book.”
“A poetry book,” she says. “In Spanish. That you bought. For a class, no doubt.” She tilts her head. “But which poet do you actually read? The answer is the one you actually go back to.”
The question doesn’t give me room to deflect without it being obvious that I’m deflecting.
“Neruda, then,” I say.
She goes still for a moment. The amusement drops into warmth, into seriousness.
“The Walt Whitman of the South, he’s been called. Read me something.”
“I’m rowing.”
“You can do both.”
“I can’t do both.”
“I’ll hold the book.” She opens it to the index without hesitation.
I give her the name of a poem. She flips to the page number and holds it out across the basket, angled so I can see it, watching me with the patience of someone who is not going to back down.
I look at the page.
I look at her.
I row while craning my neck, competing with the sun’s glare on the pages. Undignified. It’s what’s happening. I read—unself-conscious about it, the words, the ones Neruda put in that order for reasons that still make sense to me every time I go back to them.
The Spanish sounds different out here on the water, quieter, the consonants softened by the open air. Norah sits across from me with her hat brim low, holding the book up for me as she listens.
When I finish, she doesn’t say anything right away.
The boat drifts.
“Why that one?” she says finally.
She sets the book down on the seat beside her.
Here is the place where I would normally redirect. Find a lighter response, one that acknowledges the question without answering it, keep the conversation more like banter where the terms are clear and my exposure is controlled.
I don’t do that.
“Because it’s about knowing something without being able to explain how you know it,” I say. “About recognition. The feeling of knowing before you can account for why.”
Norah looks at me.
The lake is like glass around us. The light has moved higher and harder since we came out, and it catches on the water and makes everything outside the boat feel slightly unreal, slightly suspended.
“There’s something about wolves I should probably tell you,” I say.
She waits. She’s good at waiting. Better than most people, and certainly better than me.
“Wolves don’t do this casually,” I say. “Any of it. The coming back. The trivia night. Today.” I look at the oars rather than at her.
“When the wolf notices someone, really notices them, it isn’t something you can manage with distance and self-discipline.
It doesn’t stay contained. It doesn’t stay quiet.
” I stop. “I’ve been letting you think I have more control over it than I do. ”
The lake makes its small, patient sounds around us.
“And that should probably concern you more than it seems to.” I use my father’s line, which I’m apparently using now because it was accurate when he says it and it’s accurate now.
She’s looking at me in a way I haven’t seen before. Not the wit or the warmth or the humor she brings to most things. Desire underneath all of that. Like she’s finally close enough to see what she’s been looking at.
She doesn’t deflect.
“Okay,” she says.
Not what does that mean or should I be worried or any of the questions that would be reasonable to ask. Only a person receiving information and deciding what to do with it, and the decision being to stay put.
The boat drifts in the silence.
I lock the oars.
“We should eat,” I say, because we should, and because both of us need a moment to sit with the words we both said.
Norah reaches for a sandwich, comfortable with where we left the conversation. She doesn’t look at me with concern or caution or any of the things I’ve been braced for.
She looks at me and says, “You’re still going to have to tell me which one you think is better, Neruda in Spanish or Neruda in English. I’m warning you that after that reading, I now have opinions.”
The thing in my chest that braced for a different outcome releases, slow like a door settling into its frame.
“So do I,” I say.
“Good,” she says. “I hope we fight about it.”
We eat in the middle of the lake with the afternoon waning around us, and we debate poetry with the pointed pleasure of two people who both know what they’re talking about and have no intention of conceding anything.
But the thing I said sits between us, not finished, not resolved, not named for what it actually is, and neither of us reaches for it again.
Not today.
But it’s there.
And we both know it.
The shore comes back into view eventually, the dock extending its narrow length into the water, the rental shack sitting in the shade. I row us in with considerably more competence than I rowed us out, which Norah notes with commentary is a mercy on all of us.
When we arrive, I ship the oars and catch the dock piling. We are back where we started, but I no longer feel as if I’m pretending this is casual.
“Silas,” she says.
“Yeah.”
She doesn’t look at me. She looks at the water alongside the dock, at the light doing its afternoon work on the surface.
“You should know this about me. I don’t scare easily.”
Not a reassurance. Not a promise—a fact she’s setting down between us without softening it.