Chapter 5 #3
Because he felt his own body do the thing.
Even now. Even here, with the best thing that had happened to him in seven years sitting a foot away at the tiller looking wrecked and delighted — some cold competent part of Roan, the part that had kept him alive and moving and un-sunk for seven years, quietly began to prick the ears back.
Started reading the wind. Started, God help him, plotting the course out — noting that the Camden delivery was long gone but there'd be others, that the Petrel would splash inside the month, that a man could be down the coast and gone before the leaves turned if he left clean, if he left now, if he left before this got any teeth in it.
You anchored, the old cold voice said, pleasant as anything. You just set an anchor. You know what happens to a boat that anchors on a lee shore.
He knew. He knew better than anybody. He'd built his whole life on the knowing.
You did not put down ground tackle anywhere you couldn't leave in a hurry, because the one time he'd done it — the one time he and Emmett had let a life become a home, had stopped moving, had stayed to build a thing worth staying for — the staying had come to collect, and it had taken everything, the house and the years and the man, and left Roan nothing but the one boat that could still run.
He'd made her sound so they could leave.
He'd been leaving ever since. Leaving was the only prayer he had that ever worked.
And the worst of it — the part that made him want to put the helm down and sail the Ada straight past the yard and out the harbor mouth and just keep going — was that he could feel how good the staying would be.
That was the whole trap of it, the exact mechanism.
It wasn't that staying looked bad. It was that staying looked like everything: the whole warm lit life he'd sold off in pieces down the eastern seaboard, one harbor at a time.
And Roan knew from the inside out that the warm lit life was precisely the thing that got taken from you — that the size of what you built was the size of the hole it left when it went.
Emmett had taught him that without meaning to, dying slow in a house they'd made beautiful.
You don't grieve a thing you never let yourself have.
So you never let yourself have it. That was the system, whole and airtight, and it had kept him alive for seven years, and it was screaming at him now over the sound of the wind.
And here he was on somebody else's sloop with somebody else's kiss still on his mouth, having stood up in a town meeting and picked a side, having taught a good man to come about, having let a harbor start to learn his name — having done, in three weeks, every single thing a man does right before he loses everything again.
"You've gone somewhere," Hollis said.
Roan came back. Hollis was watching him, the delight in his face going careful now, going braced, a man who read hulls for where they'd fail and had just watched something start to fail in this one.
"I'm here," Roan lied. "That was — you're a natural. Told you she minds."
Hollis didn't say anything. He held the tiller, and he held Roan's eye, and Hollis Cyr, who could not say a single tender thing about himself, apparently had no such trouble reading it off another man, because whatever he saw in Roan's face made his own go quiet and old in a way Roan couldn't stand.
"You're already leaving," Hollis said. Not angry. Worse than angry. Certain. "Right now. You've got one hand on the halyard already."
"Cyr's coming up," Roan said, because the yard was, the railway and the shed sliding out from behind the point ahead, and it was the truest thing he could reach for that wasn't the real one. "You want to take her in, or you want me to?"
Hollis looked at him a moment longer. Then he let it go — gave Roan the out, the way he'd given him the out on the float in the dark, because giving a man the thing he was reaching for was the only way Hollis had ever learned to love anybody, even when the thing he was reaching for was the door.
"Take her in," Hollis said, quiet. "I'll learn the rest of it some other time."
Roan wanted, with a suddenness that scared him worse than the ledge had, to tell him.
To put the tiller in Hollis's big hands and say the whole of it — Emmett, the house, the seven years, the arithmetic, the reason a good thing landed on him exactly like a countdown.
To say it isn't you, it's that you're the best thing I've found since I started running and I don't have the first idea how to stop running without finding out what it costs.
He had the words. For once in his whole life he had all of them, right there behind his teeth, ready.
He didn't say a single one. He was better at the leaving than the saying. He'd always been better at the leaving.
And he moved back off the tiller to make room, and did not say the thing they both heard anyway, which was if there is one, and Roan brought the Ada home to the yard on a dying breeze with a kiss on his mouth and his whole body already plotting the way back out to open water, and hated himself the entire way in.