Chapter 7 #3
Dee came down to the float. Roan braced for it — for the tongue-lashing he had coming, the one he'd earned twice over — and instead she only stood beside him a while, arms folded against the cold, looking out at the water.
"I called it," she said at last, not unkindly, not kindly either.
"First day. Same as the last one who came around that point.
" She looked at him sidelong. "Difference is, the last one worked out he'd come home before he wrecked it.
You've got till Thursday" — she tipped her head up the hill, at the boat, at the yard — "to be smarter than you look.
I wouldn't hold my breath on it. But I've been wrong once or twice in ninety years.
" And she left him there, which was worse than if she'd taken a strip off him.
Roan went down to the water and stood on the float where he'd first tied up, in the cold clean October light, and did the thing he was best at in all the world, which was talk himself into leaving.
It was easy. That was the horror of it. It was so easy.
Look how it ends, the old cold voice said, warm as an old friend, reasonable as a chart.
Look how it always ends. You let yourself have the thing — you anchored, you stayed, you let a place learn your name and a man learn your body — and here it is, three weeks later, blowing up in a yard in front of a town, taking the man's dignity and the fleet's trust and leaving you standing in the wreck.
Same as always. Same as the house. Same as everything you ever let get big enough to lose.
You did him a mercy, walking in with the truth about yourself printed on you — you saved him the years.
He'll be angry a week and grateful a lifetime.
Leaving is the kindest thing you do. It's the only clean thing you do. Go.
And every word of it was a lie, and Roan knew it was a lie, and he could not stop his hands from beginning to make it true.
He walked up to the Petrel on her cradle and climbed the ladder and went down into the cabin — into the forward berth, into Emmett's tools and Emmett's chart of the coast they never reached — and he started, out of seven years of ugly muscle memory, to pack.
To stow for sea. To turn a home back into a vessel, which was the one transformation Roan Mercer had ever been any good at.
He was good at it. That was the obscene thing.
His hands knew the exact order of it — the way you stow a boat for a long offshore passage, everything to hand, nothing loose, a home broken back down into a machine for going.
He'd done it in a dozen harbors after a dozen jobs, and every time it had felt like relief, like shedding a skin, like the clean cold pleasure of owing nobody anything and answering to nothing but the wind.
He waited for that to come now. He rolled the chisels and wrapped the chart and waited for the relief to rise the way it always rose, and it did not come.
What came instead was Hollis's face in the shop door going still.
What came was I believe you, said like a benediction and a burial in one breath.
What came was three weeks of a man teaching him that tired wasn't junk, and one night of being wanted instead of needed, and the plain unbearable understanding that he was, right now, with his own two hands, in the process of proving every ugly thing his misbelief had ever whispered — not because it was true, but because he would rather make it true than risk staying long enough to find out it wasn't.
He got the chisels rolled. He got the chart wrapped.
And then he sat down on the tilted berth in the boat a dead man had loved and a live one had made sound, and he put his face in his rope-scarred hands, and he did not pack anything else for a long time, because for the first time in seven years the leaving did not feel like the water opening up ahead of him.
It felt like the water closing over.
He thought about Emmett, which he tried never to do below deck.
Emmett would have hated this. Emmett, who'd bought a downspout and a wallpaper stripper sooner than admit a thing was too hard, who'd blown three frames and steamed a fourth at two in the morning sooner than quit on a boat — Emmett had never once in his life been any good at leaving, and it had cost him everything, and he'd have done every hour of it again.
That was the difference between them Roan had spent seven years refusing to look at.
Emmett had stayed. Emmett had built the beautiful thing and moved into it and let it be a home even knowing, at the last, exactly what a home was going to cost. And Roan had taken the boat the two of them built to stay in and turned her into the fastest way out of every harbor he'd ever have to leave — and called it surviving, and it had worked, it had kept him alive and un-sunk and moving for seven straight years.
Sitting in the cold cabin with the wrapped chart in his lap, Roan understood for the first time that alive and un-sunk were not the same thing as being anything at all.
But his hands, when they started again, knew the way.
They always knew the way. And up the hill, in the empty yard, the caulking iron went into a seam and came out, and went in, and came out, a big man doing the only thing that had never once left him, and neither of them said the thing that might have turned it, because Hollis had run out of reaching twenty years ago and Roan had run out of staying before that, and the tide, which does not care, went out.