Chapter 8
Slipped Her Lines
By the time Roan cleared Monhegan the wind had gone fair for the south, which was the sea's way of telling him to keep going, and he had never in his life wanted less to be told.
He'd splashed the Petrel on Thursday, on the morning tide, the way Hollis said she would.
Hollis hadn't been there for it. That was its own answer.
One of the fall-haul hands had run the railway down and floated her off the cradle, and Roan had rigged her and bent her sails at the town float with the whole harbor pointedly not watching, and Dee had come down once and stood at the head of the float and looked at him and not said a word — she'd said her word already, on Tuesday, smarter than you look — and then Roan had cast off his lines and sailed his sound boat out past the point on a gray ebb, and no one had waved, because there was no one who thought he was coming back, least of all him.
Now it was afternoon and Merritt Point was long gone under the horizon behind him and the sea was doing the thing it had always done for him, which was open up ahead, wide and gray and indifferent and free, offering him the whole coast to disappear down.
Camden by dark. The Oyster ketch in the morning.
Petras's money, the freeze bonus, six weeks of clean solitary work and then a bus north to find the next one.
It was the life. It was the exact life he'd built on purpose, plank by plank, for seven years, and he'd have told you a month ago it was the only life that had ever fit him.
He waited for it to feel like freedom.
He'd been waiting since the point. That was the thing he could not get around, sitting at the Petrel's tiller with a fair wind and a clear horizon and everything a leaving man could want — the relief did not come.
It had always come. It was the whole engine of him, the clean cold lift a man gets when the lines are off and the land is dropping away and nobody can reach him anymore, and it did not come, and in its place was something Roan had spent seven years outrunning at four knots, finally caught up with him now that he'd stopped: the plain grief of it.
Not freedom. Loss, wearing freedom's coat.
He tried the old tricks on it, the ones that had always worked.
He named the harbors down the coast like a rosary — Tenants, Port Clyde, the Muscle Ridge, the long run past Portland and the Isles of Shoals and out into the wide anonymous south — and the naming had always steadied him before, the litany of places where nobody knew him and nothing could reach him.
It didn't steady him now. Each name was just another harbor that wasn't Merritt, another mile between him and a gray shed with a man in it, and the litany that had been a comfort his whole adult life turned, somewhere off Pemaquid, into a list of every place he was choosing over the only one he wanted.
He looked back once, north, at the empty water where the harbor had been.
You built her to leave in, he thought, and put his hand flat on the Petrel's coaming the way he'd watched Hollis put his hand flat on a hull, letting the wood know where he stood, and the wood, he'd swear it, did not answer him the way it had answered Hollis.
You and Emmett built her to leave in, to go somewhere and live.
Not to run. There's a difference and you've spent seven years pretending there isn't.
He sailed on south because the wind was fair, and hated every clean mile of it, and did not yet turn.
The worst of it was how good he was at this.
Any other man would have come about by now, would have felt what Roan was feeling and turned on the feeling.
Roan had trained the feeling out of himself so thoroughly that even now, even grieving, even with the truth sitting in the cockpit beside him plain as a passenger, his hands kept the boat pointed south — kept her sails trimmed and drawing, kept her doing the one thing they knew in their bones how to do, which was leave, beautifully, without a wasted motion.
A man could be right about everything and still, out of nothing but practiced muscle, sail the wrong way all night long.
***
Hollis let the yard go quiet for three days before he picked up the phone to end it.
The empty cradle was the worst of it. He'd hauled a thousand boats up those rails and floated a thousand off, and never once had an empty cradle at the top of the ways looked like anything but a cradle waiting for the next boat.
Now it looked like a coffin with the lid off.
He'd catch it out of the corner of his eye and his chest would do a thing, and he'd go back to the Cormier girl's boat and work harder, because working harder was the tool his hands reached for, and it had never once failed to get him through a day, though it had never once made a day worth getting through either.
That was a distinction Hollis had managed to not examine for forty-six years, and the empty cradle would not let him not examine it now.
He'd stopped sleeping up the hill. The house was worse than the yard.
The house had a bed in it that still, three days on, held the shape of two men, and a kitchen table with the Tern Point letter sitting right where it had knifed Roan, and a whole set of small domestic ghosts a man doesn't know he's made until he's alone with them — a second mug in the drainer, the memory of a low voice saying you give everybody the out and call it love.
So Hollis slept in the loft over the office, on his father's old cot, the way he had as a young man before he'd earned anywhere better, and it felt about right.
It felt like a man returned to his correct size after briefly, foolishly, imagining he was owed more.
On the third day he took Sutter's card off the bench.
There was an offer folded inside the last conversation Sutter had left him with, delivered soft, the way that kind of thing is always delivered — that Tern Point valued local expertise, that a man of Hollis's reputation would always have a place, that they'd be proud to keep him on as yard manager of the marine services division, which was a marina's word for the man who'd wash the summer people's boats where his own railway used to be.
Take the buyout for his half. Keep a paycheck.
Stop drowning. It was, Sutter had said, a way for everybody to win.
Everybody wins. Hollis had turned that one over a lot in three days.
It was the kind of thing men like Sutter said, men who'd never once stood at a wharf and watched a fleet they'd kept afloat get priced out a boat at a time.
Everybody wins meant Corliss got his frontage and Marc got his money and the summer people got their slips and the town got its tax base — and the only thing that lost was a thing that couldn't sign a contract, which was the whole reason a harbor was a harbor and not a parking lot: the working of it.
The fifteen boats that hauled here because there was nowhere else.
The hundred years of Eddies and Gils and Cyrs who'd made a living off the water instead of a view of it.
That lost. But that had never once had a lawyer, and everybody wins was a sentence built for the people who did.
Hollis sat at the desk with the card in his ruined hand and the ledger open to the number that never changed and thought: this is what I'm for.
This was the truth of it, the truth the empty cradle had been trying to tell him for three days.
He was a man built to hold things, and the thing he'd held for twenty years was going, and the kind thing, the sensible thing, the only thing left, was to stop pretending he'd ever been anything but the last man at the wharf, and take the deal, and let the harbor become whatever it was going to become without him breaking his own back against it.
He'd wanted, once, badly, for two decades, for somebody to reach across a room for him instead of handing him another thing to carry.
Nobody ever had. He'd reached, once, himself, at forty-six, and it had cost him worse than never reaching. So. This is what I'm for.
He'd dialed four of the numbers when Rory came in.
Rory didn't knock, because you don't knock at a yard, and he stood in the shed door in his cook's whites with a foil pan in his hands that Dee had no doubt sent, and he took in the whole picture in about a second — Hollis at the desk, the phone, Sutter's card, the ledger, the empty cradle up the ways behind him — the way a man reads a thing he's been half-expecting.
"Put the phone down," Rory said.
"Rory —"
"Put it down." He set the pan on the bench.
He wasn't a big talker, Rory Nash, never had been, forty years of him and Hollis two wharves apart and the man still measured his words out like they cost him.
So when he crossed the shed and took the phone out of Hollis's hand and set it in its cradle, it landed harder than a speech. "You're about to do the thing."
"The sensible thing."
"The thing where you decide the way to stop hurting is to give up the last thing that's yours and call it peace.
" Rory looked at him, steady. "I know that thing.
I almost did it. You remember. Theo came back and I was so sure it wouldn't hold that I about talked myself into letting him go a second time, so I'd get to be the one who ended it, so it couldn't be ended on me.
" He said it plainly, a man handing over the worst of his own history because it was the only thing that might work.
"You'll fix any boat in this harbor, Hollis.
Any boat but the one you're standing in.
You've been bailing your own boat with a teaspoon your whole life and telling everybody you like the exercise. "
"That's rich, coming from you." It was the only defense Hollis had, and it was a poor one. "You and Theo. You got yours."