Chapter 8 #2
"I got mine because I stopped being smart about it about ten minutes before it was too late.
" Rory pulled a stool over and sat, uninvited, which from Rory was a whole intimacy.
"You want to know what I actually think?
I think you'd rather lose the yard than fight for it.
Because losing it's a grief you already know how to carry — you've been rehearsing it twenty years, you could do it in your sleep.
Fighting for it, winning it, that'd mean standing up and admitting out loud, in front of the whole harbor, that you wanted something bad enough to maybe fail at it.
And you'd sooner go down quiet than get caught wanting where people can see.
" He stood back up; he'd said more than he was built to.
"Same reason you let the man sail off without a word.
Easier to be left than to chase. I know every one of your moves, Hollis. They used to be mine."
Hollis didn't say anything. The number in the ledger looked up at him.
"He's gone," Hollis said finally. "That part's done. This isn't about him. This is about a yard that can't pay for itself and a brother who can force the sale and a vote I'm going to lose. Roan Mercer's got nothing to do with the arithmetic."
"I didn't say his name." Rory let that sit. "You did."
And he left the foil pan and left the shed, and Hollis sat with the phone in its cradle and Sutter's card on the desk and his oldest friend's back going out the door, and he did not pick the phone back up.
He did not put the card away, either. A man frozen at the exact top of a tack — head to wind, all his drive gone out of him, off the old course and not yet onto any new one, just hanging there in the terrible quiet second where a thing can still go either way and everything in you is screaming that you've made a mistake.
***
June came in the late afternoon, after Rory had gone, when the light was going long and gold down the ways the way it had the evening Roan crossed the yard to him, and Hollis had not called Sutter back, and had not un-decided to either, and was sitting in the door of his own shed looking at the empty cradle like a man at a grave.
She didn't sit. June never sat if standing would make a point better. She came and stood in front of him, small and straight, and looked at him with the flat unimpressed eyes that had seen more of this harbor's grief than any living soul, and she said, "You're going to take the marina's money."
"I'm thinking about it."
"Course you are. It's the coward's version of the thing you actually want, which is for somebody to make the deciding stop.
" She said it without any cruelty, which was how June said the hard things, straight through the middle.
"I've known you since you were a boy in your father's shadow, Hollis Cyr, and I have watched you spend your whole life certain you were the kind of man things sailed away from.
You decided it young and you have been collecting evidence ever since, and I'll tell you the trouble with a man collecting evidence — he stops seeing the thing that doesn't fit. "
"June —"
"Hush. I'm ninety, I get to finish." She leaned on nothing, straight-backed.
"A man sailed into this harbor eleven weeks ago running from every dock he ever touched.
And inside a month that man stood up in a town meeting full of strangers who owed him nothing and fought for your railway.
Picked your fight. Against his own people, in front of the whole harbor, for a haul-out that'll never lift one thing he owns.
" She let it land. "You can call that a lot of things.
You've been calling it a betrayal for three days because betrayal's the story you know how to be in.
But I've buried enough of this town to know what it looks like when somebody wants somebody, and that, Hollis — a man crossing a whole town to stand on your side of a fight — that is not nobody sailed toward me. That's the opposite of it.
"You don't know that," Hollis said, low. "You don't know it was that. You're an old woman who likes a story with an ending."
"I'm an old woman who's watched forty years of men in this harbor decide they weren't worth staying for and then go out of their way to make sure they were right.
" June's voice didn't rise. "I watched your Warren go, and I watched you build a church out of it, brick by brick, twenty years of Sundays.
I'm not going to stand here and watch you lay the cornerstone of the second one with better materials.
" That's the thing you swore never happens, happening, right in front of you, and you're about to sign it away because it came wrapped in the one shape you can't forgive, which is a man who was scared to be known.
" She turned to go, then didn't, quite. "He was scared of the same thing you're scared of.
You just picked different cowardices. His was leaving.
Yours is this." She nodded at the phone, the card, the ledger.
"Don't take the money, Hollis. Lose the vote if you have to lose it.
But don't you dare hand them the yard just so the wanting'll stop.
The wanting's the only part of you that ever told the truth. "
She left. Hollis sat in the door a long time, and did not call Sutter, and did not un-decide, and up the ways the empty cradle waited, and the light went, and somewhere south of Monhegan a man was learning the same lesson from the other end of it.
***
It was the fair wind that finally did it, Roan would think later.
If the wind had been foul he might have made Camden and never turned.
But the wind stayed fair for the south, hour after clean hour, everything easy, everything offering itself, the whole indifferent generous sea saying go, go, here's your out, here's your open water, nobody can reach you now — and somewhere off Pemaquid, in the last of the light, on the exact stretch of water where he'd once sat in another man's cockpit and heard another man dream out loud about killing harbors like the one he'd just left, Roan finally understood the thing he'd been not-understanding his whole life.
The out was the trap.
That was it. That was the whole of it. Seven years he'd called the open water freedom, and it wasn't freedom, it was a very large and very beautiful cage a man could sail around in forever and never once have to set anything down that could be taken from him.
He'd told himself the leaving kept him safe.
It hadn't kept him safe. It had kept him empty, which is a different thing, which is the thing that can't be taken because there's nothing left in it to take.
Emmett hadn't died because they stayed. Emmett had died because people die, because a body fails, because the world is like that — and the staying, the home, the beautiful thing they'd built and moved into, that hadn't been the wound.
That had been the only part worth having.
Roan had spent seven years running from the home as if the home had been the thing that killed Emmett, when the truth, the plain unbearable truth he'd sailed four knots away from down the whole eastern seaboard, was that the home had been the last good thing, and he'd been running from the last good thing ever since because he was too much of a coward to build another one and risk the cost of loving it.
And he'd steered here. That was the part that broke it open.
Some part of him had let the Petrel's garboard go a season too long, had ignored the pump, had not-looked at the seam until it opened three miles off a harbor he'd never meant to enter — some part of him had aimed a dying boat at Merritt Harbor on purpose, the way a tired animal aims for home.