Chapter 8 #3
Eleven weeks he'd told the story that the boat had chosen.
It let him off. If the boat chose, then Roan was just a man doing right by a vessel that quit on him — a victim of his own garboard, blameless, passing through.
But boats don't choose. Men choose, and then they build stories where they didn't, so they never have to stand in the middle of their own lives and say the thing out loud: I wanted to stop.
I was so tired. I saw a harbor with a working yard and a hard clean light off the water and something in me I'd been drowning for seven years put the helm over and aimed a sinking boat straight at it and called it an accident.
He'd wanted to be found. He'd sailed in on the day of a blessing, of all the days there were, and let a good man haul him up out of the water, and every single thing that had happened since had been Roan getting exactly what some buried part of him had steered for — and fighting it the whole way, because getting the thing you want is the most frightening thing in the world when you've built your entire life on never once having it.
He'd told everyone the boat picked the harbor.
The boat hadn't picked anything. Roan had picked it, in the one language he had left, which was letting a thing break down somewhere he secretly wanted to stop.
He was crying, he noticed, distantly, with the easy unbothered tears of a man alone at sea. He let them go.
He talked to Emmett for a while, which he hadn't done in years — out loud, into the wind, the way you can only talk to the dead when there's no one for miles to hear you do it.
He told him he was sorry. Not for the dying; a man can't apologize for that, and Emmett would have cuffed him for trying.
Sorry for what he'd done with the after.
Sorry for taking the boat they'd made beautiful to live in and turning her into a getaway car.
Sorry for seven years of harbors that never learned his name, of never letting one single good thing get big enough to matter, of honoring the best love of his life by making dead sure he never risked another one.
You'd hate who I turned into, he told the wind.
You'd hate that I made your boat into a place to run from.
She was supposed to be a home. And the wind took it, the way the wind takes everything, and gave nothing back, and that was all right, because Roan wasn't saying it to be answered. He was saying it to be done with it.
And then he did the thing.
"Ready about," Roan said, out loud, to the empty boat, to Emmett, to nobody, his voice cracking on it.
He put the helm down.
The Petrel came up into the wind, and everything went quiet — the sails emptying, the drive going out of her, that hanging weightless terrifying second in the eye of it where you've left the old tack and haven't got the new one, where every instinct says you've made a terrible mistake, where it feels like the whole thing is going to stall and stop and go backward.
Roan held the turn on. He didn't panic and shove her back south.
He trusted it, the way he'd told Hollis to trust it on a bright afternoon a lifetime ago — you keep the turn on, and she comes through, and the sails fill on the other side, and you're sailing again, just going somewhere you couldn't get to before.
She came through. The sails caught aback and then filled with a soft hard thump on the new side, and she heeled the other way and gathered herself and took off, close-hauled now, hard on the wind, beating north — the slow way, the sideways way, the only way anybody ever gets to weather — back up the dark coast toward the one harbor Roan Mercer had spent his whole life pretending he didn't want to reach.
It would take him all night, tacking. You couldn't sail straight at the thing you wanted. He knew that now.
He ran the numbers, out of pure habit, the way he'd run numbers his whole life — and found, for once, that they didn't matter.
It might be forty miles of beating to windward.
It might be dawn before he raised the point; the vote might already be lost, the yard already signed away, and Hollis might stand in that shed door and give him the out one more time in that level voice.
Every line of the arithmetic still said the smart play was south, was Camden, was the clean life that couldn't touch him.
Roan had spent seven years letting the smart play win.
He was done letting the smart play win. Some things a man sailed toward not because the numbers came out right but because the man who wouldn't was already drowned and just hadn't gotten the news yet.
He'd give up the straight line and take it on the slant and claw his way back to weather one board at a time, and he might get there too late, and the man might not have him, and the doubt would surely be there in that steady brown gaze — and Roan set his course into all of it anyway, into the whole uncalculated terrifying cost of it, and for the first time in seven years, coming about in the dark with the spray coming over and the harbor somewhere ahead, he was not running from a single thing.
He was running toward.