Chapter 9
Made Sound
Hollis came down to the yard at first light on the morning of the vote having decided two things, which for a man who spent his whole life avoiding decisions was something close to a personal record.
The first was that he wasn't going to sign.
Sutter's card had sat on the desk three days and Hollis had finally, at four that morning up on his father's cot, understood what Rory and June had been trying to hammer through his thick skull, which was that taking the money was not peace, it was just the loss he already knew how to carry dressed up in a check.
He was going to lose the vote, probably.
Marc could still force the sale, probably.
But he was going to walk into that hall tonight and fight for the yard like a man who wanted it, out loud, in front of everybody, and if he was going to go down he was going to go down reaching, for the first time in his life, instead of at the dock with his hands folded.
He'd figured the plan out somewhere around three that morning, lying in the dark of the loft doing the only arithmetic he was any good at, the kind you do with materials and load.
If the rezone failed, the frontage was worth working-yard money, not marina money — and working-yard money for Marc's half was a number a great deal smaller than the one Corliss had been waving around.
Small enough that a man might reach it, if he had a partner who'd banked seven years of wages and never spent a dime.
Which Hollis did not have, because that man was hull-down past Portland by now.
So it was a plan with a hole in the exact middle of it, a hole shaped precisely like Roan Mercer, and Hollis had lain there and looked at the hole and thought: I'll do it anyway.
I'll buy Marc out on a loan I can't afford and run the yard into my grave with my own two hands, because it's mine, and because I am finally, at forty-six, done letting go of things just so the letting-go will stop.
The second thing he'd decided he didn't have words for yet.
It had to do with the man. It had to do with the fact that when he'd finally let himself stop being certain, some hour before dawn, and asked himself the plain question — did that man want you, or didn't he — the answer that came back wasn't the one he'd been reciting for three days.
The answer that came back was June's. A man crossed a whole town to stand on your side of a fight.
And whatever Roan Mercer was, wherever he was now, hull-down past Portland with his beautiful boat and his clean life, the truth Hollis had been too scared to hold was that the man had wanted him, and had been too scared to be known, and those were the same wound wearing two different coats, and Hollis had let him sail off into it rather than reach out one time and say stay.
He was standing at the head of the ways with all of that in him and a cup of coffee going cold in his hand when he saw the sail come around the point.
He knew her before he could have said how.
A gaff-headed wooden cutter, dark hull, beating in on the last of a north wind, hard on it, tacking up the harbor the slow sideways way a boat has to when it's fighting to get somewhere the wind doesn't want to let it go — and Hollis stood very still, and the coffee cup came down out of the way of his sight without his telling it to, and he watched the Petrel claw her way in around the point she'd sailed out of, and could not, for a moment, make his heart do anything at all.
He didn't move. He'd built a whole life out of not moving, out of standing at the dock and watching the water do what water did to him, and so he stood at the head of the ways and watched the little cutter beat up the harbor board by board — giving up ground to gain it, taking the wind on the slant, because you can't sail straight at the thing you want.
Roan's own words, from a bright afternoon that felt like a year ago.
With every tack she came nearer, and with every tack Hollis told himself not to hope, and with every tack he hoped anyway, helplessly, the way a man breathes.
She'd left on Thursday. It was Saturday. Roan had gotten most of the way to somewhere, and turned around, and beat all night back up a dark coast against the wind to get here, which was not a thing a man did on his way to Florida.
***
Roan brought her in to the town float on his last board with his arms shaking, and Hollis was standing on the float, and Roan had spent the whole long beating night rehearsing what he'd say and every word of it went out of him the second he saw the man's face, so he tied her off — bow and stern, fore and aft, cleated hard, the way he'd tied up the first day, except this time his hands were saying something when they did it — and he climbed up onto the float and stood in front of Hollis Cyr in the gray morning with nothing prepared.
Hollis looked like he hadn't slept. He looked like a man who'd spent a night on a cot doing arithmetic.
He looked, in fact, like exactly what he was, which was the most solid thing Roan had ever tied a boat up next to — and every mile of the long cold beat north had been Roan trying to earn the right to stand here, and now that he was here the earning felt like nothing and the standing felt like the whole of his life.
"I'm not going to tell you I'll stay," Roan said.
It came out rough, wrecked, nothing like the speech.
"You told me not to. In your bed. Don't tell me you'll come after when you know you won't. So I'm not going to tell you anything.
" He made himself hold the man's eye, which was the hardest sailing he'd ever done.
"I'm just going to be here. That's — that's all I've got.
I'm not going to say it. I came back and said it with the boat. "
He'd meant to lead with the practical thing — the plan, Marc's half, the money, the deed, the whole architecture he'd worked out beating up the coast in the dark, the thing he could actually do to prove it.
But standing in front of the man, he found he couldn't start there.
The plan was easy. The plan was just numbers and lawyers and a loan officer in the county seat.
The hard thing, the thing his whole life had been built never to say, was the small true thing underneath it — and Hollis, of all the men on earth, deserved that one first.
Hollis didn't say anything. His face was doing something terrible and still, a man braced against hope the way you brace against a sea you don't trust.
"I let her quit here," Roan said. "The Petrel.
Back in the spring. I knew the garboard was going and I ran her wet across three counties and I told everybody the boat picked the harbor, and that's — that was a lie, Hollis.
I picked it. Some part of me that's been drowning for seven years aimed a sinking boat at this harbor on purpose because I was so tired, and I wanted somebody to haul me out of the water, and you did, and then I spent three weeks running from the only thing I ever steered toward on purpose in my whole life.
" He was crying, a little, the easy unashamed way he'd cried at sea, and he let it.
"I don't leave things. That's not true. I leave everything.
I've left every good thing I ever had before it could leave me, because I loved a man once and stayed and it cost me everything, and I decided the staying was the wound.
It wasn't the wound. The staying was the only part worth having, and I've spent seven years running from the best thing that ever happened to me because I was a coward about the next one. "
"His name was Emmett," Roan said, and it came easier this time, the second time, said out loud to the man's face instead of to a wrapped chart in the dark.
"We built her to go live on. And he got sick, and we stopped moving so he could get the treatments, and I watched the whole life we were sailing toward turn into a hospital and a mountain of debt and then a funeral — and I decided the mistake had been the stopping.
The staying. I've been paying off that wrong decision for seven years, sailing away from every dock before it could get a hook in me, calling it freedom.
" He wiped his face with the back of a scarred hand and didn't look away.
"It wasn't freedom, Hollis. It was just a slow way of being dead that let me keep moving.
You're the first thing since him I couldn't sail away from.
I got forty miles south and my hands wouldn't do it.
And I sat out there off Pemaquid in the dark and finally understood the staying was never the wound.
The staying was the only part that was ever worth a damn.
" He ran out of air. Started again, quieter.
"You're the next one. I'm done running from you.
I'm not asking you to believe me. I brought the boat back.
That's the only true thing I know how to say. "
And Hollis — Hollis, who had spent forty-six years handing people the out, who had watched Roan reach for the halyard on the float and given it to him, who had told him so go in a level voice with the whole floor giving way — Hollis opened his mouth, and Roan watched him start to do it, watched the reflex come up, the generous terrible reflex, you don't have to, you owe me nothing, I'll make it easy, I'll give you the door —
And stop.
Hollis closed his mouth. And what came out instead, when it came, came slow and rough and cost him visibly, a man lifting something heavier than any boat.