Epilogue #2
He'd put his hand over Hollis's on the tiller, the way Hollis had done to him a lifetime ago on a bright afternoon. "Turns out you just keep the turn on. She comes through. Every time, if you don't panic and shove her back."
He thought about Emmett, out there, the way he could now — without the old undertow, just a warm and salt-worn ache, a man remembered instead of a wound picked.
Emmett would have liked Hollis. Emmett would have liked him enormously, would have talked his ear off about steam boxes and downspouts, would have been fierce and delighted that the boat they built to live on was living, finally, in a harbor with a man in it who reached for Roan in his sleep.
Roan had done a thing that winter he hadn't told anybody, not even Hollis.
He'd taken Emmett's roll of chisels out of the forward locker where they'd sat stiff and salt-ruined for seven years, and he'd cleaned them and oiled the leather back to life and hung them on the shed wall over the bench at Cyr & Mercer — where they got used now, every day, by hands that had loved the man who owned them and hands that had never met him.
It was the only headstone Emmett would ever have wanted: not a stone at all, but a good tool put back into service, a thing made sound and set to work.
Hollis had noticed them go up and had never once asked.
He'd just started reaching for them, using them, keeping them warm — which was, Roan thought, watching him do it across the shed one gray afternoon, about the most loving thing anybody had ever done for him without the faintest idea he was doing it.
She was supposed to be a home, Roan had told the wind, a year ago, sailing away. She was one now. It had only taken coming about.
"Do you ever think about going," Hollis asked him, out on the water, and it wasn't a fearful question anymore, just a true one, a thing a man could ask his partner on a Blessing morning with the boat drawing under them.
"Every day," Roan said, honestly, because Hollis had earned honest. "Every single day some old part of me does the numbers, plots the course, reads the wind for south.
Seven years, Hollis. It doesn't just switch off.
" He'd smiled, then, and it was the real one, the one that took the harbors off him, except the harbors didn't need taking off anymore because he was in one.
"And every day I don't. That's the part I didn't understand about staying.
I thought it'd mean the leaving voice went quiet.
It doesn't. Staying's not the voice going quiet.
Staying's choosing the harbor over the voice, one more morning, and then the next one.
It's a thing you do at dawn, over and over, the way you'd bail a boat you'd decided to keep.
" He'd looked at the man at the tiller of the boat a dead man built.
"I choose it every morning. I'm going to keep choosing it every morning.
That's the only promise I know how to make that isn't a lie, so it's the one you get. "
Hollis hadn't said anything to that. He'd just brought the Petrel home, through the mooring field, and made her fast fore and aft, and looked at Roan across the cockpit with his whole battered heart in his steady brown eyes, wanted and wanting, held and holding, a man who had, at forty-seven, finally been the harbor something sailed toward and stayed in.
***
The pastor lowered his hand. The held quiet of the Blessing broke into the ordinary roar of a town feeding itself, and Roan stood in it, in the middle of it, no longer the beat too long in anybody's corner, and was so plainly, uncomplicatedly happy that it would have frightened him a year ago.
It was Dee who saw the sail first, because Dee saw everything.
"Well, would you look at that," she said.
A boat was coming around the point. A small one, single-handed by the look of her, sails a little tired, coming in off the open water at the tail of the festival the way boats in trouble or boats in flight always seemed to find this harbor — around the point, into the middle of the town's best day, a stranger nobody knew, weathered and alone and steering for the one working harbor on this stretch of coast like something with the last of its strength aimed at home.
Roan watched her come, and felt the old recognition go through him, gentle now, from the far side of it.
He knew that boat. Not the hull. The way she was sailed — hard, and careful, and alone, by somebody who'd come a long way and hadn't decided yet whether they were running from something or toward it.
He'd been that boat. Eleven months and a whole life ago he'd been exactly that boat, coming around exactly that point with the last of his strength, telling everyone the harbor had picked him.
He wondered what this one was telling themselves.
He wondered whether they knew yet — the way he hadn't known — that a man doesn't run out of strength on the doorstep of a place by accident, that some buried part of you steers for the harbor with the working yard and the hard clean light because some buried part of you is done, and wants to be found, and hasn't got the words for it yet.
He hoped somebody down there would haul them out of the water before they had time to ask too many questions about why. Somebody had, for him.
Dee folded her arms and watched the stranger thread the moorings, and shook her head, pleased and disapproving in exactly her old proportions.
"Harbor's still not full up, apparently," she said.
"No," Roan agreed, and found Hollis's hand, and held it, and did not let go. "Doesn't look like it is."
Out in the fleet, blessed and dressed and going nowhere, the Petrel swung to her mooring in the summer light, home from the sea, made sound at last — and her skipper stood on the dock with his hand in a big man's ruined hand and watched somebody else come around the point, and thought that the thing nobody ever tells you about coming about is that you can turn the whole boat around and never lose the wind.
You just end up sailing somewhere you couldn't reach before.
This time, the turn was toward.
The End