Chapter 13 RONAN
Ronan
Marjorie waits for me the same way she’s waited for six years.
Sixty feet of her, hull white against the morning water, riding her lines at the end of the dock. Knox drives us down, and Tessa stops on the planks to read the name off the stern. I watch her want to ask what it means, and decide not to. Everyone asks.
Then I board on my own legs. Slow, but mine. Tessa a half step behind me with the gait belt she agreed to leave off if I behaved, and at the top, where the whole world starts moving underfoot, Finn’s hand closes on my arm and steadies me over.
“Easy does it, boss.”
I let him do it. That’s the deal I made with myself on the drive down. One hand, no comments, and I get the day. My jaw aches from what I’m not saying anyway.
Eight weeks ago I’d have come aboard with a phone against my ear and never noticed the water.
This morning I feel every inch of it move under my feet, and I get myself to a seat before anyone can suggest I should.
I take the one with the best view of the water, and I leave the space beside me open, and I don’t ask myself who I’m leaving it for.
Finn casts off. The engine catches, and the dock slides away behind us.
Open water, and me on it.
“You okay?” Tessa sits down beside me, her shoulder near mine, watching my face and not my leg for once.
“Fine,” I say, and it’s the biggest lie I’ve told her yet. Being back on the water with her beside me is a long way past fine. She smiles. She knows.
Finn takes us out past the point, and the coast opens up.
Dark spruce shoreline sliding by on the port side, lobster buoys scattered across the swell in pinks and greens too loud to be anything but Maine.
A boat working its string of traps off the ledges, gulls hanging over the stern.
The morning’s bright and the wind’s light and the sea is that blue it only manages in July, and I’ve owned this stretch of coast for six years and I’m seeing it for the first time.
Seven weeks in one room. I’d forgotten all this was still out here.
Tessa’s got her face in the wind. She’s in a sundress with a cardigan pulled over it against the breeze, hair loose, and the second we cleared the point, whatever she’s been carrying set itself down.
Every gull, every buoy, every island gets pointed at.
“What’s that one called?” That’s Sheep Island.
“Why’s that boat circling?” He’s hauling traps. “Are those seals?”
“Those are seals.”
“Ronan.” She grabs my arm and points, as if there’s a man alive who could miss what she’s looking at when she’s looking at it. “There have to be thirty of them.”
“They haul out on that ledge at low tide.”
“You own seals.”
“Nobody owns seals.”
“You have thirty seals and you weren’t going to mention it,” she says, and she laughs at herself, and I find myself wanting to hear it again.
The truth is I stopped watching the seals a while ago.
Finn cuts the engine off the ledge so she can look, and the boat rocks easy in the swell, and I watch this woman lean over the rail of my boat with her hair blowing across her face and no chart in her hands, no cuff, no belt, nothing to fix and nobody needing her, and I understand I’m in real trouble.
The bikini on the beach was want. Any man can want.
This is worse than want. I keep finding new things to like.
We run east through the islands, and somewhere in the middle of it Tessa drifts forward to see where we’re going, and that’s all it takes.
Finn’s twenty-four. Finn is, I’m forced to admit, a good-looking kid, cap backwards, comfortable at the wheel.
He points at something on the chartplotter and says something I can’t hear over the engine.
She asks a question. He answers with a story, and she laughs, and then they’re just two people talking at the wheel of my boat, easy, because his body does everything he asks of it and he’s got nothing to prove to anyone.
She’s laughing at another man’s jokes, and I’m parked on a cushion like a crate of good china.
I make myself look at the water.
It’s not the kid’s fault. He’s harmless.
He flirts like a Labrador plays fetch, no plan behind it, and she’s not doing anything except being easy to like, which she can’t help.
I know all of this. I sit there knowing all of it, and my hand still wants to break something, which is nobody’s problem but mine.
She’s my nurse. Five weeks and she’s gone.
Some other man will make her laugh somewhere I can’t see it.
She’s got a whole life waiting past this, and none of it belongs to me.
Fuck.
I’ve never once been jealous of a man for standing.
“You look like the market crashed,” Tessa says. She’s come back. She drops onto the seat beside me, wind-flushed, and Finn’s at his wheel where he belongs, and everything in my chest resets so fast it’s humiliating. “Finn’s been telling me about the shipwreck off Sheep Island.”
“Has he.”
“He’s sweet.”
“He’s due for a performance review.”
She laughs for me, and just like that the market recovers.
Finn tucks us into a cove on the back side of one of the islands, a green bowl of water with nobody in it, and drops the hook.
Without the wind it’s warm, and Tessa peels the cardigan off and drops it on the seat beside her, and the sundress under it is yellow and holds on by two thin straps, and I look at the lunch basket with great interest.
Mrs. Vale packed lunch. Sandwiches wrapped in paper, deviled eggs, blueberry cake, a thermos of coffee fixed two ways, because that woman misses nothing and says less.
Tessa hands me mine and sits beside me.
“When did you buy this place?” she asks. “The house.”
“Six years ago.”
“Why Maine? Your whole company’s in Boston. You spend half your day fighting with it on the phone.”
“That’s why Maine.”
She huffs, but she waits. She’s learned that about me, that there’s usually more coming if nobody rushes it, and I’ve learned that she’ll wait exactly as long as it takes, and knowing someone’s willing to wait does strange things to a man who’s spent his whole life being the first one to leave.
“Everything in Boston wants something,” I say finally. “The company, the board, the phone. Here the tide comes in and goes out and doesn’t care what I signed. I sleep here. Real sleep, six hours straight. No other roof has ever managed it.”
“And now?”
“Now someone drugs my coffee.”
“That’s vitamin D and an anticoagulant, and you’re welcome.”
She looks out at the water for a while. Then, quietly, not pushing.
“Who’s Marjorie?”
“My mother.”
She nods, and she doesn’t ask the next question, the one everyone asks, and I could tell her it’s because my mother would have loved this cove and never saw it, or that I bought the boat the year after we buried her, or nothing at all.
I give her the nothing. She takes it without complaint, and because she doesn’t ask, I almost tell her.
The wind moves the spruce along the shore. She’s eating her sandwich with one leg crossed over the other, sandal hanging off her toes, entirely at home on my boat, in my cove, in my day, and I catch myself memorizing it. The whole picture. Putting it somewhere the accountants can’t reach.
“This was a good idea,” she says quietly. “Thank you.”
“You needed it.”
“You weren’t supposed to notice that.”
“I notice everything. You said so yourself.”
She goes still for a second, and I watch her decide not to run from it.
She pulls the thermos over and refills my coffee, hers after, and we sit in the sun with the boat swinging on its anchor, saying nothing because nothing needs saying.
I’ve sat through ten thousand silences waiting for the other side to crack.
This is the first one I haven’t wanted to end.
Somewhere in the middle of it, quiet, under the wind, she starts humming.
The same tune. It’s back. I don’t know where it went yesterday or why it left, but it’s back, and I keep my eyes on the water and don’t so much as reach for my coffee.
We haul anchor at three because I have a shoulder session at five and she’s still my nurse, whatever else the day was. Finn runs us home the long way around the islands without being asked. Good instinct. The performance review just improved.
She stands at the rail for the last stretch, watching the house come around the point, and I watch her from the seat because it’s the one thing on this boat I can do all day without help.
I thought the problem was wanting her. Wanting I can manage. I’ve wanted plenty in my life and walked away from most of it, and this was never going to work anyway. She leaves in five weeks.
But the problem isn’t wanting her. The problem is the seals, and the pointing, and how she laughs at herself, and the humming coming back. The problem is I like her. Want burns off. This doesn’t.
The dock comes up.
“Same time next week?” Finn asks, coiling the line, no idea what he’s asking.
“Sooner,” I say, and I don’t look at Tessa when I say it. I can feel her smiling from here.