“What are you talking about?”
“You can either row me back to the dock or I will row myself, but I’m done being subject to this mood of yours that obviously has nothing at all to do with me or the file, which I will get when I am able to and not before.”
I thought he might take advantage of the opportunity to rid himself of me, or perhaps call my bluff to row myself with another of his pouty silences. Instead, he stood up in the boat. I resisted the urge to grasp the edges as we began to rock. He quickly sat down again with a sigh. I wasn’t sure what exactly this little departure had accomplished, but it seemed to loosen his tongue.
“I’m sorry,” he said. I started to speak, but he interrupted. “And yes, I know what for.”
But he didn’t say what for, just stared across the water in the direction of Baker Street, though he couldn’t see anything through the fog. Finally, he turned back and rested his hands on the oar handles.
“My mother is ill.”
A flare of something painful went off in my chest. Those were the exact words I’d said to Sadie Mae just months before. Hearing them, I felt like the air had been sucked from me, but I still managed to say, “You don’t have to say more.”
He didn’t speak for maybe a full minute, didn’t look at me, didn’t move—except for his hands. His fingers grasped and released the wooden seat at regular intervals, then reached up to hold the oar handles again.
“She won’t go to the doctor.” His voice broke at the end of his statement, but he cleared his throat and listed the rest of what he had to say as though he were recounting the facts of our case. “We’ve tried to convince her, but she won’t go, and now she can no longer move from her bed. We don’t know what there’s left to do—”
“Lock.”
“She is the most stubborn woman, and neither of us has ever been good at telling her no—”
“Lock.”
“We’ve tried everything to get her help. She tells us we’re the men of the house but then won’t let us do this most important thing—”
“Lock.”
When he finally did stop talking long enough to look up at me, I thought perhaps I could see what he must have looked like as a child. A lost child.
His right hand gripped and released the oar handle, and I reached out, covered his hand with mine. I didn’t know what to say. Of all people, I probably should have. But nothing anyone said had ever helped me.
He opened his mouth to speak and then shut it and furrowed his brow. He pulled out his cigarettes and stared at my hand covering his a moment, before shaking the box and pulling one free with his lips. He lit it one-handed and blew the smoke out to meld with the fog coming off the lake, all without looking away from our hands.
“I know,” I said at last, though I couldn’t look at him when I said it. “I mean, I understand . . . how it changes everything.”
He cleared his throat and shifted his hand a bit under mine.
“I never asked why you were crying that first night—the night you told me your name.” He took a deep drag and blew it out across the lake. His voice lowered. “I never thought you’d tell me if I had.”
I withdrew my hand. “You were right.”
He nodded and didn’t seem like he would ask again. Still, I said, “Six months ago. Cancer. She wasn’t even herself anymore for the last three.”
“Was there nothing that could be done?” he asked quietly.
“We thought for a little while that there was a treatment, but it was experimental and we didn’t have the money. It probably wouldn’t have worked anyway.” I paused, wondered why I was telling him any of it, before adding, “There’s not always something to be done.”
Sherlock didn’t look at me or register any emotion, really. He just nodded again and threw his cigarette into the lake. “I’m thinking of switching to a pipe,” he said.
And that was the end of our sharing. We sat in silence the rest of the time we were out in the boat. An odd silence, really. He didn’t fidget once. I didn’t feel the need to speak. And even though we never touched each other or made eye contact, even though the lake was fogged in and I had only my cardigan to warm me—I felt comforted. Better, somehow, for the silence than I’d been before it.
I had to wonder if this was what people meant when they said it was “a comfortable silence.” I wondered what it meant to feel better sitting silent with a boy than to pour your heart out to a best friend or diary or stranger. Sherlock Holmes surprised me again that day by saying just the right thing about my mom’s death—which was to say nothing at all.
Chapter 10