I thought he might look at me like I was strange again. But he looked out the window at the dock. When he looked back at me, he was smiling, as if he already knew how bright those fish would look under that black quilt covered in soccer balls.
It’ll be our secret, he told me, and I knew from the way he looked back at the water, his eyes wide, that he was telling the truth. And just like that, me and Elliot were friends.
?25
Jack
Late-August mornings on the water are the pearl in the oyster shell. The air is still cool from the night and it gives you that first taste of September. Wait an hour or two, and the sun is high, and you’re stripping down to a T-shirt, the water so flat and clear, it’s like hauling traps in a bathtub. The wind nothing more than a whistle past your ear.
This was what I was telling the girls over breakfast when Hope reminded me that I wasn’t cleared to be hauling until the doctor said so. As if I needed reminding. As if the horse pills I downed three times a day to fight whatever nonsense had taken residence in my lungs weren’t reminder enough.
I didn’t say that to her, though.
Boon had told me in the hospital room that it was Finn who’d fished me out of the water. Finn who’d slammed on my chest until water stopped spurting out of my mouth, until I was alive and breathing.
Boon didn’t let me speak, told me shut up and listen. When he was done, he said that every man gets a limited number of free passes on being an asshole, and he was pretty sure mine were used up. He crossed the room and closed the door before he said it. Like he knew if someone heard him harassing a patient, he’d get thrown out.
“Exhaustion play tricks with your mind,” I told him, repeating what the doctor said.
But Boon had grunted, grimaced. “So can stupidity,” he said.
Then he told me that a string of traps had washed ashore off Turner Point not thirty yards from my territory. Hank Bitts’s string, the dark blue buoy in pieces on the rocks. I thought of the traps I’d cut, the ones marked with a purple-striped buoy that I thought were Finn’s.
Boon didn’t accuse me of cutting them. He didn’t need to. He just put the envelope full of cash on my chest and folded his arms, his way of telling me that he knew I’d played my part in this thing. That it was over, this back-and-forth with Finn, whether I wanted it to be or not. I nodded, not saying a word, thinking that I’d have to remember to give Bitty some cash, tell him I’d run over the string by accident.
Not that it mattered. Any of it. What mattered to me was sitting across from me in the chair next to my hospital bed when I woke up, looking at me like I was someone she didn’t know.
I had to work my way back into Hope’s good graces.
Finishing the Salt House helped. That kid Alex turned out to have a knack for carpentry. And he worked cheap too, said he’d give me a week’s work for free if he could have the skiff behind the warehouse. I told him the skiff was junk, a crack in her hull the size of the Grand Canyon. That’s why I want her, he told me. It seemed like a fair deal to me until he gave me a day’s work. He got more windows framed in two hours than Boon did all day.
When I pointed this out to Boon, he put down his nail gun, went to the cooler, and cracked open a beer. “If you like that speed, you’re going to love this one,” he said.
Boon had told me in the hospital room that Hope knew about Hannah. He’d been pissed about that too, being put in that position. But he was more worried about what Hope was going to do to me.
“If I were you,” he said, “I’d go back into surgery. It’d be less painful.”
Hope waited until I was home from the hospital, in my own bed, my head propped up on the pillow, and my eyes just about shut before she closed the door and sat on the edge of the bed.
“Tell me about Hannah,” she said. “And don’t make me ask again.”
I saw from the look on her face that we’d go around and around until she got what she wanted.
“What do you want to know?” I asked, too tired to argue.
“I want to know all of it,” she said.
I didn’t sugarcoat it, pretend it was something it wasn’t. I told her the truth, said I was sorry for not telling her before, but I hated thinking about it.
“That’s not enough,” she told me. “I deserve to know what happened.”
“I told you what happened.”
“You told me the events.”
“Isn’t that what you asked for?”
“I want to know how you felt about it. I want to know what it meant to you.” She was angry, shouting at me.
“Stop yelling,” I said. “Calm down.”
“Tell me what happened.”
“I told you what happened.”
“No. There are other things I want to know.”
“Like what?”
“Just things!”
“Like what, Hope? For God’s sake.”
“Like did you love her?” she shouted at me.
I felt something inside of me let go. “I didn’t even like her,” I said, and Hope flinched. “Is this what you want, Hope? Is this the stuff you want to know?”
She nodded, but her face told me she wasn’t so sure. But she’d pushed and pushed, and now I couldn’t reel it back in. I’d have been shouting if I had the voice for it.
“You want to know I slept with a girl I didn’t like? That I knew it was wrong, and I still did it?”
Hope stared at me. I waited for her to look away, but she didn’t. She sat next to me on the bed, looked me straight in the face.
“You want to know that when she told me she was pregnant, I told her it wasn’t mine, even though it could’ve been. I left her crying. Did you know that? This wonderful husband of yours left a girl just one year older than Jess crying in her house all alone.”
Hope reached for me, and I pushed her hand away. I felt empty inside.
“I left her standing there. Then two days later, she walked upstairs, swallowed a bunch of pills, and killed herself.”
“And you’re blaming yourself for all of it? Jack. You were eighteen. And what about Finn?”
I scowled at her. “None of that matters. Doesn’t make what I did any better. I knew she was trying to mess with Finn’s head. I pretended it had nothing to do with me. That I was getting what I wanted. And Finn was getting what he deserved. I was too stupid to realize she needed me to walk away. She needed me to be one of the good guys. And I wasn’t.”
“How could you not tell me this? I can almost understand you didn’t tell me because you don’t like to think about it and it was a long time ago, but I’ve been asking you about what happened between you and Ryland, and you said it was nothing to do with me.”
“It doesn’t have anything to do with you. This was my fault. My mistake. The last thing you needed this year was this. The last thing you needed was me making it even harder for you.”
She started to speak, and I put up my hand, shook my head.
“There’s nothing more to say, Hope. I wasn’t one of the good guys. And I’m sorry that I wasn’t. That’s all I can say. I’m sorry that I wasn’t.”
“But you’re a good guy now, Jack. You’re a good husband. A good father.”
“Am I? I’m lying here useless. Instead of fixing everything, I’m out there making it worse, screwing it all up.”
“What are you talking about?”