Page 86 of Open Water
Then I couldn't sit in it anymore. So I didn't. My feet took me the other way, down toward the river, and I let myself into the boathouse with the key Hale had handed me last week.
It was empty.
I'd never been in here alone like this. No practice on the board, the launch bay doors pulled shut against the cold, the ergs sitting silent in their rows. Outside the doors the river ran fast and full, loud with two days of December rain. The shells were racked and covered, the oars stacked, everything squared away for the break. A place that's usually all noise, gone dead quiet.
I sat down on the nearest erg and just looked at it for a while. The whole room.
Up on the whiteboard in the corner, in Jace's blocky handwriting, the last lineup he ever set was still there. Nobody'd erased it. His locker by the door was already cleaned out, the name gone off the front, but the board still had him in the stroke seat of a boat that didn't exist anymore. I figured somebody forgot to wipe it. Or didn't want to.
Jace was gone. Graduated Friday, gone to the development camp in January. He'd shaped this whole program out of scraps and a bad attitude, and now it was mine.
I didn't feel ready. That was the truth, sitting there.
In September I'd walked into this building a sophomore with a chip on my shoulder and a secret eating me alive. Kept my head down, my mouth shut, my whole self locked in a box because Iwas sure that if anybody saw the real thing they'd take the only good I had — the rowing, the scholarship, the way out for me and my mom. Now it was December. The secret was out, blown wide open, and the world hadn't ended. Jace was gone, Hale had handed me the keys, and the boathouse was mine.
And I was twenty years old and supposed to hold together a team. And what would next semester bring? Back in a single? The quad? What about Alex? I let it go before my thoughts started to spiral. Not today's problem.
I felt like a kid who'd been handed something heavy and was going to drop it.
But then I thought about how I got here.
Because I didn't get here on my own. That was the thing the kid at the window never figured out, that needing people wasn't the trap I'd always thought it was. My mom worked doubles at the diner for fifteen years so I could afford a rich kid's sport, and never once made me feel the weight of it. Jace looked at a furious broke nineteen-year-old and saw a stroke seat instead of a problem. Noah never once flinched — not the whole year, right up to the door he just walked out of. Remy was right there all along. And Hale set my biggest fear down on a dock like it weighed nothing.You row. You lead. You show up.
And Alex. Golden boy, Alex. The boy who crossed the river in the dark and turned up at my door with blood on his face. Who saidit's always been youlike it was the most obvious fact in the world, like he couldn't believe I needed telling.
I'd been carried this whole time. It just took a while to see it.
On my way out I stopped at the case by the door. The glass one, with the old team photos and a couple of minor plaques — and the gap. The dark shelf in the middle where the championship trophy should've been, the stolen one nobody had seen in decades, the boathouse ghost story Tyler had been telling since I was a freshman.
I looked at it a second. Didn't feel Tyler's anger about it, didn't feel Jace's old grudge. Just saw it for what it was. An empty space. A thing that was missing that didn't have to stay missing.
Someday,I thought, and was a little surprised I meant it.
I hit the lights, and the boathouse went dark behind me, and I pushed out through the bay doors onto the dock.
The cold off the river hit me clean. I pulled my jacket tight and called my mom.
She picked up on the second ring, the way she always does, like she'd been holding the phone.
"I'm done," I said. "Finals. All of them."
"Oh, thank God. How'd you do?"
"Good, I think. A&P was solid."
"That's my boy." I could hear the smile. "When are you coming home?"
"Friday. Bus gets in at four."
"I'll be there." No hesitation. There never is, with her. Then, lighter, careful underneath it: "And Liam, is that boy of yours coming to the lake for Christmas?"
"Not sure."
She was quiet a beat. I couldn't believe she asked like it was the most normal thing in the world.
"You tell him he's welcome at our place. Anytime." A pause. "I mean that, Liam."
"I know you do, Mom."
