Stay (39 page)

I said.

“Pea, I’m so fucking proud of you.”

“You are?”

He shook his head with disbelief. “We’re
here
.”

“We
are
here.”

He just looked at me, and we were a couple of crying idiots.

He wiped his eyes with the back of his hand. He sniffed. “Jesus,”

he said. We kept looking at each other. All we’d been through

together was with us right there. “Pea,” he squeezed my hand so

hard. “There’s something . . .” The words were small and ragged,

a whisper. “Are you ever going to be able to forgive me?”

* 311 *

Deb Caletti

“Are you ever going to be able to forgive yourself?” I whis-

pered back.

“Let’s both work on that,” he said.

“Only a few more trips back and forth over Deception Pass,”

I said.

Obsession
was too big to handle on our own all the way out to San

Juan Island, and so Finn and I took out another of the Bishop

family boats, the
Freebird
. 55* God, the day was grand, the sky so

large, and that’s the way my heart felt, too, as Finn shouted direc-

tions to me and I released the rope that let the sail swoop upward,

filling with wind. I had always dreamed of a true and right place,

and that’s what I felt then as I looked out at the sea and the sky.

The rightness stretched farther than I could even see.

“It’s all ours,” Finn called. He flung both arms out wide.

“We are so lucky,” I shouted back.

Our memories and the events of our lives are untidy things.

We wish that we could file them away and shut the door, or we

wish the opposite—that they would stay with us forever. You

want to banish that remembrance of a tight hold on your ankle,

a rope under a bed, the amber-colored medicine bottles of your

father, the door your mother slams after a night of too much wine

and jealousy. You want to keep close to you always that first sweet

kiss, a maple leaf, that growing sense of yourself; you want to

hold the sight of your dying father on that last boat trip, the calm

you remember as your mother held you. Her voice.

55 Finn’s father, Thomas Bishop, was a Lynyrd Skynyrd fan.

* 312 *

Stay

But the images are all wild things that will do what they wish.

They haunt like ghosts; they mingle, like guests at a party, with

guilt and hope and revision; they pack up and leave altogether.

They spin and collide, even as you anchor the rope and the sail

billows on a beautiful September day. Even as he shifts the boat

ever so slightly so that the sail is as full as it can be.

When that happens, though, you realize that all of it is there

with you still. All of it. You remember. The remembering, and

that wind, is what pushes you forward.

* 313 *