There is a moment, on this coast, that the fishermen call slack water — the pause at the turn of the tide, when the sea has stopped coming in and not yet begun to go out, and for a little while the whole vast machinery of it simply rests. It doesn't last. Nothing here lasts. But for that hour the water lies still and you can hear yourself think, and the boats sit level on their lines, and even the gulls seem to wait.
We had our slack water the next morning, my husband and I, in the grey hour before we went to war.
Neither of us could do anything until nightfall — the plan needed dark, needed the tide, needed pieces Damian was quietly moving that I didn't yet understand. So there was, absurdly, nothing to do but survive the daylight. And I looked at my husband in the flat dawn light of the sealed room and I saw, with the eye I have never been able to switch off, a man about forty hours from collapse.
"When did you last eat," I said.
He looked at me like the question was in a language he'd forgotten.
"That's what I thought." I stood. "Sit down before you fall down. I'm not walking into Emil Roth's arms tonight with a partner who's going to faint. That's clinical judgment, not affection. Sit."
He sat. And I did the thing my hands know how to do when the rest of me is in pieces — I took care of someone. I found the kitchen, and Sofia, silent and knowing, helped me without a word, and I made him eat, and I put my fingers to the pulse at his wrist out of pure habit and found it going too fast and too thin, and I made him drink water and then I made him lie down on the long couch in the sealed room because it was the only room he could close his eyes in, and I sat on the floor beside him with my back against the couch, and after a while the tremor in his hand went quiet.
"You don't have to watch me sleep," he said, into the dark behind his eyes.
"I've spent my whole career watching people sleep who might not wake up. It's restful. Go on."
But he didn't sleep, not right away, and neither did I, and in the slack water we talked — really talked, for the first time, not fencing, not trading true sentences like blows.
"There's a piece of music," I said. "You play it. In the dark, when you can't sleep. I heard it the first night." I hummed the first few bars, badly. "What is it."
He was quiet for so long I thought he'd finally gone under.
"My mother played it," he said at last. "She died when I was ten. She was — she wasn't part of it, the business, any of it. Otto married her for something and she spent her whole life trying to keep me clean of the thing she'd married into, and she mostly failed, but she played that. Every night. It's the only thing of hers I have." A pause. "But she didn't write it. I found out later where she'd got it. There was a man who worked for my father, the only man in that whole operation who was ever kind to a strange lonely boy who wasn't allowed friends. He used to whistle it on the docks. My mother heard it and loved it and asked him what it was, and he taught it to her. And she played it for me every night until she died, and I've played it every night since, and for most of my life I didn't let myself remember whose tune it actually was."
The slack water held very still.
"It was your father's, Eve," he said. "Samuel used to whistle it on the docks. I've been falling asleep to your father's song for thirty years. It's the only lullaby I've ever had, and the man who gave it to me is the man my father killed, and I have never once been able to decide whether that's a mercy or a haunting."
I put my hand over his, on the edge of the couch, in the dark.
I don't know that it was forgiveness. I don't think it was. There was too much still buried between us for anything as simple as that. But it was a hand over a hand in the slack water, two people who had each lost the same man in different ways, and for that one still hour before the tide turned it was enough to be, simply, not alone with it.
"Tell me one thing about him," I said. "You knew him. I was seven. I barely did. Tell me one true thing about my father that isn't a folder or a switch or a body on a pier."
Damian's fingers turned under mine and held on.
"He taught me to tie a bowline," he said. "On the west dock, when I was nine. He said a bowline was the one knot worth knowing because it holds under load and it comes free when you need it to, and a man should be the same — you should be able to trust him with your whole weight, and you should be able to let him go without a fight when the time comes." His voice was not quite steady. "He looked at me when he said it like he was trying to tell me something. I didn't understand it for twenty years." A breath. "I think he was telling me how to love someone. I think your father, God forgive all of us, was the one who taught me the thing I've done worst."
Outside, far down the rocks, the tide turned. I felt it more than heard it — the sea remembering which way it was supposed to go.
Slack water was over.
