Page 91 of Presumed Dead

When the worst of it had passed and Sloane was down to the long ragged aftershocks, Catherine moved her gently, as you'd move someone hurt, got her into a chair at the table and put the kettle on and turned on the small light over the stove and not the hard overhead, and made tea Sloane wouldn't drink and set it in front of her anyway because the making of it was the point, and then she sat down across the table in the chair, and Sloane registered dimly that it was the chair, the one she'd let herself imagine, the one Ethan had sat in that afternoon to take her whole world apart, and now there was an old woman in it keeping her alive, and the chair had held both, and that seemed to mean something she was too wrung out to chase.

“They found him,” Sloane said, finally. Her voice was a ruin. “Noah. They found him a long time ago. He's—” and even now, even wrung out, even with the truth all the way in her, the word stuck, and she looked at Catherine helplessly, a grown woman who could not say a single syllable about her own brother.

“I know what he is,” Catherine said quietly, letting her off it. “You don't have to say it for me. I've known for a while, sweetheart. Not the particulars. But I've watched you carry that coffee out to that slip for four years, and I've known for a long time that you were carrying it to a grave you wouldn't let yourself dig. I never said. It wasn't mine to say, and you weren't ready to hear it, and a person gets to come to it in her own time.”

Sloane looked at her. “You knew too?”

“Everybody who loves you knew something in the way you let them. Margo knew. Roy knew. We didn't know what. We knew the shape of you, and the shape of you was a woman holding a door open for somebody the water already took.” Catherine wrapped her hands around her cup. “The difference is none of us could tell you, because none of us knew. The man on that boat knew, and he told you. I expect that's the part that has you sitting in the dark.”

Sloane didn't answer right away, and Catherine didn't push, and the tea steamed between them, and out the window past Catherine's shoulder, across the dark water of the inlet, a single light burned in the cockpit of a boat that should not have been visible from this house except that the night was clear and the water was flat and the light was the only one on that whole stretch of dark, and Sloane knew without counting the distance that it was the Sundancer, and that Ethan was on it, where he'd said he'd be.

“He's still out there,” she said.

Catherine didn't turn to look. “He told you he would be?”

“He said as long as it takes.”

“Mm.” Catherine drank her tea. “I'm not going to tell you what to do about that one. You're a grown woman and it's your heart and you've earned the right to do whatever you need to do with it, including nothing, for as long as you want.” She set the cup down. “But I'll tell you the one thing I wish somebody had told me, and then I'll leave it alone. You ready?”

“No.”

“Telling you anyway.” The pale eyes came up, steady. “You've spent four years guarding an empty slip. You can put that down now. Not the grief, you don't get to put that down, it's yours, and you'll carry it the rest of your life, and some mornings it'll be the only thing in your hands. But the guarding, the watching, the holding the door open against the truth, that you can set down tonight, because the thing you were guarding against already happened. It happened four years ago. You've been standing watch over a harbor the storm already came through.”

Sloane's eyes filled again, slower this time, the deep kind that didn't have panic in it. “I don't know how to do anything else. The watching is— it's how I've gotten up every morning. If I'm not waiting for him, I don't know what I get up for.”

“You get up for the marina you built. For Margo, who'd walk into the Gulf for you. For me, God help you, because I'm old and I'll need rides. You get up because Noah—” and Catherine said the name plainly, easily, the way Sloane could not, “because Noah would be furious, just furious, to find out his sister stopped living so she could keep a slip warm for a man who wasn't cold in it. You knew your brother. Was he a man who'd want that?”

And Sloane, for the first time since the kitchen that afternoon, since the bar, since the watch and the word and the floor going out from under her, laughed, one broken wet syllable of it, because no, Noah would not have wanted that, Noah would have been appalled. Noah would have told her she was being an idiot and to go eat something and call somebody and stop holding her breath. She could hear him say it. She'd been able to hear his voice for four years and had used it, she realized now, to keep him alive in the present tense, and she understood that she was going to have to learn to hear it in the past tense instead, as a thing he had said, not a thing he was saying, and that this was going to be the hardest small grammar she'd ever learn and she was going to have to learn it anyway.

“That's the first time you've made a sound that wasn't grief since I walked in,” Catherine said, and stood, and pressed a kiss to the top of Sloane's head as she might have to a daughter, if the years had gone differently for either of them. “I'm going to go home now and let you have your own house back. You're not going to be all right tonight, and you don't have to be. But you're going to be in the world tomorrow, and that's the only thing I came to make sure of.”

She went to the door. Sloane found her voice one more time. “Catherine. The light. On the boat. Do I⁠—”

“No,” Catherine said kindly. “Not tonight. That one keeps. He said as long as it takes, and a man who means that can hold a light up one more night while you put your brother down proper for the first time. Tend to Noah tonight. The living man across the water will still be there when you've got hands free to deal with him.” She opened the door to the dark. “And Sloane. When you do deal with him. Try to remember it's possible for a thing to be unforgivable and true at the same time, and for the person who did it to have done it because he didn't have a clean choice, only a set of bad ones, and to have picked the one that let him be kind to you the longest. That's not an argument. That's just something I've lived long enough to know. Goodnight, sweetheart.”

And she was gone, and Sloane sat alone again in her kitchen, but it was a different alone than it had been an hour ago, a populated alone, an alone with a cooling cup of tea somebody had made her and a notebook on the counter she no longer had to keep secret and a brother she could finally, quietly, grieve in the actual world instead of guard in an invented one. Across the water, the light on the boat stayed lit. She looked at it for a while, and she didn't go to it, and she didn't put it out either. She let it burn where it was, the way you'd leave a light on for someone you hadn't decided about yet, and then she picked up the notebook, and carried it to the table, and sat down in the small kitchen light to read, at last, four years of the truth she'd been keeping from herself.

Chapter Twenty-Five

Five days after the worst morning of her life, Sloane came home from putting her brother in the ground and sat on her own porch in the last of the light with a plate of somebody's casserole she wasn't going to eat, and let the things people had said about Noah move through her one more time.

They'd done it small, at the Sandbar, because the Sandbar was where Noah would have wanted it if anybody had thought to ask him, and because Margo had simply taken the thing over the way Margo took things over when she could see Sloane wasn't going to manage the logistics of her own grief. There'd been pie, not cake, on a long table, which Sloane had not asked for and which had undone her a little when she saw it, because somebody had remembered that the Mercers were a pie family. Roy had stood up, Roy, who barely talked, and said that Noah had once spent a whole Saturday helping him re-rig the bait shop's awning and wouldn't take a dime, and that he'd thought about that Saturday every summer since when the awning held through a blow. Catherine had said Noah had the eye, that he could look at a boat and tell you what was wrong with her before the owner finished complaining, and that he'd gotten it from his father and passed nothing on, only because the water hadn't let him get old enough to. George Halsey had cried, which nobody had ever seen.

Margo had held her hand through all of it and not said much, because Margo had finally run out of the thing she always had, which was something to say, and the running-out had been its own kind of love.

And the whole afternoon, Sloane had carried a quiet that wasn't the stone anymore. The stone had broken in her kitchen five nights ago, and what was left was just grief, ordinary and enormous and survivable, the grief Catherine had promised her she didn't get to put down. She'd learned the small grammar in a little over five days. She could think of Noah in the past tense now, mostly, and she could say his name. The other word, the hard one, still wouldn't come, but she'd stopped needing to step around it like a hole in a dock, and that was something, that was five days' worth of something.

What she kept coming back to, on the porch, in the failing light, was a thing nobody at the memorial had been able to give her, because nobody at the memorial had it. They'd given her Noah the man, the awning and the eye and the easy Saturdays. None of them could give her Noah the last months, the why of it, the what-he-was-doing-when. They'd buried a brother today, and she still didn't actually know how she'd lost him, only that she had, and the not-knowing sat in the middle of all the kind words like a place at the table nobody could fill.

The light went down over the inlet and the first star came up over the water, and across the dark a single light burned in a boat at slip seventeen, the way it had burned every night for five nights, and Sloane looked at it as she'd looked at it for five nights, carefully, from a distance, the way you watch a fire you haven't decided whether to walk toward.

He'd kept his word. He hadn't come to the house. He hadn't come to the memorial, though she'd half looked for him and been relieved and disappointed in the same breath not to find him, because a man who showed up to the funeral of the brother he'd kept secret would have been a man making it about himself, and Ethan had stayed away, which was the right thing, which was him being kind to her the longest, the way Catherine had said. He'd sent nothing. Asked nothing. Just kept the light on across the water, as long as it takes, a promise burning quietly in the dark every night so that she'd know exactly where he was the moment she wanted to know.

And sitting there with the casserole going cold in her lap, Sloane remembered the rest of what he'd said, on the grounded boat, with the welt rising on her face and the federal engines coming up the channel. When you want me, or want to yell at me, or want the rest of what I know about your brother, which you're going to want, and which you have every right to, I'll be on the boat.

The rest of what she wanted to know about her brother.

He'd seen it coming even then, on the worst morning, with her wrists barely free of the zip tie. He'd known that the day would come when she'd have buried Noah and grieved the first wave of him and would surface needing the one thing the grief couldn't give her, which was the truth of how, the shape of the last of her brother's life, and that when that day came the only person in the world who had it would be the man who'd broken her heart with the first half of it.