Richard Patterson - Fall from Grace

The pace of the air horn quickened. At one minute and thirty seconds, Adam heard one long and three short blasts; a single blast marked one minute. Ben’s boat, the Icarus, sliced in near Adam on the starboard side.

Thirty seconds-three short blasts. Ben was beside him now. Two short blasts at twenty seconds, a single sharp blast at ten. A chill spray dampened Adam’s face. Five quick blasts marked the last few seconds.

In unison, Ben and Adam crossed the starting line.

Adam grasped the tiller and mainsheet, straining to catch the wind. With mixed tension and exhilaration, he felt the two boats beginning to clear the fleet. Already their contest felt visceral-they raced in parallel, a mere twenty feet apart, Ben barely ahead of his son.

For an instant, Ben glanced at Adam, then bent all his efforts to seizing each shift of wind. The fog kept lowering, obscuring the water ahead. At the first marker, then the second, Ben maintained his lead. Looking back, Adam saw that this race belonged to the two of them. For the first time, he sensed that he could match his father.

Another marker, then another, the two men battling the wind and each other. Gusts of air buffeted Adam’s face. He bent at the knees for balance, muscles aching, his palm chafed by the mainsail he gripped too tight.

At mark five, the wind shifted abruptly.

Ben saw this first. Sailing into the wind, he began switching his mainsail, first to starboard, then to port, then back to starboard as he beat toward the finish line. Sinews burning, Adam fought to catch him, but Ben sailed closer to the wind, gaining precious feet on Adam. Then Adam caught a wind shift before Ben did and surged within a half-length of his father.

Just ahead, Ben peered at the misty surface of the pond. Abruptly, he changed course, his bow cutting across Adam’s. At the last minute, Ben veered away. Suddenly, Adam saw the lobster pots ahead concealed by his father’s ploy. As Ben cleared them, Adam fought to change course-five feet, then four, his mainsail luffing. Then Adam felt the sickening, unmistakable sensation of the pot’s warp scratching along his wooden hull, Sisyphus lurching as the pot’s line snagged between her rudder and keel.

Squelching his fury, Adam leaped into the pond, diving under Sisyphus’s stern to free the rudder. Deftly, he untangled the line, then clambered back into the boat soaking wet. No more than a minute lost, but enough. Helpless, Adam watched his father’s back as Icarus tacked toward the finish. Ben had stolen his victory.

Teeth gritted, Adam felt his father’s hatred of quitting swell within him. In some crevice of his mind he knew that in the total of points for a season, he must stay within striking distance of the only rival that now mattered. For bitter moments, he battled the elements and Charlie Glazer for second place. With a last shift in the wind, he reached the finish a boat’s length ahead.

Easing toward the dock, Ben circled. The two men passed in opposite directions, Ben smiling slightly without acknowledging his son.

A wise man knows the grace of silence, his father had told him. Suffused with anger, Adam silently promised that the race would go on.

Listening, Charlie Glazer looked somber. “I remember that day very well,” he told Adam. “But until today I never knew what it meant.”

Adam felt drained. “How many times, I wonder, have I wished that I’d never stepped back inside that boat. But I did, and everything followed.”

“You couldn’t have known,” Glazer consoled him. “In a few days let’s talk more.”

Jenny Leigh lived off a rutted dirt road hacked through the woods in the middle of the island. The rough-hewn cabin she rented sat on a glade surrounded by trees, its deck sheltered by a grove of pines. It was a place of quiet and seclusion and, to Adam, isolation-though reachable by all-terrain vehicles in the summer, the cabin could be sealed in for days by a winter snowstorm. As he took the gravel driveway rising to the cabin, a deer skittered across his path. This time, preoccupied with Jenny, Adam did not flinch.

He parked, walking across the grass to her cabin in the soft light of early evening. He paused there, conflicted, then rapped softly on the door.

Through the screened windows he heard a stirring, then footsteps. He felt a tightness in his chest. The door cracked open; in the space she peered through, Jenny’s expression changed from wariness to surprise, and then she managed a smile that did not erase the caution in her eyes. “I’d hoped you’d come,” she said. “Then I was afraid you would. Or wouldn’t.”

“Can I come in?”

“Of course.”

Inside was a small living room with a table and two chairs, a single place mat marking where Jenny ate alone. The decor was simple-a couch, two wooden chairs, pieces of driftwood in one corner, and bright abstract paintings offset by one of Teddy’s stark winter landscapes. There were dishes in the sink, an open book on an end table, and a jacket on a hook beside the front door. It was neater than he had expected from a woman who, when younger, could within hours turn any space she occupied into something that, Adam had told her, evoked the contents of a madwoman’s brain.

“Would you like to see the rest?” she inquired awkwardly. “It won’t take long.”

Adam followed her, surprised further by the neatly turned bed, the papers carefully arranged on a blond wooden table larger than the one at which she ate. Even her clothes seemed to be in drawers and closets instead of strewn on chairs. Looking about him, Adam inquired, “What on earth did they do to you?”

At once, she grasped the reference. “I guess you were expecting chaos?”

“At the least.” He turned to her, adding softly, “My mother told me, Jenny.”

She glanced at the floor, then looked directly at him. “That I tried to kill myself, you mean.”

“And nearly succeeded. She rebuked me for my lack of grace.”

Her eyelids lowered. “Is that why you’re here?”

“I might have come without that.” Unsure what else to do with them, he put his hands in his pockets. “I wish I’d known.”

She looked up at him with new directness. “About my pitiful attempt at suicide? I didn’t want you to, Adam. That was all I had left.”

“What, exactly?”

“My own dignity.”

Adam regarded her, unsure of what to say. “Sit with me,” she said. “Please.”

He sat on the couch. Jenny settled beside him, neither too close nor too far away. For an odd moment he thought of Carla Pacelli, regarding him gravely from the other end of a chair swing. “Tell me how you are, Jen.”

“I’m all right.” Smiling briefly at herself, she amended this. “You could say I’m even. At whatever cost to artistic inspiration, the meds seem to level me out.” Her tone was factual and resigned. “With lithium, they tell me, I’ve got a better than fifty-fifty chance of remaining stable. But I’ll be on it for the rest of my life.”

Or my life may be shorter, she did not need to add. Tentative, Adam remarked, “It’s quiet here. That must help your writing.”

She seemed to read his expression. Adam, whose work rewarded inscrutability, realized that he had not become opaque to Jenny Leigh. In the same flat voice, she said, “If I don’t try it again, you mean.”

“The thought struck me, yes. It seems lonely here.”

Jenny shook her head. “To me, it seems peaceful. And safe. I’ve come to realize that I’m better at perceiving life than living it. I’m afraid my stories reflect that.”

Between them, Adam knew, was a constraint she felt as deeply as he. But she also seemed more self-aware, less prone to moods. Watching him closely, she said, “Your mom says you’re working in Afghanistan.”