Nam Le - The Boat

And she was right, the storm was coming in — it was streaking in like a gray mouth snarled with wind, like a shredded howl, rendering the land into a dark, unchartered coast. The bay turning black. For centuries, fleets had broken themselves against the teeth of that coast.

"I can almost feel it on my face," his mum said.

Her voice was strangely amplified, then voided by a detonation of thunder — it shook the house; the remaining daylight dipped and then, with a rogue gust of wind that rocked the couch backward, it was raining — heavy and straight and stories high.

Jamie sat by the window. The sky dark yellow through the rain. The baked smells of the earth steamed open, soil and garden and sewage and salt and the skin of beasts. Potted music of water running through pipes, slapping against the earth; puddles strafed by heavy raindrops until in his mind they became battlefields, trenched and muddy. The wind swung westward and whipped the hanging plants' tendrils into the room. Wetting his face. He could hear them again.

"Ask me now," she said.

Sheets of water sluicing the other windows. The wind rattling them.

His dad's voice, so low as to be almost inaudible: "Are you happy, Maggie?"

A breaking of thunder ran through the sky and into the ground. Her answer blown away. Jamie sat in the shape of her body and closed his eyes and imagined the feel of the weather against her numbed face. He felt the sky's cracking as though deep along fault lines in his chest. He tested the word in his mouth: "Yes."

"I'm sorry," someone said. "Forgive me." Whose voice was that?

"Yes," said Jamie, "I'm happy now."

"Oh, you know there's nothing to forgive." He got up from the chair. This wasn't right, listening in like this — he'd go downstairs.

Michael burst into the room, hair pasted on his forehead and streaming with rain.

"Where are they?" he wheezed. "I can't find them."

"They're downstairs," said Jamie.

"But I checked downstairs."

Michael moved closer to the window. Water dripped from his chin, his sleeves, logging at the bottom of his shorts.

"Listen," said Jamie.

Soft, shapeless, their mum's voice wafted up. Michael turned and smiled tentatively at Jamie. "Bet Mum's getting a kick out of this," he said. The storm crashed around them. Michael seemed, in that moment, caught up simply in the anxiety of having Jamie agree with him. Jamie smiled and nodded. He was always forgetting how it had once been between them.

"Come on," he said.

At the door, there came a louder voice — their dad's — broken up by the unruly wind. He was talking about finding something, saying they found something –

Their mum's voice: "That Townsend kid."

Michael glanced at Jamie.

Their dad's voice went on, scratchy and sub-audible. Then the wind lifted the words up clearly. Findings. Findings at the coroner's inquest.

"What's a coroner?" asked Michael.

"Shut up."

"Something wrong with that kid," his mum's voice said.

"I'm worried." His dad's voice. "Know why they call him Loose Ball Jamie?"

The sky raining through the rising wind. Clay pots swaying, tapping against the window frames.

"It means he doesn't go in hard. For the fifty-fifties." A fresh agitation in his dad's voice, laying open the folds of his feeling. "I'm not saying he's gutless — but he freezes."

Jamie turned toward Michael, who shrank back, face already crimped in fear.

"Let's go," he said.

"Don't," said Michael. "Please don't."

Before they left, his dad's voice floated into the room, loud and raw and plain: "You should remember."

In the kitchen he got Michael in a headlock. "How'd they find out? You little shit."

"I can't breathe!"

"You told them, didn't you?"

"Everyone knows."

"What? What'd you say?" He shoved Michael's head against the sink washboard, forced it along the metal ribbing, then dropped him to the floor. Michael's body shivering. The storm muted in here. Slowly, he felt the remorse bleeding into him. Always it came, immediately afterward. He said, "Everyone knows what?"

Michael curled into a cupboard corner. He lifted his hand to feel the side of his head. He was breathing hard when he looked up, and he didn't look at Jamie's face but at some indistinct point beneath it.

"That you're gonna fight Dory," he said in his deep voice. "And that he's gonna slaughter you."

***

ALL NIGHT HE COULDN'T SLEEP.

He threw on some clothes and wandered outside. The rain had stopped. Branches shuddered the water off themselves. The moon was still bright, caught in their wet leaves.

His mother had fallen asleep on the reclining couch. She was snoring softly. The moonlight poured in from the window and buoyed around her as though to bear her up. It seemed unreal. He pulled the blanket snug beneath her chin. Her mouth dropped open as though its hinges had snapped, and she snorted.

"Darling?"

"Sorry, Mum," he said. "I didn't mean to wake you."

It was as though she were swimming up from some distant pit of herself. The drugs awash in her — he saw it now. With sudden clarity he understood how lost she must feel in her body.

"God, I'm sorry," she said. Her voice was drawn thin. "I was wrong. Who gets to choose where they die?" Her eyes were barely open, one of them darting about quick as silverfish.

"Mum, wake up."

"But the boys love it here. You too." Her face loosened. She said, "You wouldn't believe."

"Mum." He shook her shoulder.

"The things I see now. But my hands."

"Mum." A pulse in her eyes and then her mouth moved. It jerked, then spread slowly into a smile of recognition.

"Sweetie." She fell quiet. They listened together to her breathing. All through her the odor of bleach, bleach sopped and smeared with a used rag.

"What is it?" she said.

A nauseous rush of answers rose up in him but he said nothing.

"The girl?" She didn't wait for his response. "And that horrible boy. Are you scared?"

He nodded.

"You're my son," she whispered. A strange shifting in her eyes, as though grass moved behind them. For a moment she looked lost. Then she said, "My son does anything he wants."

Gradually her head drooped forward. The muscles around her mouth went slack and he realized she was lapsing back into sleep. This was where she lived most of the time. He felt toward her an immense quantity of love but it was contaminated by his own venom, made sour. He wanted it to stop. When? Monday, after training? What would be enough — what commensurate with his lack? And what if he couldn't? She had come back from the hospital and the first thing she said to him and Michael was, This won't happen to you. I promise . He was rubbish. Whatever he did or didn't do now, he'd hate himself later — he knew that.

A truck raced by on the coastal road, ripping skins of water off the bitumen.

Her head still bowed, she said in a slurred voice, "James?" He slid his fingers into the pouch of her right hand. He'd never before noticed how loose the skin around her knuckles was.

She said, "My wine." After a long silence she said, "Will you pass it to me, please?"

"Mum."

"Your father and I love you very much. No matter what."

"Okay."

"Okay?"

It wasn't until a minute later he realized she might be squeezing his hand. "Okay."

He dreamed he was alone. The glass was cold against his fingers and forehead. He shrank away, went to the next black, steamed window, and the next, calling out as he searched. His voice sounded as though trapped inside some metal bladder. What if the paddocks were empty? And the long white corridors, too, with their waxy floors, and the dark slopes of the dunes he clambered up and down as though drunk? What if he couldn't find him?