said. What do I need to hear?”
Puck whispers, “That tomorrow we’ll rule the Scorpio Races as king and queen of Skarmouth and I’ll save the house and you’ll have your stallion. Dove will eat golden oats for the rest of her days and you will terrorize the races each year and people will come from every island in the world to find out how it is you get horses to listen to you. The piebald will carry Mutt Malvern into the sea and Gabriel will decide to stay on the island. I will have a farm and you will bring me bread for dinner.”
I say, “That is what I needed to hear.”
“Do you know what to wish for now?”
I swallow. I have no wishing-shell to throw into the sea when I say it, but I know that the ocean hears me nonetheless. “To get what I need.”
CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN
It used to be that before Dad went onto the boat, the house would be alive with movement. Even if he left early in the morning or late at night to follow the shoals and the tides, Mum would be up baking things for him to take with him and Gabe would be sitting in his room making certain he packed his razor and Finn and I would be clutching his legs or climbing into his bag or getting into Mum’s flour. The day that they both went out together, it was me baking for them and Gabe watching what Mum packed and Finn sulking, unhappy that they were leaving.
Now, the morning of the Scorpio Races, I feel like I’m the one going out on the boat. Finn’s anxiously checking my pack and Gabe’s polishing my boots and I’m tugging my hair into a ponytail and thinking,
As if I needed the reminder of why I was racing. Nerves creep along the back of my neck.
When I finally head out, Finn says that he will bring me lunch – not that I can imagine ever eating, as my guts are a bed of snakes, which makes for poor digestion – and Gabe follows me out of the house.
“Puck,” he says. “Don’t do this.”
He leans over the fence and watches me toss Dove’s girth over the back of her saddle. He looks a lot like Dad now, in this light, since he hasn’t been sleeping and he’s got the lines under his eyes. He’s starting to look a little like one of the fishermen, with the crinkled corners of their eyes.
“I think it’s a little late for that.” I look over Dove’s back at him. “Tell me how else I get to save the house, and I’ll stay home.”
“Would it be so bad, to leave this house?”
“I like it. It reminds me of Mum and Dad. And it’s not even about the house. You know the first thing to go if we don’t have it? Dove. I can’t -” I stop and busy myself rubbing a smudge off the saddle.
“She’s just a horse,” Gabe says. “Don’t look at me like that. I know you love her. But you can live without her. You can get jobs here and I’ll send money back and it’ll be okay.”
I bury my fingers in Dove’s mane. “No, it won’t be okay. I don’t want to just get a job and work and be okay. I want Dove and I want to have space to breathe and I don’t want Finn to work at the mill. I don’t want to live in a closet in Skarmouth, with Finn in a separate little closet in Skarmouth, getting old.”
“Then next year I’ll have made enough that you can come to the mainland, too. There are better jobs there.”
“I don’t
Gabriel looks at his feet and works his mouth, the way he used to when he and Dad would get into it and he didn’t like the corners he was being pushed into. “And that’s worth dying for?”
“Yeah. I think it is.”
He works a loose splinter on the top of a board. “You didn’t even think about it.”
“I don’t have to. How about this? I won’t race, and you’ll stay here.” But as I say it, I know that he’ll say no, and that I’d race anyway.
“Puck,” Gabe says, “I can’t.”
“Well,” I reply, pushing the gate open and leading Dove out past him, “there you go.”
But I don’t feel angry about it. There’s the old sting, but no surprise. It feels like I’ve known all along, ever since I was little, that he was going to leave, and I’d just been ignoring it. I think Gabe knew, too, when he started this conversation, that there was no way that he’d keep me and Dove off the beach. It was just something we both had to say. As I pass by, Gabe snags my arm. Dove amiably stops as he pulls me into a hug. He doesn’t say anything. It is like any number of hugs he’d given me growing up, when the six years of difference between us was a canyon, me a child on one side, him an adult.
“I’ll miss you,” I say into his sweater. For once it doesn’t smell of fish; it smells of the hay that he moved for me the night before and the smoke from the funeral pyre.
“I’m sorry I made such a hash of things,” he says. “I should’ve trusted you both more.”
I wish that he’d said it before, before he was sad and scared. But I’ll take it now.
Gabe lets me go. “I’ll go find where they’re handing out the race colors.” He looks at me. “You look just like Mum right now.”
CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT
It is the first day of November and so, today, someone will die.
I hear a tap on my cracked door and it pushes open.
“How is Skarmouth’s prize hero on the morning of the races?”
I open my eyes and turn my head to where George Holly stands in my doorway. He glances around at the furnishings of my small flat; there’s nothing but a bed and a sink and a tiny stove shoved under the slanted ceiling, everything turned lavender in the weak morning light.
I give a nod that’s both a greeting and a gesture for him to enter.
“This is grim,” he says. “You look grim as well.” After a pause, he pulls a crate of tins out from next to the sink and sits on it, his legs folded up. He rests his red flat cap across his knees and strokes it like an animal.
“I cannot settle,” I say. I close my eyes. “I can’t go into his stall like this or Corr will feel this on me and I might as well not step foot on the beach at all.”
“Is this about the races?” Holly asks. “Are you afraid of them?”
“I’ve never been afraid,” I reply without opening my eyes.
Holly says, “Is this because you race for Corr this time? What is it you really want, Sean?”
I press my hand to my face, searching somewhere inside myself for the quiet that must be there. For the certainty I wear every year before every race. Every morning before I get onto any horse.
“Is it the freedom? Don’t bother with the race. Come back to the States with me, and I’ll make you partner in my stables. Not head groom. Not head trainer. Come and go as you please.” When I still don’t speak, Holly says, “Now, there, you see? So you were lying to me when you told me it was the freedom you wanted. We’ve discovered it’s not about the freedom at all. I call that progress.”
I turn my face away. Downstairs, I hear the commotion of the yard on race day, and me not among it.
