Chapter Text
It was Sunday.
His mother had just said it, but Riley knew.
“So what?” He rolled over in his narrow bed, the springs squeaking.
Annie Flynn sighed at her son’s back. “You know so what. It’s Sunday morning, Riley. That means church.”
“Have fun.”
“Riley.”
That was the way it went every week. His mom would say his name one more time, and then it’d be his dad in the doorway and Get your ass out of bed, son.
“Please,” Annie said.
Riley yanked the pillow from underneath his head and covered his face with it, groaning. He didn’t hear the sigh. He did, however, feel the booted foot in the small of his back, shoving.
“Get up and get dressed. Not going to tell you again.”
Furious, Riley tossed the pillow away. He flailed, tumbling off the far edge of the bed and landing hard on one bony hip. As soon as he got to his feet, he could feel fury pumping hot underneath the skin of his cheeks and neck. “Did you just kick me?”
“You weren’t moving yourself, so I moved you.” Ed Flynn’s face was red, too.
It was like looking in a mirror across the bed. A mirror showing a future that seventeen-year-old Riley Flynn would rather die than reach. His stupid, weak father with his stupid mustache, body too busted to work the fishing trawlers anymore.
Nothing scared Riley more than being useless. Except maybe being helpless. He’d already been there, and didn’t ever, ever want to go back. Same reason he didn’t ever want to enter St. Patrick’s again.
“I’m not going,” he said, fists clenched at his sides.
“You sure as hell are.”
“Ed!” His mother sounded scandalized.
Riley crossed his arms and smirked. It figured she’d be madder about the swearing than about Ed literally kicking his eldest son out of bed.
“You wipe that look off your face, young man,” Ed said. “You’ve got five minutes to get dressed.”
“You can’t make me go.”
To that, Ed had only stony silence to offer.
Riley was right, after all. His mother would never lay a hand on him, and he’d grown much more physically powerful than his father.
“We’ll sit in the front pews,” Annie said, a note of pleading in her voice. “You won’t even have to look at Nathan’s parents—”
“Don’t you say his name!” Riley shouted. Tears threatened, stinging his eyes. Furious, he swiped the sleeve of his pajama shirt over his face. They couldn’t see. They would not.
His own vision swam.
“Please, Riley,” Annie said. “Talk to Monsignor Pruitt again. Give it another chance.”
Ed turned to his wife with an exasperated sigh. “No more walking on eggshells with him, Annie. I’m done with it.” Swiveling again, he stabbed a finger at Riley. “It’s been almost a year. Now, I understand the need to grieve. I was pretty understanding for a pretty long time. But your friend being gone doesn’t give you license to drag us all down into misery. It—it’s a cowardly choice, Riley.”
Humiliating tears fell, hot, carving their way along sore cheeks Riley still didn’t have to shave every day. Your friend. He had to stand here and listen to Nate reduced to your friend, like they shared the same van home from Little League once in a while. The truth was, for a few brief and incredible months, Nathan Kellerman had been Riley’s other half. The rest of his world. The color that crept in with dawn and flipped the black-and-white twilight world on its head.
And then Nathan had died.
Because of Riley.
“What the fuck do you know about bravery?” he hissed. Annie let out a soft Oh and clutched her throat, but it didn’t even slow him down. “You barely work the boat anymore. You tell everyone it’s your bad back, but I know you go around the side of the house to cough like none of us can hear. Like you don’t come in reeking of smoke after you leave half a lung in the yard. Mom asked you to quit, and you said you would, but that was a lie. Because the truth is you won’t do anything that’s not your idea or you can pass off as your idea. So pardon me, Dad, if I don’t take a lesson on what’s cowardly from you.”
For a few seconds, Ed’s jaw worked—visibly clenching and unclenching behind red, quivering cheeks. He gripped the doorknob so tightly it rattled.
“Right,” he said. “We’re leaving for church in five minutes. Get dressed.”
With one hand at the small of her back, Ed ushered Annie from the room. Then he huffed loudly and yanked on the doorknob.
The door slammed with such force that the frame trembled. Riley felt the aftershocks as they traveled the worn boards to the soles of his feet. Seething in silent rage, he pulled on jeans and a henley shirt. He raised the window, admitting fingers of chilly sea air to tug at the curtains. The same goddamn curtains he’d had for ten years: hand-sewn by Annie from cheap cotton fabric printed with baseballs, gloves, and bats. Carefully, Riley popped the screen free, hauling it inside the room and placing it on the floor. Pausing only to snag his beat-up hoodie, he put one sneakered foot then the other outside the window. As soon as both had touched the hard ground, he was off, running.
In the exact opposite direction of the church.
Not everyone on Crockett went to St. Patrick’s on Sunday mornings, but enough did that Riley wouldn’t catch the stinkeye from pious residents on their way to pray. It being the one day of the week when boat crews on both island and mainland took a break, there’d be no one by the wharf, either.
Great, sodden-looking lumps of cloud hung low on the horizon. There was water on the wind, but Riley knew it wouldn’t rain. He’d lived every one of his seventeen years on Crockett, after all.
Islanders understood the moods of sky and water, how and when and with what force they met. There was a kind of comfort in being sure of something, because everything else in Riley’s life was uncertainty. Sometimes his own moods frightened him. More and more often, what started as thin, cold sadness got whipped up into anger. A maelstrom inside his head that took all of his concentration to weather. Some of it was missing Nathan, and some of it guilt.
A lot of it guilt.
There was another part, though. A nasty little intrusion, a stream of poison in the well. When Riley paid it any attention, it became a voice. It told him his last and only chance at happiness or love had died with Nate. And unlike Nate’s body, it had never been brought up from the dark sea floor. Sure, Riley could dive to look for it. It would only cost his life.
The flat-bottomed skiff was there, of course. No one owned the thing, as it were. Someone had once bought it, but the boat had been around as long as Riley could remember. Kids took it out for this or that, staying well in sight of land. On Crockett, you got on a boat as soon as you could walk. Scout troops used it to learn about currents for merit badges. Bird-legged middle schoolers had birthday parties on the water. For older kids, it was for watching sunsets in pairs, shyly holding hands. Or doing some kissing, provided they didn’t get too into it and tip themselves into the water.
The sea around Crockett was always cold.
Wannabe rebels took the battered boat out to drink or smoke weed. Riley had done his share—mostly the drinking. In fact, it had been what he and Nate were up to on the stifling summer day that ended up being Nate’s last on earth. In the windless, humid afternoon, the two of them had shoved aside a few smaller kids to get to the pier. Clad only in swim shorts and boat shoes (because the ringing aluminum hull got oven-hot in direct sunlight), carrying a tackle box containing only a fifth of cheap rum, Riley and Nate had cast off onto water still as glass.
And God, didn’t Riley wish now that one of those snot-nosed bastards they’d left back on the pier had made good on the threat to tell their parents. That way, someone might have seen. Stopped them before it happened. Riley would’ve been pissed, in trouble for being a bully. But Nate would be alive.
Nate had rowed until the island was little more than a bumpy splinter on the horizon, with Riley watching him, watching the muscles in his arms do their rhythmic work. Aware he was being studied, Nate had laughed now and then, made mocking faces at Riley: cross-eyed confusion or fake awe. People looked at Nate a lot, for good reason, and he liked it. He’d been an inch or so taller than Riley and broader in the shoulders. His pale skin could pick up a little color in the sun, but more often than not it was marble-white and just as perfect. Riley’s curls frizzed the second they got more than a half-inch long; he kept his hair close-shaved out of frustration. Where his hair was mud-brown, unexceptional, Nate’s had been almost black and curved in stupidly perfect waves, skimming his eyebrows and ears.
Why the hell a divine creature like him—sitting so effortlessly in his divinity—had wanted anything to do with Riley would remain a mystery to Riley forever. Back then, he’d at least been carefree enough not to question it out loud. Drinking in the rickety boathouse the day before school started again, Nate had passed over the bottle of lip-stinging whiskey and said, “Sharing a bottle, it’s almost like we’re kissing.”
Riley had taken a too-huge swig to cover his shock. The cheap shit they’d brought smelled like paint thinner and tasted worse. He’d swabbed his mouth with his flannel shirt and said, “Don’t be gross, dude,” while trying not to cough.
Kissing Nate was far from a gross thought, and it was one that Riley had indulged more times than he could count. But all boys learned early to perform machismo, which included acting disgusted at gay stuff.
“It’s not gross,” Nate had said. “It’s just a thing.”
“It’s not the same, though.”
“Do you want me to kiss you?”
Riley had frozen, terrified of producing a wrong answer. Nate was his friend, but Riley’s friendships had always dangled precariously, capable of coming unhooked and falling hard with one misplaced sentiment.
“Try it,” Nate had said, ever-assured.
Infected by that assurance, Riley could. He did.
And while fireworks didn’t exactly explode behind his eyes, the trajectory of his life changed at once, swinging around that single point in time and hurtling off in another direction.
Riley’s current bottle of cheap hooch lay where he stashed it a day earlier: behind a pile of mildewy life vests in the boathouse. He ducked in only long enough to grab it. In Nate’s absence, the place was an airless void. Riley couldn’t breathe inside.
He wrapped his hoodie around the bottle and tucked it under his arm, shivering.
The skiff would be in its place by the pier, rising and falling with the sway of the ocean and testing its line like a lazy dog. No one would have taken it out, and not just because it was Sunday. After Nate, Riley could always count on the boat being there. Its “curse” ensured its status as a sacred place, a memorial to Nate.
The wrapped bottle thumped onto the boat’s metal deck, and Riley’s feet shortly after, once he’d tugged the bowline free of its rotting post. Salt and water wore everything down. Except loss, as he was learning. That the water whittled to constantly finer points. Maybe one day it’d be slim enough that he wouldn’t feel it slipping between his ribs.
Riley took a healthy slug from the bottle before lowering oars. His breath steamed on the air, but he counted on the exertion of rowing to warm him.
He and Nate should have brought water. Hats, shirts, even the bane of all island kids: life vests. All in hindsight. He’d considered none of it that day. The pitiless sun had turned the boat skillet-hot. Perched on the midship thwart (thankfully made of wood), Riley had liked the dreamy, woozy sensation created by the combined heat and alcohol. He’d only learn much later—too late—that he’d been experiencing the beginning stages of heatstroke.
Nate had been in the water, his pale shoulders pinking up. His dark hair drank the sun, absorbed it. In Riley’s hazy vision, a fuzzy halo of slow-moving sparks danced around Nate’s head. He was surrounded by stars.
They’d kept popping in the blue air when Riley turned his head to look at the horizon. The island was gone. Getting nauseated, he’d slid to the deck, his wet swim shorts holding off the worst of the heat. It had been all through him at that point. So much so he hadn’t felt Nate’s hand on his shoulder.
Everything had gone white first, then black.
Riley had woken when someone touched him. Not Nate. An older man, who might have had a beard or might simply have had long hair, dangling as he looked down.
“Hold on, kid,” the man had said.
His voice had seemed to come from a blank hole where a face should’ve been. The man’s touch had felt like a branding iron.
Riley only remembered the wind as the man’s boat sped toward the island. That and a swallow of water, which he’d promptly vomited up, along with bile and booze. Later, he’d come to understand they hadn’t gone to the island but to the mainland hospital. The starchy sheets had scrubbed his shoulders and back like a grater, making him twist in agony and threatening to tug out the IV needle in his thigh.
Later—always later—he’d learn how difficult it had been in his dehydrated state for the emergency nurses to find a vein. He’d have a painful, spiderlike bruise near his groin for weeks afterward. It had hardly registered compared to the pain of his cracking, seeping, blistered skin. All of it had set in only after the delirium ended. Riley hadn’t been cogent enough to understand the first time his mother told him they’d brought up Nate’s body.
He wasn’t sure he’d ever understood it.
In the early days, the numb days, Riley had thought maybe if he could get his head around the fact of Nate’s death, he could start to process it. Grieve properly, whatever that looked like. So fucking stupid to think death was a graspable thing. So selfish to believe Riley could exert enough control to understand it when not another goddamn soul on the planet came close.
In his naivety, back then, Riley had figured at least one soul could offer insight: Monsignor John Pruitt. When he could walk without a limp, when the blistered, flaking topography of his back and shoulders gave way to new skin pink as Easter ham, Riley went to St. Patricks. Went to seek counsel from a man who’d been old since before Riley’s birth.
Most people confused age with wisdom; Riley knew that now. And the ones they thought were the wisest weren’t the people who had traveled and tried and suffered and searched, but the ones who’d stayed in the same place doing the same damn thing all their lives.
He’d believed it too, before he knew better.
“Riley Flynn,” Pruitt had said, smiling with lips closed, which he often did because his teeth were yellow. In fact, Riley had only known they were because Pruitt had laughed once in his presence. Young, impressionable altar server Riley had been uncomfortable for days afterward, trying to reconcile something so human with Pruitt. The old priest was little more than a sack of silk and brocade, filled out with the breath of sermons. For all Riley knew, he deflated after mass like one of those wobbly, weighted punching bags and lay folded on a shelf until the following Sunday.
Riley should have thought about all that before he went to Pruitt, expecting something useful to puff out of a pile of bones and dust and sacramental wafers. But Nate had gone and left Riley with nothing but desperation, and desperation bred terrible choices.
“How are you holding up, son?” Pruitt had asked, placing a hesitant hand on Riley’s shoulder.
“Okay,” Riley had said. “Well, sometimes. Mostly not.”
“It’s all right. You don’t have to be okay. You lost someone very dear to you.”
Riley hadn’t said anything to that, because Pruitt didn’t know how close he and Nate had been. If Riley had ever thought it possible to tell someone—maybe his friend Erin Greene, eventually—that possibility was long gone. Sunk to the bottom of the strand with Nate. Like everything.
“Tell me what you do feel,” Pruitt had said. “When it’s not okay.”
“Sad.” Riley had scowled because that sounded stupid. The expected answer. “Guilty. Numb. Like nothing really matters.”
Pruitt had nodded. “That’s grief, yes. At times, you might feel as though your friend is right around the corner, waiting for you to find him.”
“I do feel that. Sometimes.” Like an idiot, Riley had let those words give him hope, show him the life preserver to be wrenched away a moment later.
“And he is,” Pruitt had continued. “Not in this life, of course, but in the next one.”
Digging his fingernails into the meat of his palm to keep the tears back, Riley had asked, “What am I supposed to do for the rest of this life, then?”
Pruitt had actually laughed. Not tip-your-head-back laughter, but recognizable. He covered his yellowed teeth with one knobby fist. “The rest? Riley, God willing, the rest of your life is a very, very long time. You’ve only lived a little bit of it, so this part seems like it will last forever. Like it already has. But in the years to come, the way you respond to thoughts about young Nathan’s death will change.”
Riley had cringed when Pruitt said death, but let him go on.
“And you will change. You’ll grow up, with any luck grow old, and have Nathan watching over you. But he wouldn’t want you to spend all those years mourning him. He’d want to see you happy.”
“How do you know what he’d want?” Riley had asked, backing away. “Did he talk to you?”
Raising his bushy white eyebrows, Pruitt had shaken his head. “Never one-on-one. As we are. He wasn’t an altar server. But things are different in heaven…”
“What if Nate doesn’t want to be in heaven? What if he wants to be here, with me? Alive. He didn’t want to die.”
“Very few people want to die, Riley. And yet it happens. It happens to all of us. It will to me, sooner rather than later. Someday, it’ll happen to you, too.”
“I’m saying it shouldn’t have happened to Nate! Why wasn’t it me? Why didn’t I die and he live?”
“It was God’s choice,” Pruitt had said, “and we mortals are not permitted to know the reasons behind those choices.”
“It was a stupid choice, then. It should have been me instead.”
“Why, Riley? Why is Nathan worthy while you are not?”
Riley had stamped his foot on the dull boards of the church floor. “It’s not about being worthy . I—” He’d nearly said, I killed him. But he hadn’t. If he’d been in the water and Nate in the boat, he would have drowned. It was an accident of timing, a fluke. Not a plan or a choice.
Pruitt had merely been spouting from the same set of words he always had. Probably not in a different order than he’d spouted them at Nate’s parents.
Appalled, Riley had stumbled backward until his hip had contacted one of the pews. A hymnal fell from its ledge, puffing dust.
It was all dust, all of these words. Nothingness and death and dust.
He’d spun, ignoring the twinge in his leg and Pruitt’s calls, and dashed out of the church.
Afterward, he’d done everything he could to avoid setting foot inside it again.
Instead, Riley went to the boat. To the bottle.
Hoping one day he’d have the courage to drop that bottle overboard. And then to follow it.
To the soft, sandy deep, where he could finally rest.