October 4, 2003 The water around us is chrome today- touched at such an angle by the sun that its crests are reflected tenfold into every color of the rainbow. The waves created by our launch intensify this undeniable perfection, this unspeakable calm, this silver mixing and pouring around us like cake batter that folds over and sinks into itself, again and again. “It looks like one of those Capri Sun commercials,” I murmur to Andy. “How the water’s all silvery like that.” She turns around and smiles, her brown eyes soft like hazelnut coffee on a November morning. “We’ll turn into Capri Sun too!” She says. Or something like that. It’s hard to keep a memory in tact. You try to think about your last meal but can’t quite recall how it tastes. Your grandmother who passed away four years ago no longer has a voice. The slippers you used to wear everyday are in some dumpster in New Mexico and there’s nothing you can do about it. I want to remember exactly what Andy said. Her reactions. Her movements. How the sun sank toward the horizon, how the river bank floated past our boat, how the breeze washed through my hair, or if, in reality, there was no breeze at all. I want to know if the scenes that so often revisit my mind are just fragments of a broken fairy tale that I’ll spend Eternity piecing together wrong. How this orange sphere slides down the sky in front of us, how the color of the trees is distorted by such brilliant hues of blood and lemon. How my oar slipped into the water without sound or backsplash or half-decent catch. Is it real? Or is it how I wish it were? Specifics are nearly impossible because the day was unbearably normal. I have forgotten all too easily whatever happened in the hours preceding practice. It was Wednesday evening, October first, two thousand and three. I wore spandex shorts for the first time in public. I had a test in Portuguese in forty-five minutes and was worried about the two hours of class ahead of me, where I must speak a language that felt rough on my tongue. Tomorrow was Thursday and I was going to wake up and go through another eleven hours of non-stop activity. Charli had to work on her catches. Laurel sat behind me on port, quiet. Our coach, Amy, kept reminding me to keep my knees down at the recovery, watch my timing, stay focused. It’s hard to stay focused when everything around you is a postcard. We slow down as we approach the dock. Andy and Charli had switched out of the boat halfway through practice and Kira sits in front of me now. The world lies ahead of us past Kira’s stretch of golden hair. Cars lining the grass. The boathouse. The shapes and blurry colors of people, standing on the dock, their arms folded as they watch us row. Figures of masters and children and novices and Nick. “Why are there so many people here?” Kira asks. No one responds and she tries again. “What are all these people doing here?” “I don’t know,” I whisper. But I focus on Nick right away. Jenn will be so happy when she sees that he’s visiting us again. I wonder if she’s noticed yet. The dock clears out as we approach its plastic surface, these boxes joined together like ice in a tray, clunking around in the water. Nick stands there and waits for our boat to approach. I knew him from physics class and watched him clean the boat with the other juniors when I was still a novice rower, intimidated by their unisuits and loud laughter. He graduated high school just before I joined the team for my senior year, but I was still friendly with him. Jenn, stroke, light hair and intense eyes, was his girlfriend of a year and he visited her often at practices. The Thursday before our most recent race the team decorated white T-shirts to wear in school. Even Nick stopped by and joined in on the fun by writing “STROKE THIS” on his given shirt, which quickly became a source of Great Bay Rowing T-shirt pride. “You’re here just for us, aren’t you, Nick?” We had asked him, grinning. “Nope,” he’d announced. “I’m here for Jenn.” He stands there waiting for us. Sun casting its light down the side of his body. He waves, smiling. I always thought Nick was cute- how his short light hair pricks through his head and his eyes so easily gleam this sense of pure joy. It was always too bad that he was off limits. He grabs the three-seat oar and pulls it in toward the dock to help us get out of the boat. “Nick!” We exclaim. “You’re here just for us, aren’t you?” “Yes,” he declares. “Yes I am.” He sends an exaggerated wink to Jenn, his smile all goofy and distorted like a Picasso painting, this strained effort of his entire face. I giggle quietly and feel this love radiate between them as everyone else unties their shoes. Jenn lifts herself out of the boat, her spandex perfectly outlining her legs, and he hugs her intimately, this chemical reaction with heat and light, this magnetism of human soul. It’s so beautiful, I think. The sunset. The water. The boat. Nick and Jenn, holding each other. An entire future together. This is another one of those times when I am unsure how much I remember and how much my mind has just filled in the blanks. Oh, how I pray that all of it is true. The boat is washed off and the oars are returned to their proper racks. My watch says 5:40pm and if I hurry, I have enough time to change out of my spandex (the same spandex I had debated for quite some time about wearing, the same spandex that the team commented on upon my arrival) and drive to class. Life feels so rushed these days with all this hurrying, all this running, all this racing. Crew is the only chance I get to sit in a boat and watch the waves curl beneath one another. Perhaps that’s why I never pay attention. Perhaps that’s why I sometimes forget to focus on keeping my knees down. The next day Laurel and Aimée are in the hallway. Their eyes are red like poison ivy when you scratch it too much. Tissues nip at a ready flow of uncontrollable tears. “Did you hear about Nick?” they muster between sobs, between hiccups, between choked, forced, disgraceful noises that bite my ears, as I stand two feet away from my next class- two feet away from the familiar, from the routine, from the real. The barriers that held their voices together tumble down as they cry, an avalanche, dust and rock and a roaring that increases momentum, until it rumbles, it attacks, it strikes: “He died.” * This is what many call a classic drop-off. It was first created as a writing technique to keep readers on their toes. Soon after, it was used to help with marketing for the next book of an intended series. But here the usage is much different. It is simply because I lack much else to say. Lord knows there’s any possibility that I could explain how I spent the next few minutes walking down the hallway, the next few hours in an advisor’s office who was unsteady in the realm of grief counseling. How unexpected it was to find ourselves here. How sudden. How surreal. The next few days our team lived as one body, one life source with many arms and legs but one cry. The newspapers were read, the talks were held, the pictures were looked at, the pizza and movie nights where we squeezed together and tried to forget for two hours, these were loved more than we had ever loved the sound of our own voices. The circles we made in the school gym, and on the field, and by the math rooms. The hugs, the bodies with steady breaths, slow pulses, warmth that didn’t change. The minutes that passed as I showered, crying as the steam rolled out beyond the curtain because I was alive and Nick no longer has that chance. The little memorial that we put against a tree by the dock where we each wrote him letters and cried. The night I went home and said everything was okay and watched a news special on his death and went up to my room and sobbed and sobbed and wondered why it had to be him. The mornings I wake up rejuvenated and then glance over to the floor and see “UNH rower dies” in huge capitals on the Thursday edition of the Foster’s Daily Democrat. How my happiness just sinks right there. How there are so many things that I wish I could add, so many I wish I could subtract if it would ease the pain. You feel like you need a license to be sad that he’s gone. But anyone who’s seen him smile is entitled. I wasn’t close to Nick. I wasn’t his best friend. But I knew him. I knew him as a classmate that made physics bearable, I knew him as a rower who loved his sport, I knew him as a funny, inspiring guy who was crazy about his girlfriend. The other day at practice a boat with a few people drove toward our dock. It was the day we were writing him letters. Or maybe it wasn’t. But we were silent. A man stood up in this boat and watched us, and for a split second he looked like Nick. He was there, coming back to say “Hey, just kidding, girls. I’ll always be at practice.” Of course it was him. But the boat passed by and the people waved and I watched their image shrink in size, their light voices carrying through the wind. I think back to Nick’s last evening and remember that he had spent it with us. Healthy. Strong. Alive. And the next day, none of that was true anymore. How sudden. How strange. How soon. And yet, how lucky we were to be with him during his last sunset on this beautiful and confusing earth. At a candlelight vigil I stood by Nick’s picture and stared into his eyes, sparkling under the light of the moon. I meditated to myself, asking him if he’ll still be around for our practices, if he’ll watch us during our races, if he’ll keep his spirit alive for our parties and smiles and tears. A moment passed by and a woman I never knew walked up to me, reaching her arm toward the sky. She pointed at a star that shone much brighter than the rest. “That’s Nick,” she whispered shakily, “watching over us. He’s right here.” I drove home that night and stopped by our empty high school. I sat on the back of what I called my “retro car” and gazed at Nick’s star as it sat so comfortably in the sky. I watched the star’s presence and contemplated its shape and brightness, blinking back tears as I asked him one last time, just Nick and me now, if he’d really be there. I sat and watched him and it was cold outside, but I couldn’t leave without response. So I waited. I waited as, slowly, this answer arrived, through a rustle of leaves in trees, through a play of wind upon my hair, through a self-uttered rattling that swarmed through my bones, this reverberation of strength, of confidence, of wildfire. “Yes,” he told me, finally. “Yes, I will.” Nick, you’ll always be around. And we’ll always love you.