Archive of Our Own

By five thirty all the boats were ready, idling in humming anticipation, stacked four rows high six deep with lobster traps and buoys, deckhands hanging off the side of their ships with self-assured grace. Everything smelled like diesel and salt, the wood of freshly repaired traps, the blood and guts of half-frozen bait stuffed in them, pungent and invigorating. There was a crowd gathered to watch the boats head out on their first day, sleepy wives and children and retired captains who couldn’t stay away from it, who’d be back every morning just to hear the chatter and gossip and complaints about the price of lobster. It was only the first week of May, and the watchers were in sweaters with hands wrapped around hot coffee cups, shifting from foot to foot in the pre-dawn chill, their breath visible against the sky. Behind them were more neat stacks of traps that couldn’t fit on the boat decks for the first trip, hundreds of them, carefully organized by each crew, waiting for the second and third and fourth runs of the day. 

The sun was rising over Pardon’s Point Wharf. It was Shane’s favourite day of the year, every year. In half an hour they would go out to set their traps — the Voyageur first in line for eleven years now — and then the season would begin, seven days a week for sixty days barring fog or wind over thirty knots an hour. Even rain they would sail through. His second season there had been hail the first week, some kind of freak storm no Almanac had predicted, and he’d made his men stay out until all the lines were hauled and rebaited, unwilling to miss any second of it all. It wasn’t that dangerous unless the boat was rocking, and he made them all wear their life jackets, anyway.

Two exhausting, brutal months. By the end of it his body would be battered, sore and sunburnt, his hands shredded to bits but his pockets fat. There was nothing like it. He waited for it all year.

He didn’t feel nervous, exactly, but rather anticipatory. He knew his boat inside and out, a sleek forty-nine and a half foot blue Samson trimmed in red he’d had built when he first took over his father’s license, with only some minor tweaks and upgrading since. His men were well-seasoned and worked hard, maybe harder than most, because Shane’s reputation as a tough captain who demanded a lot from his deckhands was not exactly unfounded. But they didn’t take unnecessary risks or do coke to stay awake like some crews, and he trusted them to care for his boat and livelihood like they trusted him. This gig was dangerous enough as it was. 

“Looking good today, boys,” a voice crackled over the CB radio, rumbling and richly accented. “I’m thinking this year I beat Shane Hollander.”

Shane snorted. He waited for this too.

“I’ll put a couple hundred on it,” said someone else. Probably LeMaire, from the Nomad. Everyone knew he had a bit of a gambling problem, but he was jovial and well-liked enough to deter any ill will about it.

“Ah, ah, you still owe me from last season.” Scott Hunter, captain of the Admiral. Oldest fisherman still active at Pardon’s Point, pushing seventy five, no children to whom he could pass on his license, a man who would probably die at sea, if he had his way with it. 

“I forget, who hauled in more last year again?” said the first voice. 

Shane shook his head and clicked on the handheld. “It’s not a competition,” he said. “Let’s just all have a safe run out there today, okay? Get back home to our families in time for dinner. Over.”

The line turned to static but Shane could hear a booming laugh from the other side of the half-moon harbour where the Raider was idling. 

Five fifty four. Six more minutes and the season would open.

“Untie us!” Shane put his head out the window of the cabin to call to Hayden who was standing on the bow looking at the sunrise. Hayden flashed a thumbs up and deftly stepped his way on the ledge of the boat and clambered up to the wharf. With practiced hands he undid the cleat hitch that was their connection to solid land and hopped back down to hang onto a column of eighty pound traps — when wet they would reach over a hundred and twenty.

At five fifty eight the Voyageur kicked it into gear and got into position at the entrance to the wharf — old weathered wood on one side and a man-made gabion of huge hulking wave breaking rocks fitting together just so on the other. The others followed, twenty three colourful vessels on parade manned by men just as varied, their families waving and cheering. At six they were off.

—

Shane gave into tradition every day. Maybe gave in wasn’t quite the right way to say it — it was not forced upon him. Rather he found comfort in it, like a well-worn blanket. His was a new-ish boat, comparatively, but her name was bestowed upon her by his grandfather Eugene Hollander, a man he remembered smelling of cigarettes and sitting at the head of the dinner table at family meals telling tales about other fishermen that likely had a tenuous connection to the truth. The fishing license similarly was his, originally, handed down to David then to Shane like so many other licenses the men held. Nowadays a license attached to a wharf with a claim to good fishing grounds could go for two million, nevermind the boat and the gear. If you didn’t inherit it was hard to get into the job and harder still to imagine why you’d want to at all.

Well, that wasn’t totally true. The money was good. Really good. Great, even, most years. Shane’s two deckhands alone made twenty five hundred a week each, plus top stamps for the pogey they drew on all winter. Captains made way more, though it came with a hell of a lot of risk. The boat, insurance and gear payments weren’t nothing — Shane had seen more than one guy during lean years have to sell his whole rig at a pittance just because he couldn’t make the payments and take care of his crew at once anymore. Years when the price of lobster was as low as morale. Then, of course, the fact that it was a stupidly dangerous job done by men and a few women who weren’t cowed by nine foot waves and the sprawling anger of the Atlantic. Most, like Shane, had been doing this since they were teens, taking every chance they could to get out onto the water with their fathers. Some never ever finished school. And they’d seen their fair share of accidents and deaths. Every year, it felt like, something happened. A stupid mistake or a freak accident, a finger caught in the winch, a slip and a fall overboard. Dumping Day, the day they set the traps, was most dangerous, if the risk could be at all ranked, because of the way the traps had to be stacked and flung out to sea, each pot separated by a few dozen feet of rope in lines of eight. It didn’t take much to get tangled up in it or banged about by it, and one second could turn into eternity quickly. Some guys used racks on the boat to pile their traps up higher, make fewer trips to the wharf that cost precious time and diesel, but this made the rows precarious and prone to tip. Shane never did this. Men died out there. He’d known men who’d died. And Hayden had a wife and kids, JJ a fiancée and a dog. 

Every year, though, some young upstarts from the city made their way to Pardon’s Point, lured by the promise of money and eligible bachelorettes eager for fresh blood in their little village. Most didn’t come back the next season. Those who did gained a little respect, more offers from different crews. If they didn’t hate it they would take years to save up for a down payment, or they would find a wife whose father was getting older and needed to hand down his business and livelihood. Never had Shane seen someone just up and buy a license without ever having set foot on a wharf before, a completely insane leap into the watery unknown that not even a total psychopath could take. Never, except once.

Shane was not a total psychopath. He was comfortably part of Pardon’s Point lobster fishing legacy. He was known here. His father and grandfather were known. People asked after him and his family when he went to the grocery store, and forty years ago they had folded his mother into their circles, their distrust of her less than their unwillingness to disturb the careful peace of a fishing community. Wherever he went he heard tales of his grandfather’s exploits – a man who, by all accounts, was hard-living and hard-working and never said no to some whisky, a curmudgeon widower who lived and breathed the fishery, who knew every fisherman for miles around and considered them all friends. Shane remembered him gently: crooked, hard fingers ruffling his hair and showing him to tie knots, a low rumble of a voice asking him about school and girls, a wooden pipe of sweet tobacco, the wheezing way he laughed. In the early morning sometimes, when Shane got old enough, his grandfather would pick him up with a coffee in hand, and they would drive around the village, Eugene pointing out different landmarks, Shane learning about his home from the man who made it.

Six hundred or so houses along a mostly wooded peninsula dotted with rocky outcroppings, attached by a thin finger of earth to the mainland. Hours from the nearest Wal-Mart, though the Tim’s in town made a brisk business, especially in the summer. Apart from the Tim’s there was the grocery store, the hardware store, a garage with two old-style gas pumps out front, post office, liquor store, a bakery that served brunch until noon on the weekends, a motel with a restaurant attached that only opened when the lobster season did, a campground along one of the sandier beaches. A daycare, an old folks’ home, a funeral home. He knew every single person who lived here and had spent thirteen years at the local primary to twelve school where his mother was Principal. When it got hot, rich tourists flocked to this place, the population of the village doubling as impressive summer homes along the coastline filled up for a few months. There was nowhere like this anywhere else, they said. Shane mostly ignored them except when they braved the wharf to buy a feed of lobster directly from the fishermen. 

All of it was home. He felt the pull of the tides and the push of the currents in his lungs. It was love and it was something worse than love too.  

Other traditions: Sunday night dinner with his family, no matter the season. Bringing the first feed of lobster to his parents, donating the last to the old folks’ home behind the school. Tracking the day’s weather and catch in a new notebook every spring. Christmas gifts for Hayden’s kids. Buying minor hockey tickets from every young hopeful who knocked on his door to sell them. Listening to the local radio station on his way to the wharf. The baseball tournament after the season ended, crews against crews, a drunken raucous affair that lasted all day. Getting up at 4am all winter just to stay in the routine of it.

And on Dumping Day Shane went to the Tavern. 

The Tavern was the kind of establishment that may have been considered a dive if there had been any other bar in town to compare it to, but there wasn’t, so instead of being considered gross, people thought it quaint, charming, and well-loved. Mismatched chairs around rickety wooden tables, a stage for musicians and space for dancers before it, pool tables as old as Shane or older, flashing Bud Light and Alexander Keith’s signs. Wings sold by the pound. The most exotic imported beer was Stella Artois. Every Friday night the local house band played the same tired CCR and Fleetwood Mac covers, and every Saturday afternoon there was fiddle, the bar filling up quickly with people from nearby towns ready to dance. The bar top was permanently sticky, the group of retired fishermen at the corner table a fixture from 11 in the morning til 1 at night. This was where Shane had had his first legal drink, freshly nineteen, Hayden crowing his delight at his side. This was, in fact, where Hayden first saw Jackie, who was in town for a college friend’s baby shower. And this was where, eleven years ago, a total psychopath sat next to Shane at the bar, made fun of his glass of ginger ale, winked at him, and said, “I’m hear you are best at fishing. You showing me, ah, the rope?”

In his memory Shane chuckled attractively but really it was probably more of a snort.

“No way,” Shane said. “You’ll have to figure it out like the rest of us.” 

This was unfair, Shane knew, unfair then and still. No one figured it out on their own. But something about this stranger waltzing onto Shane’s wharf and buying old Buddy Walsh’s license and decrepit rig sight unseen with less than ten hours of sea time under his belt made Shane angry. This life wasn’t a game to play. It was a hard-fought battle against nature that took years, decades even, to wage, and even then no one could ever win but the sea. 

“I will,” said the man. And he did.

Now, eleven years later, the same man sat next to Shane at the same barstool, drinking the same vodka on the rocks, wearing the same impish smirk. 

“Not a competition, eh,” Ilya Rozanov said. His English was better now than it was a decade ago but at the beginning of the season his accent was stronger. It always took him a couple weeks to settle into the feel of it, find the right rhythm of the syllables. “We both know you are lying.”

“Why does it have to be like this?” Shane said. The bar was packed as it always was on this evening, even if it was a Tuesday, filled with jolly laughter and the clink of glasses. It was one of the only places that stayed open year round but this was the start of their busy run, too.

“Because you like it too much,” Ilya said, his lips popping the last word. His fingers traced the rim of his vodka tumbler. 

“You’re an asshole,” Shane said. 

“You like that too,” Ilya said. He drained his glass and clasped a hardened hand on Shane’s shoulder before standing and throwing twenty bucks onto the bartop. He didn’t say anything else but waved at the bartender, a tiny woman named Brenda who’d been working here at least forty years. Shane waited five minutes before he did the same and followed. Tradition. 

— 

In a place like Pardon’s Point there was always gossip. A good rumour was as good as legal tender, and on more than one occasion Shane heard a breathless story about something he’d done that he himself had not even been present for. In general, though, Shane kept to himself enough that most speculation about his life outside of his family ties and job died down around the time he turned thirty, when it became clear he was not interesting enough to merit any particular fascination. He had no wife or children. He lived like something of a recluse in his dead grandfather’s house in the woods just a minute’s drive from the wharf, and had not dated anyone publicly in years. The opinion his fellow villagers had of him were that he was intense about his work, demanding of his men, generous with his money but not his time, and somewhat aloof. None of this was untrue. He was happy to let them believe this, and happier still that any rumours circulating about him were short-lived and frankly boring.

Ilya Rozanov, of course, had no such luck, though it was not like he hated the attention like Shane did. He was a local curiosity as soon as he came to town late winter eleven years ago, a strikingly handsome twenty-two year old Russian ex-pat whose English was weak and knowledge of the lobster industry weaker. He was a consummate flirt and a generous tipper, and was both the cause and the end of many a bar fight before he ever even hit the water. It was a miracle he found anyone willing to fish with him the first summer but he did, and it was a greater shock still when they both survived the year, and came back every year after. 

Somehow, no stories had ever gotten out about this particular scandal: Shane slipping into Ilya’s modern box of a house overlooking the ocean every Dumping Day, and at least once a week for the following sixty days or as long as Shane could bear separation, door unlocked like everyone’s was on the peninsula, car parked out behind the place, not quite hidden but not overly conspicuous either. There were a million black trucks like his in town anyway, and his closest neighbour was half a kilometre away through some squat trees stunted by wind and wild rose bushes. 

Ilya was waiting for him, as usual, in the bedroom.

“Your driveway’s fucked,” Shane said. He took off his shirt and folded it carefully. Ilya was already naked and watching intently from the edge of the bed. “It rained a lot this year.”

“Great,” Ilya said. “Did I miss anything else exciting?”

“Lauren Walsh got married at the Legion on New Year’s Eve.”

“Must have been the party of the century.”

“The baby barn behind the garage caught fire,” Shane continued. He was down to his underwear now, and pulled them off smoothly.

“Thrilling.”

“My mom retired.”

“Sincere congratulations to Yuna.”

“JJ got engaged. Nice girl, I like her.”

“This is so fucking boring,” Ilya said. “What else?”

Shane approached the bed. For some reason he wanted to crawl but didn’t. 

“Mary-Ethel from up the road lost her cat for a week but found him again.”

“On your knees.”

Shane dropped. The hardwood floors should have been hell on his knees but instead he barely felt them. All fall, all winter — he tried to fight it but the truth was that he waited months for this. Maybe if he had this all the time the thrumming want inside him would lessen but then again, after over a decade, it hadn’t yet. Then again, maybe nothing could rid him of it. It was insidious, like a virus, and one he doubted affected others. If this is what other couples felt like all the time, he didn’t know how anyone got anything done. 

Ilya spread his legs and Shane could think of more to say.

—

It was over too quickly but it always was. They both had to get to sleep to be up in a few hours, fresh for their day hauling traps. The first week or so they averaged fifteen hundred pounds a day but by mid-May that number would rise to three thousand before dropping off again — the waters surrounding Pardon’s Point were some of the most fertile this side of the Atlantic — and while most captains were not as hands-on as Shane, he couldn’t help but be out on the deck with his men instead of staying holed up in his cabin waiting for them to haul up a line before moving to the next. This was how his grandfather and father had been, so this was how he would be. It was as much a game of experience as it was of chance, and they would probably move their lines a few times over the course of the season, at first further out into the open sea then slowly closer to shore, following the lobster with the currents. He liked to feel the spray against his face, the wind, the salt, and see what he was catching every day with his own eyes. 

“How was Russia?” he asked as he was getting dressed again, muscles pleasantly sore and loose. Ilya was lounging on the mussed bed, naked and shining with sweat. Something about it made Shane want to take longer than usual to leave.

Ilya looked at him strangely. “Fine,” he said shortly. “Cold.”

“What, I can’t ask you how your winter was?”

“I did not think you were interested in anything outside of this dull place,” Ilya said. 

“That’s not fair,” Shane said. “You chose to be here.”

“Something like that.”

Shane liked to catalogue the ways in which Ilya changed every year, his deepened laugh lines, early greys threading through his curls. There were things that stayed the same, a constellation of moles across his skin not yet tanned by the sun, toughened fingers, a long thickened scar on his shoulder from some unknown injury, but it thrilled Shane to find the new. He was not under any illusion that he was the only one who got to see Ilya like this but it still felt special, like a portrait slowly revealed over time.

This, the way Ilya was staring at him now, was new, too. Shane didn’t know what it meant. 

“Well, I should — I’ll just — see you later,” he stuttered. “Have a safe season.”

“You too,” Ilya said, then paused and smiled. “Captain.”

—

The good weather held for a week, and so did Shane. On the eight morning of the lobster season he woke to heavy rain lashing against the windows of his house, and when he peered outside in the dark, the wind was shaking the trees. It wasn’t much of a surprise. All fishermen were obsessive about the weather — it came with the job — and he’d checked the marine forecast at least five times before bed. He’d even preemptively texted Hayden and JJ to turn off their alarms and sleep in. Likely their bodies wouldn’t listen but at least he had tried. Like him they were finely tuned to the tides. 

Shane was not a bad captain, he didn’t think. Tough, but not bad. If he were, his men wouldn’t have stayed on for all these years with him. He was hard on them but never mean. Some captains were rough with their crew, with words or unnecessarily hard work, like making them move their lines every other day adding hours of sea time or not hiring repairmen when things inevitably broke on board, insisting instead on them being fixed-in house, adding more hours still. Some were disorganized, messy, with dirty decks and old equipment, a particular kind of reckless endangerment Shane despised. Some paid poorly and refused to invest anything into their rig to make it better. Some did drugs, not just weed but harder things like coke and even meth. Some ran drugs. Some, the most despicable, poached. 

The rules around lobster fishing were complex, strict, and necessary. At least, Shane thought so. Many didn’t and would prefer less or no oversight at all, but most submitted without complaining, at least when any authority was near. Certainly Shane had heard hundreds of complaints over the CB radio or on the docks when unloading his catch and selling it to the local fish buyer. No small lobster, no breeding females. No selling under the table — some even refused selling to tourists for cash. No fishing past nine at night or before four in the morning. Your license outlined how many traps you were allowed to have active at one time, anywhere from two fifty to four hundred, and if you were caught with more than permitted you could face heavy fines. Even if one washed ashore, somehow untethered from its line after a storm, you had to report it before substituting another. There were sixty days to a season, no more, even when there were long bouts of bad weather. Things that made the fishery fair, and more or less sustainable, and running smoothly. 

There were unspoken rules, too. There were three wharves on the Pardon’s Point peninsula, and each had its share of the fishing territory, though this was much more controversial and at times incendiary. Fights among crews from rival wharves were uncommon but not unheard of. Lobster moved, were maybe moving more due to the rising temperature of the ocean, and men were desperate to keep the livelihood that had sustained their families for generations. The nebulous delineation of fishing territory could be your salvation or your damnation, depending on the year.

So far Shane had been lucky. Theirs was a prosperous fishery, for now. He could gross three quarters of a million dollars in two months in a regular year — and much more than that in good years. Most captains had wives who didn’t have to work and children who wanted for nothing, trucks, ATVs, Ski-doos, speedboats, RVs. Shane had an old house and a truck. Instead of the rest he gave large donations to the school and local minor sports associations, and paid Hayden and JJ more than any other captain. Two and a half thousand a week plus a hefty bonus depending on their total annual catch, plus one hundred pounds of lobster they could take whenever they wanted throughout the season. They’d been friends for years – Hayden since birth, JJ since grade eight when he moved to Pardon’s Point from the city. Hayden’s father was David Hollander’s deckhand, and his grandfather a trusted man on Eugene Hollander’s boat. As well as you knew the tides and the currents and the fish, a captain was nothing without his deckhands.

By all accounts Ilya Rozanov was a good captain too, though Shane didn’t go digging around too much for details. He had one man with him since the beginning and liked to hire a young guy fresh out of high school to round out his crew, keep him on a few summers before finding another. Something about giving others the opportunity he never had, maybe — Shane didn’t ask. There were lots of things Shane didn’t ask, but wanted to. Mostly he didn’t know how to, or why he should. They had sex — good seemed like too small a word for it but it was good sex, deeply and unerringly — and saw each other at work, and occasionally out in town. They weren’t friends, not really. They’d never shared a meal together, only a few drinks over the years. Shane knew about the mole on Ilya’s inner right thigh, and he knew what noise Ilya made when he bit it, but didn’t know what his mother’s name was, or if he even had one. 

It was easier not to know things about Ilya Rozanov. The fact was that the man didn’t stay here year-round. He came, he made his money, he lounged around for a bit afterwards, then as soon as the local children went back to school and boats were lifted out of the water to go dormant for the colder months, he left. This was one reason Shane did not have much use for winter. Most of what he thought about then was fishing and fucking and when he would get to do either again. The rest of the time he spent coming up with reasons he should not go back to fucking Ilya Rozanov, and should instead find a nice girl somewhere and have a nice family and pass down his nice boat and nice business like his father and his grandfather before him. 

It never worked. Like clockwork he fell back into Ilya’s bed as soon as his boat left the wharf for the first time. The two were inextricable. He thought as long as he fished he would want this, and he would always want to fish. Worse than that, even. Today he could not fish – but he still wanted Ilya.

It was still dark when Shane started his shower but by the time he was done and dressed, the sky had lightened to a dirty grey, drab and dull. The wind whipped through his wet hair as he climbed into his truck. It was too early to call on Ilya yet, even if they were likely both awake. He had not yet descended into that level of desperation but some days he didn’t feel far off, the need thrumming just under his skin until he felt like he would explode from the force of it. Instead he took the familiar route through town to get to the wharf. 

Weather like this could wreak havoc in a lot of ways. For one, it could push your lines out of place and even tangle them up in other captains’, leaving you to try to find them without the GPS plotter where you so carefully saved your buoys’ coordinates. The detangling process was a real pain in the ass, too, slowly pulling up the rope with the winch hoping it was just a matter of crossing lines and not something more knotted. The wind could also cause chaos at the wharf. If crafts were not properly tied up they could drift off into the small harbour, or bang into the dock or other ships. If you hadn’t shut your cabin door properly or brought in any drying gear then you were doubly fucked. Then there was the matter of losing precious catch. If you could not haul up every day or rebait your traps when you needed to, you necessarily missed out on good lobster. This above all rankled Shane. It made him feel like an addict, like Vincent LeMaire who sat at the slot machines in the back of the Tavern every night.

In light of all this he was not the only one at the wharf to check on his things this early in the morning. He pulled his truck directly onto the dock by the Voyageur and nimbly jumped down onto the rocking deck. She was well tied and bouncing off the big tractor tires hanging off the side of the wharf put there to protect the boats and the wood from exactly this. He checked the cabin — no leaks. He’d brought in their rain weathers — the high-visibility waterproof overalls everyone wore to work — and jackets last evening. Every day after unloading they left them out to dry in the sun on the deck of the ship and every night after supper and before bed he came round to do one last check on his ship, and bring their gear inside.   

Satisfied, he clambered back onto solid wood and into his truck. He waved over at old Scott Hunter who was doing the same over on the Admiral and was just about to back out and leave when he saw, over on the other side of the water, the black and gold Raider swinging out of place with the wind, her bow pointing not parallel to the wharf but turning toward the middle of the harbour, the rope attached to her dock cleat swaying uselessly with too much slack. Through the rain the knot looked minutes away from falling apart, and the door to the cabin slammed open and shut in the wind.

“Fuck,” Shane said, and swung his truck around to the dock on the other side of the harbour. 

It wasn’t unusual for captains to help each other out like this. They had to look out for each other, in such a dangerous industry. Plus, it wouldn’t do for an unmoored ship to crash into someone else’s. 

What was unusual was Shane doing this for Ilya’s boat — he’d never even set foot on it before — but he’d do it for anybody else, so here he was. With too much ease he undid the sloppy knot around the dock cleat and pulled on the thick hemp rope just as a particularly strong gust of wind blew the boat further away. He wobbled dangerously and tried to catch himself. Falling over the side now would be a death sentence.

He sunk his body a little lower to give himself more leverage and pulled again, just as a second pair of hands joined his to help. Shane looked up to Ilya, curls plastered to his forehead and sweater soaked through, and nodded. They hauled the boat closer with just the right amount of slack and Shane let go to watch Ilya’s nimble hands make quick work of retying the rope to the cleat. He stared a beat too long before remembering there was more to do, and he shook himself before hopping down onto the deck. 

There was a jacket flapping wildly, caught on the life ring attached to the wall of the cabin, so he grabbed it before entering. Behind him Ilya, done with his task and following close behind, wrestled the door closed. 

They didn’t speak as they surveyed the damage. The Raider was an older boat, but clearly, Ilya had not been afraid to invest in some upgrades, because it was quite nice in here, compared to some cabins he’d seen. The tech was on the newer side, some better even than Shane’s, and everything was gleaming white. Every surface was wet — the plotter and GPS, the various screens and controls, the radio and the little banquette table where they ate, the Captain’s seat and wheel, the mini fridge, and microwave, the floor and the narrow stairs down to where there would be storage, small bunks and a toilet. There were papers strewn about everywhere and at least one broken mug littered at their feet. 

“That fucking kid,” Ilya said, then something harsh in Russian, which Shane didn’t understand but could pick up the meaning of. 

“The one you hired this year?”

“Augh. Buddy Walsh’s grandson. I said to close up last night but I knew he got a girlfriend. I should have known he would be too much rushing to do it right.”

“Why didn’t you do it?”

Ilya narrowed his eyes. Water was dripping down the side of his neck and Shane couldn’t help but stare. 

“I was trying to show him responsibility, or something. Not all of us are being, ah, complete control freaks about this.”

“Fucking dick,” Shane said. He rolled his eyes. 

“You love doing that,” Ilya said. He started down the few stairs down into the hold. “Stay here, I’ll go get mop.”

Shane bent down to start picking up some broken ceramic. It was slippery, and the boat rocked as he bent down, but his sense of balance after spending most of his life at sea was excellent, so he just caught himself and continued. Before long Ilya was back with a mop, some rags and a couple towels, the last of which he threw unceremoniously onto Shane’s head. They didn’t talk until they were done, but together they made quick work of the clean up. 

The cabin door rattled with the wind and rain fell hard against the windows until it and their breaths were all they could hear. When they were done they both stepped back and looked at each other. Like ships they had drifted until they were so close as to be almost touching.

“Thank you for your help,” Ilya said. 

Shane shrugged. “Of course. I’d do it for anyone.”

Ilya raised an eyebrow and reached out to grab Shane’s waist, tucking his head into Shane’s neck. “What about this?”

“Ilya,” Shane hissed. “People could see.”

“Is a storm,” Ilya said into Shane’s throat. Already it was hard to resist him and his body responded to the light touches as if it had been doused in flame. “No one is looking.”

“My truck is idling outside,” Shane said, weaker now.

“You are good person helping stupid fisherman from away,” Ilya said. 

“You’re not – oh!”

Ilya bit the tender spot of skin behind Shane’s ear. 

“I know what people say about me,” he said. “One more story cannot hurt.”

Any argument Shane could think of – and God, could he think of arguments, spent months thinking of them – died when Ilya slid his hand down the back of Shane’s still damp pants and squeezed. 

“Alright,” Shane breathed, but it was lost to the wind and Ilya’s mouth. 

–

Stories, stories. What good was it to be afraid of the stories? What did it matter if there were stories? Who cared, really? If a story sustained the old men and women who spent their time gossiping over double doubles at Tim’s all year, then who was Shane to deny them their joy? The stories were always ridiculous, and had but the most delicate grasp of the truth anyway. When he was young he was often the main character of such stories, by virtue of being the only Asian kid on the peninsula and probably a ways off it too, which made him exotic and mysterious. Nevermind that he could trace his family’s line in Pardon’s Point back two hundred years. Nevermind that his mother worked at the only school in town and everybody who’d gone through its doors since 1990 knew her. 

But the stories were a part of him. Of course they were, the bad like the good. How could they not be? How could they be anything but part of what he’d inherited from his family? Who was he without them? They were a map of this town. He could drive through and say look, here is the tree where my great uncle got caught stealing cherries by the landowner. Here is the home that was once a hair salon, where my mother got her hair cut for the first time in this village. In fact, here is the grocery store where my father met my mother on vacation with her family, he in rubber boots and ripped jeans and she in a soft dress the colour of lilacs. Here is where my grandmother was born, and here is where she died twenty five years later. Here is the church where my grandfather married her. Here is the garage where I attended my first high school party. A girl kissed me behind the building and I didn’t know where to put my hands, and afterwards she told her friends that I was a weirdo with sweaty palms. Here is the liquor store where she works now. And here is the sea I was born to love, and the beach with the undertow I was taught to avoid, and here on this cliff is where a woman fell to her death once, a century ago, where now there is a fence and a bench where I sit to watch the sun set. Here is the story of my life and my home. Here is where I am known. I am a man made of stories, he could say. Stories and blood and salt.

It didn’t make being a part of them any easier, but Ilya was probably right. One more story couldn’t hurt. Could it? 

So instead of going home or going to Ilya’s to fuck again, they went for breakfast. 

Of course the restaurant was busy — every fisherman and his wife had had the same idea to take advantage of this windy morning, it seemed — but they found a table at the back, near the window which overlooked the community’s main street. If you could call it that, seeing as there were only four real streets total and a few meandering dirty roads. On their way to their seats they were stopped to talk no less than three times, small talk about the weather and the season. Ilya clapped men on the back as he passed by and Shane smiled tightly. No one thought it odd they were together, or at least, no one mentioned it. They were coworkers, more or less, and by all accounts friendly, if competitive. So what? 

“My treat,” Ilya said when they sat. “For saving little Walsh’s life.”

“You would not have killed him,” said Shane. 

“When I first come here people think I am mafia.”

Shane laughed loudly. He felt giddy with it. “I hadn’t heard that one.”

“Mm, yes. Scary Russian stranger in town. Police came to see me my first week,” Ilya said.

“Really? What for?”

Ilya shrugged. “Noise report, apparently. Stupid. But more like, it was to check on me, I think. I lived in town then, you remember?”

Shane remembered everywhere Ilya had lived in Pardon’s Point. The first was a small basement apartment below the postmistress’ house. It was damp and she complained to anyone who listened about how bad his gear stunk up the washing machine they shared. Then there was the place he rented behind the liquor store, an old one-and-a-half-story house that hadn’t been updated since the Sixties, at least, if the brown checkered linoleum covering the place was anything to go by. Upstairs in the bedroom they couldn’t stand up properly, but they always forgot, and Shane had bashed his head on the ceiling more times than he could count. One summer, when he couldn’t find a place to live before the season started, he spent four months living out of one of the motel’s rooms and washing everything at the laundromat attached. Now he lived on the cliff, a boxy white pre-fab that looked so incongruous with the surrounding landscape it was almost poetic. 

Shane lived with his parents before he moved into the same house in the trees where his father had grown up. It had been passed onto him when Eugene Hollander died five years ago, and he could find no reason not to move in. It was nothing big or exciting, but familiar and warm, all wood and worn couches, a fireplace trimmed in rock. Even now he couldn’t bring himself to paint anything. Ilya had never been.

“Of course I remember,” Shane said. “The fucking hot water heater was right in the living room next to the couch.”

“Not up to code,” Ilya said.

“Probably not.”

They paused to let the waitress take their order – someone Shane didn’t immediately recognize, but in the summer sometimes people came from away for work then went away again when things died down. Nothing really stayed open after September, aside from the basics. The village grew quiet, haunted by the ghost of prosperity, empty of thrumming diesel engines on the water, a noise you could hear from almost anywhere on the peninsula in May and June. Some deckhands went out west to find work in the winter months and came back only when the snow melted. Sometimes he thought about it, how the whole place hinged on the fishery and by extension, the fishermen. And, of course, the lobster. In some places on the mainland the lobster had already moved on to cooler waters, taking with them families and businesses. Few stragglers remained — optimists at best, idiots at worst, but more likely Shane thought they were just stuck in it. Not making enough to leave, with a license to pay off, a boat to keep afloat. A family legacy to uphold, maybe. A story they weren’t done telling yet.

Even here, with as busy as Pardon’s Point got every year, Shane had heard his whole life about how it had been even more so thirty, forty years ago. This was how it was everywhere, in forgotten places like this. He could see the evidence with his own eyes: salt-streaked and faded homes once grand now falling to ruin standing next to well-kept houses with laundry on their lines and children playing in their yards, tourists walking by empty businesses with FOR SALE signs in dirty windows, a fish plant long since closed, its workers gone and dandelions sprouting between cracks in the parking lot pavement. When you looked it was easy to see the village’s past everywhere, a kind of haunting presence not unlike a ghost.

“Why did you come here?” Shane said finally, after the young waitress had brought them coffee. Ilya’s hair had dried funnily after they got in from the rain, curling at odd angles, and Shane stopped himself from reaching out to flatten it. 

“I was hungry,” Ilya said, raising an eyebrow. 

Shane huffed. “I meant — here, Pardon’s Point. Why this?”

“Ah. You think I am insane too.”

“A little. Maybe not so much anymore. But I did think — he’s a total psychopath, honestly, the first time I saw you on that boat.”

Ilya shrugged. “It was insane. Medically, probably.”

“What do you mean?”

He dumped some sugar and milk into his coffee and spent a long time stirring it, his spoon clink-clink-clinking against the mug. “I was not well.”

“Oh. Sorry. I mean. Okay, so, what—”

“My mother died when I was young,” Ilya said. 

“Sorry to hear that.” 

Ilya waved a hand at him. “Long time ago. When I turned eighteen I got, ah, money, from her.”

“An inheritance,” Shane said quietly. 

“Yes, that. But I was very stupid with it. Lots of drugs, lots of booze. My father was police, you understand, in the military. Big name, bad for son to be like this. My brother is police, too. So I was not — not like the others, you know.”

“Black sheep,” said Shane.

“Yes, and — liked men. Well, both. But the men – my father found out, and made me leave.”

In eleven years, it was the most Shane had ever heard Ilya speak about himself. In the noise of the dining room he was sure no one could hear them or was paying attention, but he couldn’t help the way his heart started beating faster when Ilya said the words out loud.

“And then, ah, I travelled a lot, all over, but still not very smart,” Ilya continued. “I made many bad choices. Did some little jobs here and there. My best friend, she says I need to do something with my life. So, I thought, okay, maybe I find real work. But what kind of work? And then I found this. It was a bad few years, I guess, here, I mean. The license was cheap. Buddy gave his rig for free. And work visa, it is easier when you own a business.”

“Did you Google, like, most dangerous jobs in the world?”

Ilya shrugged. “Yes. Pretty much.”

“Jesus,” said Shane. “So you did have a death wish.”

“Yes, well, lucky for you I’m not dead yet.”

The waitress startled Shane when she appeared with their food, so intently was he staring at Ilya’s face. His square jaw, blue eyes, heavy brow, a single mole on his left cheek. Weathered skin. Slightly crooked bottom teeth, perfectly formed lips around them. 

“Can I get you guys anything else?”

“No, no, thank you,” Shane said. He looked at Ilya another beat before he tucked into his omelette, Ilya into his steak and eggs. 

“So,” Shane said, when they were done eating and gazing at each other once more, “why did you come back?”

“Like I said.” Ilya smiled with all his teeth. “I was hungry.”

–

By afternoon the wind was dying down, the sun peeking through clouds and alighting on puddles left in potholes across town. Shane didn’t know what to do with himself. Ilya bade him goodbye after their breakfast and they both went to their respective homes, and now Shane was left alone, unsure of how to fill his time. This early in the season he was not yet exhausted enough to spend a free day napping, and his house was not messy enough to spend more than half an hour tidying it. He tried to read, a book on the collapse of the cod fishery he’d been picking at since February, but each word felt increasingly unwelcome, a heaviness on his shoulders he couldn’t bear. He put it away and went to his truck. 

“Hello?” he called when he entered his parents’ house. It still felt odd not to call it his, though it’d been years since he’d been living on his own. But things hadn’t changed much, or ever, in this house, and he still kicked off his boots and set them on the same rickety shoe rack he’d fallen on once as a kid that tilted to the left ever since. The walls were the same yellow as ever, the kitchen as warm. 

“In your room, honey!” his mom’s voice came, slightly muffled. She didn’t sound surprised he was here. “Will you come help me with this?”

His old room was down a short hall off the front entrance, and he entered to find his mother sitting in a cloud of dust. His bed was still there, but the rest of the room had become something of a space for storage in the years since he’d moved out, a catch-all of Christmas wrapping paper, a broken radio or two his dad swore he would fix eventually, cases of mason jars for June strawberry jam, an ancient translucent Macintosh computer, large bins stuffed with what he assumed were winter clothes, a fax machine sitting unused for twenty years, skis leaning against the wall — the detritus of a long life lived together, the clutter of cohabitation. His mother liked to prepare for any eventuality and his father was a man of hobbies. He had a thriving garden every summer and liked making hot sauces and jams with his harvest. In the winter he played hockey in the local gentleman’s league, and liked to go ice fishing for smelt too when the water froze. He had a hunting license and a membership to the snowmobile club. Here in this room was evidence of his life post-retirement, though if Shane was honest, David had been like this, a doer, a lover of life, even when he was actively fishing. 

This is something Shane noticed about the other captains he worked with: they gave their two months of hard labour in exchange for ten of leisure and steady employment insurance cheques. He heard it all the time. Hayden talking about the vacation down south his family did every year and helping his kids with their homework, JJ discussing his home renovations and in-ground pool, his trips to the city to watch NHL games with his fiancée. Scott Hunter had an apartment in Florida in a seniors’ community, and what he got up to down there was a source of constant speculation. Vincent LeMaire liked to go to Vegas and Atlantic City for reasons that were more obvious. Ilya went to Russia, to see — who, exactly? In light of this morning’s conversation, Shane couldn’t square it. Still, Ilya closed up his house and went away in the fall, and Shane did not. Not everyone traveled, certainly, but most seemed to find it easy to fill their time in the off-season. The fishing was their penance, maybe, the price to pay for a life free of obligations outside of May and June. 

Shane did not find it easy. He didn’t know if he ever would. When he thought of the future he thought of Scott Hunter, seventy odd years old, limping onto his deck year after year. He thought of his grandfather, who drove down to the wharf every day until he couldn’t anymore, just to make sure Shane was taking care of things the way he taught. He thought of Hayden, his wife and his rapidly growing children, and he thought of his parents in their garden, retired and content. 

“What are you doing?” Shane said to his mother. He coughed and flapped his hand in front of his face to wave away some motes of dust sparkling in the sun streaming in from the window. They hadn’t painted this room since he’d moved out and it was still the navy blue he’d chosen at 16 even though he assured his parents that he didn’t care about the colour of his walls, no, really. His father had looked at him strangely and said in a desperate reedy kind of voice: but it’s your room, Shane, shouldn’t you care about it more? What if you want to bring home a girlfriend, don’t you want it to look nice? So he picked a colour that one of the pamphlets at the hardware store called ‘masculine yet comforting’ and his father stopped asking him questions.

“Cleaning out your closet,” his mom said. She was sitting in front of a bin full of — clothes, it looked like, and old blankets and things he didn’t recognize. “Look at this, you wore this to your baptism.”

She held out a frilly white dress, flattened from years in a box, though not yellowed with age yet. He’d seen the pictures of himself in it, a tuft of black hair swallowed up by ruffles, held up by his beaming father whose hair had not yet turned grey and whose skin was still smooth.

“Jesus,” he said. 

“Precisely,” Yuna said. “And this — oh, I found this in a thrift store on the mainland and I thought it was so cute but you were too big for it. Never got to wear it.”

She shook out a tiny pair of denim overalls, an OshKosh logo embroidered on the front.

Before he could ask why she kept it all these years, she was already onto something else. He watched as she pulled out item after miniature item — a small pair of sneakers, a t-shirt with Barney on it, a colourful windbreaker, a baby blue blanket crocheted by his Sobo, a woman he but vaguely remembered but who was apparently quite skilled with yarn. He helped her shake out the dust and refold everything, letting her coo at the pieces as they did. His mother was not one to be too sentimental, and was instead a pragmatic and efficient woman who liked to be one step ahead of everything and stay ready for any challenge. It was odd seeing her like this, glassy-eyed and sighing. Maybe in her retirement she was getting emotional.

A few tears did spill when she pulled out his first pair of rain weathers, the little impermeable overalls he wore when his father would first take him out onto the boat on days he didn’t have school. He couldn’t really remember the other pieces of clothing they’d looked at but this he did. The sturdiness of the fabric, the way it was stiff over his limbs at first. His mom begged him to stay in the captain’s cabin with his father but he couldn’t bear it, even at six years old. He  stood out on the deck, swaying with the waves, watching his father’s deckhands pull up a trap, stick their gloved hands in it to take out a lobster or two, then carefully measure the squirming creatures, tossing the small ones back into the water to grow. They’d do this, one trap after another, until the line was done, then the rumble of the engine would start up and they’d move onto the next line, a few minutes of sailing away. He remembered feeling shocked at how close to the boat the seagulls swooped down, eager to catch some leftover bait or a colourful little tomcod that had made its way into a trap in search of an easy lunch. If he closed his eyes he could see the sparkle of the sun on the waves, hear the chatter of the radio in the cabin, his father’s men shouting and laughing at each other, a cigarette hanging off their lips. It was dirty work, bloody from the bait in the traps, and the smell was unlike anything else he’d smelled before, maybe unlike anything in the world. Shane could not look away, even then.

“Why did you keep all this stuff, anyway?” he said, rubbing his thumb over the rain weathers’ bib. He couldn’t believe he was ever this small.

“Oh,” she said, rubbing her eyes. “Just in case you’d ever want to pass it onto someone.”

He frowned. “What do you mean? Like who?”

Yuna shrugged. “Well, if you ever wanted children of your own.”

He didn’t say anything as he put the weathers back into the bin. It wasn’t like he never thought of it, it being — a family, a baby, little Hollander hands reaching out for large calloused ones, though he tried not to dwell much on the specifics. This imagined future was as blurry and unfocused as the rest of them, because Shane found it hard to think beyond the current fishing season. Maybe he liked living in the moment or did not want to plan ahead on purpose. Maybe it was both. A future meant making a decision, and a change. 

Still, he was only human, and his mind wandered. He was thirty-three and most of his friends from school all had families, their happy faces and latest achievements splattered across his Facebook feed, so of course he thought of it. Hayden had made him godfather to little Arthur and he loved that little kid, tumbling around the wharf on little stubby legs when Jackie brought the kids to visit. Some days in the deep dark yawn of winter it was all he could think about. Not in longing but rather in a sort of stupefying anxiety. He was quite certain that having children — even hypothetical, imaginary children — out of a sense of duty was unfair to all involved. Not having them was maybe worse. 

“Maybe I should just get rid of it,” she said, and took a deep breath. Much hung unspoken in that inhale, even more in the exhale. 

“I’ll take the bin home,” he said. He didn’t know what else to say to make her stop breathing like that. 

“Oh, honey, it’s not—you don’t have to—”

“It’s fine,” he said. “There’s room in the basement.”

“Are you sure? It’s just, well, you never know when… you know. And I wouldn’t want you to regret giving it away.” Before he could answer she laughed a little wetly. “Look at me, blubbering like this. Gotta get it together.”

Abruptly he realized his eyes were damp too.

“Okay,” he said and straightened his shoulders. “Okay. Let me go put this in the truck.”

—

He was back on the water the next morning and by evening, back in Ilya’s bed. Then the day after, and the day after. They didn’t speak much beyond their typical banter and quiet questions about their catch and the season so far, but Ilya didn’t turn Shane away when he knocked on the door. He never had, not in over a decade. 

Before Shane knew it they were thirty days in, hauling upwards of two and a half thousand pounds of lobster a day, making both his fish buyer and his baitmonger very happy men. A transmission on the fritz made them lose half a day some time in late May, but the good weather held up and they were still ahead of last year’s numbers. Scott Hunter’s Admiral towed them into the harbour while Shane called his repair guy. This time of year his guy was on call essentially around the clock, like many tradesmen were, and the Voyageur was declared seaworthy by suppertime. 

“Get some fucking rest,” Hayden said after the mechanic left. “You look like shit.”

They’d taken the free afternoon afforded by the broken transmission to cut and bundle some more bait, frozen redfish and gaspereau sawed in neat halves then bundled together and left out to thaw so they could start the pungent process of rotting. It was nasty, cold work in the garage off the side of the wharf fitted with freezers and stainless steel tables and drains right in the floor so they could hose off any blood remaining. Nasty, cold work that attracted lobster like nothing else. 

Over the years Shane had tried combination after combination of bait, and still liked to switch it up based on how the lobster was biting, the price of the stuff, and how he was feeling. Some men never deviated from their special recipe, but in this, Shane did not feel it was necessary to stick with what his father and grandfather had done. Same with the trap. In years past they were rounded on the top, straight on the bottom, thick wooden things that didn’t stack right and were hard for lobster to crawl into. Then he tried rectangular traps made of vinyl-coated wire. Lighter, bright yellow, neatly stackable things that didn’t catch lobster worth shit. Now he had settled on a mix of both: rectangular traps of wood, cement weight on the bottom, heavier but sturdy. The lobster seemed to like this the most, so Shane did too. To be the best you needed the best equipment, the best bait, the best men, and Shane wanted to be the best.

“Why do I look like shit?”

“You been sleeping alright?” said JJ, in his French accent inherited from his mother. They were hosing off the garage and themselves, watching the water run from red to clear. 

“Christ, we’re halfway into the best season we’ve had in years. I’m a little tired. Sue me,” Shane said. He wiped his face with his hoodie sleeve. He was a little tired, this was true, but only because he’d been spending later and later nights at Ilya’s, even falling asleep there once after a particularly demanding fuck, waking only at two in a panic when Ilya got up to piss.

“Oh please,” Hayden said. “You live for this.”

“I can still be tired,” Shane said. “We’ve been getting some sun.”

“So if I drive by your house tonight, at say, nine, you’ll be asleep?”

“You can’t drive by my house,” Shane said, aware he sounded defensive but unable to stop it. “It’s on a dead-end road.”

JJ shut the hose off and squinted at him. “What’s got you out of bed so late?”

“Nine o’clock is not late,” Shane grumbled. 

“It is for you,” pointed out Hayden, correctly. “At least it is this time of year.”

“Since when are you two this fucking nosy!” Shane stomped toward the garage door.

Hayden snorted and followed him, JJ not far behind. “Since always?” Hayden said. 

“Do you know where you live?” asked JJ.

“Well aware.”

They stepped out into the sunshine. The wharf was nearly quiet, with most gone home for supper by now. Some seagulls flew in lazy circles at the mouth of the harbour and little black ducks floated with the rippling waves near the Voyageur.

“Captain Hollander!” he heard, and whipped his head around to see Ilya striding toward them in rubber boots and clothes wet from working, a young man with his shoulders around his ears in tow. 

“Jesus,” said Hayden. “What’s he want?”

“He’s a nice guy,” Shane said. 

“With a terrible singing voice,” said JJ. Just this morning Ilya had regaled them with a rousing and decidedly pitchy rendition of Barrett’s Privateers over the CB radio. Most days, like he did the first morning, he liked to get on there, send out a few roasts, comment on the weather, make note of some gossip he’d heard about neighbouring wharves, or sing them a song, even if he didn’t know the words. Shane was impossibly fond of this phenomenon, and listened intently with his coffee as the sun rose over the horizon, while JJ and Hayden and likely most of the fleet were perpetually annoyed.

“Captain Hollander, my deckhand has something to say.”

Ilya’s eyes sparkled in the sun. It was getting warmer but still chilly, and a stiff breeze blew his salt-caked and sweaty curls around his face, and Shane couldn’t help but smile. Beneath Ilya’s sweater Shane knew there were marks from his nail and teeth. It thrilled him to know Ilya must have felt them on him all day. 

“Uh, hello, I’m Brayden Walsh,” said the kid. Not more than eighteen, with the big ears that ran in his family and sleepy, downturned eyes.

“Buddy Walsh’s grandson,” said Hayden. “How’s it going on your old man’s boat? Captain Rozanov make your ears bleed yet?”

“Heard your sister got married,” added JJ. “Went to school with her, you know. How’s your mother?”

Ilya grunted. “Shane, I did not know you hired the old women at Tim Horton’s to work your deck this year.”

“Certainly feels that way sometimes,” said Shane, rolling his eyes. “What can I do for you, Brayden?”

Ilya nudged the kid. 

“I just wanted to, ah, thank you, for making sure the Raider was okay in the storm the other day.”

“Jesus, kid. That was three weeks ago. It’s fine.”

Brayden nodded and turned to go, but stopped when Ilya raised an eyebrow. 

“And?” Ilya said. Hayden and JJ watched the exchange with wide eyes, their heads swinging back and forth.

“And… it was my fault it wasn’t tied up properly. I’m sorry you had to step in to help. It won’t happen again,” said Brayden. 

“I’m sure it won’t,” said Shane. “You learned your lesson. Right?”

“Right.”

“Augh,” said Ilya. He looked disappointed. “I thought you’d be a little harder on him.”

“Hey!” cried Brayden, affronted. 

Shane laughed. 

“I could be,” he offered. “If you were my guy I would be.”

“First year, Jesus Christ,” said Hayden. “Thought he was gonna bite my head off the time I suggested having a beer with lunch one day.”

“Remember when he had to redo like, six coils of rope because I couldn’t figure out how to get them to stay in those nice tight loops?” JJ said. “I thought he was going to fire me on the spot.”

“You’re making me sound like a fucking tight ass,” grumbled Shane. He didn’t have to look to know that Ilya was staring at him with glee. 

“He annoyed me so much about smoking I quit,” said Ilya. “Do you know how fun it is to smoke on the water while you work?”

“Didn’t know you two were so friendly,” said Hayden mildly. 

“More like he just really hates cigarettes.”

“I’m going home, assholes,” said Shane. “I don’t deserve this.”

He waved a dismissive hand at them and walked off without looking back, their laughter following him all the way home. He couldn’t help but smile.

—

The truth was that Shane and Ilya met the first time at the Tavern, like so many other couples in the village, and in his weaker moments when Shane thought of telling his parents about Ilya, this was what he told them. It was stupid, though, to think of telling them. Really, what would he say? They didn’t even know Shane was gay, or whatever. Shane and Ilya weren’t in love. They were secret long-term fuckbuddies. They’d shared one meal in eleven years. Shane had only recently learned Ilya had a brother, for fuck’s sake, and he still didn’t know the brother’s name. The only reason Ilya knew anything about Shane at all was because everyone knew everything about Shane, or mostly everything — his family and its history was splashed all along the pages of Pardon’s Point’s story.

They met at the Tavern, but they didn’t sleep together for the first time until weeks later, and this, he would keep to himself forever. It wasn’t even a good story. He would just have to explain to his parents why he’d blown off a date with a beautiful out-of-towner with flowing red hair and big blue eyes he’d met the night before while walking along the beach hunting for the sea glass his mother loved, and why instead of this date he’d gone back to the wharf to sit on the tailgate of the old beat-up truck he had back then and watch his father’s boat — Shane’s boat — with a can of lukewarm beer in his hand. He didn’t even like beer much, not then and not now, but it felt like the right thing to be drinking. 

If he closed his eyes he could see it before him, a scene that never changed and happened still nightly: mosquitos floating around the back of his neck, the smell of seaweed and mud and lobster prickling his nostrils, the sun dropping lower above the horizon. The harbourmaster came and did his rounds, checking for any suspicious activity, waving a hand at Shane. Some captains drove right up on the docks to make sure everything was right with their ships, as they always did. What was different about that night was Ilya Rozanov, twenty two and looking shell-shocked, sunburnt, and winded by his first few weeks at sea, parking the tiny Toyota hatchback he drove back then and unfolding his long legs from the front seat before hopping up onto the tailgate to sit next to Shane. 

It occurred to him now, all these years later, that he should have felt surprised by this. They didn’t know each other, not really, and back then Shane still felt a flash of irritation every time he watched the Raider sail away with Ilya at the helm instead of old Buddy Walsh. It felt incongruous to the Pardon’s Point he knew and loved, how the careful rhythm of the village stuttered around this cocky, inexperienced stranger. 

But he wasn’t surprised. He just scooted over so Ilya had room, and pulled out another beer from the bag next to him and handed it over wordlessly. 

“You are new captain too,” Ilya said.

“Yeah,” Shane said. “I took over my father’s license. That’s — a lot of guys do that.”

Ilya nodded. He’d likely heard this particular piece of gossip his first week. 

“I’m figure it out,” Ilya said. Back then his grasp on the English language was still weak. “Fishing, I mean. But is very hard.”

A call back to their first meeting at the Tavern. Shane scoffed.

“Of course it’s fucking hard. If it was easy everyone would do it.”

“You like things hard, Captain Hollander?”

Shane thought of the woman he was supposed to meet with that night and how he had texted her something stupid about needing to get to bed early. Really it was just that he’d tried the dating thing before, at his own behest and at Hayden’s insistence. He’d had flings here and there, and he was tired of it. They never understood why every year they had to be put aside for two months in favour of a lobster boat, why he came home so bruised and battered his legs and stomach were more purple than not and why he felt proud of it, why he still lived with his parents, and why he didn’t want sex all the time like other men in their early twenties. This last wasn’t even true, but it wasn’t like he could tell them that. He did want sex, just not with them, and in unguarded moments, late at night with snow hitting against his bedroom window, he thought he knew why. Hayden just called him picky. Yuna called him a romantic. God only knew what the guys on the wharf would call it. And Shane — Shane tried not to call it anything.

But here was Ilya, an impish twinkle in his eye, broad shoulders, a body with hard muscles so unlike the soft curves of that woman, and a boat that was his in the harbour, looking at Shane with such frank openness. Shane could have taken the out and said something about how he did like hard work, and this hard work especially, how he liked the way his mind settled and his muscles burned, and how he didn’t even need the plotter to remember where he’d lain his lines because he was obsessive about them, and how he felt when he unloaded the catch onto the dock for the fish buyer to send off to Japan, or America, or any of the different lobster processing plants off the peninsula, knowing that lobster he’d caught was feeding people around the world, and business he’d brought filling wallets in his village.

What he said, instead, was this: “How hard?”

“Oh,” Ilya said immediately, “I could show you.”

“Yeah?” Shane drained his beer and threw it behind him into the dirty truck bed, and Ilya did the same. After the season was over he was sure this total psychopath would never set foot here again, so what did it matter, really? “Alright. Show me.”

—

That was how it started, really, but he still didn’t know how it would end. He kind of hoped it never did but also knew he was just delaying what felt inevitable. It couldn’t continue like this forever. Eventually it had to erode. Something, or someone, had to give. And yet – eleven years. Eleven years of clandestine sex, slipping out of Ilya’s house in the star-studded dark, biting back questions he knew he shouldn’t ask. For the first few years it felt like what adults told kids about farm animals and stray cats: don’t name it, you’ll get attached. The unspoken being that it would eventually run away or die. Now they’d spent too long avoiding any kind of honest conversation about it in favour of making the best use of the little time they had together by fucking some more, that he didn’t know how to broach the topic or even if he should. But they had had breakfast together, now. Shane had been on Ilya’s boat. Ilya had made a joke in front of Hayden and JJ about him quitting smoking because of Shane, which was actually insane, because he’d never said anything about it before, and it had been at least four years since he’d last smelled of tobacco.

Maybe all those reasons were why, for the first time, Shane let himself feel the full force of his want. It was a staggering, weighty thing, stronger than any shame he felt about disappointing – his family, maybe. His legacy and the expectations it came with. The excuses began to feel weaker than his desire. He couldn’t shy away from it any longer, and certainly couldn’t bring himself to stay from Ilya’s for more than a night or two anymore. 

The night after Ilya made his deckhand apologize, Shane found himself once more driving up Ilya’s shitty driveway, parking his truck next to the house in its usual spot. The only light was from a single fixture on the outside of the garage attached to the angled, modern building, and the stars. It was quiet in a way that wasn’t really quiet at all: spring peepers and crickets screeching, the sound of the waves coming to die against the cliff over and over, the crunch of gravel beneath his feet, the rustle of the stunted brush along the side of the house that separated Ilya from his nearest neighbour. If you kept going past that neighbour you’d find the old Pardon’s Point lighthouse, now battered and on its way to ruin, though Shane remembered its haunting drone and light as a child in times of heavy fog.

This was the soundtrack of Shane’s life, soft sounds he wanted to bottle and keep with him forever to listen to whenever he had to go away.

Though – there was another sound, out of place in this calm night, that Shane could hear from the other side of the house. Ilya’s voice carried in the dark, a raised, angry sort of voice in a language Shane had never heard him speak before but he assumed it was his mother tongue.

Instead of going inside he walked round the house to the front deck that overlooked the water, where he found Ilya pacing, his phone pressed to his ear. Ilya glanced at Shane but said nothing to him, only huffed and continued his discussion with whoever was on the phone. 

Though he couldn’t understand anything Shane decided to afford Ilya the privacy of getting angry without Shane listening in. He walked the sixty feet to the edge of the cliff and looked out into the ink-black water. He could see a light far away – a cargo ship, or a coast guard vessel, perhaps. He stared at it until it winked out, gone over the horizon, then he turned his attention to the cliff. Over the years it had receded, the waves gouging out rock from the bottom of it until the top bits fell into the sea. Tufts of grass grew along the edge where Ilya’s didn’t dare mow, but the roots weren’t enough to keep the soil intact. With each storm it got worse, and with each year there were more storms. The house was far enough away from the edge now, but it wouldn’t be the case forever, and Ilya was not the only one with this issue. Like the fishery, Shane felt that sometimes the end was looming near. Likely his grandfather had never worried about water getting too warm to support the crustaceans he so coveted, nor about the cliffs on which a good third of the houses of Pardon’s Point rested upon washing away. Would he have done anything differently, if he had known? Would he have still passed on his livelihood to his son, and then his son’s son and then–? Or were the tides just too intrinsic to his body, the waves too attuned to his heart? Could he have imagined any other kind of life or future for himself or his progeny?

Shane asked himself all these questions even as he knew he was no better a man. At this point there was nothing now that could tempt him away from this life. Everything he wanted was here. He had never wanted anything else. Or, well, almost.

An arm wrapped around his torso as he blinked away something wet clinging to his lashes.

“Ah, sorry to keep you waiting,” Ilya murmured in Shane’s ear. They were the exact same height, and Shane leaned back to rest his head on Ilya’s shoulder.

“It’s okay,” Shane whispered. “Are you alright?”

“Just my brother,” Ilya said. 

“Oh,” Shane breathed. He had a million things to ask. He settled on one. “Are you close?”

Ilya huffed a laugh into Shane’s neck. “Ah, no, not really. But I still need him.”

“You miss him?”

“Is complicated,” Ilya said.

“Tell me,” Shane breathed. “Why do you go back to Russia every year? You said – you said your father…”

“My father is sick. Like he – he forgets things.”

“Alzheimer’s?”

“No, the other one.”

“Dementia,” Shane said. Ilya nodded against him. 

“He needs me to care for him,” Ilya said. “He does not remember about making me leave. Sometimes he thinks I am still just little and my mother is alive.”

“Oh,” Shane said. “I’m so sorry.”

“I don’t know if I am sorry about it,” said Ilya. “Sometimes yes. Sometimes no.”

They stood quietly in the night, wrapped in each other. The sounds of his life around him, and the scents of it too. The salt, the seaweed, the fresh green spring on the wind, sweet wild roses, Ilya’s laundry detergent and the spice of the deodorant he wore. He didn’t know much about this man but he knew this and he would know it forever.

“You wanna go inside?” he said eventually.

“Not yet,” Ilya said. “We do not have stars like this in Moscow.”

Shane had been to cities, had visited on vacations with his parents and school trips. He knew what they were like. Not ones as large as Moscow, certainly, but he figured all cities were kind of the same. Loud, mostly, and bright, their people unpredictable, no one stopping to say hello in the grocery store next to the salad dressings and mayonnaises. Nothing like the slow tempo of life he knew, the faces he recognized. And loved.

“I bet,” he said.

The arms around Shane’s waist squeezed even tighter, and Shane melted into the hold.

“I do not have anything like this in Moscow.”

–

An hour later, sweat-sticky and sated, tangled in Ilya’s bedsheets:

“You could stay.”

“Stay? Here?”

“Yes. For tonight.”

“But my, my lunch for tomorrow–”

“I will make you a sandwich to take with you. Baloney.”

“Jesus Christ, Ilya, is that what you eat every day?”

“Mm, is good, is cheap. I put mustard and pickles. What’s wrong with that?”

“Clearly you still wanna die.”

“Ah, no. Not anymore. I promise.”

A breath. A kiss.

“Okay. I’ll stay.”

–

Thirteen days left and their numbers were still up from previous years, and the price of lobster held around eight fifty a pound. Hayden and JJ were already making plans with what they would do with their bonus, sure to be high. Shane was trying not to think about what would happen when the season ended. Ilya would stick around for a month or two, fixing broken traps and cleaning the boat before he stored it for the winter, and then he would be gone, and Shane would be alone, again. 

Well, as alone as he could be, given where he lived. He could not go anywhere without being stopped to ask how the season was going, how his mother was enjoying retirement, how his father’s garden was doing. Answers: great, very much, and excellent so far, if the number of jars of jam and sauerkraut in Shane’s pantry were any indicator. He didn’t mind the questions. Truthfully his mother had thrown herself into the cleaning out of her house, and the care of the business side of Shane’s life. The bookkeeping he always put off too long was for once up to date, thanks to Yuna. He wondered how Ilya handled the paperwork and administration that came with owning a boat and managing employees. He didn’t seem like the type to enjoy this kind of thing, but Shane had been surprised by him before.

To thank his mother he brought her fifty pounds of lobster and a pint of wild strawberries the size of the tip of his pinky he’d picked along the road to his house. They ate them together with his father while they waited for the lobster to finish boiling in the huge pot they reserved for just this occasion, perched on a propane burner on the cement floor of the garage. The berries burst like sweet candy on his tongue. Every year David said he would save some and make strawberry shortcake with them but every year they couldn’t help themselves, and there was never any left for dessert.

The lobster they had with beer, fresh bread and potato salad. Some liked to dip the meat in butter but his family preferred it simple and well-salted, suffused with the sweetness of late spring catch. The dozens of lobster left over were for processing. They worked in an assembly line at a picnic table with a plastic gingham checkered tablecloth over it in the garage: his mother cut the claws and bodies open, Shane pulled out the meat, his father packed little half-pound plastic containers with it, topping it off with brine, so they could freeze them for the winter and keep them tasting juicy and fresh. All over Pardon’s Point he suspected people would be doing much the same in the final days of the season. Again, Shane thought of Ilya. Had he ever learned to do this? Did he know the feeling of satisfaction you got when you opened your freezer in the dark hopelessness of January and saw rows of meat that you caught and you prepared? How it felt to feed your family with it, to watch someone you loved rub his belly in contentment? Surely, he must have brought some over with him so they could see and taste tangible proof of his work. Did they even know the life he led, the way he pushed his body every day for this little crustacean, this strange bottom-feeding cockroach of a creature that people around the world thought of as the height of luxury?

It should have been impossible to hide something like that from your family. When Shane looked at Ilya he saw the ocean. Perpetually wind-swept hair, glittering blue eyes, a beating heart thumping like the tide against the cliff. A tempestuous laugh, an off-key song over the radio, clever fingers tying knots. Tall steel-toe rubber boots, fluorescent yellow rain weathers, an old holey t-shirt underneath, arms tanned in the sun. If Shane closed his eyes this is the man he thought of, waving at him from his ship across the harbour, at twenty two years old and at thirty three, and every age in between. He didn’t know any other Ilya. How could his family not know? It must bleed through everything, he thought. When they look at him they must know he belongs to the sea. 

And yet – it was not impossible. 

“I have something to tell you,” Shane said, when the sun was beginning to set and they were finishing the last few pounds of lobster. He wiped his sticky hands on a towel and sat up straighter. “I – please don’t be mad.”

He watched as Yuna and David glanced at each other and put down their tools.

“Okay,” David said, when Shane didn’t speak.

“We’re listening,” from Yuna.

It felt ridiculous that he could face ten foot waves on a tiny, floating vessel on the great Atlantic without so much as a raise in his heart beat but this, this made his palms clammy with sweat and his stomach hurt. 

“It’s just that – I mean, I should probably have told you sooner – I think I’ve known a while,” he said.

“Honey,” breathed his mother.

“I’m gay,” he said, finally. His parents just looked at him, unblinking. He couldn’t read the expression on their face and felt compelled to continue. “Actually, I’ve known a long time. And it killed me to keep it from you but I was – scared, mostly. Of what you would think.”

His father spoke first.

“Shane,” he said, “we love you, no matter what. You know that, right?”

“I know that, in my head I know, but I thought – maybe this isn’t what you wanted for me,” Shane said. “It isn’t really what I wanted for me either.”

“We just want you to be happy,” Yuna said. “We kind of – I think we kind of suspected.”

“Really?” His voice cracked.

“Well, it’s been a while since we’ve heard about you, ah, seeing any women,” David said. “And I know we shouldn’t rely on the rumour mill or anything, but, you know, people talk.”

“I know. I know.”

“We’re so proud of you, you know,” his dad continued. “Your grandfather would be so proud of you.”

“Don’t say that,” Shane said. “You can’t know that.”

“Of course we know that,” Yuna whispered. “You work so hard. You’re exactly what he hoped for.”

“But what if–” Now he was crying, and his mother was too, and he couldn’t stop it. He couldn’t even wipe his eyes as the lobster juice left over on his hands would sting too badly, so he just let the tears fall, salt on salt on salt. “What if I can’t, you know, continue the legacy? What if it ends here?”

“Is this what you were afraid of?” David asked. Shane could only nod. “What legacy? It’s not real, Shane, it’s just stories.”

“They feel real,” Shane said. “Don’t they?”

“You can still have children, Shane,” Yuna said. “You being gay doesn’t make any difference. Nothing has to end here.”

“Mom…”

“And if you don’t want to, it’s okay,” David said swiftly. “None of it matters. You could retire tomorrow and live a good life. Who cares?”

Shane closed his eyes. “I do. Or I did. I don’t want anything to change.”

“Things change all the time,” David said. “The whole industry is changing. Who knows if there will be anything to pass on at all?”

“God,” Shane said. He felt almost relieved — relieved and sick with it. Maybe it was like Ilya said, about his father not remembering him. A blessing, a curse. 

“Are you seeing anyone?” Yuna asked.

“I – don’t want to say.”

She nodded. He knew his answer was a roundabout way of saying yes but in this, at least, his mother didn’t pry. 

“Well, if ever you do, we’d love to — to have him over,” she said. And with a decisive nod she picked up her kitchen shears again and continued the last of the work before them, and Shane and David did the same. 

—

Twelve days, a heavy fog settled thick over the water, a delayed start. Shane kissed Ilya in the sunshine, a muted sunshine diffused by mist, for the first time in his life before hopping into his truck and driving to the wharf. 

Eleven days, and he began taking inventory of the work he and his men would have to do to the traps and the boat and the garage once the season ended, what he would have to subcontract and what they could do themselves. 

Ten days, choppy waters, just shy of fifteen hundred pounds of catch. He never wanted it to end, not when the lobster was still biting, not when he had a toothbrush at Ilya’s and had gotten used to the taste of baloney with mustard and pickles. 

Nine days, calm. 

Eight days. Ilya fucked him under the Pardon’s Point stars on the back deck, soft and slow like the waves. 

Seven days. Six days. Five days, and — a storm forecasted for the weekend. Storm of the summer, they said. Hundred klicks an hour, maybe more. Scott Hunter raised his traps early. Ilya said he’d hang on as long as he could, and Shane agreed. It would only be fair.

—

A season was sixty days, no more, no less. If the beginning of the season, which was not on a fixed date and was chosen every year by the authorities, had to be pushed back due to late spring ice floes in the zone’s harbours or bad weather, maybe they’d tack on a day or two at the end. But it was still sixty days, and if at the end of those sixty days you could not haul in your traps, they’d be seized and you’d be fined heavily, and maybe have your license suspended for a time. Not to mention the significant investment into new traps, which could run you a few hundred each, and when you had over two hundred traps — well. Ghost gear, gear left forgotten in the currents, was taken seriously because of its effect on marine wildlife. If there was reason to believe you could not raise your lines by the deadline, you had interest in doing sooner.

Two days left in the season, and Shane had to call it. 

“I think this means I will beat you this year,” Ilya said before they left the house, pressing Shane’s sandwich and a thermos of coffee firmly into his hands. Only, his words had no heat behind them, and Shane knew he’d pull up his gear too. They were two of the last left out there, the wind forecasted to pick up by nightfall. 

“Yeah, yeah, as if,” he said. He pulled on his jacket where it was hung in the closet after its run through the washer last night, like every night. His own washer hadn’t been used in — two weeks, maybe. 

Ilya scrunched his nose. “Fuck, I forgot to bring the patio furniture into the garage.”

“Ah, shit. Let me help you,” Shane said, though he was antsy to head off, and Ilya knew it. He wanted to get it over with. 

“No, no, go, I won’t be far behind,” said Ilya. He punctuated it with a kiss and a firm pat on Shane’s ass. 

Shane turned to go but stopped at the door.

“Hey, uh, be safe, okay?” he said. “I’ll see you tonight?”

It was the first time he had ever made plans before for them, even if the plan was just what he would do anyway: find Ilya in his bed, have sex that left him shaking and profoundly well in his body, and fall asleep together. Ilya rewarded this silly little moment of bravery with a smile that reached his eyes. 

“Yes, you will.”

—

Shane was so intent on preparing for the task of the day he didn’t notice Ilya’s truck missing from the rows of similar vehicles. The harbour was a bustle of activity with crews coming to haul the last of their traps up and prepare for the oncoming storm. Already, there were great rows and piles of traps stacked along the wharves, an echo of the first day of the season, only instead of excitement, Shane felt dread.

“What’s going on with the Raider?” Hayden asked as he pulled his life jacket on but left it unzipped.

Shane whipped around to stare across the water where the Raider was tied up. It was hard to tell in the grey light of dawn but it did not look like it was idling yet, just swaying gently with the waves. On the deck Ilya’s men seemed to be having an argument. Cliff Marleau was pacing, his phone to his ear, while Brayden Walsh was waving his hands animatedly.

“They’re cutting it close if they’re not raising their lines today,” JJ said. 

“They are,” Shane said. “They’re supposed to be. I mean, wouldn’t they?”

He thought back to Ilya’s words, about beating Shane in annual catch, but that was just a joke. It always was just a joke. It didn’t mean anything, not really. It was just for fun, Shane thought, like a little boy pulling on a crush’s pigtails. His stomach twisted. He ignored it.

“Go see,” JJ said. “You’re buds with the guy, right?”

“He’s been weird all season,” said Hayden. “I used to see him in line at Tim’s every morning for coffee and he hasn’t been in like, weeks.”

“Haven’t seen him at the Tavern much either,” JJ said. “Definitely not picking up any hot come-from-aways anymore. Maybe something happened?”

“Nothing happened,” Shane said. “Frig. Okay. I’m going to go over.”

With ease Shane clambered out of the boat and onto the dock. He strode straight to the Raider, where Cliff was now standing looking mutinous, arms crossed. Brayden was sitting on the deck with his legs splayed out, head in his hands. 

“What’s going on?” Shane said. He hopped down into the boat.

“Fucker didn’t show up,” Cliff said. He was a few years older than Shane, but Shane had gone to school with his youngest brother. In a town like this you were connected to everyone, in funny little ways.

“What? What do you mean?”

“Cap’s not here and he’s not answering his phone,” Brayden Walsh said. “We’re fucked.”

“I — what? I saw him, like, half an hour ago,” Shane said. He peered into the cabin as if Ilya would be waiting there, radio in hand ready to rattle off his daily observations about the state of the world, smirking at their panic.

“Where?” Cliff asked. 

“I, uh, met him on the road.”

“Which way was he headed?”

“Christ, I don’t – why don’t I just go to his house?”

Cliff squinted at him. “Don’t you have your own shit to deal with?” he said. “I’ll go. Brayden, stay here in case he gets here.”

“He’s never late,” Brayden said. “Fuck!”

“Okay, okay, okay,” Shane said. He was trying very hard to stay calm, though with the way his heart was beating, he knew he was only somewhat successful. “Call me if you hear anything or – whatever you need, I guess.”

Cliff nodded and climbed off the deck. Shane gave his phone number to Brayden then followed behind. 

“What’s going on over there?” Hayden asked when Shane returned. 

“They can’t find him.”

“Who?”

“Ilya, fuck.”

“He’s a grown man, I’m sure it’ll be fine,” Hayden said. “We’ve got to get going, anyway, if we want to do this in good time.”

Shane shook himself and ignored the way JJ and Hayden glanced at each other. The sky was turning lighter, an ugly colour, cloudy. The boat rumbled beneath their feet.

“Okay, let’s do this.”

It was lucky JJ and Hayden knew what they were doing. Lifting traps at the end of the season was a tricky operation that required multiple trips back to land, and a certain kind of ragged finesse to do it safely. You not only had to contend with the pots themselves, wet and heavy and smelling of seaweed, taking up space on deck, but the lobster too, had to get back to shore to be sold. They threw them in grey plastic crates, around one hundred pounds per crate, then stored them below deck where normally the bait would be held, but it was a tight space that didn’t hold much. The deck was slippery, the gulls ravenous, but JJ and Hayden were sure-footed and efficient, gossiping and joking as they worked. For once Shane stayed mostly in the cabin. There wasn’t much room for him out with them and he didn’t feel like talking. He checked his phone every few minutes, and called Ilya too, using the number he’d saved ten years ago for the first time. It went straight to voicemail.

Every time they returned to harbour to unload some catch and traps Shane looked over to the Raider, still moored. Even if Cliff knew how to navigate, which wasn’t a given as you had to take a course and become certified to do it, he wasn’t allowed to sail it without his captain aboard. The only way another captain could man your craft is if you got special permission from the authorities. Otherwise, like leaving your traps in the water after the deadline, they would fine you, and most likely suspend you, if not take away your license outright. 

When they stopped briefly to eat the baloney sandwich felt like sand on his tongue. He was angry he couldn’t enjoy it. If it was the last sandwich Ilya ever made him.

It was mid-afternoon when his phone finally rang. They had a few lines left, but it was their last run, and JJ and Hayden were discussing their evening’s plans for getting drunk at the Tavern with other fishermen from around the peninsula. The last day of the season was always a celebration. On other ships it started early, with beer or harder stuff out on the deck by mid-morning, and it continued all day. Shane didn’t allow this but he did enjoy sharing a cold one when they were done. He did have a two-four of Keith’s in his storage hold he’d stashed earlier in the week but with the weirdness of the morning he hadn’t had a chance to put it on ice. It didn’t look like anyone was going to stick around the wharf to get drunk anyway. Given the weather they’d likely all head to the warm and dry shelter of the Tavern.

Shane was leaning against the door of the cabin watching Hayden pull the winch up when he felt a vibration from the phone he gripped tightly in his hand.

“I’ll probably just stay home – oh!” cried Shane as his phone rang loudly. He fumbled to answer it. “Hello?”

“Hi, is this Captain Shane Hollander?” said a voice he did not recognize. Shane frowned.

“Yes, speaking?”

“I’m Officer Grace Gallant with the Department of Fisheries and Oceans,” said the voice. She sounded young. “I’ve received a request from an, ah, Ilya Rozanov. It seems he’s unable to lift his traps today due to some unexpected circumstances.”

“What? What are the circumstances? Is he okay?” Shane said. He ran a hand through his hair. 

“He’s okay,” she said. “Family emergency.”

“Jesus Christ, okay, he didn’t say what kind?”

“I don’t know if I should say. In any case, he submitted an emergency request through our office to have you lift his traps. We can grant the request as long as — you mean you didn’t know about this?”

“No, no, God, I didn’t know.”

“Well, as long as you’re able and you want to, you could do it. Any payment would have to be negotiated with him. He gave us a few back-up names but — you understand this is unorthodox.”

“It would have to be—” Shane said, looking up at Hayden and JJ who were staring. “I mean, with the weather, so, uh, I have an hour left with my rig and then I can be there.”

Hayden made a noise. “Who is that?” he said. 

“One sec,” said Shane to the officer on the phone. He tucked it against his chest to speak to Hayden and JJ.

“It’s DFO. They want me to haul the Raider’s lines up.”

“Now? Are you a total psychopath?” exclaimed JJ. “You’ve got maybe five, six hours left before it gets dangerous out here.”

“I fucking know!” Shane felt wild. If something happened to Ilya, if he couldn’t call Shane himself and explain  — it had to be for a good reason. Or else Shane had completely misunderstood this man and what they were doing together. 

“Let Scott Hunter do it, that old fuck lifted his traps days ago.”

Hayden rolled his eyes. “You wanna kill the guy? Think Shane’s the only one who could do this, anyway. He knows where everyone’s buoys are. Tell her we’ll do it.”

“Now I know you’re both fucking crazy,” JJ said. “I’m not signing up to die because some out-of-towner can’t follow the rules.”

Shane looked at JJ, and JJ looked back, his eyes hard. 

“Okay. Fine. Then let’s hurry up and get finished with this so JJ can go home,” Shane said. He turned away and stepped into the cabin. He heard them jump to work behind him, the winch starting up again.

“Alright,” he said into the phone, closing the cabin door behind him. “I’ll be in harbour in forty five minutes, maybe an hour. I’m bringing one of my guys to help.”

The woman on the phone made a noise of agreement. “We’ll have some paperwork for you both to fill out, and I’ll be accompanying you, just to make sure everything stays on the level.”

Outside the sky was darkening steadily and the boat swayed, up and down. “That’s — it’ll be dangerous, probably. I won’t poach his catch, I promise.”

“Rules are rules,” she said. “I’ll stay out of your way.”

He sighed. “Whatever. See you soon.”

—

On his final trip of the day back to the harbour with the Voyageur, Shane called the fish-buyer to let him know he was going back out, and he called his mother.

“Mom?” he said when she picked up. 

“Hi honey, are you still out there? David, come here. Okay, you’re on speaker.”

“Hi Dad,” Shane said. “Yeah, we’re on our way back with the last run. Listen, can you stop by the wharf in a bit and pick up the crate for the old folks’ home?”

“Of course,” David said. For decades their family had donated a hundred pounds of catch at the end of the season. “Why can’t you bring it?”

“Long fucking story,” Shane said. “I’ll tell you guys later. But I just want to say that I love you, okay?”

“Are you dying? What’s going on?” Yuna said. 

“Definitely not,” Shane said. His heart was beating too fast for that to be a lie. “But don’t wait up for me for supper.”

“It’s Sunday,” David said. They always had Sunday supper. “I made ribs.”

“Save some for me. I gotta go now. I love you.”

He hung up before they could ask any more questions. 

Minutes later they docked. Waiting for them on the wharf was Cliff Marleau, Brayden Walsh, and a woman in a black uniform with a nametag indicating she was the DFO officer Shane had spoken with. He climbed up onto the wharf. 

“Fuck, she’s getting rowdy out there,” said Cliff. “We doing this?”

“No choice,” said Shane. “Brayden, stay with JJ and unload our catch. Hayden’s gonna come with us to help.”

“Thank God,” said the kid, who was staring at the large waves hitting mercilessly against the rocky gabion protecting the harbour, and who looked pale and close to vomiting. 

Hayden appeared behind him, tying the boat to the dock cleat.

“I called Jackie,” he said. He grunted when he stood and swung his arms to stretch them out. “God, what I wouldn’t give for a beer and thirteen hours of uninterrupted sleep.”

“You’ll have all winter,” said Cliff. “Man up.”

“Spoken like a guy with no small children.” 

“Alright, alright,” said the officer. She seemed young but sturdy, and certainly didn’t look afraid of what they were about to do. “Let’s go fill out this paperwork and head off.”

So they did. The Raider was an older vessel but the deck was wider with a different center of gravity than Shane was used to. Still, a boat was a boat, and this boat in particular had a powerful engine and new tech that Shane was familiar with. It was faster than the Voyageur but didn’t maneuver quite as smoothly. It felt more like his grandfather’s old boat when he got behind the wheel, the one he’d first learned to navigate with. Like a ghost he felt Eugene Hollander’s steady hand on his shoulder and like something more substantial he felt Ilya’s lips on his neck.

It wasn’t his first time in this cabin but it took him a minute to get situated anyway. It wouldn’t be too hard to find all of Ilya’s buoys, even in these foamy, dirty waters, fluorescent green to Shane’s yellow and blue. This late in the season they were closer to the cliffs of the peninsula, the lobster moving inshore as the water warmed, and everyone else had lifted their traps by now, too. Plus, Shane did like to keep track of everyone else’s lines — especially Ilya’s.

“You hear from him at all?” Shane murmured to Cliff when he poked his head in to see how Shane was faring. Officer Gallant was sitting comfortably at the table, scrolling through her phone. 

“No,” Cliff said. “Just know what you know. But I figure it’s something to do with his dad. He’s not well, I don’t know if you heard.”

“He told me,” Shane said. “Didn’t go into too many details but I figured.”

“God, that’s a shitty fucking story if I ever heard one,” Cliff said. 

“He told you about it?”

“He tells me everything.” Cliff raised an eyebrow and looked Shane over slowly. “Well, almost everything.”

Shane tried to keep his face straight. “I’m fine here. Go outside and make sure Hayden isn’t trying to swim back to shore.”

Cliff saluted him and headed out. 

“Hope they’re giving you hazard pay for this,” Shane said to the officer after he stopped the boat at the first buoy and a particularly tall wave tilted the bow up. So far it was nothing he hadn’t handled before, but it was getting worse.

She snorted. “Yeah, but I grew up on a boat like this, a couple hours away from here on the mainland,” she said. “Used to skip school to sneak onto my uncle’s boat. This doesn’t scare me.”

“Yeah? Never thought about getting a rig of your own?”

“Nah,” she said. “I mean, yes, he offered it to me. But where he is, you know, further inland, it’s like, four hundred pounds a day now, maybe six hundred in peak season. Used to be a couple thousand a day when I was a kid. Now the lobster’s just gone. He even had a hard time finding a fish buyer to come to the wharf the past few years. I guess I saw the writing on the wall and decided to do something else.”

“Oh,” said Shane dumbly. To turn your back on this life — God. Even if he caught nothing at all he didn’t think he could do it.

He kept an eye out on the deck where the men were hauling up the last trap of the line in silence. Normally there would be talking and laughing and music from JJ’s tinny speaker, but now there was nothing but the engine and the waves and the gulls and the wind.

“Can’t stay away from the water, though,” she said. 

Cliff waved at him to continue their voyage as Hayden measured one of the creatures they caught – a small female, by the looks of it, fecund with thousands of eggs on her belly. He threw her back in the water and wiped his face of salt spray with his sleeve. Shane’s stomach swooped with the rise and fall of another wave, like a rollercoaster on the sea.

He laughed with it. He felt breathtakingly, stupefyingly, alive.

“Who could?” 

Who could?

—

It was tricky to maneuver in and out of the harbour at the best of times — some parts of the channel were too shallow for boats, and sometimes they had to wait for high tide to get out in the morning. There were floating daybeacons lit up green and red to indicate where a captain was to navigate. In the wind they swayed dangerously, and the rain that had begun obscured the light. Still, Shane was exceptionally skilled even with someone else’s vessel, and steered the Raider right into its spot to bring the first batch of traps up onto the dock. He was shocked and pleased to see not just JJ and Brayden waiting for them, but some other men too who must have heard the news. No one wasted a second. As soon as they pulled up Hayden threw the rope to JJ who secured it to the cleat, and a procession of men came aboard one at a time to unload and free up some space. They threw the catch directly into the fisher buyer’s reefer, waiting in idle for it. In fifteen minutes Shane, Hayden and Cliff were off on their next run, the fastest he’d ever seen.

The deck was getting slippery and the winds stronger, but they made their second run in record time, too. When they rounded the cliffs along the very edge of the peninsula Shane could see Ilya’s house, stark white against the deep grey sky, a beacon. He wondered if the door was locked, and if Ilya ever got the patio furniture in. He should have stayed to help. He should have — fuck.

“What happens if we have to call it?” Shane said to Officer Gallant, peering out at his men working diligently. He wanted to be out with them but Hayden had firmly told him to stay inside and get out of their way. Shane’s hands shook with longing to do something useful, but it was dangerous enough as it was without another body out there to keep track of. 

He didn’t want to risk making coffee but he’d scrounged up some Cokes and pepperettes from the mini fridge in the cabin, which the officer had taken with thanks. She didn’t seem seasick but her eyes were darting to the windows more often now.

“He eats the loss,” she said. “DFO would haul the traps when the weather clears, release the lobster. Probably confiscate the gear until he pays whatever fine he’s given.”

“Even if it’s a — a family emergency?”

“Well, they probably won’t make him an example or anything, but there would still be consequences. I don’t make those decisions.”

Decisions, decisions. Shane didn’t know what Ilya would want, here. The man was a good sailor, better captain, but did he want it the way Shane did? What would Ilya do, here? He didn’t know. He knew — fuck. He knew about the tender way Ilya kissed Shane’s head when he woke, and the way he hated wearing socks but did it because he had to, and the way he mouthed on his crucifix pendant when he thought Shane was looking, and how he talked to his coffee maker and toaster like they could understand him, and how he liked Shane to play with his balls during blowjobs, and how he loved to look at the stars. Little things, private things. But this was different. 

There was a pinprick of hurt inside him that if prodded would likely begin to bleed. It was stupid, he reasoned, to feel left out of Ilya’s life, when he himself had never even invited Ilya to his house. Or told him — fuck. 

God, they really had fucked this up.

One thing he knew: Shane could go until he couldn’t anymore. He never wanted to stop, not now, not ever. And Ilya had requested Shane to do this, had trusted him with it. But this wasn’t Shane’s ship, and Cliff was not Shane’s man. 

“Cliff!” Shane yelled over the rising storm. He tried to poke his head out but couldn’t see much around the rows of stacked traps before him. 

“One minute!” 

In a moment Cliff had climbed up onto the side of the boat on the edge of his feet, twisting his body around the cargo, and hopped into the cabin. 

“Jesus Christ,” Shane said at the risky move. He shook his head. “What do you want to do?”

Cliff panted in exertion. “Fuck, I don’t know. We’ve got maybe a run left to get them all. What time’s it?”

“Getting close to five,” Officer Gallant said. “Wind’s pushing thirty knots, forecasted to go up to forty in the next hour, sixty five by midnight.”

“You wanna do it?” Shane asked. He didn’t know which answer he wanted. Anything felt like giving up.

Cliff wiped his face. His hair was soaked through, and even with the rain weathers he’d probably been getting water in his boots.

“I don’t think he’ll blame us if we don’t,” said Cliff. “God — who could?”

Who could? Who fucking could?

Shane hesitated. 

“Hayden’s got kids, man,” Cliff said. 

“Fuck, okay, let’s finish this run and go home,” said Shane. “Careful!”

Cliff didn’t stick around to listen. He was rapidly weaving his way back onto the deck already, heedless of Shane’s warning. 

For the first time since they started this fool’s mission, Shane took out his phone. He had a couple minutes before they were ready to move onto the next line so he scrolled through his notifications. A missed call from his father — no doubt they’d heard what was going on from some nosy neighbour or other — and nothing else, save a couple junk emails and Facebook comments. His finger hovered over Ilya’s number. Should he call him again? Should he text? He didn’t know if Ilya had any friends aside from Cliff, or who he would even reach out to to find out what had happened. It was terrifying, this silence. What he wouldn’t give to hear Ilya’s mocking voice over the CB now, but the radio sat uselessly on the dashboard.

Before he could do anything, a swell made him fumble his phone and nearly drop it. He put it back in his pocket without calling or texting anyone. 

“Let’s go!” he heard Hayden call, his voice muffled. Shane shifted the boat into gear.

They fought the wind and the waves the whole way back to harbour. For as fast as the Raider was, this was slow going. Too slow. The traps were held down as tightly as Cliff and Hahden could manage it with bungees and rope, but the deck was wet with rain and salt water and lobster juice, and the traps skidded and pitched inch by inch. He wanted Cliff and Hayden in the cabin, away from the elements and the heavy pots that could fall at any moment, but to get them to safety they would have to tiptoe over the ledge like Cliff had done previously, only this time, the boat was going fifty klicks an hour in ten foot waves. 

“I can barely see the markers,” Shane said when they neared the harbour. He had to slow the engine down to approach, so they could thread the delicate needle of entering the channel and avoid getting smashed up on the wave-breaking rocks of the gabion. He could see how the water surged against them in a spray of foam, over and over again, the force of the ocean against the stalwart stone. 

“I’ll watch your starboard and make sure you’re not getting too close to the daybeacon,” said Officer Gallant. She was sitting on her knees on the banquette looking out the window. 

“Scared yet?” Shane said. 

“Only if you are.”

He almost laughed. “No comment.”

She guided him through it while they rose up and down, great splashes of water drenching the bow with every time they tipped down into the waves. When finally, finally, they made it into the calmer but still roiling waters of the harbour, Shane felt dazed. His exhaustion hit him at once, the drop in adrenaline shocking, but he didn’t let himself stop until the boat was tied up and he’d jumped in to help pull up traps and throw crates into the reefer, even if his legs felt like jelly. Cliff and Hayden too seemed unsteady on their feet when he sent them home. Officer Gallant shook his hand and left, walking straight and proud. 

The crowd of helpers was still there, which would perhaps have felt miraculous to any out-of-towner who would have happened upon the scene, but to Shane it felt like home. They dispersed quickly when it was all over and done but not without claps on the back and offers of free drinks at the Tavern. Shane waved them all away with a tired smile.

“We’re missing like eighty traps,” said young Brayden Walsh. On land the north wind didn’t seem so bad as it had on the water but it was cold and the rain was relentless.

It pained Shane to hear it but he knew there was nothing to be done anymore. He shrugged and splayed his hands in front of him, as if asking for forgiveness. From whom, he didn’t know.

When finally the Raider was secured and her cabin safely shut, he looked over at the Voyageur. 

“You take care of everything?” he said to JJ. 

“Just like you showed me,” JJ said. 

Shane closed his eyes. He probably should have gone over and checked it all himself, like his grandfather would have almost certainly done, but he was just so fucking tired. Split open and wrung out.

“Okay,” he said, “I trust you.”

—

When he woke it was to the sound of a rhythmic vibration somewhere under his pillow, rain lashing against the window, and the scream of a showerhead somewhere nearby. Blearily he looked around — his old childhood bedroom, mostly bare now, almost sterile with his mother’s recent cleaning spree. He barely remembered how he got here, but he must have driven himself here out of unwillingness to go to his own empty dusty house in the trees or Ilya’s lonely sentinel on the cliff. He was clean and in a pair of his father’s pyjama pants, so he had showered the day off before falling into bed way too early. He didn’t know what time it was but it wasn’t dark outside anymore. 

The phone vibrated insistently and he fumbled around with sleep-weak hands for it. 

“Hello?” he said. His voice sounded rough.

“Shane, hello.”

“Ilya?” Shane shook himself and sat up. “Where are you? Are you okay?”

“Russia,” Ilya said. “In Moscow. I just landed twenty minutes ago.”

“Are you alright?”

“My father died,” said Ilya. “I’m sorry I could not call you before. I spent the whole drive to the airport on the phone with DFO and the immigration people for my work visa, and then I was running to catch my flight, and now here I am.”

“Jesus,” said Shane. “I’m sorry about your dad. How do you feel?”

“One minute.” Shane heard Ilya speaking to someone in Russian in short, clipped tones. There were other voices in the background, other sounds. He was likely still in the airport, maybe waiting for his luggage. Had he had time to pack anything? When Shane left him yesterday morning he was in old holey sweatpants, thick wool socks and a t-shirt, what everyone wore under their waxed rain weathers, because the work was as hard on their clothes as it was on their bodies. The few occasions Shane saw Ilya outside of work or sex the man liked to dress well, in trendy-looking outfits Shane didn’t always understand and which made Ilya stand out in the Tavern or the aisles of the grocery store, easily marking him as a come-from-away with disposable income. Outside of Pardon’s Point Shane supposed Ilya would not look as special. Or maybe he would. Maybe people everywhere looked at Ilya and saw him illuminated, as if the golden glow of dawn on the horizon followed him around everywhere he went. 

He thought of Ilya saying there were no stars in Moscow like the ones in Pardon’s Point. And Shane thought, the sun must be different here too.

“Okay I’m here,” Ilya said into the phone, clearer now. “Were you able to, ah, take my Raider out?”

“Yeah,” said Shane. He felt the same sinking of his stomach as he had yesterday watching Brayden count out the traps. “We couldn’t get them all. I’m so sorry.”

“Shane, Shane,” said Ilya. “You did your best?”

“I really tried. But it was just too — the waves, you know, it was a North wind, we couldn’t keep going.”

“It’s okay,” said Ilya. “Of course it’s okay.”

“It’s not!” Shane’s voice cracked. “They’ll seize your traps and fine you.”

“Okay, so they fine me. How many traps?”

“Around eighty, maybe. I wanted to keep going, but Cliff said — I don’t know, I think he was scared. I wanted to keep going. I really did. I’m sorry.”

“Enough,” said Ilya sharply. “You did what you could. More than anybody else would.”

“That’s not true. Anybody would have.” But Shane thought of JJ, and of Brayden Walsh, and knew that no, some would not have helped Ilya, maybe because he was Ilya or just because — fuck. 

“I did the math,” Shane whispered. “Eighty traps, couple hundred bucks each, plus the fine, you’ll be out maybe forty thousand dollars, maybe more.”

"Okay, and?”

“And?” Shane closed his eyes. “I wouldn’t blame you if you wanted to cut your losses and give it up.”

He felt nauseous and cold. Incongruously Ilya laughed.

“You are worried about this?”

“Yes.”

“Shane Hollander. You are an idiot.”

“What?”

“I will be home in a week, okay?” Ilya said. “Stop worrying.”

“You’re coming back?”

“I will always come back.”

They sat in silence — or as silent as it could be, with the sounds of a bustling airport behind Ilya. 

“I’ll be waiting,” Shane said finally. “Call me if you need to talk this week, okay?”

There was a knock on Shane’s door, just before his mother opened it and popped her head in. 

“Honey, do you want breakfast? Oh! Sorry,” she said. 

“Go,” said Ilya over the phone. “I need to call a taxi.”

“Okay. Bye. If you need anything, you’ll—?”

“Yes, promise. Goodbye.”

Shane waited until Ilya hung up to put down his phone. His mother was staring at him with a single raised eyebrow. 

“Who was that?” she asked. 

“Just — it was Ilya,” he said. Then, “hey, how do you feel about having us supper with him next week? Maybe at my house?”

“Alright,” Yuna said slowly. “That would be nice. Is everything okay?”

It was the last day of the fishing season, and Shane was sitting in bed. He realized he didn’t know how much lobster he’d pulled in yesterday, not for himself nor for Ilya. Somehow, he didn’t even care to know. 

“It will be,” said Shane. “I’m pretty sure it will be.”

—

The thing about it all was that it had to be in your blood, Shane thought. There had to be something flowing in you, something persistent and stupid, that made you look at the Atlantic and all her anger and her depths and her changes and think you were any kind of match at all for her, let alone a good one. You could be as cautious as you wanted, you could wear your life jacket and do all your annual first aid classes and insist on your crew’s sobriety at all times, but the ocean didn’t care about any of that. She would take what she wanted. So to trap what was hers for your own benefit, or your people’s — it demanded a special kind of arrogance. It had to be innate, you had to be born with it. Otherwise, why else would any of them do this? Why were they not plumbers, or accountants, or doctors, or factory line workers, or teachers? Why were they fishermen? Why did they go back, year after year?

“Maybe,” Scott Hunter said. “Or maybe I’m just a lonely old man who needs something to keep me going until I die.”

He was leaning against Shane’s truck bed where it was parked overlooking the wharf and the boats bobbing in the gentle evening light. He was still tall for a man his age and his shoulders sat straight as ever, but his face and hands were tough like leather after years of sun and salt. It reminded Shane of his grandfather, whose fingers were thick and hard and whose skin was more sunspot than not. They would have fished together, Shane thought. Scott and Eugene Hollander. Maybe he would ask him about it some day.

“I thought you loved it,” Shane said from where he was sitting on the tailgate. He felt warm. All traces of the previous week’s storm were gone and washed away.

“That too,” Scott said. “Probably every guy you talk to has a different reason for doing it.”

“You flying south soon?”

“In a few weeks after we finish fixing up the gear and stuff. The cold isn’t great for my joints.”

Shane hummed. 

“And,” Scott said, “I have someone down there.”

“What? Really?”

“You never heard the rumours?”

“Well, yeah, but I thought it was just stories. What’s her name?”

Scott laughed and winked. “Ask around. You never know which stories are true.”

A familiar truck pulled up next to Shane’s, loud music Shane didn’t recognize stopping abruptly when the door opened and Ilya stepped out. His sunglasses covered the bags under his eyes that Shane knew were there, but fuck, did he ever look good in a tank top that showed off his arms and fisherman’s tan. Shane smiled.

“Not good to spend the winter alone,” Scott said. He pushed himself off the truck and started to hobble away. “See ya around, fellas.”

“You’re here,” Shane said. Like an echo of another life Ilya jumped up onto the tailgate and sat next to Shane, though this time he pushed their shoulders and thighs together. At the end of the dock near the Voyageur was a group of teenagers with fishing rods, casting for sea bass, a typical scene. One of them must have caught something — Shane could hear hoots of pleasure and bragging. 

“Hm, had to come make sure you didn’t fuck up my boat,” Ilya said. 

“Oh, sure.”

“No lasting damage.”

“None you can see.”

If he was born with it then he would die with it, no matter if the lobster went away or the cliff fell to ruin, no matter how heavy it was on his shoulders some days. Even if he let his legacy end here, or if there was no legacy at all. The tide, the wake behind the ship, the currents — he couldn’t run away from them and didn’t want to. 

“Want to go home?” Ilya said. He took Shane’s hand in his.

Maybe Ilya was the same. Maybe what drew him to this life was not the promise of death but something else, something bigger. Maybe the salt in his blood was the same as the salt in the sea. Maybe it was love and something worse than love too. 

Or maybe — fuck. Maybe they were just men, at the heart of it, just sailors doing a job, feeding their families, finding ways to make it worth something more.

“Not yet,” Shane said. “There is nothing like this anywhere in the world.”