“Definitely.”
She looked at him more closely, then took a step back. “I did get this on my own. You had nothing to do with it.”
“First time I’ve heard about it.”
“You never talked to Donatti,” she pressed, “you never got involved.”
“I swear,” he lied.
After she left, Calvin clasped his hands together in a silent fit of glee and flipped on the hi-fi, dropping the needle on “Sunny Side of the Street.” For a second time, he’d saved the person he loved the most, and the best part was, she didn’t know.
He grabbed a stool, opened a notebook, and began to write. He’d been keeping journals since age seven or so, jotting down the facts and fears of his life between lines of chemical equations. Even today his lab was full of these nearly illegible notebooks. It was one of the reasons everyone assumed he was getting a lot done. Volume.
* * *
—
“Your handwriting is hard to read here,” Elizabeth had noted on several occasions. “What’s that say?” She’d pointed to an RNA-related theory he’d been toying with for months.
“A hypothesis about enzymatic adaptation,” he answered.
“And this?” She pointed farther down the page. Something he’d written about her.
“More of the same,” he said, tossing the notebook aside.
It wasn’t that he was writing anything terrible about her—just the opposite. Rather, it was more that he couldn’t risk having her discover that he was obsessed with the notion that she might die.
* * *
—
He’d long ago decided that he was a jinx and he had solid proof: every person he’d ever loved had died, always in a freak accident. The only way to put an end to this deadly pattern was to put an end to love. And he had. But then he’d met Elizabeth and, without meaning to, had stupidly and selfishly gone on to love again. Now here she was, standing directly in line of his jinx fire.
As a chemist, he realized his fixation on jinxes was not at all scientific; it was superstitious. Well, so be it. Life wasn’t a hypothesis one could test and retest without consequence—something always crashed eventually. Thus he was constantly on the lookout for things that posed a threat to her, and as of this morning, that thing was rowing.
They’d flipped the pair yet again—his fault—and for the very first time, they’d ended up in the water on the same side of the boat and he’d made a terrifying discovery: she couldn’t swim. By the looks of her panicked dog paddle, she’d never had a swim lesson in her life.
That’s why, while Elizabeth was off in the bathroom at the boathouse, he and Six-Thirty had approached the men’s team captain, Dr. Mason. It was bad-weather season: if he and Elizabeth were going to continue to row—she actually wanted to—it was best to be in an eight. Safer. Plus, if the eight did flip—unlikely—there’d be that many more people to save her. Anyway, Mason had been trying to recruit him for more than three years; it was worth a shot.
“What do you think?” he’d asked Mason. “You’d have to take both of us, though.”
“A woman in a men’s eight?” Dr. Mason had said, readjusting his cap over his crew cut. He’d been a marine and hated it. But he’d kept the hairstyle.
“She’s good,” Calvin said. “Very tough.”
Mason nodded. These days he was an obstetrician. He already knew how tough women could be. Still, a woman? How could that possibly work?
“Hey, guess what,” Calvin told Elizabeth a minute later. “The men’s team really wants both of us to row in their eight today.”
“Really?” Her goal had always been to join an eight. The eights rarely seemed to flip. She’d never told Calvin she couldn’t swim. Why worry him?
“The team captain approached me just now. He’s seen you row,” he said. “He knows talent when he sees it.”
From below, Six-Thirty exhaled. Lies, lies, and more lies.
“When do we start?”
“Now.”
“Now?” She felt a jolt of panic. While she’d wanted to row in an eight, she also knew the eight required a level of synchronization she had not yet mastered. When a boat succeeds, it’s because the people in the boat have managed to set aside their petty differences and physical discrepancies and row as one. Perfect harmony—that was the goal. She’d once overheard Calvin telling someone at the boathouse that his Cambridge coach insisted that they even blink at the same time. To her surprise the guy nodded. “We had to file our toenails to the same length. Made a huge difference.”