"I put my hand on your name," Lucas said. "Last October. I took the bus down to Virginia Beach and I found my dad's name and I touched it, and yours was right there above it, and I touched yours too. I didn't even think about it. It was just there. I thought, this guy died trying to save my dad." His voice was shaking. He made it stop. "Is that what happened?"
"No."
Lucas turned and looked at him.
His father was looking at the water. His jaw was working.
"No," he said again. "It was the other way around."
And he told him. All of it, the way he'd told Elena at a kitchen table in Virginia Beach eighteen years before. Mike coming back down when he'd been ordered up. The air pocket, and the laugh, and the count. The breach. The hand laid flat against his chest, pushing him out through the only space there was. The squeeze. The letting go.
Lucas didn't say anything while he talked. He held the diploma cover on his knees in both hands and listened, and once, when his father got to the part about the hand, he made a small sound, and his father stopped, and waited, and then went on.
"Then the stone room," his father said. "Seven months. And a man nobody can name got me out, and the price of it was that I stay dead. And I did. I said it was for that man and his family, and it was. I said it was for your mother, and you. It was that too." He finally looked at Lucas. "And then the man died, seven years ago, and there was no more reason. And I stayed dead anyway, bud. Because I didn't think I'd earned the right to come back. Because your father pushed me out of that ship, and I've never known what to do with that except try to be worth it, and I never once thought I was."
Lucas looked down at the diploma cover.
"Nineteen years," he said.
"I know."
"You let me — I asked you. On the way to Bangor, I asked you if it was because of him, and you said you were afraid, and I thought you meant you were afraid I'd die. I thought you meant —" He stopped. "You let me stand at that wall."