Because He Loved You: A Story About Boats, Rain, and One Beautiful Man Named Ned
“This came in the mail today.” My ex set the box on the extra couch we have by the garage door. He reached in and pulled out a large, red raincoat.
“That’s . . .”
“Ned’s,” he finished for me.
“Ned’s,” I finished for myself as he held the jacket up so that it straightened out, took on a more three-dimensional shape of a tall man’s upper torso.
I swallowed hard. It was Ned’s jacket and Ned’s shape should have been beneath it. My face must have looked confused because my ex answered my question before I got to ask it. “David sent it.”
“Oh.”
My fingers grasped at the bright red of it. It was such an alive color, a vibrant color.
“That was really nice of him,” I managed to say.
David is Ned’s son. He did some sort of medical stuff at Duke and he looked just like Ned, same kind of squirrel-gray eyes, same voice that was even and soft and crackly like a fire that had just started in a wood stove, like a fire you knew was going to warm you up.
Then I said it, “You’ll have to wear it.”
My ex sighed. “I’ll wear it all the time. Whenever it rains.”
My arms reached out to hug him and Ned’s jacket pressed between us. “I know.”
But he didn’t. He didn’t ever wear it ever. It hung on a hook by the door to the garage, this red symbol of loss, of Ned. But Ned wasn’t a man who was about loss. He was a man who tried to heal people, to lift them up through medicine or just compliments and deep listening.
“Can I wear it?” I asked eventually, months later, motioning to the raincoat.
“Of course.”
In the pocket, I found a piece of gum that was my favorite kind: Dentyne. Ned never chewed gum. My ex didn’t either.
“Weird,” I said.
“David must have left it in there,” the ex said.
“Yeah. Maybe.”
I have that jacket now. I still wear it all the time. It’s shrunk and I’ve grown, but it’s still too big and I still wear it every singly time it rains. It’s not fashionable. It’s red has dulled a bit. But it was Ned’s. So to me? It was magic and it always will be.
The thing is that I once knew a beautiful man. His name was Ned.
One weekend, a long time ago, before Ned died, my ex and I were trying to get my ex’s sailboat from the boatyard to the mooring. We were having a hard time of it. Things inside the sailboat were broken.
That sounds pretentious: boatyard, mooring, sailboat.
It wasn’t.
The ex’s boat was a 20-foot-something Catalina. It was older than me. Seriously, and since I didn’t have any mold or black rotting places and my own engine still purrs, I was (and am) aging a lot better. To be fair though, that’s not really saying much.
Despite its age and flaws, the Catalina was a lovely, graceful boat. It was the kind of boat that the ex had fallen in love with. It was the kind of boat he could never give up on.
The boat is not an objective correlative for me, obviously. I was a bit easier to give up on.
Anyway, this particular weekend, the ex really wanted to give up on that boat. The day started off well with warm weather and a beautiful Maine-blue sky. We met Ned at his boat. He motioned toward the heavens and the lack of clouds. He put his arm around my ex’s shoulders.
“It can’t get any better than this,” he said, his favorite catchphrase. “Two of my favorite people. A gorgeous day.”
Then we rowed out to his boat, a beautiful wooden boat that looked like a photo in the Wooden Boat calendar Ned gave to the ex every year for Christmas. We climbed on. Ned’s knees creaked. He walked fast and well even though he was in his eighties but getting on and off a boat was a harder thing to manage, but he managed.
He smiled when we were all on board. He looked skyward. “It can’t get any better than this, can it?”
He turned the key. The engine didn’t start.
Doug ripped up the battery, hauled it out, rowed back to shore where he rigged up a jumper cable contraption. While Ned and I watched, the ex made Ned’s engine come back to life.
Ned shook his head, smiling. “He knows how to do everything, doesn’t he?”
He thanked the ex again and again and apologized for slowing down the day.
“It’s nothing, Ned. There’s nothing we’d rather be doing than be with you,” the ex said as Ned’s boat sped through Blue Hill Harbor told the ex’s embattled sailboat, Affinity.
The whole way Ned marveled about the ex’s mechanical ability. We boarded Affinity where the engine temperature was running at 1,987-degrees Fahrenheit or so. The ex diagnosed the issue as a hose block or something and climbed into the nether reached of the boat with only his feet sticking out.
He brought out the hose, snaked something metal through it. Pieces of mussel shell and black goo crawled out.
“Yuck,” I said, backing up like it was the black slime on ancient X-Files shows or something.
“First my boat, now his.” Ned just smiled again. “How does he crawl in there?”
“Magic,” I said.
“It can’t get any better than this, can it?” Ned asked me as a seal popped up to say hello.
Engine fixed, we were off, but Ned refused to go too far ahead of us for the return trip.
“Just in case,” he said.
In sailor lingo, “just in case” means “wait a few minutes and everything will soon by horrible again. Best hope there aren’t any sharks and do your personal floatation devices work?”
Just in case became reality.
Affinity wasn’t like us much that day. The engine started to smell like my car, which is not a good thing. The ex turned it off. Some cap had exploded off the top and disappeared to that same place wayward socks and pen caps go.
“It’s disappeared,” I said. “Like the forks that magically vanish in the dishwasher. Like the twenties in my wallet.”
“Exactly,” the ex said as he wiped black goo from his forehead.
Water covered engine things that water is not supposed to be on: electrical wires, fuel lines, the engine black whatever that was. The ex decided to make a plug out of a glass baby jar and a funky-shaped piece of wood that he randomly found on the boat somewhere. It was not good.
“Ned!” I screamed across the water. “Ned! Come back!”
In sailor lingo that’s termed “calling for help.”
Ned did come, roaring back in his beautiful wooden boat, the speed of it breaking through the air rippling his old, navy-blue sweater. He kept close as Affinity’s engine finally started again. Thunder cloud began rolling in. The seals, knowing they’d seen happier sailors, decided to duck their heads back under the water and not watch.
We followed Ned in. Limping, with our fingers crossed, we made it halfway to the marina when the engine failed again. In technical sailor terms, it “just pooped out.”
“Ned!” I screamed. “Ned!”
He appeared in a moment.
The ex, now defeated, adjusted his ball cap a little lower on his head. “Could you tow us, Ned?”
“Any time.”
They attached the lines. Ned brought us home.
The moment we moored and rowed back to shore, Ned the Hero thanked the ex for helping him with his battery. He ran his hand through his hair, trying to make it less Einstein-crazy windblown. He patted the ex on his back.
“You’re my hero, man,” Ned said.
The ex shook his head.
It began to rain.
“No, Ned,” he said. “You’re mine.”
Two weeks before Ned died of cancer, he called me from his room in the hospital-type section of Dirigo Pines, a retirement home where he spent his winters. His voice was so weak that when he said, “Carrie, this is Ned,” I almost didn’t believe him.
“I haven’t been up and about a lot,” he said, “and I was hoping you might do me a favor.”
“Anything.”
“Could you go out and get (the ex) one of those Wooden Boat calendars for Christmas and maybe get that sweet girl of yours a giant, stuffed tiger.”
Ned wanted Em to go to Princeton. The mascot is a tiger. Ned went to Princeton. He was convinced that Em was special and should go to Princeton.
“Would you mind doing that?” he asked.
“Of course not,” I said, a sinking feeling in my chest because I knew what this meant. I knew it and didn’t want it to be true. “I’d love to do it.”
“I’ll pay you back.”
“You do not need to pay me back. That is silly”
“I know,” he said. “I really love you guys, all of you.”
“We love you too, Ned.”
So much.
We hung up. I put my mug away in the cabinet above the counter. I leaned up against the stove. I tried really hard not to cry.
Ned died before Christmas. When I gave my ex the Wooden Boat calendar, he cried. He just sat on the sofa and tears streamed down his cheeks, water covering surfaces it didn’t normally cover. He couldn’t believe that Ned had thought of him. He thought I did it, got the calendar myself, thought of it myself, sort of a homage from Ned.
He didn’t tell me that until March. I didn’t know that he didn’t believe in how selfless, how thoughtful Ned was, even when Ned was about to die.
We were sitting at my ex’s parents table at their condo in Florida. Everything was white and clean and there was no black goo anywhere, no broken engines, no rainclouds.
“But how could he be? How could he . . .?” the ex finally said. “How could he think of me then?”
“Because he loved you,” I told him. “He just loved you.”
A person can’t really get any better than that.
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