On My Call

Chapter One: The Four O'Clock Bay

The lights in the rigging bay came on in banks, one row at a time, with a sound like something clearing its throat. Tatum Vaughan hit the last switch with her elbow because both her hands were full — coffee in one, a canvas roll of wrenches in the other — and stood a moment in the doorway while the fluorescents warmed and the river smell came up off the concrete.

Four in the morning. Late October in Brayton, Pennsylvania, which meant the air was forty-one degrees and wet enough to drink. Out past the bay doors the Cassaway River lay flat and black, and two miles upstream, invisible in the dark, the old railroad trestle put its iron legs down into the water like it intended to stand there forever.

She did not look upstream. That was a rule she'd made for herself so long ago she no longer noticed keeping it, the way you don't notice a shoe until it stops fitting.

Eight shells sat on the racks, four to a side, hulls up, the varnish on the older ones crazed like the glaze on a cheap mug. The newest was an eight named after a dead alumnus, the middle three were shells that had been new when Tatum was in high school, and the rest were relics that Dean Mackall kept alive out of pure stubbornness and Tatum's hands.

She set her coffee on the workbench, unrolled the wrenches, and got to work.

The two seat rigger on the *Marlin Sherrod* had a hairline crack at the pin, which she'd found Tuesday and told Mackall about, and Mackall had said what he always said, which was *do what you can, Vaughan*, and she'd said what she always said, which was nothing. She had the replacement in a box under the bench, scavenged off a boat that had been sold for parts before she was born. She pulled the old rigger, laid it on the towel, and started on the bolts.

Her hands knew this. Her hands had known it since she was nineteen, when the money ran out and the seat went away and Mackall — who was not a kind man, but was a fair one, which is rarer — had said, *I can pay you eleven-forty an hour to be here at four,* and she had said yes before he finished the sentence because at four in the morning nobody was awake to look at her.

There were people who thought Tatum Vaughan had disappeared after the accident. She hadn't. She'd just moved eighty feet, from the stern of a boat to the bench behind the racks, and it turned out that was far enough.

By five-fifteen the rigger was on, torqued, and swung through its arc twice with her hand on the oarlock feeling for anything that wasn't smooth. She wiped it down. She said, quietly, without meaning to, "Half slide. Half slide. Build in two."

She caught herself and stopped. It happened when her hands were busy. Her mouth ran rates like a radio left on in an empty house.

At five-thirty the first lights came down the hill — headlights swinging across the gravel, a truck with a bad muffler, doors, voices, the particular loudness of large young men who have been awake for eleven minutes. Tatum put her wrenches away in order, largest to smallest, and moved to the far end of the bay where the wire spool was, because that was where she went when the boathouse filled.

"Vaughan." Dean Mackall came through the side door with a clipboard under his arm and a knit cap pulled down to his eyebrows. Sixty-three years old, four decades on this river, one season from a retirement he'd told exactly two people about. "Two seat."

"Done."

"Swings clean?"

"It swings clean."

He grunted. That was the whole review. He flipped a page on the clipboard, and Tatum saw, upside down, the lineup grid with a hole in the coxswain's box where a name used to be, and she looked away fast, like a woman stepping over a snake.

The crew came through in a herd. Nine men, ten with the spare, in mismatched spandex and sweatshirts with the sleeves cut off, and the sound of them filled the bay to the rafters. Malachi Reeve, seven seat, six-four and built like a bank door, laughing at something. Hutch Lindell at six, Sy Barrera at five, Rudy Achebe, Jonah Estes, Tucker Boyle, Wes Dolezal in bow. And stroke seat.

Stroke seat came in last, carrying two sets of oars over his shoulder that other men carried one of.

Kellan Ortiz was twenty-three years old and enormous in a way that wasn't only size — six-five, two hundred and ten pounds of ropey shoulder and long back, black hair too long and pushed straight back off his forehead, forearms like bridge cable. Fifth year, out of a mill town two hours west, on a partial scholarship and a job hauling for the athletic department. He had a face that was too pleased with itself and a mouth that never stopped.

He saw her at the wire spool. He always saw her.

"Morning, Vaughan."

"Oars go on the rack, not the floor."

"They're going on the rack."

"They were on the floor Tuesday."

"Tuesday I was a lesser man." He racked them, blades out, exactly the way she liked, and she hated that she noticed. "Two seat's fixed?"

"Two seat's fixed."

"You do that in the dark?"

"The lights work."

He grinned. He had a chipped canine, and the chip made the grin worse. "You're a delight before dawn."

"Hands off the stern deck when you carry."

"Yes ma'am," he said, and went out to the dock, and she stood there for a second with the wire spool cold under her palm and told herself, as she did most mornings, that she was not going to think about it.

They took the eight down. Boat over heads, four steps, roll to shoulders, walk it out. The dock boards knocked. Someone dropped a shoe. Mackall's voice went out across the water in the flat, carrying bark of a man who has been shouting on rivers since 1984.

And then the launch coughed and pulled away and the bay was empty again and Tatum went back to work.

At seven she sat on an overturned bucket and ate a granola bar and opened her phone. There was an email from the bursar's office with a subject line she could have recited from memory. *Installment Plan — Payment Past Due.* Four thousand, one hundred and sixty dollars, which was the balance from spring, which she had been paying down at three hundred a month out of eleven-forty an hour, and which had to be current by the fifteenth of January or she would not be permitted to register for her final semester.

She had been eight credits from a degree for a year and a half.

She closed the phone and finished the granola bar and went and got the splicing kit, because the bow line on the *Sherrod* was fraying and there were three hours before her first class and hands that were busy were hands that were fine.

---

The thing about the accident was that everybody knew a version of it and no version was the whole thing, including hers.

The whole thing, as far as she could reconstruct it: mid-May, two and a half years ago, Mid-Atlantic championships, women's four with coxswain, Rutledge lane three. River fog off the Cassaway so thick that from the stern you could see the four seat and after that a suggestion of people. The trestle bridge, which in that stretch of river was the last landmark before the two-thousand-meter mark, put four stone piers in the water and left three arches, and the racecourse ran through the middle arch, and everybody in the region had steered that arch a hundred times.

Tatum had steered it a hundred times.

At fourteen hundred meters her bow started to walk left and she corrected and it did not correct. She corrected harder. She remembered — and she remembered this the way you remember a scald — the toggles going slack in a way that felt like nothing at all, like pulling on a string with no kite on the end. She remembered opening her mouth to call *hold water port* and getting the *hold* out and then the *water*, and then the stone.

The hull hit the pier at a shallow angle and slid, and Tegan Ruiz, who rowed three seat, had her right hand on the gunwale where a rower's hand is not supposed to be but where every rower's hand goes when the boat is doing something wrong. Twenty-two bones in a human hand. Tegan lost the function of eleven of them.

Afterward, the boat came out of the water and the rudder cable was found parted at the turnbuckle, and the investigation determined the cable was two years old and well within service life and that a parted cable of that kind was consistent with — the phrasing stayed with Tatum for two years — *a sudden lateral overload consistent with steering input applied at the extreme of travel.*

Cox error. Over-steered into the arch, jammed the rudder, snapped the wire.

And then, because the world was not finished, Blake Turnbull had gone in front of the review panel.

Blake had been twenty-eight, an assistant coach in his second year, handsome in the way of catalog models, and Tatum's boyfriend for seven months. He had sat at the long table in his quarter-zip with the Rutledge crest and said, with what everyone in the room read as visible reluctance, that he was aware Tatum had been drinking at a team house the night before the race.

Which was true. She had had a beer. One, at nine-thirty, at a house full of people, before going to bed at ten because she raced at eight in the morning.

But *drinking* is a word that only has one shape once it's out of the mouth, and the panel wrote it down, and the finding said *conduct detrimental* and *judgment* and *scholarship revoked,* and Tegan Ruiz never spoke to her again, and Tatum Vaughan had not sat in the stern of a boat since.

She had asked Blake, once, in the parking lot after, why. He had put his hand on her arm and said, in a voice she'd once found kind, *Tay, I had to be honest. It'll be worse for you if it comes out later.* Then he had gotten in his car, and by August he was engaged to a woman who did development work for the alumni association, and by the next spring he was the recruiting coordinator with an office and a title, and Tatum was making eleven-forty an hour eighty feet away.

That was the whole thing.

She finished the splice at eight-forty. It was a good splice. She held it up to the light and turned it and it was clean and fair and it would hold four thousand pounds and nobody would ever look at it again, which was, she thought, the entire point of everything she did now.

The launch came back. She heard the crew on the dock and Mackall saying something short. Then she heard the thing she'd been half-hearing all week — the tone in the boathouse that means news.

Malachi Reeve came through the bay wet to the waist, and said, to nobody and everybody, "They can't cut us. Right? They can't actually cut us."

And Tatum stopped with the splicing fid in her hand.