Chapter 3: Blessing of the Boats
By noon there are four reporters on your porch, and one of them is trying to interview your cat.
You watch them through a crack in the shutters. They've come in on the morning hovercraft, which means somebody in the Capitol made a phone call within an hour of that newspaper landing. They have the shoes. They have little recorders. One of them has found your washing line and is photographing your second-best apron with real tenderness, as if it's going to be important to the nation later.
"I could throw something," says Annie Cresta from your kitchen table.
You didn't invite Annie. Annie simply arrived, twenty minutes ago, through your back gate, with a basket of bread and sea glass in her pockets, and sat down as if she'd been coming over for years. She has never been in your house before. She's looking around at it now with frank pleasure, at the nets drying over the stove and the shells on the windowsill and the mended chair.
"I already threw something," you say. "That's how this happened."
"It was a very good throw." Annie tears a piece of bread in half and gives you the bigger piece. "I watched it eight times. Finnick watched it more. He has the paper folded up in his shirt."
You stop chewing.
"He's at mine," she says, gently, the way she'd tell you a tide time. "He came up the hill at six this morning looking like a drowned dog and asked if he could sleep on my sofa, and then he didn't sleep, he just sat there with the newspaper, and every so often he'd say, 'She's going to hate this,' and then look at your picture again." Annie tilts her head. "Do you hate it?"
"I hate them." You jerk your chin at the shutters. "I hate that they're on my porch. I hate that by tomorrow everyone from here to the mountains is going to know what my apron looks like. I hate that they ever turned him into a poster." You stop. Start again. "He came home to be nobody. That's all he wanted. I was supposed to be the one place he didn't have to be Finnick Odair."
"Mm." Annie turns a piece of sea glass over in her fingers. It's green. Nearly the color of his eyes. "Can I tell you something he told me? In the bunker, before the wedding. Before any of it."
You wait.
"He said he could stand all of it. The Capitol and the parties and the people who bought him. He said he could stand it because when he came home there was one person on the dock who looked straight through all of it like it was weather." Annie sets the sea glass on the table between you, very precisely, like a piece in a game. "He wasn't talking about me. I asked. He went bright red. I'd never seen him go red before. It was wonderful."
You stare at her.
"He's going to try to leave," Annie says. "That's the other thing. He's going to decide that you'll be better off if he goes somewhere else, the mountains or the coal district or a lighthouse somewhere, and the cameras will follow him and leave you alone. He's at my house right now writing you a letter about it. It's very noble. He's crossed out the first line six times." She stands up and brushes the crumbs off her dress. "I'd go now, if I were you. He's slow at letters. But not that slow."
You go out the back, over the wall, through Hanna Bright's garden and down the alley behind the smokehouse, which every person in District Four knows is the way you go when you don't want to be followed. You come out on the harbor road with tar on your knee and your hair falling down.
The whole harbor is dressed for the Blessing of the Boats. You'd forgotten. Every year on the first spring tide of autumn they string shells and bright rag and paper lanterns from mast to mast, and the old priest of the sea walks the length of the docks throwing salt water on every hull and muttering, and then the whole fleet goes out past the breakwater together and comes back in a line. Last year nobody did it. Last year there was a war. This year the masts are so thick with ribbon the harbor looks like a garden, and the docks are packed, and there are cameras everywhere, Capitol cameras on long poles swinging over the crowd like herons looking for fish.
And there, on the seawall above the sheds, in his spot, the one Pell told you about, with a folded paper in one hand and a pencil behind his ear, is Finnick.
He sees you coming. He goes very still.
"Don't," you say, before he can open his mouth.
"I haven't said anything."
"You're going to leave."
He looks at the letter in his hand. Then back at you. "Annie," he says, resigned.
"Annie." You climb up onto the seawall next to him. Below you the crowd shifts and murmurs, and you feel the cameras turn, the long poles swinging around toward the two of you. "Give me that."
He gives it to you. You don't read it. You fold it in half, and in half again, and you put it in the pocket of your apron, where it can stay until you're both old and you can laugh at it.
"They're going to take your picture every day," he says quietly. "For a while. Every day you'll walk down that dock and somebody will be waiting with a camera and a question. They'll want to know what you eat and what you think about the President and whether I'm a good kisser. They'll make things up when you don't answer. I know how it works. I was the thing they made up for years." He's looking at the harbor, not at you. "You didn't sign up for that. You signed up to teach a drunk gull to tie knots."
"Are you a good kisser?"
He turns his head. "What?"
"It's a fair question. Apparently the whole country is going to ask me."
For a second he simply looks at you. Then that crooked smile starts at one corner of his mouth, the small one, the real one, and doesn't quite make it across.
"I'm told I'm very good," he says. "By people who were paid to say it."
"Well," you say. "That's not much use to anybody."
You hold out your hand. Down on the dock, beneath the ribbons, your father's old boat is tied up at the end of the row where it's been since the Gull went down and your uncle salvaged what he could and built it new around the same keel. You've kept it tarred. You've never once taken it out past the breakwater. It's got a fresh ribbon on its mast, a blue one. You didn't put it there. You have a feeling you know whose hands did.
"Come on," you say. "Nobody films the blessing from the water. They get seasick."
The Gull goes out in the line with the rest of the fleet. You take the tiller and he takes the sheet, and he's barefoot on the deck and laughing as the wind fills the sail, and for a little while you are two people from District Four doing a thing people from District Four have always done, sailing past the breakwater in the bright cold afternoon while the priest's salt water dries on the hull.
Then you put the helm over, and the Gull peels off from the line and runs out into open water, until the harbor is a smudge of ribbon behind you and the cameras are just glints on the shore.
You drop the sail. The boat rocks. The sea is that deep autumn blue that goes almost black where it's deepest, and the only sounds are the slap of water on the hull and the gulls, who have come back.
Finnick sits down on the thwart across from you. He has a bit of cord in his hands, of course he does. He isn't tying it.
"Can I tell you something embarrassing?" he says.
"Please."
"When I woke up in the hospital, the first time, properly woke up, they had me on so much medicine I didn't know where I was. I thought I was still in the tunnels. I couldn't see. They'd bandaged my eyes because of the burns." He touches the scar on his neck without seeming to know he's doing it. "And I kept saying a name. Over and over. The nurses thought it was a boat."
You feel your heart stop and then start again, harder.
"They wrote it down," he says. "On my chart. Patient asking for his boat. A nurse brought me a little wooden model to hold. A sailboat. I held onto it for three days." He laughs, very quietly, at his hands. "Annie found it when she visited. She read my chart and she took one look at the name and she sat down on the end of my bed and said, Finnick Odair, you complete idiot, and then she cried for an hour. I couldn't even see her. I just kept holding the boat."
"It was my name," you say. It isn't a question.
"It was your name."
The Gull rocks under you, gently, the way your father used to rock it to put you to sleep.
"I didn't come to the hospital," you say slowly, "because when they read the first list, I went to the end of the breakwater and I threw a shell in the water for you. The same as I do for my father. I'd already done it. I'd already said goodbye. And then you were alive and I didn't know what to do with my hands. I didn't think I was allowed to be glad. I'd never been anything to you. I was the one who charged you double."
"You were the one who charged me double," Finnick agrees. He sets the cord down on the thwart. He leans forward with his elbows on his knees until his face is very close to yours, close enough that you can see the salt drying in his eyelashes. "Every single time. Even in the Capitol, when I was eating off gold plates, I'd think, she'd charge me double for this net. And I'd feel like a person."
"That's ridiculous."
"I know."
"It's the most ridiculous thing anyone has ever said to me."
"I know," he says again, softer, and then, "Can I?"
You nod.
It turns out that the people who were paid to say it were not lying. It also turns out not to matter at all, because Finnick Odair kisses you like he's never kissed anyone, like it's a knot he's learning and he wants to get it right, slow and careful and a little unsure, his hand coming up to the side of your face with tar still under the nails. It's nothing like the posters. It tastes like salt. His hand is shaking. You catch it with yours and hold it still against your cheek, and he makes a small sound against your mouth like something being let go.
When you pull apart he rests his forehead against yours and laughs, breathless, disbelieving.
"So?" he says. "For the nation. Am I any good?"
"You're doing it backward," you tell him.
"I am not."
"You go under on the last tuck. Not over." You pull him back down by the front of his grey shirt. "Here. I'll show you."
The sun is going down by the time you sail back in. The whole harbor is lit with paper lanterns, orange and gold, swaying from every mast, and the crowd is still on the docks, and so are the cameras, every one of them swung around to face the little boat with the blue ribbon coming in late and alone.
Finnick takes the sheet. You take the tiller. His knee is against yours.
"Last chance," he says. "We could go around the point. Come in at the fish market. Nobody would see."
You look at the cameras. You look at him, barefoot, scarred, holding a rope in a way that has nothing to do with his hands needing something to do.
"Let them look," you say, and you take the Gull straight in.
On the end of the dock, under the lanterns, Pell is sitting on a bollard with his arms folded, and Annie is beside him with sea glass in her hand, and when the Gull bumps against the pilings and Finnick jumps down to make her fast, Pell squints at the knot he ties and nods once, slowly, the way he nods at a net he's decided to save.
"Under on the last tuck," he says. "About time."
Then a reporter shoves a recorder over the rail at you, and the question comes, the one Finnick warned you about, loud enough for the whole dock to hear.
You don't answer it. You don't have to. Finnick is already reaching back to help you off the boat, and he doesn't let go of your hand once you're on the dock, and the whole of District Four, and soon enough the whole of Panem, gets to watch him not let go.