Chapter 16: Kenji at the Depth Marker

The key was under the same loose board it had always been under.

Kenji stood in the darkness of the boat shed with his hand still pressed flat against the floor, the wood damp under his palm from last night's rain, the key cold and small in his fingers. He had not been inside the shed since February. He had told himself there was no reason to go in. He had told himself this so many times that the telling had become a kind of architecture, a set of walls he walked around without examining, and now he was inside them anyway, and the boat was in front of him, and it looked exactly like it always had.

His father's boat was four meters of fiberglass and salt-bleached paint, a ten-year-old Yamaha outboard bolted to the stern, a sun-faded buoy painted with the Oda family name in characters his father had done himself, slightly too large, the brushstrokes of a man who had learned kanji as an adult and never quite lost the effortfulness. Kenji ran his thumb along the hull, feeling where the paint had oxidized to a chalky texture at the waterline.