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closet and set it on his foam board. Then he rolled out a medicine ball that weighed about as much as he did and balanced it in the ring. By now, Owen’s machinations were far more interesting than the review Burr had brought to the pool.
    The divers shut off the bubbler to practice entries on smoother water. Jet spray riffled the surface, breaking the reflection so they could spot the water precisely and enter with a rip. As the divers held chrome rails and dialed in tension with their feet on large white cogs, Owen sat on the padded lip of the pool, running more engine tests and breaking the quiet rhythm of their approach. Bound— bzzz —rebound, then the warble and clatter of lumber tossed from the bed of a truck.
    Charybdis returned. It was the women’s turn to practice new dives. Early in the season, when they were still setting their programs, they kept the stakes low by bubble-wrapping their misses with the upwelling air. Owen focused on the turbulence. He sat behind a veil of thunder and burbling, like sitting in the cave behind a waterfall.
    The senior in Burr’s Homer seminar stopped mid-stair to talk with her coach. High-cut suit and hair glinting like a swirled gallon of gold-flecked paint. She noticed Owen’s fascination with the boats, how he smoothed the cordage and pulled as tight as he could. She clapped a few times and yelled down, “Let’s go, Owen!” whooping until he blushed.
    Leash woven between the catamaran hulls, Owen set the board and boats in the pool. He stacked the two remotes back to back in his hands, turning the bottom joystick in the opposite direction from the top. At first, he was able to pull everything—kickboard, buoy, and medicine ball. But once the boats hit the blister’s edge, the rig pitched, sputtered, and drowned.
    The team groaned with Burr. But Owen was undaunted.
    He spent the next hour yoking the boats like plow oxen, then linking them to the board. But it did nothing. Side by side they stalled. Burr tried to help. Owen glared.
    â€”I’ll get it, Owen snapped.
    Owen, a four-foot Ajax. That was the moment Burr understood heroic stubbornness, the Sophoclean refusal to relent, as something real rather than rhetorical, something Owen had inherited from his mother’s side of the family.
    Still. Owen never managed to drag the medicine ball more than a few feet. He sat on a towel in the passenger seat, totally shattered that his plan had failed. Burr tried to bring him back through bribery.
    â€”Is there anything you’d like for your birthday?
    â€”A remote-controlled boat.
    â€”You already have the Argos and the Mentor .
    â€”Not a toy boat. I need a stronger one, a real one.
    â€”You mean an RC yacht? Those don’t come cheap.
    â€”It would be a present from you and Mom.
    Before the afternoon was up, Owen was unboxing the ship, christened Zebulon , and Burr was left to wonder why two pounds of molded plastic needed eight D-cell batteries in its hull.
    The night of Owen’s sixth birthday, they were reading a condensed edition of the Odyssey .
    â€”Where exactly did Mom go? Owen asked.
    The picture on his nightstand was her new-discovery smile.
    â€”Beyond the setting sun.
    The phrase was imprecise, but it sounded fatherly—a pipe-smoking answer, his best Gregory Peck.
    â€”The sun sets in different places, though. That’s why we have time zones.
    â€”No. It’s always in the west. And your mother is waiting for us beyond the west.
    Burr let the words linger and hoped they’d gather weight in the silence.
    T hey were Division III, but Mission University’s diving team took their practices seriously and quickly grew tired of their unofficial mascot zipping his boat over aerated water while they summoned enough confidence to turn a handstand into a back double. Owen’s first boats, the smaller boats, were cute peripheral distractions that cut the tension of divers pushing the