Blue Field(16)
She wondered if she should try to eat. She swigged her cooling coffee. She listened to people chew. Her stomach turned.
When Rand pushed back from the table everyone glanced up. He resettled in his chair, bumping her arm.
Sorry, she hissed again.
He cocked his head at Leo. There a plan? he said.
Her apology last night also hadn’t flown. He’d returned to the room late, undressed and showered and collapsed into bed. She remained on the sofa while a rising wind conked the trees outside. With any luck the whole rocky island would bust. What hadn’t she already lost, including her recent pride? She’d encountered a frightened fish or Rand’s overkill knock—what did it matter? In her panic she’d forgotten the drill. All there was to know. The cabin’s eaves creaked. He tossed in bed. Hours passed. I’m sorry, she finally said. Go to sleep, he snapped. Dead. I thought you were dead. You know? For the rest of the night she replayed his words. She did know. The terror and guilt of outliving. The sensation of falling out of life’s rotation into some cruel limbo. The pickled dread of what might come next—more dull life and then more. He’d lost his parents to a car wreck when he was a baby, too young for him to recall. But he did remember close friends who died while cave-and wreck-diving—men and women he’d sometimes name after lovemaking, his fingers afloat in her hair, chuckling at old, once-shared jokes. Instead of twisting alone in his own private versions of hell while she stewed in hers on the sofa. Did he sleep at all? When grey light soaked the edges of the drawn curtains she scuttled to dreamlessness like a slick pool. And when, drained and exhausted, she opened her eyes again, he’d already left.
Leo coughed, squared his shoulders and puffed his chest. He rapped his knuckles on the table. Okay, he announced. Here’s the situation. Marine forecast says twelve knots out of the northwest by ten. That’s a lot of rock and roll. I can get you freaks out there, but I doubt you can get down. Or get your sorry asses back on board.
Rand stared at him and she followed suit, noting as she often did Leo’s peculiarly elfin nose and jawline, the skin strangely unsullied by sun or windburn from the six or seven times a season she and Rand chartered his services. A leather bracelet and a chunky steel-banded dive watch adorned his slender wrists—the watch expensive-looking and impressive only to non-initiates since technical divers relied on computers. Now, under Rand’s steadfast gaze, Leo’s shoulders caved slightly. Okay, he said. So you can get down and back. But what about these pussies here?
Jason and Matt and rest of the guys snickered. Matt flipped Leo off. Pussies? one of the guys said. Bro, that is so unfair.
With a snicker Leo gave a wave of his long tapered fingers in her direction. Sorry Mare, he said. Don’t mind me. I’m just a pig.
Rand stretched then got to his feet. His acne scars had taken on a grey cast. Purple crescents rimmed his eyes. No rare blue today. We’re on, he said.
No please, she responded to Leo. Don’t mind me.
As if anyone was. Someone knocked her chair getting by and then someone else did. Guys. Guys in the morning. She could almost sniff the testosterone. Probably they’d all drown. Even Jane. Even her husband clearly not at his best, who couldn’t find it within himself to disappoint anyone, except his wife. Someone should stop them, insist they sit this one out. Not leave her stranded with the greasy dishes and crusts streaked with jam, tea-party leftovers from a social event held in honour of an imaginary friend invented by some suck.
15
Blown out. There really was no sailing the tug in such snotty weather. By late morning everybody packed and left. For much of the miserable ride to the mainland on the car ferry, Jane and Rand occupied the lounge, plying crosswords while Marilyn scanned the shabby receding vista from the stern’s upper observation deck. The trees on the island’s shoreline looked like puny sticks—this late in October, this far north, on vegetation not terminally acid-rained, the dressy leaves had long since turned to mulch. Another two months and the water’s surface would congeal. By December the ferry would yield to snowmobiles and cars and trucks racing to fishing huts stacked with cases of beer and fishing poles angling lines under the ice. She’d seen that cold underworld for herself once. Slipped on a cold sunny February day through an opening chainsawed from the twenty-inch crust into water unperturbed by surface disturbances and found a junked car on the bottom in such crystalline relief she expected it might start up and drive off. Just past its rear bumper she noted a motionless pike carceral with cold, eyes clouded with winter dreaming. Its grinning needle-sharp mouth. She wasn’t under long though—not nearly long enough. Secured by a rope to a topside line tender to prevent her from getting lost, a nervous, jumpy guy who insisted on cutting short her allotted time by yanking feverishly every two minutes on her harness, she’d returned to the hole feeling like a dog on a leash —until, just before she exited through the hole, a near-hallucinatory blue at the ice’s underbelly elated her. Those memories still held their goodness, she thought now on the ferry’s deck, holding onto herself, again shaking with cold. Some memories still might.
She paced past the towering wheelhouse. She imagined the captain or pilot or mates watching her walking, wondering at how tortured she must look. How desperate to escape. But with no one visible behind the mirror-like windows, the wheelhouse looked like an impenetrable fortress. She glared. She could almost believe there was no one up there. Nobody home. Not even a ghost.