Blue Field(38)
The gusts kept up all through dinner which she only picked at and soon their florid rushes accompanied the movie she and Rand and Leo watched, one they’d all seen before. Leo periodically checked the marine forecast. When she and Rand retired early to the guest lair, she fell asleep immediately, an errant airstream hooking her ankles and hauling her upside down and far away, hair trailing below, the wind jubilant, black, if black were a sound.
She woke to find her husband practically on top of her. Mare, you awake?
She opened to him and he entered and f*cked her. She was about to come when, from Leo’s bedroom next door, she heard above her own wail another woman’s. Marilyn grew rigid. Stretching his mouth over hers, Rand ground away, beating a succession of cries from her which passed into him.
Blown out, she and Rand and Leo played cards all the next morning. Still no sign of Leo’s mystery crush. At one point he scrambled some eggs and they ate. They watched more movies and slept again. Mid-afternoon she got up and washed her face then took a walk. A brute raw day. By the side of the road, the trees shorn of leaves scraped and bent and threw up their bows as if pissed. From here, half a forested mile inland, she failed to see the vast tract of water. And yet the enormous bay on one side joining with the great lake on the other filled her mind. Their increasing poisons, given the damaged world. This open water. No entering a cave or a wreck on this dive. No inside unfolding as if into a labyrinthine infinitude. Instead, a seemingly formless gray-blue blotting and snuffling the shore. And yet not open, not formless. A scaffolding of levels—each with its own exigencies depending on depth and temperature and light and viz. Each level of a deep open-water dive demanded a plan like an airy set of trusses delicately cantilevered over liquid in an architecture invisible to the naked eye. So she’d planned. All her plans, she thought now. What of them? She’d plotted and schemed to superintend what she could of her parents’ skittery presence. Jane’s too. Even Marilyn’s own breaking marriage. As if that would keep them all safe, herself included. Safe from herself.
This wind. Leo’s boat wouldn’t have a chance against the insane surface conditions. Tomorrow would likely be a wash. As if in response the sky began to hiss and spit. She marched anyway, past the locked cottages lining the road like blocks in a wall, trooping like a rat on a treadmill. Inside her, a juiced-wire lashing. On and on she went, ghosting everyone she knew and had ever known. Refused to know. Her mind a fastened hatch.
She returned to the cottage to find Rand alone in the living room, dark except for the TV. She turned the lamps on for him as one might for an invalid. Leo had left for the shop where he was tying up business odds and ends. After this weekend he’d close for good for the season. Around four in the afternoon she and Rand made sandwiches with the bread and cold cuts they’d brought. They read old dive magazines and spy novels plucked from the rickety bedroom shelves. Leo called at six.
Bag it, Rand said over the phone and she clicked the off button on the TV remote. No glory in losing your boat, he said after a moment had passed, then he fingered his scarred temples and listened some more. Fuck’s sake, he continued. I can do it.
He hung up and tossed his device onto the couch beside him, refusing to meet her gaze.
She said, Thanks for the sterling recommendation, boss.
He rose. Piss off, he said and stalked from the room and down the stairs.
The front door slammed. She took a shower and dressed again then lay down in her clothes and scored another nap. She woke at eight o’clock at night. She stared at the darkened ceiling. Soon it was nine. The TV kettle-drummed and keened from the living room. She trudged to the bathroom. In front of the mirror she untangled her hair and harped a fingernail along the ridges of her comb. Puh-link puh-lunk. At ten Leo called again to report the wind was down.
She and Rand climbed in the truck. He backed onto the road, bumpety-bump. Drive faster, she nearly said, but already he was picking up speed as he rounded the first corner. The road was so dark she wished he’d turn off the headlights. See what happened next.
37
So stoned.
As if in a glass jar, suspended among drifts of white gauze. She was diving relatively deep, breathing air just to feel the effects and here they were. Metallic pings and sonorous snores—her breath a miracle-soup. She halted her descent and studied the display on her primary computer. Instantly the fog around her brightened—hello synapses roaring back into business. She swept her beam through the tar-waters below. The jagged monochrome contours of the limestone cliff revealed themselves. Forty-foot viz, she guessed. She guessed she better recheck her computer and gas gages. Another recheck to let the situation really sink in—two hundred and five feet. Noted. Also, she was shaking with cold though she felt lit as a drunk jacketless on a frigid night. She picked her way lower, avoiding the sludge-furred rock. Stir that and she’d reduce her light to a hazy circle swallowed by silt. Check and recheck. Two-fifteen. Two-twenty-five. Her breath was an accordion wooze. Noted—at this depth the slightest spike in her inhalations would at the very least enhance the narcosis. Noted—breathing harder could also spike the oxygen levels in her bloodstream to toxic levels. She’d convulse, drown. Noted—the need to check and recheck, work the sloppy cantering horse of her brain and understand the slipshod bullshit she was in.
Plus she’d lost sight of Rand.
She directed her beam toward her chest. Darkness exploded. She gazed further down the inky well and picked out the faint gleam of a beacon fading fast. Thirty feet below her? Rand, breathing air at the limits of where air should be breathed—and here her mind dismounted. Not here. In white veils trailing hidden streams, where a gondola floated beneath crumbling aqueducts, a barrel-chested boar sang, striped boater at a rakish angle. From a nearby tavern thrilled a wolf-whistle coloratura. She disembarked here and entered through a thick oak door. A colony of grey cats with cricket tongues greeted her, chirping notes like chipped tesserae in an ancient mosaic. She tried to swallow but her throat was a dry bone no drink could help. What could? Hurry, she thought.