Blue Field(39)
She again cast her light. The aureate slope was like an old painting fading around its edges. She stroked her beam up and down. Urgent. Please respond. Zip.
Options, please.
Please?
She could still figure that Leo was somewhere above. She’d last seen him bailing on his dive in the vicinity of a hundred-seventy feet. The boat meanwhile had been left unattended, an illegal move in any book—no one to make sure the anchor didn’t break free, no one to prevent the former fishing tug from surging away and capsizing, from colliding with other night-plying vessels. No one on board to radio for help in case of an emergency. No one left. No help.
Rand’s light expired.
She gorged, fattened on fog. Blood sirened through her veins. Her heartbeats a sortie of hobgoblins. Down she went after him. Two-thirty, god-forty. Special delivery. She no longer shivered in her golden cocoon. No longer anything but a delivering machine.
She called it at two-fifty-seven. She felt the decision as physical, neural-glandular, pineal as a third eye. Pure primitive. She turned and faced the broken slope and commenced her ascent. It took forever. She saw it could be her unstinting present, that it pre-existed her, like a mold she would pour herself into for the rest of her life. So she would live after all. Some weepie. As she went she periodically scanned behind. No sign. Her head slowly cleared but she mostly ignored it though she continued to understand the need to attend her gages, her pace. She noted a tickle in her left eye. It hung in her sight like a sac of hope and she cursed it. Why hope now? She shuddered, clinging for a moment to the rock face, and then relief hatched in her belly and swarmed her chest.
She waited. Eventually Rand passed her with no notice and she climbed again until, somewhere in his vicinity, she made her first decompression stop for a minute at a hundred feet. She continued trailing, switching to her decom gases from extra tanks slung at her sides. By the time she reached thirty feet she and Rand hung together in a balmy fifty degrees, having risen through several thermoclines. She had to pee. Otherwise with little sense of urgency she prayed that the boat and Leo waited on the surface to ferry them back. That they’d all gotten away with something.
At twenty feet she and Rand rested against a massive limestone outcropping riddled with holes the size of quarters. Hang time, major deco. They turned off their beams to conserve the batteries and lay in darkness to avoid attracting swarms of the underwater life that existed at these warmer, shallower depths, the tiny pale freshwater shrimps and nits that already fashioned a twittering corona around her and Rand—the two of them larger bugs sparking in a dark field. Occasionally they plied a small backup light and checked their instruments and when they did the illuminated limestone became a crayfish condo—at each of the thousand windows, antennae pricked, the crustaceans waved at visitors once giants but now nearly fish food. How close they’d come.
Part Six
38
She woke drenched and threw off the spread.
Bright spring flowed in the open window—finally. Spring, or something like it.
Cooling, she again closed her eyes. She’d committed some terrible crime. Awaiting incarceration, she received her dead mother—dead but an uncancered whole again—in the living room of their old home. The old family sheepdog there too. Time for new goodbyes. Marilyn had never felt so loved! Then the appointed hour neared. She entered a narrow sunken street of ancient cobblestones and darkened shops. Lost and alone she paced and retraced her steps in a cold rain. Soon a white delivery van slid alongside, windows streaked. She got in the back seat. Noted with gratitude the heater blasting—she’d never felt so cold. The driver turned toward her. Rand, his face dirt-streaked as raw beets. Eyes slitted against her. She wondered how long he’d been crying.
She woke again, foggy, and plumped the pillows and sat and soon the dream-dross melted. Like this past winter—always the snow like tiny cold seeds, and then hyacinths in the neighbours’ terracotta pots. Ivy slickening green and ascending the walls of her towering tower of a house. Outside the bedroom window, three stories down, children’s pipsqueak voices bouncing like white balls. Did not, did so. Did so. As the children passed by, their voices trailed off, like dots of light elongated with dark tails.
On another morning not much later, first of a long weekend—nearly summer again, nearly a year since Jane’s death—Marilyn woke at dawn to a silver light like none at all. She woke her husband and they readied and then she drove, cutting east-north-east past the latest checkpoints and then through the rolling hills. They stopped for grilled cheeses they barely ate and made a night of it in a motel where they turned to each other briefly, then turned away—Rand with a bad cough. Nothing really, he insisted, though it bore holes and tunnels in their sex and sleep and ended as leaks in memory-murmurs of things passed—Jane’s teeth picking around the pit of a plum and Bowman rasping of princesses and weenies. Reminding Marilyn when she fully woke at five the next morning—of what? Remind her? Bowman for-real dead this past winter deep in a cenote in Tulum. Turned into one more storied frog, croaking prince for some princess. And so, some seven months after she’d kissed Bowman, frogs in his honour heaped from a snoring Rand’s ears onto the motel bed and laurelled her with chorus-croak. They drowned the sad roar in her head and then drowned her back to sleep again.
Late again, very late. They suited up at high noon on the low bank of the northern river. Cold. Strong current out there. The water green, grey, green, depending. Rand opened a valve on his doubles and a hose ripped. He cursed and hacked and spat. She pulled her hood over her head and filled that with the tender leaves on the trees backing the riverbank. Then she swapped those leaves for the weeping willows of her childhood. They’d once thrived on the banks of the old neighbourhood creek that snuck under roads and culverts and rose snaking through parks and the alleys behind people’s homes. She and Jane smoked not only their first cigarettes but also their first joints by the creek slope while sleek muskrat sunned, doubling in the water’s mirroring sheen. Marilyn’s first period commenced there and, two days later, so did Jane’s. The creek long ago filled in by bulldozers and the willows replaced by invasive survive-at-all-costers—honey locust and ailanthus, tree of heaven. Here it was mostly spruce and scrappy maples and birch not fully budded out yet but she wondered at briefly feeling the old wonderment and soon Rand’s foul curses subsided. He finished changing over his hose. Shadows flitted among the branches and shades of branches impossible to distinguish for real. Especially given the distraction of his grunting and coughing. His increasingly gaunt frame. Postpone? she asked him on the days leading up to this trip, and he’d shrugged her off and she’d let him. It’s on, was all he’d say.