Girl in Ice(42)

Four minutes, twenty seconds.

“You don’t have to do this now,” I said. “Get me geared up, I mean.”

“It’s okay, I want to.”

I stretched my arms back so she could jigger the sleeves up to my shoulders. “Sigrid looks so happy, watching us get you geared up,” Nora said with a wistful smile. She worked the hood over my head, showed us on the chart where we were: step fifteen. “Raj hasn’t been able to put himself back together at all, really. He’s got some heart issues himself, blames himself even though that makes no sense; the defect wasn’t inherited. Sometimes I think grief affects everything, I mean, maybe his body at some level is saying no to mine.”

“How did you two meet?” My attempt to ease off the subject.

“In grad school. Doing a research project at Woods Hole. I came from London, he transferred from New Delhi.”

“Was it a coup de foudre?”

“Coup de what?”

“It’s French for love at first sight. Literally means a bolt of lightning.”

“Yes!” She smiled, finally. “Straightaway we were mad for each other. Still are. How did you guess?”

“It’s… the way you talk to each other, the way you are with each other.”

“Has that ever happened to you, Val—a bolt of lightning?”

“No. I don’t leave my house enough for that sort of magic to ever happen.”

“Well, you sure left it this time.” Nora hauled the big zipper across my chest and took a step back. “Look at that, you’re already at step eighteen, see?”

I felt like a sausage in the dry suit, which reeked of old rubber.

She turned back to the clock. Six minutes had passed.

“How many times has he been down there?”

“Oh, we’ve dived hundreds of times. All kinds of conditions.” She clicked on the mic. “Raj, how’s it going?”

His mic snapped on, but only static came through.

Nora tried again.

More hissing and clicking.

“Bloody thing.” She rubbed her forehead, her eyes beautiful without a trace of makeup. “Sometimes, when it’s this cold, we get crystals in the mic and this happens.”

Me half-amphibian, we sat on stools next to the slushy blue pit, watching the second hand tick into seven minutes. Sigrid sat cross-legged next to me on the floor, occasionally grinning up at me or hugging my rubber-encased calves. I wanted to keep talking to Nora, learn more about what it was like to be in love like she and Raj were, but it felt wrong, as if that would distract from our unacknowledged prayers that Raj’s voice would ring clear from the mic or that he would burst to the surface. Nora got up and paced around the hole, then back the other way, never taking her eyes off it. She smoothed back her gleaming black hair and tied it in a hasty ponytail; seconds later she yanked out the rubber band, jammed on her hat, and knelt at the pit, staring down into it as if she could will him up.

By seven minutes, forty-seven seconds I had already imagined her a widow, dumbstruck, floating senseless through a year of grief before being swept up in a new love, even more tainted by the ever-present possibility of loss.

The second hand swept cruelly around the face of the clock. We were staring down nine minutes. The struts of the dome rattled with a sudden blast of wind; the canvas walls bellied in and out with the gusts. I shivered in the suit, hands numb, as if I were already in the water.

Nora clicked on the mic. “Raj, are you on your way up? Over.”

Continuous static grated the air, spitting and crackling.

Nine minutes, fifty-seven seconds.

“Raj, can you confirm—”

He exploded from the water, shards of ice flowing off his black-hooded head. I nearly fell backward off my stool, while Sigrid clapped and laughed. He bobbed for a moment, goggles clouded, before nudging out his mouthpiece with a pop. Nora caught him by the straps that secured the tank to his shoulders and with shocking strength hauled him halfway out of the water. We each took an arm and slid him the rest of the way. She got down on the ice and helped him sit up.

“Couldn’t you hear me?” he sputtered.

“Couldn’t you hear me?”

“Sure! I responded but—”

“Something’s up with the mics.” She cradled him, one hand over his heart. “All we heard was static for the last four minutes. Nearly five.”

He coughed a bit, shook his head, and peeled off his rubber hood with a wet smack. “It’s probably the valve again. You weren’t worried, I hope. I was fine—”

Nora hugged him, soaking herself. For a few moments they breathed together, then he pulled away, aware of the audience.

“Everything went perfectly. It was a ten-minute dive exactly, right? Didn’t I say it would be? Down to the second almost.” He held out one red rubber hand, a lidded plastic bucket half filled with pearly sand dripping from it. “Got the sample.”

Nora nodded and put a smile on her face.

Raj looked me up and down in the spare suit and laughed. “So, you’re going to give it a try?”

Which is when I made my decision—I could at least drop in with my head above water—show Sigrid I hadn’t put the suit on for nothing.

“Just going for a quick dip.” Making sure Sigrid had her eyes on me, I got on my ass and scooted over to the hole, dropped one finned foot in, then the other. Snakes of cold encircled my calves. “I’m not going under, just to be clear.”