Never Have I Ever(92)
I got her face again, pulled it close to mine, forehead to forehead, my bare eyes peering into hers through the mask. I breathed in and out, slow and steady, calming her by something like osmosis. The netting had me now, too. I could feel it. I waited until she was still, her breath easing, then managed to free one arm and reach my thigh.
She jerked again when she saw the silver flash of my knife near her face. I kept a good grip on it. If I dropped it, we were screwed. She had me so entangled that I doubted I could get to the backup mesh cutter I always stowed in a low pocket on the BCD.
I began cutting the netting away, patient, slow, my movements minimal, preserving air. She hung still, letting me work, and once her hands were free, she reached to see my air gauge. I heard her shuddering cry when she saw it. Not good, but I didn’t think about that. I got myself loose and then peered at her through the churning silt. Her BCD and tank were too entangled. I cut some straps and unfastened others, then helped her slide out of it. I’d dropped my light, and I could see its beam slicing through the blackness to our left. Its beam was the only way I knew which direction was down. I left it, reaching instead for the wreck reel clipped to my waist, finding the line. Roux clung to me, slim and trembling in her wet suit, her protective shell removed.
I had to move her hands manually off my arms, putting them on my body. She barnacled onto me, shaking. I followed the reel’s line with my hands, working us out of the wreck, foot by foot.
Once we came around the corner, I could see light from my entry point. My air had redlined, and we were seventy feet down. No time to get back to the other air tank. We had to go up. Right then. Still, I took it as slowly as I could, considering the doubled buoyancy, following our shared bubbles up, Roux shuddering and moaning in my arms.
Three minutes later and I would have found only her body. A minute later—thirty seconds, even—she might have drowned me with her, damn her eyes.
We broke the surface, and I dumped the last bit of my air into the BCD, though it wasn’t enough to keep us on the surface. I turned her, cradling her with her back to me, floating her in a tired-diver hold. We both dropped our mouthpieces. No point. The tank was dead dry. She took in heaving gulps of fresh air, limp, and I used my free hand to blow more air into my BCD, making it buoyant enough to float us both. I was so exhausted that if the seas had been rougher, we might have drowned right there, with the boat only a hundred yards away.
I unclipped my emergency signal float and unfurled it, and it was a fight to find the breath to get it inflated. The neon tube rose bright and slim from the water like a cheery orange finger, telling them that we were here. They had to retrieve the anchor, but within a couple of minutes the Miss Behavin’ started her engines and turned our way.
As they got close, I could see Luca and Maddy hanging over the bow, and all three of the Babbages as well, peering across the water at us. Maddy’s face was swollen from crying, and Luca looked haggard and terrified.
When the engines cut, Roux lifted one arm in a wave. I think only then did they realize I wasn’t holding up a body. Across the water I heard Luca burst into a hail of noisy tears. Maddy grabbed him in a hug, and he turned toward her, wailing in relief.
Jay hit the siren, an alarm that blared down into the water. It would reach Winslow, signaling both where the boat was and that he should come up.
I turned my back and began towing Roux toward the ladder. She’d lost one of her fins, and she lay helpless in my arms. She was craning her neck, trying to see me, but she couldn’t see my face in her position.
“This changes nothing,” she said. The words rasped out in a fierce and angry whisper, just for me.
Tired as I was, I rose to it. I snarled, “You’re welcome,” in her ear.
“Fuck you,” she said. “Nothing has changed.”
Even through my anger, I knew that she was wrong. I knew it before we’d reached the boat and I was shoving her up the ladder, into their waiting arms.
She was dead wrong to say nothing had changed, because I had. I had gone into the water, found her, brought her up alive, against reason and my own dark interests.
The past remained the same, and so, apparently, had she, but I had come up new. I could feel a sea change in me, sure and certain. I was too tired, too blown, to understand it fully. I only knew two things with any certainty: I had changed, and she wasn’t going to like it.
17
We met at Rosie B’s near the university. It wasn’t my kind of place, much less Roux’s. The walls were festooned with neon beer signs, and its mismatched wooden chairs and booths looked pirated from a defunct diner. A warped pool table took up real estate near the bathrooms. This was a student hangout, where Davis’s sophomore microeconomics students could coast into Dollar Beer Night on the flimsiest of fake IDs; we would not run into our neighbors here.
The old sound system was playing a grindy R&B song that no one my age had ever heard. Davis had wanted to come with me for moral support, but he thought I was meeting Roux to talk through today’s near disaster.
The rest of the weekend’s dives had, of course, been canceled, and Maddy and I had told him the whole story in tandem. She’d been breathless, speaking in hyperbole, while I’d tried to downplay the whole event. Davis knew us both well enough to guess that the truth was somewhere in between. He’d been both proud of me and frightened for me, caught in that weird post-event anxiety that sets in when someone dear has a close call. He asked three or four times if I was really okay, and all afternoon he’d unconsciously kept a hand on me. When I’d asked him to take care of Oliver and make us all dinner while I met with Roux, he’d more than agreed. He’d taken Maddy and the baby and gone out to buy filet and fresh, local shrimp for the grill, his go-to celebration meal. We’d left at the same time, me for this ratty bar, them for Publix and Joe Patti’s Seafood Market.