Our Wives Under the Sea (18)

On occasion, and typically out of nowhere, I would wonder whether this level of patience would hold out, should a test ever prove I was likely to develop the same condition as my mother. On occasion, I would look in the mirror and consider the briskly diminishing fact of myself, hold my hands to the sides of my face as if preventing collapse. Would you look after me, I found myself wanting to ask and unable to do so, the request tangling back on itself, coming out as would you pass the gravy, would you change the channel, would you look at this. For a long time, it failed to occur to me that I was not, in fact, the only person this could happen to. I would look into the mirror and imagine that only I could be in any sense finite.



* * *



I don’t realize until well after the fact that I haven’t been expecting to get through to anyone actually able to help me. The phone calls to the Centre have simply established themselves as routine, akin to hair brushing, to running my finger across my teeth and calling them clean. The morning it works, I am already planning the rest of my day: idle pileup of tea and spoons and gummy vitamins, unread emails and post left unopened and linens changed, salt hidden, residue scrubbed from the sides of the bath. At the table: two plates, the crusts of bread rolls with their insides picked out, a pitcher of day-old water growing a skin. We haven’t spoken about the previous night, though the bed in which Leah sleeps has dried and her behavior seems largely unaffected. I have googled and found the results mostly unhelpful: reasons for vomiting clear liquid—do you have acute gastroenteritis? Have you drunk too much water? Have you been making yourself sick?

Leah is locked in the bathroom, humming something that might be a song I recognize but almost certainly isn’t. I am listening to the sound of the taps, to the sound of her humming, and thinking for whatever reason of the clutter of my mother’s bathroom shelves: the cold cream and Jungle Formula and the Blue Grass perfume that she always kept in its box with the turquoise and cream Celtic lettering. The space around us is a claw half-grasped, holding tight without quite crushing, and I wish, in the idle way I always wish it these days, that I felt more confident in my ability to breathe.

I am staring out of the window when the hold music cuts midchorus and a voice comes online, asking me in businesslike fashion how it is they can help me today. Automatically, I start to recite the numbers—rank number, transfer number, and so on, and so on—but the voice interrupts to assure me they already have all the details they need.

“I’m sorry if it’s been a bit of a process,” the voice adds, in a tone that could convey almost any emotion, “getting in touch with us.”

The upstairs neighbors are playing a soap opera on the television, a woman screaming in a voice that tries and fails to convince that this isn’t what she’d wanted at all.



* * *



I remember a time that Leah went away. Not the time, but a point long before she was working for the Centre, a point at which expeditions were still infrequent—brief dives off the coast of Scotland, weeks abroad on fishing trawlers, research trips to places I could find on a map. The way I remember it is this: late September, washed-down dregs of a liquid summer. The seasons always change more swiftly on the water, the light on the sea autumnal long before the chill has reached the city, and I was far from the city that day, having traveled miles to see Leah off. The afternoon they left, I watched from the viewing deck along with three or four of the other wives, one of whom complained of being cold until a staffer from the rig offered her a life jacket in a bid to shut her up. Colder on the water, she said, over and over again, should have thought of that, should have brought something warmer.

I remember the slip of the craft across the water, long metal nose and sculpted conning tower, the way it seemed to dip and slink, eel-like, white lights along its spine and finial. I watched it float, not bobbing, seeming less to sit upon the water than to hang within it, half-submerged and threatening to sink. I remember turning to the woman on my right and saying I wasn’t sure a ship like that could possibly withstand the ocean’s weight on top of it, that the crew would all be crushed, that we ought to speak to someone. This woman, I forget whose wife she was, only smiled at me, took my hand, and said that first timer always felt like this. You expect them to come back looking like Flat Stanley, she said, and I told her I wasn’t a first timer and asked her who Flat Stanley was and she asked if I’d really never read those books and in the ensuing conversation I moved my eyes away from the water long enough to miss the ship going down. By the time I looked back there was nothing—bob of gulls upon an undisturbed surface, gentle sense of something pooling in my wrists as if my heart had momentarily stopped.

Now the thing is, from everything I know and everything I have otherwise experienced, it seems unlikely that the ship could have gone down that quickly, and certainly not with such minimal disturbance on the top. But even so, this is what I remember and short of getting in contact with the other wives onboard the viewing deck that day, none of whose names I even recall, there is no way of checking this scenario for accuracy. What I remember, then, becomes what happened: Leah leaving like the summer from the ocean, not by degrees but all at once.



* * *



The last time she went away was different—for one thing, I wasn’t there. After the Centre threw their going-away party, I went home and Leah didn’t and that night I dreamed auroral colors and woke at three to a white rubbernecking moon at the window, which I chose not to find unsettling.