Our Wives Under the Sea (31)

Pushing back her bench, Jelka stood and walked over to the lower hatch, tapped her toe against the handwheel, and frowned. The escape trunk sat at the base of the craft and operated in a manner similar to any air lock, sealed off from the main body of the ship and designed to match the air pressure on the outside, which would allow the outer door to be opened. In our current situation, of course, it was completely useless, as opening the outer door to deep-sea water pressure would result in whoever was in the escape trunk being instantly crushed. This was not an expedition that had ever anticipated any one of us going outside. Our brief had been strictly to observe and map any life we encountered, not to collect or take back. Even so, there could be no theoretical harm in opening up the inner hatch to check what was down there, whether some piece of machinery had come loose or something in one of the drain valves was causing the sound that continued to wail up through the floor. Jelka tapped her toe against the handwheel a second time, tilted back on one heel, and stepped away, still frowning downward.

“Don’t be daft,” she said, though no one had said anything, and shortly after this she came back to the table and sat down with her back to the hatch.





MIRI


I knock on the bathroom door, then wander through to the bedroom where I stand for a minute, picking things up and putting them down again, drawing my toe in circles through the carpet of hair that has formed over the actual carpet. I haven’t been cleaning in here—it feels so specifically Leah’s space now—and everything seems unpleasantly furred over and unwashed. I have always been neater than Leah, although in the old days, much of this was simply due to my being at home more consistently. I wore it as a badge of honor, nonetheless, picking up abandoned glasses with a sigh and ferrying them to the dishwasher. I don’t really think it’s that hard, I used to say a lot, and she would apologize and fill the kitchen sink with soap suds, and really, now I think about it, what an absolute waste of life.

I don’t realize that Leah has emerged from the bathroom and is standing behind me until I half turn, catch her shadow in the corner of my eye and jump.

“Fucking hell.”

She doesn’t move, only frowns at me briefly before crossing to the bed and sitting down. I think about being cold in the mornings, about pushing my feet down beneath the bedsheets and finding hers. I think about Leah taking off her makeup in bed, the blurry crescents of mascara across the cotton discs that she would ball on the bedside table.

“Come over here,” she says, and I’m surprised but do as I’m told. I sit beside her on the bed and let our shoulders brush, then lean away again, this gentle touch and then removal. I feel for a moment that I understand the whole bright dailiness of our life before this: the morning glances at the bathroom sink, the spit of toothpaste, the cramp and comfort of our hall and living room and kitchen—understand it and also understand that it is gone.

I lean away and she doesn’t follow me, clamshelled in her dressing gown and scratching idly at the inside of one arm.

“I was thinking that it’s unfair of me,” she says, “to hog this bedroom when it isn’t only mine.”

I say nothing and she nods as though I have.

“I was thinking,” she says, “that you can have it if you want. I don’t mind switching.”

I look at her, think of saying, I don’t think switching would make a difference, think of saying, Why don’t you just sleep in the bath—you spend enough time there as it is, say none of this.

“I’m fine,” I tell her and she nods and continues to scratch at her arm. I’m surprised when she leans back against me, her toweling shoulder touching mine again, her head dipping into the crook of my neck and holding there. I don’t know what to say to this, really. It isn’t that we haven’t touched since she came back—between one thing and another, I’ve touched her often, though this has chiefly been in the form of blood mopped up and hair held back as she vomited water. This is different. I find it difficult to remember the feeling of reciprocation, difficult to locate the muscle memory required of me. I let my head tilt sideways, touch my cheek to the top of her head, find that I badly want to cry.

“I think,” she says, “that there’s something that’s seriously wrong with me. I keep thinking about Jelka. I keep thinking about what we thought we were doing down there.”

“What are you talking about?” I say, but she only shakes her head.

She is still scratching at the inside of her arm and this time she shows me, pulls the sleeve of her robe back farther than I have seen in forever, reveals the changing texture of skin, the rubbed-raw glint of something unfamiliar.

“What’s that?” I ask, and she shakes her head, pulls up her other sleeve, then parts the floor-length folds of the dressing gown to show me her legs, pulls the cord at the waist, and shows me everything. It is not at all what I expected, all those times when I looked at the scuffed-off particles of matter in the bathtub and imagined her flayed and fraying beneath her clothes. It is something else, and I don’t know what to call it or what to say. I look at her and think, briefly, of the strange oyster sheen of her underarms and elbow creases in the first long weeks of her return, of the way she had shown me and said, with a bland sort of certainty, that she’d been told it would go away. I think, too, about the way she had bled, from the face and the gumline, so many mornings of bleeding that have since petered out, as though there might be no more blood to lose.