Our Wives Under the Sea (32)

Now, from midcalf to upper thigh, along her sides and then across her breasts and up along her arms to midforearm, she is at first surf-white, uncertain, and then changing as I look at her, white to blue to green—her skin a drifting texture, somehow unmoored, as though it only floats upon the surface of her flesh.

“I think we need to get you to a doctor,” I say, in a useless tone that she seems barely to register.

“I don’t feel very good,” she says, as though I haven’t spoken, and now that I have seen her I know that her voice is not the same, but rather a voice that seems to drown in air, unused to oxygen. “I think,” she says, “that there was too much water. When we were down there. I think we let it get in.” I look at her and see the way her eyes appear to spill their irises, the way the pulse throbs hard in her throat and at her wrists, as if in answer to some failing inner rhythm.

A bright knife of memory: my mother, holding her hands out flat in front of her. The tremor that wouldn’t subside when she willed it, the finger and thumb that wouldn’t respond to her efforts to pinch them together. I feel wrong, she had said—her voice clear in a way it increasingly seemed not to be—and I’d registered the impulse to throw my arms around her, to struggle against whatever was happening, to tell her I’d make it all right.

“I think,” I say to Leah, “I think we should take you back to the bathroom,” and I don’t know why I say this, really, except that when the bathtub has been filled and I have eased her down into the water, she seems less troubled. She ducks her head, the throbbing at her throat and wrists recedes from view. I kneel beside the bath and watch her shift herself, the pull and shrink of skin around her knees and ankles, the color taking on new shades—first white, then blue, then something else. I look around the bathroom and think about nothing, really. Stupid things. The way I always used to floss and brush and mouthwash where Leah only brushed. The way I used to sit on the edge of the bath and read to her and drink beer while she washed her hair with water poured from a plastic vase, because she preferred it to standing up in the shower. The way she never managed to wash the conditioner out of the tops of her ears.

I look at her now and know what has been true since she returned: this change, this dragging tide beneath her surface. I watch the water dribble from the corner of her mouth and do not know whether it is simply bathwater or something spilling from inside. I take a flannel and wipe her, gently, cup her head and wonder what it is I feel beneath my palm that isn’t hair or skull but something other.

I used to imagine the sea as something that seethed and then quieted, a froth of activity tapering down into the dark and still. I know now that this isn’t how it goes, that things beneath the surface are what have to move and change to cause the chain reaction higher up.





Abyssal Zone





LEAH


Matteo slept, and then I did, and when I did I dreamed in an odd, compressed fashion, as though there were too much water on top of me for my thoughts to move about in their usual way. I dreamed about long corridors and about my own spine and about Miri drawing a finger down my neck and then stopping, and when I woke my vision had retracted to a couple of pinholes and everything took several minutes to adjust. We tried the comms panel again and again, we took apart the main deck piece by piece in search of what had gone wrong. We discussed unreasonable ways of orchestrating a rescue, imagined exerting enough pressure on the hull that the craft began to roll, imagined causing a controlled explosion whose aftershocks might be seen from the surface. We sat, sometimes, as though unintroduced at a dinner party, each waiting for the other to offer their name. On occasion, I would wake from sleeping to find Jelka muttering to herself in the kitchen or the wash stall or the doorway to the main deck and it would take me seconds to get it clear in my head that she was praying.

“Your God,” Matteo said to her once, “has put us in a shitty situation.” His voice had taken on a tone of disbelief that seemed to follow him about our shared space, a disbelief that stoppered up the other aspects of his personality and made him curt and difficult. “I want,” he said a lot, “to eat some normal food. I want a cocktail olive and a pizza and a pack of Melba toasts. I want to stretch my legs. I want to see some fucking weather.” I wanted to tell him that of course I felt that way as much as he did, but it seemed unkind, too nagging in a desperate situation. I wanted to tell him that of course I felt afraid, but it seemed too unlucky to say the thing out loud.

I came to regard my role onboard as something akin to peacemaker, although Matteo and Jelka were never exactly fighting, only scratching about one another in a manner I sought to defuse. I tried to fill silences, told stories to drown out the madness of the situation. “Once a month,” I said, “when I was little, my father would pack up the Volvo, throw me into the passenger seat, and take me out to the beach. We didn’t do much when we were there, we’d just collect pieces of sea glass and cowrie shells. We’d walk the length of the beach, marking our progress via these beach huts that ran along the top of the sands. You could tell how far you’d walked by the color of the beach house you were looking at. The hut painted peach marked the midway point between car park and headland, the hut striped white and blue was the three-quarter point, and so on. When we’d walked far enough, we’d go down to the water and eat sandwiches and look for beached barrel jellyfish. There always seemed to be so many—they’re pink when you see them in the water but they always go blue when they wash up on shore. Thing is there’s basically nothing to a jellyfish. Almost all of what you picture when you picture a jellyfish is actually just water, this thin skin and then this hood around its reproductive organs and its digestive system. Basically, the second a jellyfish is washed up, it starts to die because the water starts to evaporate. It only takes a few hours in the sun.”