Our Wives Under the Sea (49)
“Are you going to slap me,” I said, and he stopped, dropped my arm, and looked at his fingers, and I felt my unkindness in the twist of his mouth but found there was nothing I could say to make it better. “I don’t—” I started, and then abandoned the thought, felt it slip from the upper drift of my mind to somewhere lower. Sunken thoughts, said a voice in my head that was not mine, and then I moved toward the main panel, ignoring the place where someone had smashed a segment of keyboard with a torch, preparing to wake up the main engine and pilot the craft across the ocean floor.
After this, Matteo did very little of anything, sat dumb as though unable to believe what I had said to him or what I was choosing to do. The craft responded to my controls with the ease of something that had never been out of commission, and I wondered with a semihysterical pinch of amusement whether we might simply have misunderstood the situation all along, taken a broken light for a craft that could not be moved. We slid through the water, the darkness opening out only into further darkness, the lights from the front of the craft and the sensors picking up a geography of irregular basalt, wide-open crags of rock that spoke to a broad crevasse—something deep and narrow into which we had fallen—and yet not one living thing. I’m not sure how long I moved us forward through this darkness, the strange emptiness opening up before us the farther we went. I remember now that I caught that smell again— the burning flesh, the rendering of something too hot to keep its form—though I am not sure if that is something I really registered or something I superimposed over the memory at some later point.
Come on, I found myself thinking, as I had while staring out into the blank wide blackness of the window and longing only for some struggle of life. Come on, I found myself thinking, give.
And movement, then, as if in acknowledgment. At last, a movement in the dark.
MIRI
When Leah came back, they called me at an odd time to let me know—three o’clock, too late for lunch, my gaze trained on a patch of carpet that seemed slightly lighter than the space around it. I didn’t realize at the time, but she had actually been back for two weeks when the Centre got in touch. We have been operating a cautionary quarantine, the woman on the phone explained to me, as I’m sure you would expect. I remember her tone as conversational yet curiously distant—distant in a literal sense, as though she was holding the phone away from her. The background noise was difficult to parse: a shuttling sound, a succession of jerkings and shudderings, as though someone was moving large pieces of furniture across the floor. You’re welcome to come and pick her up, the woman on the phone informed me. I had to ask her for an address and then to wait while I fetched a pen.
I remember very little about that afternoon. I put on shoes and found they were the wrong ones for the weather but by that point I had already left the flat. I hailed a cab and did not ask about the price. The Centre was somewhere outside the city, a few minutes from the coast, but I couldn’t tell you where exactly, or how big it was or even what it looked like. I remember only a car park, tumbleweeded through with crisp packets the way all car parks are, and a sickish lurch at the base of my ribs—perversely bridal with anticipation—and then Leah, suddenly present as though she had manifested, nothing on her but the clothes she wore, no bag, no nothing, as though they had bundled her out in a hurry. I remember this: the way she stood and looked at me, half raised her arms, and then dropped them, as though uncertain of her welcome, and the way I ran toward her anyway, the bright reality of her, and felt such wide white blinding love and relief that all other memories from that day disappeared.
* * *
Some twenty minutes after I call her, Juna is outside in a dark green Volvo; an ichthys decal in the back window above a sticker reading WOULD YOU FOLLOW JESUS THIS CLOSE? “My sister’s car,” she explains, when she catches me looking. “Don’t have the energy to scrape the fuckers off.”
She is wrapped up in a moleskin coat over what appear to be pajamas. She looks at me frankly—a stickiness of bed still clinging to her edges—and I find that I badly want to call Carmen or Sam or anyone at all who isn’t the stranger in front of me now.
“So where are we going?” she asks in an even tone, as though the two of us are simply deciding where we might go for lunch. I tell her to follow me upstairs.
My neighbor’s television can be heard from the communal stairwell, two reality stars from a show I don’t remember the name of gossiping like ghosts in the walls. Climbing the stairs behind me, Juna raises her eyebrows. “Bit late for it,” she says, and I appreciate this. It is because of this, I think, that I choose not to warn her, pushing open the bathroom door without first turning to say, OK, so I know you won’t believe this but. Her reaction appears to justify this instinct—she appraises Leah in the bathtub, looks at me, eyes the towels I have piled, sopping wet, in the sink. “OK,” she says, “so I guess we’ll need water.”
We fill several plastic bottles from the tap, take out the washing-up bowls I keep under the sink and fill them, too, mixing salt into each before ferrying them down to the Volvo. We place the washing-up bowls in the footwells behind the front seats and stack the bottles in the passenger seat before returning to the flat. “I can help you,” Juna says, “if you want me to,” but I ask her instead to go into my wardrobe and pack up whatever look like appropriate clothes for a trip. When she’s out of the room, I pull Leah up out of the water as gently as I can, trying to ignore the rattling protest of her breath as she surfaces, the way her hand clenches down and then releases, the terrible softness of her body, like a plastic bag overfilled with water. I wrap her up in the saltwater-soaked towels, two around her torso and another at her legs, mermaiding her thighs together, twisting two damp cloths around her wrists where the pulse beats fast and fluid. I leave her face until last, lift her up and look at her, at the traces of a person I still recognize, and then Juna calls from the other room and I think to myself OK and then I take the white flannel from the edge of the sink and I press it over her face.