Our Wives Under the Sea (53)

“Smugglers used to stow rum in those caves,” I say now, my voice conversational, something I barely recognize. “Did I ever tell you that? Rum, brandy, tea leaves, whatever they could get. They could moor here in good weather without being seen. Town’s too far inland for anyone to have heard them or seen them coming in. See those rocks just before the base?” I nod my head in the direction of the water, look down at Leah as though expecting her to respond. “You could throw a rope around just about any one of them, no problem at all. Tide’s never completely out here—this part of the headland juts out so far—but it’s dry toward the backs of the caves most of the time, so it was the perfect place to store things you didn’t want to be found. Sometimes they’d even sleep there. Those caves go pretty far back but they certainly don’t get roomier the farther in you get. I knew a boy at school who got stuck there once for almost a day and a half. Just mucking about, you know. I think he did it on a dare. Eventually the coastguard had to come and fish him out. We got to watch the whole thing from the house, my mother and me. I don’t think I ever told you that. I don’t know why I didn’t.”

The beach is just over the next rise, the sand curving like a bite taken out of the coastline, a mile at least toward a rocky outcrop that seems to mark its natural end. The sea reels outward, the tide some distance off and still retreating, revealing an extra inch of sand with every heave.

It is early still, deserted but for us, and I know what I am doing now.

I take her down toward the water, feet sinking in wet sand—lugworm tunnels, oarweed stretching up the beach like clambering hands. The water, when it penetrates my shoes, is freezing, the tight cold climbing sharply up my ankles, but I continue outward, down into the water until the tide is at my calves and then my knees. I keep Leah high in my arms, move farther, press my feet into the sand when the water is at chest height, kick my legs and push us farther, hold her in as closely as I can. The waves are gentle here, an easing surge of early morning. I no longer have much purchase on the sand, one leg tangled up with seaweed, mouth filling once with water, then again. I have never been a very good swimmer, even after Leah’s lessons, and it is this thought, this memory that makes me grasp her tighter, pulling her into me from where my arms have slackened with the cold. A desperate squeeze inside my heart. My Leah—the way she held me around the waist at the lido and told me to kick, told me that she would buoy me along. My Leah.

But I can see it happening already, look down at her in my arms as the towels fall away, weighed down by the water that has saturated each in turn and left them too heavy to cling. Passingly, I think that this might always have been inevitable, that perhaps she had always known it but had wanted to hold on for me, for as long as she could. I can see it now, the way her chest begins to frill, the upward swell and tremor of the skin that registers its natural habitat, growing first translucent, then entirely clear. I can feel, as well, the way the body I am holding is becoming less a body, the way she slides between my fingers—first my Leah, then the water, first my Leah’s arms, her chest, her rib cage, then the water they are struggling toward. I think of nothing, then I think about the sea lung, the day on the beach with Leah where the ice sat on the water and the air around us seemed about to take some other form. This alchemist sea, changing something into something else. I think of this and I look at her face, the remains of her face, my Leah. She is looking at me—this now, the last of her—and she is still looking at me when I move my arms to release her, when she melts between my hands and into water, twisting down into the rolling tide.

What persists after this is only air and water and me between them, not quite either and with one foot straining for the sand.





LEAH


We surfaced, of course. This is something to remember—that we turned toward the panel after who knows how many hours spent staring into that eye and told the craft to take us upward. That we grasped each other’s hands, Matteo and I, and begged a being neither of us believed in to allow us to surface. I don’t remember much about the rest. I know the creature did not stop us, though its eye held a strange, anticipatory expression as we receded, if “expression” is the word I want. I know, too, that Matteo held on to Jelka’s rosary beads as we rocketed upward, as we moved up from darkness into further dark, the light so many miles above our heads. I know all this, and I know that as my head cleared, finally, of everything, sunken thoughts receding with the thing that we had left below, I thought to myself Miri Miri Miri and I waited for the ocean to end.





A NOTE ON THE TEXT


In case you haven’t guessed, I am not a marine biologist. However, in my willful imitation of one, I’ve been lucky to rely on some incredible books and articles, particularly the following: The Sea Around Us—Rachel Carson (Staples Press) The Soul of an Octopus—Sy Montgomery (Atria Books) “Thirty-six Thousand Feet Under the Sea”—Ben Taub (The New Yorker) “Her Deepness”—Wallace White (The New Yorker)

I’m also highly indebted to Neal Agarwal’s Deep Sea resource: neal.fun/deep-sea.

In addition to this, a couple of nonmarine texts were crucial to shaping the preoccupations that in turn shaped this book. I am grateful in particular to Annie Proulx’s The Shipping News (4th Estate), for fostering a decade-long obsession with sea lungs, and Claire Cronin’s Blue Light of the Screen (Repeater Books), for making me think about the intersection between ghosts and demons in a new and different way.