The Art of Not Breathing(45)
I wait for more instructions, but he doesn’t say anything else. There’s a slight breeze out here, and it skips across the water, making the ripples travel in a steady line farther out to sea.
Rex and Joey jump off the boat on the opposite side to where the buoy is. Usually I see which direction they travel in, but today I can’t see anything. The water is too dark. I’m guessing they swam under the boat to find the wire.
“Where did they go?” I ask Danny, breaking the silence. He is fiddling with a weight belt. Sliding the weights on, tightening it, sliding the weights off again.
“Over there.” He points a little way back toward the harbor.
“They didn’t go down the wire?”
“Told you—there’s nothing to see down there.”
“Then why are we here? We don’t have to go down today,” I say. “We could go another day.”
The weight belt clangs onto the floor of the boat.
“I thought this was what you wanted. To go deeper. It’s good prep for the wreck dive.”
It is what I want, I remind myself silently. But now I’m here, it doesn’t feel right. I’m not ready to see it. I’m not ready to do this without Tay. My eyes prick, and I wipe them quickly before the tears come.
The boys surface a few meters away and swim back, whooping and swearing about how damn good the water is. They seem more alert than when they went down, and this reassures me.
“Ready?” Danny asks. He puts his weight belt on and sits on the side of the boat with his fins in his hand. I start to fasten my weight belt, the one he was fiddling with, but my fingers are shaking too much. He reaches over and fastens it for me. His hands around my waist make my breath quicken.
“Ready?” he asks again.
My brain is still hesitating, wondering how quickly I can pull the motor cord and drive us back to the harbor, but once again I find my body doing the opposite of what my brain is thinking. My body moves closer to the edge of the boat, my hands adjusting my mask and pulling on my fins. Then I sit on the side next to Danny.
“I’m ready.” I’m ready to go to the bottom, and you can’t stop me.
“Let me get a head start, okay? Feet first. There’s a bit of a current just below the surface. Three minutes max, okay?”
As Joey reaches the boat, Danny drops off the other side and I follow him. I cling to the buoy and wait for him to go down. My weight belt is so heavy, I struggle to stay on the surface. When I can’t feel Danny’s movement below me anymore, I fill my lungs, then stomach, and let go of the buoy. In the darkness, fighting the current, I grip the wire and follow it down, desperately trying to bring my body in close to it, but my legs float out behind me. The pressure in my head builds, but my ears won’t pop. Danny’s face is right up against mine as we descend. Every now and then he lifts one hand and motions for me to relax, slow down, stay calm. I focus on his face as the water around us gets cooler and darker.
Finally, my legs no longer feel as though they’re being pulled out. We settle our bodies so we are vertical again, and I hold the wire with one hand. I dare myself to look down, following the cone of light from my flashlight. The water is muddy brown with white bits floating in it. A dust cloud billows below us. Small gray fish emerge and then disappear. My watch says forty-five seconds, then forty-six, then forty-seven. My ear pops with a loud bang. I groan, but the water muffles the sound. The pain is excruciating for a second, but then the pressure in my head is gone.
It’s now or never. Danny is turned away, shining his flashlight on some kind of flatfish—a flash of orange in the darkness. I let go of the wire and sink toward the dust cloud. As soon as I hit it, water seeps in through the bottom of my mask. The salt stings and I can’t stop blinking. I resist the urge to swim back up and instead let my weight pull me down. A high-pitched voice tears through the water.
“Over there,” the voice cries. The voice is mine. I’m on the beach that day, yelling to everyone to look at the spot where Eddie disappeared. I make my way to the edge of the water but fall down onto the pebbles. Shaking, murmuring, I try to work out if I’m looking at the sea or the sky. There’s a loud crack of thunder, and it keeps on going, vibrating through my head, and then I see my father’s feet moving across the pebbles, toward me. In his hand he has my mother’s blue coat. He throws it over me.
“Help, someone! I need help,” he cries. “She’s fainted.”
Danny grabs my arms and pulls me up toward him. I kick as hard as I can for the surface, and lactic acid burns in my thighs.
The air above the water is cold, but I suck it in and wait for the dizziness to pass. All this time, I thought the blue haze that tinged my memories might be significant in working out what happened that day, but it turns out it was just Mum’s coat.
“What the f*ck was that?” Danny growls. His blond hair is skewed to one side, and he has red marks around his eyes where his mask was pressed against his skin. I yank my mask down so it sits around my neck.
“I slipped,” I lie, trembling.
“You mean you let go on purpose. Damn, Elsie—why do you always have to take risks?” Danny’s lips are pursed again. He brushes a clump of seaweed from his hand and tries to shake the water from his ears. “I nearly didn’t find you,” he says.