Chapter 4 #2
Then: "You haven't been under since."
"No."
"You told me you'd been to ninety."
"I have been to ninety."
"You absolute — " She put both hands over her face. "That's lawyer talk. That's the worst sentence anyone's ever said on this boat and my father once told a Coast Guard officer that a bilge was 'aspirational.'"
"You'd have called Arizona back."
"Yes! I would have called Arizona back! That is a reasonable thing to do when a man who hasn't dived in two years shows up to dive ninety feet!"
"And Cade would have said there's nobody else."
"Then I'd have gone down myself."
"You're not certified past sixty and your boat's your only asset and your name's on the claim. If you get hurt, they win by default." I looked at her. "That's why it's me. That's the whole reason it's me."
She stared out at the water.
"You could have told me," she said.
"Yeah."
"Not because I'd have stopped you. Because I'd have known what I was holding."
And that one got in under everything, and sat there, and it's been sitting there since.
"I'm sorry," I said.
Which, according to two separate people in the Iron Compass MC, I have said out loud fewer than five times in eleven years.
She nudged my boot with hers.
"Well," she said. "Now I know."
We sat there a while. Junho was making a lot of noise with a hose two feet away, badly, on purpose, which is a twenty-six-year-old's way of giving people privacy.
"Can I ask you something about him," she said.
"Yeah."
"Not about the accident. About him."
I turned the bottle around again.
"He had a system for buying paperbacks," I said. "He'd go in a shop and go to the shelf and pick up whatever was third from the left, whatever it was. Every time. Never looked at it first."
"Why third?"
"He said the first two are what the shop wants you to buy."
She laughed. "That's completely insane."
"He read a book about knitting in Cozumel for four days."
"Did he finish it?"
"He finished everything. That was the rule." I looked out at the water. "He knew a lot about knitting for about six weeks and then it went away."
"That's a good person," Nerissa said. "That's an actually good person."
"Yeah."
"And you've told nobody about him in two years."
I didn't say anything.
"Torren."
"They know what happened."
"That's not what I asked. I asked if you'd told anybody about him.
The paperbacks. Third from the left." She pulled her cap off and shoved her hair back.
"Because when somebody dies, the accident belongs to everybody — it's in the report, everybody's read it, everybody's got a maybe.
But the third-from-the-left thing belongs to you, and if you don't say it out loud, then in about forty years it just stops. "
The permit came back and looked at us both.
"I hadn't thought about it that way," I said.
"Well," she said, and stood up and put her cap back on. "Now you have. That's my whole contribution. I'm going to go yell at my cousin about the ladder again."
"You already did that."
"I'm going to do it thoroughly this time," said Nerissa. "The first one was a draft."
Junho found the bell at four in the afternoon.
Not a dive find — a dredge spoil find, off a test hole we'd blown at the field's southern lobe, and he came up the ladder holding it over his head like a man who'd won something at a fair, yelling in two languages.
Bronze. Small, maybe fourteen inches at the mouth, half its crown gone, the whole thing green-black and rough as a reef.
Ship's bell.
Nerissa took it like it was a baby and put it on a towel on the fish box, and got out a soft brush and a squeeze bottle and worked on the shoulder of it for forty minutes without speaking, which I now understand is the longest she has ever gone without speaking while conscious.
The concretion came off the lettering in flakes.
"Okay," she said. "Okay. That's an S. That's — S-A-N. Santa. Santa, obviously, everything's Santa, that's not — "
She kept brushing.
"Santa," she said. "M."
Her hand stopped.
"That's an M," Junho said. "That's clearly an M. Even I can see it's an M."
"Junho, be quiet, I'm — "
"I'm helping. I found it."
"You found it with a dredge, which is not a discipline — "
"It's the most anyone's found on this boat in three years!"
"That's — " She stopped, brush in the air. "That's fair, actually. That's completely fair. Well done. Now be quiet."
"That's not a P," I said.
"That's not a P."
"Perpetua starts with a P."
"I'm aware of what Perpetua starts with, Torren."
Junho leaned in. "So what's it say?"
She got the last of it in four more minutes, and then she sat back on her heels on the deck of her father's boat and read it out.
"Santa Margarita del Mar," Nerissa said.
Nobody said anything.
"That's the wrong ship," Junho said.
"No," she said slowly. "No. That's the wrong name."
She looked up at me. And her face had gone from the thing it does when she's furious to the thing it does when she's five moves ahead and delighted about it, and I felt something in my chest that had nothing whatsoever to do with ninety feet.
"She was sailing under a false name," Nerissa said. "Torren. She was sailing under a false name."
Behind her, out past the stern, the Argos Reach sat on the horizon with its lights coming on, doing its slow, arrogant, hundred-and-forty-foot lap.
Not knowing.