Chapter 4
Torren
Saturday came the way Saturdays do, whether or not you've decided anything.
Flat water. Two knots of current. Ninety-one feet on the sounder at the anchor, eighty-eight at the northwest corner.
I didn't tell her.
I had eleven separate opportunities between four a.m. and eight and I didn't take any of them, and I'd like to explain why, and I can't, except like this:
If you say it out loud, it's true.
If you just get in the water, maybe it isn't.
"Okay," Nerissa said, "so, gear check, and I'm going to narrate it, because that's how I do it, and if you find that annoying you can find it annoying at ninety feet where I can't hear you."
"Go."
"Primary."
"Good."
"Backup."
"Good."
"Cutting tool, both."
"Both."
"Lift bag."
"On the D-ring."
"Slate."
"Pocket."
"Line."
I looked at the line.
Yellow. Half-inch. Clipped to my harness at the left hip and running back through a fairlead to the drum and the woman with her hand on it.
"Line," I said.
"Signals. Because I don't care how long you've been doing this, we're doing signals, because everybody's dead cousin thought signals were for beginners." She counted on her fingers. "One pull, you're fine. Two, I'm asking. Three, come up. Four — "
"Four's trouble."
"Four's trouble, and if I get four you get the whole boat, do you understand me? You get me, you get Junho, you get the skiff, you get a flare, you get everything I own."
I looked at her.
Sunburn. Cap. Grease on her forearm at eight in the morning already, which is a talent.
"Yeah," I said.
"Say it back."
"Four's trouble and I get everything you own."
"Good." She stopped. "One more thing and then I'll shut up, which is a lie, but."
"Go."
"There's a comms unit on the line. Hardwire. It's from 2004, it sounds like a man yelling into a coffee can, and the mic on your end has been broken since before I owned this boat." She tapped the little gray box on the console with one knuckle. "So it's one-way. You'll hear me. I won't hear you."
"That's a bad system."
"It's a free system," she said, "and it came with the boat, and if you'd like to critique it, there's a ledger."
"You're going to hold that ledger over me for a year."
"I'm going to hold that ledger over you until one of us dies," Nerissa said, "and I want you to know I've thought about it and I'm at peace with that."
She slapped my tank. "In you go, biker."
The water closed over.
Here's what nobody tells you about coming back after two years.
It's not frightening at ten feet. Ten feet is a swimming pool. Ten feet is a warm green room with a light on and your own bubbles going up like an argument you're winning.
Twenty is fine.
Thirty is good. Thirty is genuinely good, and this is the trap, because at thirty you think: oh, I've been dramatic. I've made a whole thing out of nothing. Look at me. I'm a diver.
At forty the light starts doing its thing where the red leaves first.
At sixty the color's gone out of my gloves.
At fifty I caught myself doing a thing I hadn't done in twenty years, which is checking my gauge every six seconds like a man watching a kettle.
I made myself stop. Then I did it again.
At sixty I noticed my breathing had gone shallow and fast, and I did the thing you're taught, which is to make the exhale longer than the inhale, and it worked, and that's when I got confident, and that's the actual error. Not the descent. The confidence at sixty.
At seventy the bottom came up under me — pale sand, seagrass at the edges, a long low scatter of black lumps running away to the northeast like a dotted line somebody drew and then thought better of.
The debris field. Ballast stone. Two hundred and forty years of a ship being slowly turned into geography.
I remember thinking she was right, it's a beautiful field, it's a textbook field.
Then eighty-five.
Then eighty-eight.
Then ninety.
I want to describe it accurately because I think people who haven't had it think it's fear, and it isn't fear.
Fear has an object. Fear is a shark or a bad hose or a boat propeller. Fear you can do something with; fear is useful; fear will get you home.
This wasn't fear.
At ninety feet the water stopped being water and became a room I had been in before, and Silas Pham's light was on and pointing up, and it wasn't a memory, it was the actual present tense, it was happening again currently, and my chest closed like a fist around nothing.
I couldn't get air.
The regulator was working. That's the part that makes you crazy. There's a hundred and fifty cubic feet of air on your back and a working second stage in your mouth and you are drowning anyway, in the dry part, somewhere behind the sternum.
My hands went numb.
The field tilted, which fields don't do.
And I heard myself think, very calmly, in a voice like a report being read out: this is how it happens. This is how a diver dies. Not a shark. This.
I reached for the line.
Three pulls. Come up. I got my hand on it and I couldn't close my fingers.
And then the line moved on its own.
One pull.
You're fine.
Which is not a thing a tender sends. Tenders don't initiate. Tenders answer.
One pull. Then nothing. Then one pull again, slow, patient, like a hand on a shoulder in the dark.
And then she started talking.
She had the comms unit on the surface unit — a cheap hardwire rig I'd assumed was decorative, wired into the line, half-broken, tinny as a can — and she'd left it hot.
I have never asked whether she did that on purpose.
"— so anyway I'm not saying Sasha's a bad person, I'm saying that a person who owns four different pairs of the same shoe has told you something about themselves and it's your job to listen, and Junho does not listen, Junho has never listened, Junho once dated a woman for five months without learning that she had a twin, and I want to be clear, he met the twin — "
I stayed exactly where I was.
Kneeling on the sand at ninety feet with both hands on a yellow line.
"— he met the twin twice, and he said, and I quote, 'she seemed different that day.'"
Air moving somewhere. Not mine yet.
"And before Sasha there was Coralie, who was a nightmare, Coralie once told me the reason she didn't eat fish was that she 'didn't trust anything that could look at her from both sides,' and Torren, I want you to sit with that as a sentence, because I have, for two years — "
My hands were still numb.
"— and before Coralie there was a girl whose name I genuinely never learned because she was only around for eleven days and Junho referred to her exclusively as 'she's got a lot going on,' which is not a name, that is a review — "
My chest didn't open. But it stopped closing.
"There's a fish looking at me. Off the stern. It's — I don't know what it is, it's got the face of a guy who's about to ask you for money. It's a — it's a permit, it's probably a permit. Hi, buddy. He doesn't care. He's completely uninterested in me, and honestly, respect."
Sixty seconds. Then ninety.
"Now, my father's position on permit was that they can't be caught on purpose, only by accident, and if you catch one on purpose you have to let it go, because it means you were trying, and trying is unbecoming — "
Air moving. In. Out.
"— which is, I want to note, a philosophy from a man who died owing forty-one thousand dollars."
The field stopped tilting.
The gloves came back. I could see the seam on the left thumb where I'd burned it on an exhaust in 2019.
"You're at eleven minutes," she said, without any change in her voice at all, still exactly the same as the permit and the twin.
"You've been very still and you're breathing like a garbage disposal and I'd like you to come up the line at thirty feet a minute, and I'd like you to do it now, and I'm not going to say why, and you're not going to make me. "
I got up off the sand.
"Nice," she said. "Good. Okay. Fifty feet. Junho, get off the ladder, he's coming up. Junho. Junho. Get — thank you."
At thirty feet she said, "There's a stop at fifteen. You know there's a stop at fifteen."
At fifteen feet I hung on the line in the light with the boat's hull above me like a cloud and I shook for three straight minutes.
She talked the whole time. About the mangroves. About a man named Wexler at the fuel dock who overcharges. About nothing.
Eleven minutes of talking, start to finish.
I have the log. I've kept the log.
On deck she took my fins off.
She didn't say anything about it. She just crouched down and took them off like it was a step in a checklist, and then she cracked a water bottle and put it in my hand and closed my fingers around it, and then she went and yelled at Junho about the ladder for a while at a volume that gave me somewhere to not be looked at.
Twenty minutes later she came and sat down on the deck next to me with her back against the gunwale.
"So," she said. "Do you want to tell me, or do you want me to keep pretending I think you had a mask flood?"
"I had a mask flood."
"Sure."
"For eleven minutes."
"It was a bad flood," she said. "Structurally."
I turned the bottle around in my hands.
"Two years ago," I said, "off Cozumel, I tended a man named Silas Pham at ninety feet and he got pinned under a plate and I got to him four minutes late."
She didn't say anything.
Which I hadn't expected, and which undid me more than anything she could have said.
"He was thirty-one," I said. "He read paperbacks with the covers torn off. He said covers were advertising and he'd already bought the thing."
"That's a good bit."
"It was a good bit."
"Did he do it to be funny or did he mean it?"
"Both. He was one of those."
"Those are the best ones," she said, "and they're exhausting."
"Yeah."
I drank some of the water. The permit — or one just like it — came and hung off the stern like a guy waiting outside a bar.
"I had the line," I said.
"I know."
"I felt him stop."
"Yeah."
"Forty seconds to get a tank on."
"Torren." She pulled her knees up. "How long does it take to get a tank on?"
"Forty seconds."
"How long does it take anybody?"
I didn't answer.
"That's what I thought," she said, and let it sit there.