Epilogue
Torren
Six months later.
Stock Island in February, which is the only month down here where a person from Arizona can walk around at noon and feel like the planet is being reasonable.
We've got two boats now.
Both of them are named badly, and I want that documented, because I've been blamed for one of them and I've only earned it partially.
The Halcyon stays the Halcyon. That was never in question. She's got new injectors, a compressor that doesn't sound like a man clearing his throat, and paint on the transom for the first time since the second Bush administration.
The second boat — forty-four feet, aluminum, a working platform with a real crane and a real air rack — is registered, hailed, insured, and painted as the Silas.
That took a whole afternoon. Nerissa handled the paperwork and did not once look directly at me while she filled it out, which is her version of tact.
And the skiff.
The skiff is named Skiff.
I won that. It went to a crew vote. Junho voted with me, entirely to be difficult, and then had to live in a household where Nerissa Kwon had lost a vote, which he described later as "the worst four days of my life, and I've been left at a wedding."
The vote itself deserves a record, because Nerissa has since disputed the procedure.
It happened at the galley table on a Tuesday. Four voting members: me, Nerissa, Junho, and — over Nerissa's furious objection — Ivelisse, on the grounds that she was in the room and it was Junho who insisted, purely because he'd worked out she'd side against him for sport.
"She's not crew," Nerissa said.
"She's aboard."
"So is a wasp!"
"The wasp doesn't get a vote," said Ivelisse, "because the wasp isn't holding cards."
The ballot: Skiff versus Doubloon, which was Junho's entry and which he defended for six full minutes.
Result: two to two.
Tiebreak, per Nerissa's own rule written on the back of a fuel receipt in 2019 and never once invoked: longest continuous service aboard.
Which is Pop.
Pop came in off the dock, listened to both sides, looked at each of us in turn, and said:
"It's a skiff."
"POP."
"It's a skiff, girl. What else is it."
Pop's still with us.
Not in a way anybody's lying about. He's in the bed on Big Pine three days a week now, and on the bucket the other four, and the bucket has a cushion on it that he pretends to resent.
His hospice nurse is a woman named Ivelisse who is fifty-one and takes no position on anything.
She learned to play cards in October.
By November she was ahead.
By February she was ahead by a hundred and eighty dollars, a folding chair, a cooler, and — as of last Thursday — Junho's speaker, which he bet in a state of what he later described as "confidence."
"She counts," Junho said.
"Everybody counts."
"She counts out loud. She narrates it. She says the number and then she takes your money and she says the number again — "
"That's Nerissa's whole personality," I said, "and you've survived twenty-six years of it."
"Ivelisse is worse, Torren. Ivelisse is calm."
Pop, from the bucket, without looking up: "Nurse is up two hundred and eleven as of this morning."
"WHY DO YOU KEEP THE RUNNING TOTAL — "
I dive every day.
That's not a metaphor and it's not a triumph.
It's a schedule. There's a contract survey off Marathon, a mooring inspection job that pays terribly and steadily, and the consortium's phase-two work on the Margarita site that'll run another two years and has three graduate students on it who all call me sir and one of whom I've had to teach how to use a lift bag twice.
Here's the thing I'd tell somebody, if somebody asked, which nobody does.
It didn't go away.
I still count down through it. Sixty, seventy, eighty. And at ninety feet there is still a floor in the building, and Silas Pham's light is still on, still pointing up, and I don't expect that to stop and I've stopped wanting it to.
The difference is that I don't stop there anymore.
I go through. I go down to a hundred and ten in the cut and I work, and on the way back up I pass through ninety again and I say his name in my head, and then I keep going, and I come up a ladder onto a boat where a woman is yelling about o-rings.
That's it. That's the whole recovery. Nobody's going to make a movie of it.
There's a graduate student on the phase-two team named Priyanka who asked me, in October, what it's like at ninety feet.
She meant it professionally. Visibility, thermocline, bottom time.
I told her the visibility and the thermocline and the bottom time.
Then I told her the other thing, which is that at some point in her career somebody is going to hand her a line with a person on the end of it, and that she should take that more seriously than any certification she will ever hold, and that if she takes nothing else from a summer on this boat she should take that.
She wrote it down.
That's the part I didn't expect. Nobody tells you that the far end of it isn't feeling better. It's a twenty-four-year-old with a notebook.
Nerissa's on the line for the deep ones. Still. Every time.
She's got a proper comms rig now — good one, clear as a phone — and she still talks the entire dive, and last month a graduate student asked her, politely, whether the constant chatter was a safety protocol.
"Yes," said Nerissa.
Which is the truest thing she's ever said and also the biggest lie she's ever told, both at once, and I had to go look at a gauge for a second.
Cade came out in January.
Flew in, rented a car, drove the highway with the water on both sides, and stood on my dock for a long time without saying anything, which is his greeting.
"Maritime file's yours," he said eventually.
"I know."
"Officially. Church voted. You're the coast."
"I know that too. Amos texted me a crossword clue about it."
"What was it?"
"'Water rat, six letters.'"
Cade almost smiled. "What'd you put?"
"Torren is six letters."
"That's not a word."
"It's my name, Cade, it's the whole reason it works."
We stood there. Two men from a desert looking at nineteen miles of turquoise.
"Wexler's given us four folders," Cade said. "The Gallery's got a maritime arm. It's not new. It's older than the land side."
"How much older?"
"That's what the four folders are for."
"So this isn't over."
"It's never over," Cade said. "That's not pessimism. That's just what a job is." He looked down the dock at the Silas, at the Halcyon, at Skiff. "You named a boat Skiff."
"It's a skiff."
"You're a very frustrating man and I miss you very much," said Cade Merrick, and got in his rental car, and drove three thousand miles' worth of highway back to a plane.
He came back forty seconds later, rolled the window down, and said, "Odette says if you're not at the table at Thanksgiving she's driving here herself."
"She can't drive."
"She's aware," Cade said. "That's the threat."
Wexler calls about once a month.
He's got a desk in Cerro Vista and a shirt with a collar and, according to Amos, the worst crossword performance ever recorded in that building. He asked me in December whether he'd made the right call at eighty feet in a storm.
I told him he hadn't made a call at all. He'd put a pry bar through a loop, which is a thing your hands do about four seconds before your head catches up, and that's not a decision, that's a character, and you can't take credit for it and you can't give it back.
"That's not very comforting," he said.
"No."
"You're bad at this."
"Yeah," I said. "Ask Odette. She's got a whole thing about Tuesdays."
Last week she gave me the patch.
We'd been out on the Silas all day on the phase-two grid and come in at dusk, and everybody had gone up to the Rusty Anchor except us, and I was hosing the deck.
She came out of the wheelhouse with something in her hand.
"Okay," she said. "So. This isn't a thing."
"Okay."
"I want to be very clear before I hand you this that it is not a thing, it's a piece of canvas, there's no ceremony attached, we're not doing a — "
"Nerissa."
"Here," she said, and shoved it at me.
Rectangle of canvas. Machine-stitched, badly, on somebody's home machine, which I found out later was Ivelisse's.
Across the top, in white:
KWON SALVAGE
And underneath it, smaller, in the same thread:
VALE
I stood there on the deck of a boat with a hose running in my hand.
"It's for the jacket," she said. "The work one. The canvas one, not the — I'm aware you have a club one, I'm not — this isn't a competing garment — "
"Nerissa."
"It's just so people know who to yell at when you break something."
I couldn't say anything.
She kept going, because that's what she does, that's her whole engine:
"And I got the placement wrong probably, I don't know how you people do the — is it left chest?
It's left chest, right? Because if it's the back, that's a much bigger piece of canvas and Ivelisse is going to want to be paid, and she is up two hundred and eleven dollars, Torren, she does not need — "
I put the hose down and went and stood at the rail for a minute.
Just stood there. Facing out. Back of my hand across my face once, quick.
She didn't come over. She let me have it, which is a thing she has learned in a year, and which cost her more than the ninety dollars did.
After a while I said, without turning around, "Left chest."
"Left chest. Okay. Good. I got it right."
"You got it right."
"I got it right," she said, and her voice went slightly off the rails at the end, and she cleared her throat about it aggressively.
Out past the mangroves the light was doing the thing where the water stops being blue and starts being nothing at all.
Two boats behind me. A skiff called Skiff. An old man's bucket with a cushion on it. A hundred and forty-one charts in a conservation lab in Seville with her name on the report.
Ninety feet of water nineteen miles out with a floor in it that I go through every day.
"Hey," she said. "Torren."
"Yeah."
"Come inside. I made rice."
"You didn't make rice."
"I made something."
"Is it gray?"
"It's cooking," said Nerissa Kwon, and I turned around and went in.