As I purged the air out of my BC and began to drop, I thought about you, Dad, behind bars, what you were doing at that moment. And I felt you there, bobbing beside me in the waves, giving me advice, like you did the first day you dove with me and I was afraid.
We’re all in this together, you told me. We don’t leave anyone behind.
I had done this kind of dive hundreds of times on dozens of wrecks. But the descent felt strange this time, alien. And I was the alien, slowly floating through the atmosphere of a new planet, pulled by gravity to a place I didn’t belong.
Brave new world, baby, I told myself, brave new world. You may not belong, but you’re going there anyway.
It took ten minutes to drop eighty feet and reach the wreck. Halfway down we hit a swift current. I spent a solid minute pulled sideways, like a flag on a pole, moving hand over hand down the line. Marshall followed like a pro, the yellow stripe along his leg making him easy to distinguish from the other divers closer to the surface.
Once the current eased up and we’d dropped another forty feet, the ship appeared within the mist beneath me, two hundred feet long and almost turtled, its hull swelling up from the sand. I pegged it as a Navy destroyer of some kind. A spar in the bow jutted out at a forty-five-degree angle, extending so far it disappeared in the haze, as if the sea was slowly dissolving it.
As I drifted down through the chill of a thermocline, the massive wreck grew. The ship looked different than I remembered. Like it had rolled over in its sleep and was inching its way to the coast.
As the memory floated away with the current, a shiver—that had nothing to do with the cold—ran down my spine. Because I’d never been to this wreck before. I couldn’t have a memory of it.
No one had been here but Phil, and he’d found the wreck only last week. It wasn’t on any of the maps. An old World War II vessel newly scuttled to make a reef, he’d told us. No blog posts or announcements, and somehow I didn’t think about how strange that was.
When my depth gauge read 95 feet, I landed a few feet from the ship. Marshall followed, letting himself fall to his knees, like a man praying on the moon. A warning pulsed louder in me. I had an urge to grab Marshall’s arm and shoot to the surface, claw my way back to the boat with this stranger who, for the next forty-five minutes, belonged to me.
I ignored the instinct. I know you think I’ve forgotten all about your famous daddy-daughter listen to your gut lectures. Well, you weren’t there, and every year your voice gets softer in my head. And that’s not my fault.
Marshall gave me an okay sign, more confident than the last time, and a little head bob as his bubbles mingled with mine.
Mom was already on the other side of the wreck with her group, the neon-green stripe running the length of her wet suit bright and cheery against the gray hull. Easy to spot when you’re following the leader. A diver with blue fins rounded the top and joined us. Colette. Probably Mom’s idea of keeping me safe with the new guy, sending someone who’d logged over three hundred dives—at least a hundred of them in caves and ships—to bring up the rear.
I attached my orange line to a sturdy bolt and flipped on my dive light. The three of us slid through a wide gash in the hull, a cloud of bubbles dribbling behind.
I unreeled the line, letting it hit the deck so softly the silt barely rose. Pulsed a shot of air into my BC to keep me off the floor. Colette stayed within an arm’s reach, her light a smooth circle traveling along the ceiling. Marshall followed, shooting his beam over the walls like an excited firefly. Scared, maybe. No one gets through a shipwreck scuba course without having the risks tattooed on the inside of their skulls.
The first compartment was small, the size of a bedroom—one wall torn open to the sunlit world, the space locked in twilight. We skirted a metal table lying on its side. Marshall’s buoyancy was good, his fins a foot off the floor, his movements controlled and small, his hands working their way up the bright orange line I reeled out.
The door to the next compartment hung open, the beginnings of a reddish scale clinging to its hinges. I stopped and pointed. I’m not sure Colette and Marshall understood why. I was watching the beginning of the reef, and if I could speak, tour guide-style, I would’ve told them nature has a way of taking back everything, even an object like this meant to defend and attack and destroy. Mother Nature, she takes it all into herself and makes it beautiful again.
I unwound more orange line and led them into the silky darkness beyond the door and into the galley. Since the ship was tilted, you know the tables and crates and cooking gear had all shifted to one side. I pointed out objects in the room to Marshall: a single fork on the floor, a glass jar, a can of peaches. At the time, I didn’t think how strange it was that the reef program would scuttle a ship with furniture and food still in it, blow a hole in the hull without taking out all the bits first. New life, new reefs, like to grow on bones, not guts. Instead of putting two and two together, I focused on the small black bream darting out of my path, leaving a little gray cloud behind it, and led them deeper.
The darkness thickened, until I imagined it was like hovering in space, in some corner of the universe where the stars have all gone out. I skimmed the light behind me to check on Marshall, and he sent a cloud of bubbles into the beam, his eyes wide and curious behind his faceplate. As I turned back, my dive light caught the brass glimmer of a plaque. The USS Andrews. I made a mental note to write the name in the dive log, add it to the post-dive fish and history talk when the three of us got topside.
Two more pitch-black compartments and I found a small octopus. It was time to get my brand-new wreck diver back to the charter, just to make sure we had plenty of time for mistakes, but I hadn’t seen one of these little guys in years, so I was ridiculously excited.
Curled up into the size of a basketball, he’d stuffed himself in the corner behind a wooden crate. The creature stilled under my light. Then the tentacles unspooled in slow motion. My breath thundered, fading and swelling. No matter how calm I am, the sound’s so loud in my head I always think fish for a hundred miles can hear me breathe.
I reached toward the tip of one tentacle. It shied away, trembling. I pushed off from the wall to give it room to escape. When I turned to watch it float toward the doorway, I realized Marshall was gone.
Oh God. I’d lost him.
ENTRY 2
I THREW MY BEAM ALL OVER THE ROOM. No Marshall. Not at the opening, not anywhere.
A small cloud of silt hovered at the doorway. I swam to the entrance and pulled myself halfway into the hallway beyond. My light picked up nothing. As if the ship had swallowed him whole.
Another beam crossed mine. Colette and I locked eyes, and even behind the mask I could see the shock.
A new diver was off the line. Dad, you don’t know that kind of panic. The denial. I was in charge. Me.
And I’d lost him.
Colette grabbed the gauge at my shoulder and fumbled it over. The glass face read 1200 PSI. Her hand stilled, which meant she was calculating, just like I was. In panic mode, Mr. Marshall was probably sucking it down, which meant he was already at 1000 PSI. At that depth, 1000 PSI would buy him maybe twelve minutes of life.
If he was lucky.
I pulled out my slate and golf pencil and argued with Colette for a precious minute. She wanted to go after Marshall. No way was I letting this labyrinth swallow her too. Finally she nodded, her hair floating around her mask. She would find Mom and get an extra tank from the surface. I would stay and look for Marshall. She squeezed my shoulder with her gloved hand, turned, and disappeared through the doorway.