A faint silt trail led me down a long, narrow hallway. I unspooled the line and tried not to rush. Slow, keep it steady, stay off the bottom. My breath thundered in my ears. Bubbles edged to the corner of the ceiling. Everything inside the ship was tilted, the world off-kilter, like swimming through a child’s painting of a really bad dream.
Marshall’s faint cloud of silt led me, like Hansel’s breadcrumbs, into the belly of the ship. And all the things that could happen to him spun through my mind.
He runs out of air, panics, dies. We fish his body out later.
Or maybe he runs out of air, finds a way out, and sprints to the surface, and panic makes him forget he shouldn’t hold his breath. The air expands in his lungs. They pop like balloons.
No, he remembers not to hold his breath, but he still ascends too fast. Nitrogen comes out of solution from his tissues. The bubbles that form lodge in his joints, his brain, every organ. He dies on the helicopter that comes to airlift him out, blood bubbling up from his lungs.
I forced the next two scenarios out of my head. Then, honestly, I panicked for a second. Worried I would run out of air too. Pictured myself in scenarios two or three, my corpse floating to the surface alongside Marshall’s.
My mask fogged and the world disappeared. I cleared it with seawater so I could read my gauge. The needle had dropped. A lot. I slowed my breathing. I couldn’t leave the ship without finding Marshall.
At the end of the hallway, I passed an opening. My hair, which had slipped out of its band, floated in front of my mask. Through the black veil, I swear I saw a flash in the corner of my eye. At first I thought it was Marshall’s yellow-striped leg, but no. It looked like a dive light. As I turned, the glimmer broke in two pinpoints, then disappeared.
Adrenaline made my hands shake. And now I was seeing things, from stress or the pressure or God knows what. Poor Marshall. Where on earth did he think he was going? He was going to get us both killed.
My light revealed two upended cots and a pile of jagged bits in the corner where a grouper floated, its eyes huge and unblinking, its mouth opening and closing as it watched me. I slipped inside the small berth, searching the other corners.
And then I felt it. A rush of something powerful in my blood. A flare of premonition.
I turned. Nothing. A corked glass bottle on its side. The hallway door yawning open, half off its hinges. My neoprene skin felt thinner. And I knew the next thing to swim near me would pierce me with a flip of a fin. The spines would impale me right through.
I kicked, turning in a circle while fire hosing my light around the room. Nothing. But my breathing, my heartbeat, my skin—they told me something different. I unclasped the dive knife strapped to my thigh.
My light moved smoothly up the walls toward the door. I stopped halfway, pointing the beam to the corner instead. The grouper had jammed its body within it, its eyes huge and shining in my light, the little fins moving slow. It wasn’t watching me. It was watching the doorway.
You’ll think I’m nuts, Dad, but instinct—the weird sense I knew what was going to happen—told me to shut off my light. I didn’t argue. Something was looking for me.
Click. The world contracted to the size of a sleeping bag, black so thick, a velvet cloth over my eyes. The chill dropped several degrees. The seconds passed. I breathed. In. Out. Rush of bubbles, heart pushing so hard, a caffeine-like rush. My body shook with the cold, as if my suit was nothing. I’ve never retained heat well, but this kind of chill went deeper, its tendrils reaching all the way into my lungs. I couldn’t see my gauge, but I could feel it, the needle slinking down. And as I was about to give up, to turn on my flashlight and get the hell out of there, suddenly the world wasn’t completely black anymore.
A faint glow, deep green. It grew in the hallway on the other side of the half-open door. As I watched it brighten, it felt familiar.
I swam to a corner of the berth, out of sight. The glow grew brighter. A voice inside me said Shut your eyes. You’re walking down death row. The worst of them wants you to look, so shut. Your. Eyes. And yes, the voice whispered, the thing out there, it really is that wicked. It really is that powerful.
I stilled. And then a current came, brushing over my face. A high-pitched scrape started up, long and slow, like something big moving through a tight space. A thrum as a piece of metal fell. The scrape softened, until it faded.
I opened my eyes. Blackness. My hands trembling, I flipped on my light. Gave myself ten breaths before I swam to the doorway to check the hall.
Nothing there. The dread gone, the fear eaten up by the need to find Marshall. I tried to slow my breathing and failed, looked at my gauge—800 PSI. Nine minutes left. If I could calm down.
A cloud of silt swirled in the hallway. I went deeper into the ship, where I thought Marshall had gone. I turned a corner at a T-junction.
Mid-sweep, my light moving into the deeps of the ship, something grabbed my arm.
I screamed a cloud of bubbles.
Dark brown hair caught in my light. A familiar mask, the neon-green stripe running down a black body.
Mom.
My relief lasted only long enough to see what she was dragging behind her.
It was Marshall, floating. His eyes were closed. His reg was in his mouth. But no bubbles.
Mom and I made eye contact. Pure panic. She tapped her oxygen gauge and pointed to the end of the hall.
Out. Now.
I grabbed Marshall’s other limp arm and pulled him from the beast. Somewhere close to the exit, I glanced at his face and my heart flipped into overdrive. You won’t believe me, but I saw it. His eyes. Something phosphorescent leaked from them, like tears.
I stopped swimming. Mom turned to me. In the crumbling hallway of a shipwreck, eighty feet down and running out of air, she actually took the time to give me the look. You’ve seen it a hundred times. The blame. Then, like a silvery fish slipping away, the look was gone, and she turned to the tear in the ship and swam through.
ENTRY 3
DEAD BODIES DON’T COOPERATE. They don’t grab hold of the ladder rung and pull themselves onto a dive platform. They don’t react when a four-foot wave knocks their faces against the boat engine. They don’t say thank you when you hold on to them tightly to keep it from happening again. You can’t know what it was like for me, struggling to keep him safe. A dead man. Safe. My brain kept trying to square the circle, like a mother arranging blankets around a dead baby.
By the time Mom, Phil, and I had dragged Marshall out of the ocean and onto the wooden platform, I was shaking from head to toe. I think I was crying, but with the salt water streaming from my hair into my eyes, I couldn’t really tell. A few divers who’d come up early rushed to the stern.
A tourist dropped her beach towel and kneeled next to him. “Oh my God. What happened?”
“Sia! Wake up and get his mask off,” Phil said to me.
I pulled it over his forehead, and Phil tipped Marshall’s head back to listen for breath sounds. Felt for a pulse. Started CPR.
The voices kept coming, tumbling over one another.
“Is he breathing?”
“We have to call someone.”
“This . . . This is terrible.”
“We have to get him to the hospital.”
“Is he—”
And that was it. I turned away, leaned over the side at the same spot Marshall had only an hour ago, and threw up. The waves crested and fell all the way to the distant blue horizon, and I felt sick in every bit of my body. Marshall had looked at me and nodded when I told him he would feel better if he listened to me. He believed me when I told him that if he just got in the water, everything would be okay.