“Then you”—he slides his arm along the bench seat behind me—“you’re going to love snorkeling.”
Alex parks in front of a dive shop just off Gulf Drive, the road that runs the length of the island. The glass front door is pasted with flyers for dive trips and upcoming certification courses, and a bumper sticker tells us that “a bad day diving beats a good day at work.” This is the kind of life I think my mom always meant for us to have, and even though my stomach flutters with excitement, I feel a little sad that I’m living it without her. Alex threads his fingers through mine as we go inside, and I push the sadness away.
A guy wearing a faded red T-shirt with the shop logo printed on the back is hanging dive masks on a display in the middle of the shop. He looks up as we come in.
“Hey, Alex!” He tucks a stray lock of long dark hair behind his ear as they shake hands and flashes me a grin. “Long time, bro. Good to see you.”
“You, too.” Alex introduces us. “Callie, this is Dave. He’s one of my dive buddies. Dave, this is Callie. She’s the girl I eat Drumsticks with in the middle of the night.”
“Never heard it called that before.” Dave laughs, making me blush. “Doing the wreck today, or the rocks?”
“Rocks,” Alex says.
“Nice choice. Viz has been about fifteen to twenty feet the last couple days. Should be lots to see. Maybe even some dolphins. Need gear?”
“I brought mine,” Alex says. “But Callie could use some, and maybe a suit if you have a spare.”
Dave sizes me up. “I think my sister’s stuff would probably fit. Hang on.” He crosses to a wooden door covered with white oval-shaped decals from different dive sites around the world. As he disappears behind the door, I wonder if he’s been to all of those places. He emerges with a mesh dive bag. “I’ve got a snorkel, a mask, fins, boots, and a shortie. Need anything else? Got water? Sunscreen?”
Alex nods as he takes the bag. “This’ll do it. Thanks.”
Dave grabs a disposable underwater camera from a counter display and hands it to me. “Take a camera, too. On me.”
“Thanks.”
“Anytime. Listen, man, we’re doing a trip to Roatan in February. You in?”
Disappointment washes over Alex’s face, as if it’s seeping right out of his pores. He shakes his head. “Still working the boat.”
“No worries, bro. There will always be more trips.” Dave slaps his shoulder and turns to shake my hand. “It was great to meet you, Callie.”
“You, too.”
Alex is quiet as he throws the gear in the back of the truck beside his own dive bag and a small red cooler, and we turn back out onto Gulf Drive, heading toward the north end of the island. I wonder if he’s thinking about missed opportunities, too.
“What are the rocks?” I ask.
“The Spanish Rocks,” he says. “It’s a reef made from some limestone ledges along the bottom. Not sure why they call it Spanish Rocks, because it’s neither, but it’s been called that as long as I can remember. Anyway, it’s a good place to learn.”
Alex turns left into a tiny beachfront parking lot where a couple of divers in full wet suits are unloading tanks and fins from the back of their SUV. Something that resembles envy flickers across his face as they carry their gear to the beach, and I worry that he’ll be bored snorkeling on the surface with me when he could be underwater like them. He leans over and kisses me. “Ready?”
“I think so.”
We get out of the truck. While Alex takes the bags and cooler from the bed, I unbutton my shirt. He pauses, watching.
“Do you have to do that?” I ask. “You’ve seen me in my underwear before.”
He laughs. “I’ve seen you out of your underwear, too, but I haven’t seen you in a bikini yet. Consider me curious.”
The bikini is pretty basic—blue-and-white gingham checked with pale-green ties—but Kat declared it The One. The way Alex is looking at me now makes me wonder if she wasn’t right. “Happy now?”
“Absolutely.” His curls bobble as he nods. He leans forward to kiss me again and I come away with a rash of goose bumps, and I’m not sure if they’re from the cool breeze sweeping in from the gulf or his hands on my bare hips.
“The water temperature is about seventy-five, which is fine for splashing around in shallow water at the beach, but it gets cold when you’re in the water for an extended period of time, so this will help keep you warm.” He hands me a wet suit, but instead of being the full-body style the divers are wearing, it has short sleeves and thigh-length legs. “You do know how to swim, right?”
Mom taught me one summer at a lake in Indiana, and there was a lifeguard at the community pool in Michigan who let me in free so he could stare at my chest. Not that Alex needs to know about that. “Yep.”
We put on the suits at the truck and carry the rest of our gear down to the water. We leave the dive bags, beach towels, and cooler far enough up in the sand to keep them from being washed away. The borrowed boots are the right size for me, and once I have them on, we move out into waist-deep water to put on our fins. Tiny streams of cold trickle up my thighs, taking my breath away, and I have to stop to let the water in my suit warm up.
“Oh my God, how do you do this every day?”
“This is a picnic compared to what I do.” He puts on his fins, and I watch and do the same. “There are a lot of mornings I’d rather stay in my warm bunk than jump into water this cold and then spend hours walking along the bottom of the gulf, most of the time against the current, cutting sponges off the sea floor. It’s hard work, but more than that, it’s boring and lonely. But calling in sick doesn’t pay the bills, and you’ve seen what happens when the harvest isn’t enough.”
“I’m sorry.”
The tilt at the corner of his mouth absorbs my apology. “Warm enough yet?”
“I think so.”
“Good. Now take your mask and spit in it.”
“Seriously? That’s a real thing?”
“It helps keep it from fogging up.” Alex spits in his own mask, smears the saliva around the lens, and then rinses it in the water. “And before you ask, I have no idea why it works. It just does.”
I do the spit-smear-rinse technique, then peer at him through the lens. He looks exactly the same. “How will I know if it worked?”
“If your mask starts fogging up, it didn’t work,” he says. “Then surface and do it again.”
“Now what?”
Alex positions his mask on his face. The strap mats down his curls where it circles around his head. He shrugs. “Swim.”
“But—”
He takes my mask and eases it down over my head, being careful not to tug my hair. When it’s centered on my face, he moves his hands away. “Does it feel okay?”
“How would I know?”
“It would feel loose here”—he gestures toward the sides near his temples—“or the strap might feel too tight around your head.”
“I think it’s good.”
He holds the U-shaped end of the snorkel out where I can see it. “So now all you do is put this end in your mouth and use it to breathe while you swim.”
I lift my legs and put my face in the water. The world goes green and quiet, except for the sound of my own breathing. At first I breathe too fast, as if I’m somehow going to run out of air, even though the snorkel connects me to the world’s supply. In shallower water, the sand is dotted with puffy brown sand dollars that look nothing like the bleached white ones we sell in the shop. Tiny minnows hover and dart just above the bottom, and prehistoric-looking horseshoe crabs bulldoze tracks in the sand. For yards, the only change to the landscape is the addition of larger fish and coral fans that look like lone trees in an underwater desert.
Then we reach the Spanish Rocks.