Now Marilyn’s head reeled. She needed to lie down. I’m a fuck-up, she said. I know it. But can we please just keep going?
Two laughing girls sheared by and a filthy child darted after them, shaking a cup. The buskers resumed busking and Marilyn imagined each musician beneath their clothes, tambourining their bone suits. With a sudden massing of helicopters above the river, light strewed on the festive filthy current and crumbling aqueduct. Marilyn pictured herself and Jane as old women hunched like aged crows on the river’s far bank, eyes hooded and watching—ruthlessly watching—their younger selves preen past.
Sure, Jane said. But you better crash at my place.
Jane and Jane and Jane, Marilyn thought. She’d let her parents go as if they were strangers, unaccompanied and uncomforted to their deaths. Her mother in intensive care, alone except for medicals in the middle of the night. Marilyn’s father frantic with grief and beelining unattended to the nearest crowd for cold solace on a rush-hour subway ride he otherwise had no need of taking. And Jane—Marilyn had abandoned her once too.
Marilyn slunk forward, hoping her friend might follow for a change. Right, she said, mimicking an airy tone. She hoped! She said, Let’s just not talk about what I never did.
Part Two
9
Jane knelt on the rollicking deck and pulled an item from her toolbox. She reached out her hand. A small silicone ring studded her palm. Here, she said. Allow me.
Bile clawed Marilyn’s throat. A tangle of grey messed the horizon and screaming gulls lurched in the wind. Save it, she said.
Jane’s torso seemed to flick back and forth as the boat bucked. She stretched her arm farther in Marilyn’s direction and shook it. Just take it, Jane said.
Only a few excursions left—maybe only today’s—before the late season slammed shut the whole enterprise until next summer. But Marilyn’s planned big dive now looked like major asshat. What couldn’t go wrong? Motion sick. A blown O-ring in one of her tank valves and lucky her she’d failed to restock her kit. A loud round with her husband over her apparent unprepared bullshit before he skulked into the cabin where the crew and other divers congregated out of the bluster in a space so tight it seemed teeth might knock. Leaving Jane to the rescue. Although something of a novice still, she was fully suited already, her black hood pinching her face and whitening her lips. Unlike Marilyn’s, Jane’s rig was ready and lashed to the boat’s hull with bungee cords. Jane closed her fingers now on the proffered ring. You’re right, she said. Call it. You’re stressed. Or dive with me instead. Very chill, like yesterday. I promise.
Nausea swelled Marilyn’s gut like something grappling to get out. Two intense years of diving told her she just needed to get down fast, beneath the surface commotion, beneath the waves. So she opened her mouth to the scouring wind, stalked forward and dug the ring from her friend’s fist.
That was yesterday, Marilyn said.
Hey, Jane said, shaking her fingers. I’m not the enemy. Remember?
First one in, Marilyn hung. Alien, aquanaut—trussed and bound, packed tip to toe into a sealed drysuit. Hoses from her tanks tentacled around her and a nylon harness cradled her chest and hips and crotch and cupped her buoyancy device to her back like wings. Above, wave-stitched seams. Below, mud. Rising from that mud, the wreck, a chance to commune with a hulking carcass of wood and steel. But here, twenty feet beneath the surface in a pewter-tinted corona of visibility that extended maybe thirty feet in all directions before blurring like smoke—thirty-foot viz—just water, water, everywhere. Freshwater. Middle of the north channel between two great northern lakes. Marilyn tightened her grip on the derricking down-line. It tethered the floating buoy—to which the converted fishing tug was tied—to a concrete plug sunk in the muck next to the busted freighter. She took it on faith that the boat with the other divers and crew remained where she left it, that the wreck she’d dived as recently as yesterday with Jane remained. Marilyn closed her eyes, worked out a hitch in her breathing. God forbid she ever keep Rand waiting. She opened her eyes again. The underside of waves a shimmering twill.