In the floating place.
Childhood dog swimming alongside her in a lake, wet snout upthrust, snorting like a water dragon—please let me never forget, she remembered begging herself at the time. Another time, sick with having swallowed an ant, realizing too late as she pigged the cookie wickedly proffered by Jane’s older sister. Never again. Time too that Marilyn, bedevilled by hot greed, gobbled Jane’s doughnut on the school bus—Jane’s attention momentarily drawn to something out the window—and shame-sick recognized the lesson learned. Time of mumps-sick and feverish in bed, the slow lightning of the wallpaper’s repeating ivory roses, hiving vanilla cupcakes, Ferris wheels—brought to mind years later by Jane’s drifting hair a slow-spinning craquelure on the surface of the pool and then dissolving as she disappeared under for the first time, first dive class under Rand’s tutelage and Marilyn’s proud assist. Disappeared too the lush childhood ravine cut with creek water, that creek eventually bulldozed under, long gone. A snowflake’s brief sharp prism at mother’s funeral turned to dog dander, dog grown gimcrack, beloved muzzle massaged as the vet put him down. Or father’s drained exasperation each time he called his daughter a chub during her pre-teen years. Mother’s favourite ashtray whipped at Marilyn’s late-teen head the night cops drove her home, having found her high and bumping into parked cars on her return from a high-school party. The pilling on Dad’s most festive wool socks, worn every winter Saturday. In spring, mother in the yard with a baseball bat, laughing at her daughter’s wild pitch, the ball at rest among a rapture of daffodils.
*
Stay. No one will ever love you as much. A lullaby never-again like a lantern she brandished farther inside the wreck. One more small berth and then one more and she’d turn back—not much time left here, she knew, she wasn’t stupid. But in the precious minutes allotted her she’d take what she could get. Hers, all hers, all of it, the bad with the good. All aboard.
As if possessed she angled her light beam, gridding and slicing with surgical precision into each compartment, parting and parsing nothing and nothing. Something—an abandoned rubber boot overflowing with a fountain of mud. Stunning sight. Something to kill for. To die.
She took the hit like a dial-twist to static—atomized flight into silt, then full-stop in a grey fizz. No up, no down. She vibrated blindness. Took a moment to realize how hard she sucked her reg. So she knew—still breathing, still here.
Here but she wanted out. This instant. The urge struck to strip free from her gear. As if that was what trapped her here. Another instant and she regained some of her reason. The way in, the way out. Think, she thought from some pit deep in her brain. Think hard or die. Had any thought ever been clearer? Think and live.
For a second she relapsed, panted with want. Mom, Dad. But they were gone to pieces with nothing to put them together again.
Breath gurgling like something wounded, she fought her way back to that stone centre in her skull, its pure-cold imperatives. She willed herself to slow her breathing so that more thoughts could enter her head. They rooted there, enlarged her, pushing against the prison of her panic as her sense of possibilities grew. Will what you want to see, she told herself. Live! And so she groped at the hoses fastened to her chest, vented her wings— and with a bang discovered floor. And so knew up from down. A start. She stretched an arm. Nothing, and with it the sense she might thin herself like an ever-diminishing, unrecalled ghost. She smothered the thought. She located her belly—her body, still here—and crawled forward not knowing where forward might be, but searching at least, making a new starting point. So she inched along. Nothing and more nothing. Then wall. More wall. She nearly wept with wall. And when it disappeared she nearly cried in rage. Room? Stumble into one and increase the already frenzied silt and get more lost, breathe her tanks dry. And just thinking she choked again with fear, her mind a derangement of shrinking origami.
And so thinking she refused to think more. Just count, she urged herself. Breathe in three seconds. Three out. Here were her gut and arms and legs. She spanned both arms. Wall and then wall. Her chest vast as air. All she needed.
Then another topple through space, until a sliver of emerald stayed her.
12
Light. The above-world filtering dimly down through a crack in the wreck. She wallowed toward it. Only when she closed in did it register that the chink angled sharply, maybe a whole foot. Not much but she’d take it. Undo her harness, shed her gear. Reg gripped between her teeth, push her rig through and then squeeze herself after. Finally out, don her rig again for the swim back to the rope and make her ascent. She’d survive.