Over the next several days she entered and re-entered the underworld. Deep and narcotized in Jordan Blue, her blood boomed to the belling curves of grand white walls. She exited with Rand at noon for a first decompression stop at eighty feet. For the sight—seen from the bottom of this tower of water—of trees rimming the top of the sink like eyelashes. For an hour rising in stages through clear liquid like an omphalos between realms. In Torsun Sink she flipped upstream in current that pinged baroquely curlicued rock. Her exit one fast gliss. For that dive’s deco, they lounged on their stomachs in the cave mouth, sharing a magazine they’d stowed in a giant baggie that Rand had clipped to the permanent line so they could catch each page’s drift before it eddied into the water in schools of ink.
She felt great. Never fucking better. Then less so when, far back in low-flow Milford, rafts of dwarf-sized arches seemed to infinitely recede beyond their lights. This was her fourth day diving the caves. There was the fatigue factor, factor of residual nitrogen. Of cloaked shapes crowding her peripheral vision among the arches, her reg-whine seeming like cave-chant. Mind-fuck was right. She reached her turn-pressure then humped grim and grimmer toward the exit, Rand following behind. Hosts of shadows skittered from her beam. The elation of the last few days dispersed like dingy gas.
But the way in was also the way out. Her slow hour entering meant its torturous opposite. At the thousand-foot-long breakdown field that presaged the end of the dive—a messed-up bedding plane on average three feet, ceiling to floor—she wedged herself stuck repeatedly, raising her head and banging the roof, tanks jammed into nooks and crannies from which she scraped free. She caught her hoses on stubby outcroppings and detached herself by feel. Begging for each dear inch. Begging no rips. No massive air loss. No clawing her fingernails loose. Once or twice Rand’s light spasmed from behind. He was near. But in this narrowing, not much help if she needed it. She stopped to lay her head in her forearms. She breathed. That as far as you can go? The question cackled at her. Suddenly the bottom shifted slightly. She put her hand to it—it was warm, pliant as flesh. She felt she could sink through rock, elbow to armpit to chin. As far as she could go. For this.
He was waiting on the leaf-littered ground—he must have passed her during the exit and decommed farther along in the spring basin. She chugged on the surface toward him. Where the water shallowed, she again lost sight of him as she scavenged for solid footing in the muck. She kept her reg clenched in her mouth and her mask on—mostly out of the water, in air now, but not trusting the fact of it. She could easily drown in half a foot of water if she turtled onto her tanks and couldn’t flip back. Drown or earn Rand’s scorn as he rode to her rescue. Wouldn’t he? Scorn her. Rescue her. Finally with a great mud-unsucking she stumbled onto land. A few unsteady steps beneath her hundred-pounds-plus gear and she latched her arms around a tree trunk and twisted her mask from her face. A smoky rosemary scent. Random birds. Smudge of grey sky. He was partway up the incline now. She zagged for the next nearest trunk. Then on to the next. Like shadows in reverse, various golds glinted off bark and dripping moss. She followed them as far as she could go. Jane, Marilyn kept thinking. Raise you. You crazy bitch.
When she arrived at the truck, he was in the driver’s seat, staring straight ahead through the windshield. She waddled to the rear and banged down the door. She wrestled out of her harness and carelessly dropped her tanks and, without breaking down her regs, shoved her rig onto the flatbed then stripped off her suit and suit underwear. She stabbed her legs into jeans and feet into flip-flops. Everything still worked. She yanked a tee on. Made it. Good to go. In the woods a rustling she took for mysterious. She got in the truck beside him. Ready, he asked, voice flat. What do you think, she snarled.
Sorry, nope. She would not be taking up knitting. Across the chow mein, his expression queered. His scalp gleamed yellow beneath his thinning crew cut more grey than brown now. His knees snicked hers under the table. Wait, he told her. He was only trying to tell her something. He was tired. She was tired. Milford, he argued, wasn’t actually complex like Cleargate. If she had trouble with Milford, forget the harder stuff. So there she had it. He’d had it. Sorry, nope.
But come on, she argued, getting her swagger back. Milford was a one-off. Was bullshit. Sor-ry! She flagged the waiter and pointed to her stained beer glass. Sorry, but she had a lot to make up. Ten months’ worth of interring herself in her townhouse office while certain others disported themselves in caves and wrecks. She’d give him sorry. But the waiter fast-fetched her beer and she calmed enough to grandly clink Rand’s untouched water glass. After dinner—sort-of dinner, as neither of them ate much beyond a bite or two—they rode back to Bowman’s in the truck. The tires shirred on the black-silk pavement. There was a crescent-moon pin on the velvet sky. She hoped Bowman would be off shooting cats somewhere, whatever! Who knew how her evening might end?
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