Cooling, she again closed her eyes. She’d committed some terrible crime. Awaiting incarceration, she received her dead mother—dead but an uncancered whole again—in the living room of their old home. The old family sheepdog there too. Time for new goodbyes. Marilyn had never felt so loved! Then the appointed hour neared. She entered a narrow sunken street of ancient cobblestones and darkened shops. Lost and alone she paced and retraced her steps in a cold rain. Soon a white delivery van slid alongside, windows streaked. She got in the back seat. Noted with gratitude the heater blasting—she’d never felt so cold. The driver turned toward her. Rand, his face dirt-streaked as raw beets. Eyes slitted against her. She wondered how long he’d been crying.
She woke again, foggy, and plumped the pillows and sat and soon the dream-dross melted. Like this past winter—always the snow like tiny cold seeds, and then hyacinths in the neighbours’ terracotta pots. Ivy slickening green and ascending the walls of her towering tower of a house. Outside the bedroom window, three stories down, children’s pipsqueak voices bouncing like white balls. Did not, did so. Did so. As the children passed by, their voices trailed off, like dots of light elongated with dark tails.
On another morning not much later, first of a long weekend—nearly summer again, nearly a year since Jane’s death—Marilyn woke at dawn to a silver light like none at all. She woke her husband and they readied and then she drove, cutting east-north-east past the latest checkpoints and then through the rolling hills. They stopped for grilled cheeses they barely ate and made a night of it in a motel where they turned to each other briefly, then turned away—Rand with a bad cough. Nothing really, he insisted, though it bore holes and tunnels in their sex and sleep and ended as leaks in memory-murmurs of things passed—Jane’s teeth picking around the pit of a plum and Bowman rasping of princesses and weenies. Reminding Marilyn when she fully woke at five the next morning—of what? Remind her? Bowman for-real dead this past winter deep in a cenote in Tulum. Turned into one more storied frog, croaking prince for some princess. And so, some seven months after she’d kissed Bowman, frogs in his honour heaped from a snoring Rand’s ears onto the motel bed and laurelled her with chorus-croak. They drowned the sad roar in her head and then drowned her back to sleep again.
Late again, very late. They suited up at high noon on the low bank of the northern river. Cold. Strong current out there. The water green, grey, green, depending. Rand opened a valve on his doubles and a hose ripped. He cursed and hacked and spat. She pulled her hood over her head and filled that with the tender leaves on the trees backing the riverbank. Then she swapped those leaves for the weeping willows of her childhood. They’d once thrived on the banks of the old neighbourhood creek that snuck under roads and culverts and rose snaking through parks and the alleys behind people’s homes. She and Jane smoked not only their first cigarettes but also their first joints by the creek slope while sleek muskrat sunned, doubling in the water’s mirroring sheen. Marilyn’s first period commenced there and, two days later, so did Jane’s. The creek long ago filled in by bulldozers and the willows replaced by invasive survive-at-all-costers—honey locust and ailanthus, tree of heaven. Here it was mostly spruce and scrappy maples and birch not fully budded out yet but she wondered at briefly feeling the old wonderment and soon Rand’s foul curses subsided. He finished changing over his hose. Shadows flitted among the branches and shades of branches impossible to distinguish for real. Especially given the distraction of his grunting and coughing. His increasingly gaunt frame. Postpone? she asked him on the days leading up to this trip, and he’d shrugged her off and she’d let him. It’s on, was all he’d say.
Was it? she thought. Still? Last fall seemed to her like a burst blister. She felt less on and more out—of grief. Fresh out. And when he coughed and glanced at her now from the rear of the pickup and grimaced—or smiled, who knew?—she wondered why he wanted to do this dive today. Why she did. They just did. Her own thoughts felt like afterthoughts, accidental the way Jane’s death was ruled an accidental drowning. She’d knocked her tank manifold hard enough in some tight crevice that she lost all her air at once. Never had a chance.
Your turn, he said, his face now the ordinary face of a tired ordinary-looking pock-faced man—it surprised her that he was someone she knew. He donned his mask and maneuvered his flashlight-rigged helmet onto his head and fastened the chinstrap. Over his neoprene gloves he pulled a pair of lightweight mesh Kevlar ones, like hers, designed to protect hands when scaling and gutting fish—handy for feeling through the razor-edged limestone in today’s cave. He shouldered his rig and affixed his extra tanks to his sides and laboured by.
She clapped on her helmet and weaselled into her harness and snagged her stage bottles then hurried to catch up. She hadn’t dived this cave in ages, but he had more recently—with Jane—and so knew exactly where to find the submerged entrance near the river’s far shore, overgrown with impassable bracken. But once he showed Marilyn the mouth, she’d be on her own. They’d both agreed. Having studied the map, fruit of his and Jane’s careful surveys, Marilyn knew what to expect. No more trust-mes.