“I promise.”
Leaving the Yard after work, she still looked for Dexter Styles’s automobile on Sands Street—always with a throb of disappointment when she didn’t see it, followed by relief.
Two weeks after her harbor dive, while she was waiting for the other divers to get their food at the Oval Bar, Anna opened her Herald Tribune to glance at the encouraging headlines she was coming to expect: Rommel barely hanging on in Tunisia; the Russian army forcing the Germans back toward Smolensk. When she flipped the paper over, her eye caught on an item at the lower left:
MISSING NIGHTCLUB OWNER FOUND DEAD
BULLET-RIDDLED BODY LEFT NEAR
ABANDONED RACETRACK.
Anna stared at the photograph. Although she was not aware of reading, words seemed to crawl inside her: A two-week search for missing nightclub impresario Dexter Styles ended in gruesome tragedy on Sunday, when Andrew Metuchen and Sandy Kupech of Sheepshead Bay, both ten years old, discovered his body near the vestiges of the old racetrack . . .
She pushed the newspaper away and took a sip from her beer. She watched the divers around her wolfing down bay mussels and pigs in blankets. Her head felt like a balloon floating several feet above her body. She heard breaking glass and realized she was falling.
They brought her to with smelling salts. She lay on her side, sawdust under her cheek. Ruby’s face hovered just above, her smeary eye makeup close enough to Anna that its floral sweetness sickened her. She vomited and tried to stand. Eventually, Bascombe and Marle hoisted one of her arms around each of their necks and helped her up. They walked her out of the bar past smirking sailors who presumed she was drunk.
The cold street air was a relief. Anna walked with her eyes shut, relinquishing most of her weight. It felt like sleepwalking. Something awful had happened in the bar, but she’d escaped. After many twists and turns, they were indoors again, and she recognized the briny burnt-rubber smell of the diving dresses. They’d brought her to the recompression tank.
Marle got in with her. “Any pains?” he asked, setting the dial. “What about before you fainted?”
“It isn’t the bends,” she told him, and then remembered what had made her faint. Her hands began to shake.
“Who was your tender?”
“Katz,” she said through chattering teeth. “But I wasn’t down too long.”
“He was the one wearing the watches.”
She vomited again.
When her recompression was complete, Marle unscrewed the door to the tank, and they stepped back out. Bascombe and Ruby were waiting. Bascombe gave Anna a long look through his narrow silver eyes, and she wondered whether he’d seen the headline. They hadn’t spoken again about their illegal dive beyond noting that the equipment smuggled from the Yard had been returned without incident. Anna had been afraid her friends would avoid her after that night, but it was the opposite: now the bond between them felt familial and complex.
Marle agreed not to record Anna’s symptoms or recompression in the diving log if she promised to go directly to the hospital and have her vital signs checked. A marine guard ferried her up the hill on his motorbike. She described to an intake nurse what had happened, and was told to wait. The newspaper headline floated in Anna’s mind preposterously. It couldn’t be true, but it exhausted her to keep discounting it.
A naval nurse woke her eventually; she’d dozed in her chair with her head against the wall. By her wristwatch, it was after nine. The nurse looked hardly older than Anna, a blond chignon tucked behind her cap. She took Anna’s temperature and administered the blood pressure cuff with a look of pure concentration that Anna admired. With a small bright light, she peered inside Anna’s eyes and ears. She held a cold stethoscope to her heart and noted each result on a clipboard.
“Everything looks fine,” she said. “How do you feel?”
“All right,” Anna said. “Just tired.”
“The doctor wanted me to ask whether you’re married.”
“No,” Anna said, surprised. “Why?”
“If you were, he would recommend a pregnancy test. Some girls faint early on.”
“Ah.”
“He thought you might have taken your ring off to dive.”
“Did you . . . give me the test?”
“No, of course not. I would have to draw blood.”
“It isn’t necessary,” Anna said.
She left the hospital, stepping between square white columns down a shallow flight of steps that faced the grassy oval where she and Rose had given blood the previous fall. She lingered in the shadows, fixing her eyes on a pale columnar sculpture she remembered from that day. It had an eagle on top. She hadn’t had her monthly since joining the diving program—two months. She’d assumed that diving itself was the reason, and had been relieved, dreading the complications. This new interpretation arrived not as a possibility but as a certainty.
Anna returned to the apartment to find Rose’s father in the front room, reading the Forward by his green glass desk lamp. She thought she saw a flicker of disapproval—or perhaps just concern—at her tardy, disheveled state. In her own room, she lay in bed with her hands over her belly and stared at the tree outside her window. She reminded herself that she didn’t know for sure. But she did know. She was in trouble, at long last.
The next morning she left early, without eating. She placed the pocket watch in her purse with an ominous sense that she’d reached the limit of its protective powers. Riding the streetcar to Flushing Avenue, she was stricken with nausea compounded by monstrous hunger. At a cafeteria on the corner of Flushing and Clinton, she joined a legion of Naval Yard workers lining up for eggs, hash browns, coffee, and dry toast—there was a freeze on butter and other “edible fats.” She felt steadier after having eaten, and walked the rest of the way to work. She stopped at Lieutenant Axel’s office to say good morning. He was always the first to arrive.
“Kerrigan,” he called. “I was hoping you’d turn up. Come in a minute.” When she was standing before his desk, he said, “I’ve five new trainees coming in today, don’t know their elbows from their asses. What have you scheduled?”
“Tending in the morning, diving in the afternoon.”
“All right if I send these dopes along and hope they learn a thing or two by watching?”