An Ordinary Drowning, Book One of The Mermaid's Pendant (6 page)

Chris
nodded. “I believe you, but I’m gonna need to know what happened the other day,
before I take you out in open water. That is, if you still wanna dive.”

John
looked out the window. He’d gotten the kayak, but he still needed the lessons.
All the coursework and confined diving in Pittsburgh meant nothing without the
open-water dives. What else could he say about his accident? He returned his
gaze to the lanky instructor and then looked down at the glass case. The
emerald winked at him.

“I have
these attacks sometimes. They’ve always been at night before so I didn’t expect
this one.”

Chris’s
large eyes grew larger. “Attacks? Like your heart? Man, that’s not something I
think we should mess with.”

John’s
mouth went dry. How would he make what happened sound mundane? “No, nothing
like that. I just wake up sometimes feeling like the room is going to swallow
me.” He sounded weak. He spread his fingers on the counter, forced an easy grin
and some apology into his voice. “What can I say? Thought of my girlfriend and
suddenly I couldn’t breathe. Got some water down my gullet and suddenly I was
drowning.”

Chris
frowned. “Tell the truth, that makes me a little nervous.” He turned, pulled a
thick navy binder down from a shelf behind him, and plopped it onto the counter
between them. “But it’s probably covered under the standard release form.”

John
nodded. He waited while Chris considered the situation out loud.

“You
won’t be diving alone, of course.”

“Right.”
John nodded again.

“And you
gotta do well on my quiz before we go out.”

“No
problem.” John knew he could ace any written test—he always did well on paper.

Chris
scratched his chin again. It sounded like sandpaper. After what seemed like
forever but was probably only ten seconds, he made up his mind.

“If you
start to feel that way again, give me a sign—hands at your throat works for
me—and I’ll drag you up. Also, you gotta wear a full-face mask.” He waited for
John’s nod before grinning. The lantern of his large white teeth lit up his
long face. “Now that’s settled, I gotta ask: is it true that some woman pulled
you out?”

“Afraid
so.” John shifted his feet, shrugged, and smiled. “Any idea who she was?”

“Maybe.
What’d she look like?” Chris’s eyes had taken on a funny light, especially
given how serious he’d been only seconds before. Later, John would wonder
uneasily if he’d misread Chris the whole time or if he’d turned into a whack
job only after hearing John’s story.

“Not
sure. I was a little out of it.”

“Did you
see breasts?” Chris sounded eager; breasts might do that, but the fact that
he’d even asked the question stunned John.

“Y-yes,”
he said. “Is that relevant?”

Chris’s
grin had grown excited. “Maybe. I’ve seen one or two of them but never so close
to the island.”

“Of
who?” The change that had come over Chris surprised John. Worse yet, he
couldn’t follow Chris’s narrative. “How many women swim alone and naked around
here?”

Chris
blinked as though the question caught him by surprise. “Women? No women swim
alone and naked around here.”

John
began to feel exasperated, but he pushed it down. It would do no good to let it
out; who knows how Chris’s mood would shift. “I’m sorry. What are we talking
about then?”

Chris’s
expression lightened. “The
gente del mar
. I’ve seen them several times.”

“‘
Gente
del mar’
? People of the sea?” Even when he translated it into English, John
didn’t understand as quickly as he should. When he did, incredulity flickered
through his thoughts, and then died down. He smiled. “I see you talked to
Tomás. He teased me too.”

Chris,
who’d been staring out the window and muttering to himself, a little smile
curling his mouth, stopped and focused on John. “No one’s teasing you. I
have
seen mermaids. And so have other Culebrenses. Pablo and Jorge, the guys who
work on my boat, talk about seeing mermaids. …”

“The
oceans are such a huge mystery,” John said, choosing his words carefully.

Chris’s
smile faded. “You think I’m one of those people who believe in UFOs and the
Bermuda Triangle, don’t you?”

John
couldn’t meet Chris’s eyes. “I didn’t say that.”

Awkward
silence padded the space between them. John looked down at the consent form
that Chris had left on the counter. One man’s fish might be another’s mermaid.
Who was he to decide? He looked at Chris, who watched him, shrugged again, and
smiled.

“A
mermaid’s certainly better than a giant squid.”

Chris
smiled back. “I bet you see her again. I’d take you out, panic attacks and all,
just for the chance to be with you when you do.”

***

After
leaving the dive shop, John spent the rest of the morning in Dewey. Chris, although
he’d agreed to rent a kayak, had stipulated that he needed to check on John for
his own peace of mind. What that meant was that John had to wait until
tomorrow. So he shopped for supplies at the
mercado
, picking up a
Caribbean soda made with tamarind syrup, peanut butter, a loaf of bread, and a
half a dozen oranges. He’d brought a camp stove and enamelware for some of his
meals but only halfheartedly tossed four cans of beans into his basket. He’d
suspected that camping would test his devotion to Zoë’s diet, but he hadn’t
expected the dearth of good vegetarian convenience foods. He’d have to make do
with fruit, imported chips and candy bars, and purified water from the main
island. One good thing about Zoë’s visit in twelve days: breakfast came with
their room at Tamarindo Estates.

When he
came out of the
mercado
, he stopped on the sidewalk, clutching his bag
of supplies and blinking in the brilliance of the late morning. For perhaps the
first time in recent memory, he had no agenda, no goal to accomplish or
activity to pursue. Even the intense desire to go to Luís Peña had lost its
edge. As he stood there, an unexpected tide of nostalgia surged in him. At 26,
he couldn’t be justified in missing his youth, in missing the free hours
frittered away during summer. Or weekends. Or holidays. The lazy, hazy time
spent daydreaming on soft spring mornings instead of tapping away at his
keyboard or reading a textbook. But he did miss his youth. More often than not,
he turned away from the beckoning green world outside his graduate office. More
often than not, he spent hours below ground in a bunker euphemistically called
a research lab.

He’d
brought a book, of course, Lewis Thomas’s
Late Night Thoughts on Listening
to Mahler’s Ninth Symphony
, but at the moment it seemed like pulling it out
qualified as an assignment. A must-do, focused and probing. He wanted—no, he
hungered for—diffuse, unplanned, open-ended wandering. After some time, a man
pushed past him, lifting his reverie for an instant. Rubbing his forehead in a
vain attempt to control his thoughts, he saw his bike and understood that he
needed to get on and ride. Unlike his almost-frantic tour of the island
yesterday, he pedaled only strongly enough to keep the bike going and gradually
his thoughts unspooled into emptiness.

His
surroundings melted and merged into a living Impressionist artwork, a
stained-glass filter that blocked out details of baked asphalt and dusty scrub.
He’d lost two hours this way when a nagging ache in the pit of his stomach
brought him back to the needs of his body. In his moving meditation, he’d
managed to bike back to town—a very good thing because the back of his neck and
his forearms had started to burn even though he’d slathered them with sun
block.

He
walked slowly into a deli, blinking his dazzled eyes in the sudden dimness. A
plump, middle-aged American woman in an apron stood muttering with a clipboard
before a cooler. She glanced up and smiled; her large eyes and upswept wrinkles
promised old-fashioned hospitality and good cheer. She piled shredded carrots
on top of a mound of hummus and feta, jabbed an olive-adorned toothpick into
the sprouted-grain bun, and grabbed a large handful of plantain chips to wedge
into the basket next to his sandwich. Seeing him settled at a table, she
returned to her inventory and left him to his book.

John
read through the heat of the afternoon, sucking in Thomas’s essays with all the
fervor of a man dying of thirst. Here was a kindred mind, a scientist and music
lover driven beyond the myopic world of hypothesis, controlled setting,
calibrated instruments, and precise measurements. To life beyond lab specimens.
Even though Thomas’s palpable fear of a nuclear holocaust no longer held the
urgency it must have once excited, his genuine sense of wonder at the beautiful
complexity of the natural world more than made up for its appearance in the
lead essay. His willingness to tackle the dark side of modern technology, to
pull back and consider the intricate connections among humans, life, and
science both gratified and disturbed John.

He left
the deli, stuffed in body and in thought. This time when he pedaled toward
Punta Soldado at the tip of the southern peninsula, coasting on the downhill
stretches, he returned again to Thomas’s observations about the Earth. At the
end of the paved road, he left his bike at the top of a steep hill and picked
his way down a rutted dirt path to the rocky beach. He snapped a few photos and
then sat down on a boulder near the water. The sun hung low in the sky, its
reflection a golden fractal.

After a
minute or two, he dug the essays from his backpack and flipped again to a
sentiment that had grabbed him:

Of all celestial bodies within reach or view, as far
as we can see, out to the edge, the most wonderful and marvelous and mysterious
is turning out to be our own planet earth. There is nothing to match it
anywhere, not yet anyway.

Lewis
Thomas was right, of course: the Earth was one of the seven wonders of the
modern world, one hidden beneath the feet of all those urban souls who tramped
unconsciously upon its skin, forever busy with their self-important tasks. His
own vision had long been clouded, his own soul long troubled. On impulse, he
rose and climbed back up the hill where he could look out at the blue horizon
and marvel at its vastness. No one noticed it, this vastness, sitting inside a
cubicle or walking along a sidewalk surrounded by houses or office buildings.
But here, where there was nothing to obscure his vision, to bring the world
down to his size, it was clear just how wide the sky was and just how small
he
was.

He
glanced at his watch for the first time in hours. There was still time before
the sun set to write a few postcards. He thumbed through glossy photos of old
San Juan with its Spanish colonial fort and images of Caribbean parrots, orange
and green and yellow like sweet-and-sour lollipops with beaks and claws. What
should he send to Zoë? Historic buildings or living creatures? What would he
write in the two-inch by two-inch square that would strike the right balance
between “having a good time” and “it’s no big deal that I’m here without you”?

After
shuffling through the postcards, he sighed and decided to put off writing.
Instead, he pulled out one of Punta Soldado that he’d bought this morning and
scrawled a note to Stefan, who’d joked about John never returning to
Pittsburgh:

They named this point of land
after a soldier who went AWOL when he came to Culebra. I feel like going AWOL,
too. The beauty of the ocean calls to me, like a siren.

What
would Zoë think if he admitted that Culebra answered some primeval need in him?
She’d take it personally, of course. An image of her large black eyes radiating
angry hurt flickered to life in front of his eyes. Perhaps he’d better keep his
note chatty and impersonal. After staring toward the setting sun for ten
minutes, he finally wrote this on the back of a postcard of Ensenada Honda,
Dewey’s harbor:

Jackpot! I’ve found the last
unspoiled spot in the Caribbean. No casinos, no swanky resorts. I’m up with the
rooster, literally. Lots to see, do. The food’s great and the locals are
friendly. I’ll call this weekend to talk about our plans.

He’d
filled the four square inches; his writer’s block had unfrozen once he’d
discovered the appropriately casual tone supplied by the exclamation “jackpot.”
There was hardly room to sign his note, but he hesitated anyway. He never wrote
a closing in an email to her, but a handwritten note demanded one. If he signed
just his name, would that be intimate enough? Did she expect a “love” or would
“cheers,” just squeezed in, do? He waited for the answer and when it came, he
knew that he couldn’t write “love” no matter what she expected. If he was going
to fall in love with her, it hadn’t happened yet. He was still falling. So he
signed only “John.”

He
stayed at Punta Soldado until the sun sank into the water, its brilliance
extinguished in the rhythmic blue. Afterwards, he biked in the deepening dusk
through town until he reached Isla Encantada. Standing just inside the entrance,
he searched the dim interior, but only a handful of customers sat at the bar
drinking. Tomás looked out from behind them and when he caught John’s eye,
nodded and returned to drying a rack of glasses.