Cradle (35 page)

Just to the right of the refrigerator in the Winters’ kitchen, hanging on the wall,
there was a small plaque with simple lettering. ‘For God so loved the world,’ it said,
‘that He gave His only begotten son, that whosoever shall believe in Him shall have
everlasting life… John 3:16.’ Vernon Winters saw this kitchen plaque every day, but
he had not actually read the words for months, maybe even years. On this particular
Saturday morning he read them and was moved. He thought about Betty’s God, a God very
similar to the one he had worshipped in his childhood and adolescence in Indiana;
a quiet, calm, wise old man who sat up in heaven somewhere, watching everything, knowing
everything, waiting to receive and answer our prayers. It was such a simple, beautiful
image. ‘Our Father, Who art in Heaven,’ he said, recalling the hundreds, maybe thousands
of times that he had prayed in church. ‘Hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come. Thy
will be done. On Earth as it is in Heaven….’

And what is thy will for me, old man
, Winters thought, a little taken aback by his own irreverence.
For eight years you have let me drift. Ignored me. Tested me like Job. Or maybe punished
me
. He walked over to the kitchen table and sat down. He took another sip from his orange
juice.
But have I been forgiven? I don’t yet know. Never once in all that time have you given
me a definite sign. Despite my prayers and my tears. One time
, he thought,
right after Libya, I wondered if maybe…
.

He remembered being half asleep on the beach, lying on his back with his eyes closed
on a big comfortable towel. In the distance he could hear the surf and children’s
voices; occasionally he could even distinguish Hap’s voice or Betty’s. The summer
sun was warm, relaxing. A light began to dart about on the inside of his eyelids.
Winters opened his eyes. He couldn’t see much because the sunlight was too bright
and there was also a glare, a metal glint of some kind, in his eyes. He shaded his
forehead with his hand. A little girl with long hair, a year old perhaps, was standing
just above him, staring at him. The glint was coming from the long metal comb in her
hair.

Winters closed his eyes and opened them again. Now he could see her better. She had
shifted her head just a little so the glare was gone. But she was still staring fixedly
at him, with absolutely no expression on her face. She was wearing only a nappy. He
could tell that she was foreign.
Arab perhaps
, he had thought at the time, looking back into her deep brown, almond-shaped eyes.
She didn’t move or say anything. She just watched him, curious, relentless, without
seeming to notice anything that he did.

‘Hello,’ Winters said quietly. ‘Who are you?’

The little Arab girl gave no sign that she had heard anything. After a few seconds,
however, she suddenly pointed her finger at him and her face looked angry. Winters
shuddered and sat up abruptly. His quick action frightened her and she began to cry.
He reached for her but she pulled away, slipped, lost her balance, and fell on the
sand. Her head hit something sharp when she fell and blood started running down her
scalp and on to her shoulder. Terrified, first by the fall and then by the sight of
her own blood, the little girl began to wail.

Winters hovered over her, struggling with his own panic as he watched the blood splatter
the sand. Something unrecognized flashed through his mind and he decided to pick the
little Arab girl up to comfort her. She fought him violently, with the reckless abandon
and surprising strength of the toddler, and struggled free. She fell again on the
sand, on her side, the blood from her scalp injury scattering drops of red around
the light brown sand. She was now completely hysterical, crying so hard she often
could not catch her breath, her face suffused with fear and anger. She pointed again
at Winters.

Within seconds a pair of dark brown arms swooped out of the sky and picked her up.
For the first time Winters noticed that there were other people around, lots of them
in fact. The little girl had been picked up by a man who must have been her father,
a short, squat Arab man in his mid-twenties wearing a bright blue bathing suit. He
was holding his daughter protectively, looking as if he were expecting a fight, and
consoling his distraught young wife, whose sobs intermingled with the little girl’s
frantic cries. Both the parents were looking at Winters accusingly. The mother daubed
at the little girl’s bleeding head with a towel.

‘I didn’t mean to hurt her,’ Winters said, recognizing as he spoke that what he said
would be misinterpreted. ‘She fell and hit her head on something and I….’ The Arab
couple were backing away slowly. Winters turned to the others, perhaps a dozen people
who had come over in response to the little girl’s cries. They also were looking at
him strangely. ‘I didn’t mean to hurt her,’ he repeated in a loud voice. ‘I was just….
‘He stopped himself. Big tears were falling off his face and on to the sand.
My God
, he thought,
I’m crying. No wonder these people…
.

He heard another cry. Betty and Hap had apparently walked up behind him just as the
Arab couple had backed away with their bleeding daughter. Now, having seen the blood
on his father’s hands, five-year-old Hap had broken into tears and buried his face
in his mother’s hip. He sobbed and sobbed. Winters looked at his hands, then at the
people standing around him. Impulsively he bent down and tried to clean his hands
in the sand. The sound of his son’s sobbing punctuated his vain attempt to wipe his
hands free of the blood.

As he was kneeling in the sand, Commander Winters glanced at his wife Betty for the
first time since the incident had started. What he saw on her face was abject horror.
He entreated her for support with his eyes, but instead her eyes glazed over and she
too fell to her knees, careful not to disturb her tearful son who was clinging to
her side. And Betty began to pray. ‘Dear God,’ she said with her eyes closed.

The crowd dispersed slowly, several of them going over to the Arab family to see if
they could be of any help. Winters stayed on his knees in the sand, shaken by his
own actions. At length Betty stood up. ‘There, there,’ she consoled her son Hap, ‘everything
will be all right.’ Without saying another word, she carefully picked up the beach
bag and towels and started walking toward the car park. The commander followed.

They left the beach and drove back to Norfolk where they were living. And she never
asked about it, Winters thought, as he sat at his kitchen table eight years later.
She wouldn’t even let me talk about it. For at least three years. It was as if it
had never happened. Now she mentions it once in a blue moon. But we still have never
discussed it
.

He finished his orange juice and lit a cigarette. As he did so, he thought immediately
of Tiffani and the night before. Fear and arousal simultaneously stirred in Winters
when he thought of the coming evening. He also found that he had a curious desire
to pray.
And now dear God
, he said tentatively,
are You testing me again?
He was suddenly aware of his own anger.
Or are You laughing at me? Maybe it wasn’t enough for You to forsake me, to leave
me adrift. Maybe You won’t be satisfied until I am humiliated
.

Again he felt like crying. But he resisted. Winters crushed out his cigarette and
stood up from the table. He walked over to the side of the refrigerator and pulled
the plaque containing the Bible verse off the wall. He started to throw it in the
waste-bin but, after hesitating for a second, he changed his mind and put it in one
of the kitchen drawers.

Carol was swimming rapidly about six feet above the trench as they approached the
final turn. She took a few photographs while she waited for Troy to catch up, pointed
down below her to where the tracks turned to the left, and then started swimming again,
more slowly this time, following the tracks in the narrow crevice toward the overhang.
Nothing here had changed. She motioned for Troy to stay back and swam down into the
trench, carefully, as she had done before when she was with Nick. Her search of the
area under the overhang was very thorough. She did not find anything.

She gestured to Troy that nothing was there, and then, after another quick sequence
of photographs, the two divers began retracing their path, going back along the track
toward the area under the boat where they had already spent fifteen minutes earlier
searching fruitlessly for the fissure they had seen on Thursday. It had mysteriously
vanished. All the tracks, although somewhat eroded, still converged in front of the
reef structure where the hole had been just two days before. Carol had poked and prodded,
even damaged the reef in several places (which, as an environmentalist, she hated
to do, but she was certain the hole
had
to be there), but had not found the fissure. If Troy had not seen it so clearly,
first on the ocean telescope monitor and then in the pictures, he would have thought
that it was just a figment of Nick and Carol’s collective imagination.

As Carol, deep in her thoughts, turned right over the main trench after leaving the
side path that had led to the overhang, she was careless and brushed ever so slightly
against a crop of coral that was extending outward from the reef. She felt a sting
on her hand. She looked down and saw that she was bleeding.
That’s funny
, she thought,
I just barely touched it
. Her mind flashed back to ten minutes before, when she had been roughly pushing the
coral and kelp aside in search of the fissure.
And I wasn’t even scratched…
.

A wild, inchoate idea started forming in her mind. Excited now, she intensified her
swimming down the long trench where the fissure had been. Troy could not keep up with
her. It was a long swim but Carol completed it in about four or five minutes. She
checked her regulator pressure as she waited for her diving partner. They exchanged
the thumbs-up sign when he arrived and Carol tried, without success, to explain her
idea to Troy using hand signals. Finally, she bravely reached out and grabbed a piece
of coral with her hand. Carol saw Troy’s eyes open wide and his face grimace behind
his mask. She opened her hand. There were no cuts, no scrapes, no blood. Astounded,
Troy swam over beside her to look at the coral colony she had just disturbed. He too
could touch and even hold this strange coral without cutting his hand. What was going
on?

Carol was now pulling the coral and kelp away from the reef. Troy watched in amazement
as a huge segment of the reef structure seemed to peel off, almost like a blanket….

They heard the great
Whoosh
! only milliseconds before they felt the pull. A giant chasm opened in the reef behind
them and everything in the area—Troy, Carol, schools of fish, plants of all kinds,
and an enormous volume of water—was swept into the hole. The current was very swift
but the channel was not too large, for Carol and Troy bounced against what felt like
metallic sides a couple of times. There was no time to think. They were carried along,
as if on a water slide, and simply had to wait for the ride to be over.

The dark gave way to a deep dusk and the current slowed markedly. Separated by about
twenty feet, Carol and Troy each tried to gather their wits and figure out what was
happening. They appeared to be in the outer annulus of a large circular tank and were
going around and around, passing gates of some kind after every ninety degrees of
revolution. The water in the tank was about ten feet deep. Carol rolled on her back
and looked up. She could see a lot of large structures above her, some of them moving,
which seemed to be made out of metal or plastic. She could not see Troy anywhere.
She tried to grab the sides of the tank so she could stop and look for him. It was
useless. She could not resist the motion of the current.

They made three or four trips around the circle without seeing each other. Troy noticed
that all the fish and plants had slowly disappeared from their annulus, suggesting
that some kind of sorting process was underway. Suddenly the current increased and
he was pitched forward and down, under the water and then through a half-open gate,
into darkness again. Just as a trace of light appeared above the water and the rate
of flow again slowed, he felt something clamp on to his right arm.

Troy was lifted out of the water a foot or so. In the dim light he couldn’t see exactly
what it was that had caught him, but it felt very strong. It held him without additional
movement. Troy looked behind him in the current, where he had been, and he saw Carol’s
tumbling body approaching. With his free left arm he grabbed at her. She felt his
arm and immediately wrapped herself around it. She composed herself, lifted her head
out of the water, and struggled to reach the trunk of Troy’s body. She succeeded in
holding tight to him as the current rushed past. She caught her breath and for just
a moment their eyes met behind their diving masks.

Then, inexplicably, the clamp released. When they were back in the water, the current
did not seem so strong. They were able to hold on to each other without much difficulty.
After about fifteen seconds, the flow of the water slowed down altogether. They had
been deposited in a pool in what appeared to be a large room and the water was draining
out, running into some unseen orifice at the far end of the room. The last of the
water disappeared. Shaken and exhausted, Carol and Troy started to stand up in their
diving gear.

Carol had great difficulty getting to her feet. Troy helped her up and then pointed
to his regulator. Ever so slowly, he slipped out of his mouthpiece and sampled the
ambient environment. One breath, then another. As far as he could tell, he was breathing
normal air. He shrugged his shoulders at Carol and, in a fit of bravado, took off
his mask as well. ‘Hello,’ he shouted nervously. ‘Anybody there? You have guests out
here.’