Tom pilots the Sea Ray next to the blue-and-white mooring ball as Kate deftly reaches over the bow to grab the line and tie off to the cleat. Then Tom kills the engine and the 25-footer dances in the chop. Something in your stomach shifts. You grab the gunwale for balance and peer over the starboard side. The mooring line disappears into the green murk of Lake Erie and you try to imagine it running 70 feet deep, secured to a concrete block next to the wreck of the Admiral.

The old tug lies half-buried in mud below, her hull crumbing around the bones of the 14 men lost with her in a December storm, 1942. Kate is already jamming fins over her boots, a constant state of motion, so you zip up your wetsuit and grab your gloves and hood. It’s 75 and breezy on the boat, but it’s going to be damn cold down below.

When Kate calls your name, you see that she’s ready to descend. You throw yourself backwards over the rail and lose her in the bubbles of an underwater somersault. She’s already gone so you fin over to the line and begin the descent alone.

The freshwater preserves thousands of wrecks below its surface, but the cold and low viz are treacherous. Like Sinatra might have said: if you can dive here, you can dive anywhere.

*****

Kate Courtland – your new coworker at the Greater Cleveland Aquarium, and an experienced Great Lakes wreck diver despite being somewhere in her mid-twenties – lives her life hurry-hurry. You barely know her, but she cornered you on Friday as you clocked out and asked if you could be her dive buddy on a research trip. Something about documenting decay. She may have been hard up for a buddy, or maybe she saw something in your first week at the aquarium. You casually agreed and then spent the rest of the weekend putting your gear together, changing computer batteries, getting cylinders refilled.

This is why you joined the aquarium out of college. The pay is crap but the type of people who scuba dive in Cleveland have access to boats and adventure. Bowling Green State University was surrounded by corn fields and your parents never learned to swim, but you earned your cert in the pool at BG and have a buddy in HR at the aquarium, so here you are.

This is Kate’s charter, but it’s Tom Savidge’s boat. An old friend of Kate’s and former jarhead with two tours, Tom is a bronzed and tattooed firefighter with Popeye forearms and a gruff demeanor for anyone other than Kate. When you met at happy hour, he crushed your hamate bone with a handshake and a smirk. With his arm around Kate’s shoulder, you figured they were a thing. You’ll ask her to lunch after the dive today, suss it out. Tom doesn’t dive, so at least you can escape his glare underwater.

*****

Always stay with your dive buddy, says the instructor in your head. You purge your vest – it exhales into the chop – and the weight belt pulls you below the surface. Sound is muted; the hood painted to your skull. Green light fractures around you like broken glass, then dissolves. It’s suddenly so silent that you can hear your carotid artery pumping. Negative buoyancy drags you down. The pressure and the cold always make you want to piss, so you let go. The warmth pools against your skin – foul, comforting.

A sudden realization – you forgot to ask Kate which direction she’s going to circumnavigate the wreck. It’s 100 feet long and if you follow the same direction, you might never find her in that abyss before you resurface. Alone at a gravesite under 70 feet of murk – what a way to spend a Monday.

You get the sinus squeeze at ten feet. To equalize, pinch your nose shut and gently blow. At 30 feet, it’s no longer clear which way is up. Somewhere beyond 50 feet your head feels better, you breathe deeply and slowly exhale, and you wonder if you should signal Kate with a knock against your cylinder. Then it’s as if someone opens a can of soda next to your head and you know precisely what’s about to happen.

*****

Your open water certification came with a free subscription to a dive magazine, and you find that you’re riveted by tales of underwater mishaps – heart attacks at depth, regulators freezing deep inside a cold-water wreck. Scuba diving is relatively simple, Boyle’s Law rules the day, and the difference between life and death underwater is usually just redundant systems and a calm response.

The pop and fizz that you just heard was vividly described recently by a man who had ruptured his eardrum and experienced a nightmare dose of vertigo in the open ocean. The sinus squeeze is instantly relieved as the lining of your inner ear rips (that was the pop). Then fluid rushes out of your ear and is replaced by cold lake water (the fizz). You close your eyes and grip the mooring line like you’re cresting the first hill at Cedar Point. You hate roller coasters.

Cold water in the inner ear is immediate and debilitating. Your vertigo-induced brain screams holyshitkillmenow as if you’re dangling from a rope inside of a tornado. You imagine letting go and cartwheeling off toward Canada, never to be found. None of this is real – you know this – but every muscle in your body shrieks with tension. Terror erupts from your chest like a swarm of spiders, encircles your neck, coats your tongue. You bite down on your regulator. You’re all alone and your mind is playing for the other team.

There’s only one way out: close your eyes. Breathe slowly. Climb the line hand over hand. You have a full cylinder of air and plenty of time, so you gulp it down and make sure you exhale deeply with each breath. Your stomach churns. You think back to your spinach omelet and vaguely, theoretically, recall that a diver can vomit through his regular and continue to draw air, but you’d prefer not to stack one more malady on top of another. You swallow your sickness and climb.

As you rise, you sense the water brightening through your shut eyelids, but the cyclone tosses you without relief. Your arms ache. You steal a peak at your gauge: a dozen feet down and plenty of air. A few more deep breaths, a full more pulls, and your eyes open as you fall upwards through the surface. The water tumbles out of your ear, away from the eardrum, and the vertigo immediately vanishes. Tom is leaning back in the captain’s chair reading a book. He casually looks up and crinkles his brow, so you throw him an okay sign, inflate your vest and stare into the sky. Kate – 70 feet down and on her own. Good thing she’s a professional. What does that make you?

*****

You’re asleep, hand holding the mooring line, when Kate finally surfaces and asks where you were. You tell her you busted an eardrum. “Badass,” she says, and hands her gear up to Tom. Tells you she didn’t get much footage but at least you got a story. She has a stutter, and it’s not just the cold. An endearing quirk in someone so confident.

She climbs the ladder and looks down at you in the water from the cockpit, resting her hands along the gunwale. The sun peeks out from behind a string of clouds, backlighting her wild blonde hair. Her wetsuit is as dark as charcoal from below. Maybe to hide your face or maybe thinking you could still redeem something on this mess of a dive, you pull up your GoPro and snatch a quick shot.

In your naivety, you had imagined swapping stories with Kate over IPAs at the dockside bar but as soon as you climb aboard Tom’s boat, you learn something new: having only one eardrum magnifies seasickness, triggering a wave of vomiting both debilitating and embarrassing. Once again, your eyes are shut tight, this time to keep from crying. Kate pats your back as you retch. As Tom speeds towards shore, you realize you spent a weekend preparing and half a day traveling for five minutes of torture in a lake-sized washing machine and an injury that’s going to test the limits of your health insurance. No small wonder Lake Erie is largely free of amateurs.

Your stomach settles at the dock and Tom helps you haul your gear back to your car. He shoulders your weight belt and steel cylinder; you drag your mask and fins. Head down, you try to apologize about the mess in his boat, the failure of the day, but he waves you off and grips your shoulder. “Heal up, brother,” he says; “Try again.” You notice tattoos across his knuckles: K-L-E-S on the left. K-N-U-C on the right. He watches your face as you read his hands. Then you laugh so hard that snot shoots out of your nose and for a minute you’re both doubled over crying. Kate is already gone.

*****

When you remember to look through your GoPro a week later, you find that you’ve captured something beyond your skill. Green lake water shimmers at the frame’s edge, then the looming white hull of the Sea Ray. Kate stands above. The camera found enough light to make out her face; freckles dance across her nose, her lip curls into a curious smile – not quite laughing at you, not pitying you. For a moment she just sees you with those eyes that are lit with fire.

She leaves the aquarium and Cleveland soon after. You and Tom remain, pulled together by absence as much as shared experience.

*****

Years later, Tom returns from a snack run in the Dublin airport with a copy of National Geographic and a bag of pretzels. Kate is on the cover and Tom flips to her profile. The world now knows her as a professional explorer and wreck diver. She looks older and harder but has the same firelit eyes. A feature spread includes photos of sunken cities and pirate ships. You think of your photo on the Sea Ray and, when you return home, print two copies.

Sometimes you wonder how memory has been distorted by photography. You couldn’t even see her face from below. The best look she ever gave you was through a lens. When you think of her now, you remember Tom’s arm around her at happy hour. How you misread everything. You only have been back to Tom’s boat to go fishing, and your dive gear mildews in the closet.

One copy of Kate’s photo finds a home on your desk. She becomes your Mona Lisa; her expression changes from bemused to encouraging.

The other copy you give to Tom. He says, it reminds him of cleaning your vomit from his transom. Says he’ll gas up the boat.

“You were within feet of the Admiral but never even saw it,” he says. You look again at Kate looking back at you from the past. Now it’s unmistakable.

It’s not a grin. It’s a dare.

 

Raymond Danner is an emerging fiction writer from Cleveland Heights, Ohio. His non-fiction work, primarily about baseball history, has appeared in the Cleveland State Cauldron and several Society of American Baseball Research (SABR) collections. His fiction has appeared in “(Everything Is) Cells and Bodies: Ohio Migration Anthology, Volume 2.”