find me, pretending to be someone I owed a debt that I could never pay. It was smart, and cold, and utterly amoral. What wouldn’t I give if Lolly Shipley asked?
I shook my head, sick and so dizzy. My past was loose, alive inside me, roiling in my head and in my guts like a thick, tangible howling.
I took down Maddy’s Saturday-only cereal, shoveled a handful into my mouth. It was like eating sugar-crusted Styrofoam, sterile and chemical. There was no pleasure in it, but I kept putting it away inside myself. It stopped me thinking. I ate it until my tongue burned from the sweetness, until my belly was a hard ball pressing at the band of my yoga pants. I thought that I might vomit. I leaned my head against the shelf, shaking.
I was not this girl. This was Amy Smith, and Roux had conjured her. Roux had pulled her out to play.
This was a game to her. When she first told me the rules, I’d been thinking small and personal. I worried about neighborhood politics, as if she were Tate trying to take over Charlotte’s book club. I’d worried what would happen if she gossiped. Then she’d come to me saying “justice” and caught me up in that moment. It had all felt so huge. The confession she’d peeled from me, incomplete as it was, had felt so freeing.
But this game was larger than a petty power play and smaller than real karma. You owe me, she had said. Twice. You are going to pay.
Sick from all the sugar, I looked at the almost empty box of cereal. I surely did not owe her this. I dropped the box on the floor, the last Froot Loops scattering out.
Thirty seconds later I was upstairs pulling on an old lime-green tankini, throwing a loose cotton dress on over it. I hurried to the guest-room closet, where I stowed all our dive equipment, and started packing up, gear checking as I went. I had two full tanks on hand. I knew they were nitrox, 32 percent, but I calibrated my analyzer and tested the gas content anyway.
This was good. This claimed my whole attention. Everything had to be right, because I was about to bet my life on these machines, these tubes, these frail connections. On the way to the car, I checked the weather and the tides on my phone app and then drove straight to the abandoned fishing pier. Here in September, midmorning on a school day, I was alone on this sunny stretch of beach. I hadn’t even called Davis or the shop to tell someone where I was. Smart divers did not solo, I told my students. Not even at familiar walk-in spots like this one. But I dropped my bag and peeled my dress over my head and kicked my sandals off anyway. I geared up and did my final checks, then walked into the green-blue waves.
The water rose around me, slowing my unwieldy steps, until the low waves were slapping at my upper thighs. It was enough. I fell forward, arms out, and the water caught me. It took me in. It let me under.
The ocean was thick with bits of green seaweed. Low visibility, but I was almost glad. I didn’t want to see too far ahead. I had no desire to look behind me. I wanted only to be in this now, the water a living world of green surging around me. The ocean had its own breath, and, suspended in the huge, relentless inhale-exhale of the tide, I matched mine to it as I slipped my fins on.
For the first time since Roux had said that word to me, “justice,” I felt as if the air I drew got all the way inside me. I exhaled in regulated, even ways, using my own breath and the ocean’s to keep my body angling ever downward, following the sloping sand into this sacred, silent space. It was huge enough to hold the things inside me.
I came to the wreckage of the pier, where the baitfish churned in schools, flashing silver in the green gloom. They swam, like with like, hundreds banded into a single organism. Each was its own self, but they all stayed in formation, each hoping it would not be singled out. Two long, thin shadows took shape in front of me. Barracuda, drawn by the baitfish, and this was the way the world worked. Predators came, drawn to easy meat.