nearsightedness, which, in an uncharacteristic fit of vanity, she had not corrected with eyeglasses. “Those bottles,” she said. “I’ve been dying to tell you.”
I put aside the law journal I’d been reading, an article Dennis had published earlier that year. “Tell me,” I said.
She squatted on the gunwale of the boat. I shaded my eyes to look up at her. She said, “I found them on a wreck. A shipwreck.”
“Where?”
She pointed south across the bay. “Out there.”
My first thought was that surely it was not legal to remove items from a shipwreck. “Can you get in trouble for that?” I said.
She laughed. “I don’t imagine they’re worth much. But they’re beautiful. I found them in the forward cabin the other night. It took me two trips to get them all up.”
“You dove at night?” It seemed impossible that on those nights when she’d been out until dawn, she’d been scuba diving. I’d seen Bette’s boat—it was a seventeen-foot sailfish, a toddler of a boat. Surely it wasn’t fitted with dive lights. This meant she’d been diving with someone else, from that person’s boat.
“Don’t worry,” she said. “I go with a friend. It’s safe.”
I thought of Benjamin, a ruddy-faced bear of a man who spoke softly and had the habit, I’d witnessed, of lifting Bette over his shoulder until she battered him into letting her down. I stood up and stepped over the railing of the Egret, and maneuvered until I was straddling the gunwale, facing her. “OK, tell me,” I said. It was a little awkward, I admit. She hadn’t ever invited this kind of gabfest, and I wasn’t sure we were suited to it.
For whatever reason, though—she was excited, bursting—this was not a secret she wanted to keep. “I met this woman,” she said, throwing me for a loop. “Her name is Jane. She’s a professional salvor. You know what that is?” I shook my head. “She has an engineering degree or something, and she works with dive teams to raise shipwrecks. They have to do it without hurting anything, inside the wreck or outside it. It’s very complicated work. Anyway, I met her at the club.” The club was the Coconut Grove Sailing Club, where Bette taught sailing lessons on the weekends in exchange for a discount on her boat slip. “I’m teaching her to sail.”
“And she’s teaching you to—salve?”
“Salvage,” she said. She looked off, as if remembering. “No, we just dive together. She knows the best spots. There’s a wreck she’s bringing up soon, and sometimes we just go there to hunt around, see what we see. It’s an old hull freighter that sank on its way from Venezuela. Nothing valuable aboard, just trinkets. Memories.”
I couldn’t think of anything I’d ever done that was nearly as exciting as scuba diving in a sunken ship. “Does Dennis know?” I said.
“Of course not. Are you going to tell him?”
“Not if you’d rather I didn’t.”
“Jane said we should keep quiet about it. I guess the state wouldn’t be too happy that she was diving the wreck before bringing it up.”
“When are you going out next?” I said.
“Tonight, probably. I don’t know why I told you.”
“I’m glad you did.” We sat quietly for a moment, and Bette returned to polishing the railing. “Are you ready to get married?” I said.
She dropped the polishing cloth onto the pier and stepped over the railing. “I guess not,” she said. “Are you?”
“I don’t know,” I said. But I believed I was.
She dropped her shorts to the pier, pulled neon snorkeling gear from a bag, and put it on—first the flippers and then the mask. She held the snorkel in one hand and a flat metal tool—for shucking snails and barnacles off the boat’s hull—in the other. “It’s not as simple as it always seemed, is it?” she said. Her voice was nasal from the mask, but she was unself-conscious. She walked to the end of the pier and turned her back to the water, then put her hand over her nose and mouth and stepped backward into the air. Once I’d heard her resurface and begin knocking around the hull, I relaxed. I felt we’d just had our first real—albeit stilted—conversation, and now could become friends. With no end to my visit in sight, this was fiercely important to me. To have a few friends in Miami—Marse and Bette, plus Dennis—felt like the start of a real collection, a treasure trove of my own.
That evening, rather than wait for Dennis to pick me up