Ghosting (43 page)

She’s the first to arrive, it’s not yet two o’clock, and she feels a touch wary at how cold the quarry water might be despite the long weeks of hot days and no rain. She hauls the gear out of her trunk, one of the few students to have already bought most of the necessities rather than renting them from the shop, carrying the large duffel containing her fins, snorkel and mask, the weight belt and buoyancy compensator that were once Cole’s, down to a spot of cut stone near the shore. The car door’s open with the radio on—it’s not turned up loud enough to be called obnoxious but in the cove-like shape of the quarry the music pings back off the limestone shelves in a queer echo and seems to assault what would otherwise be perfect silence. When she retrieves the air tank and slams the trunk, it sounds like successive claps from three directions.

She turns off the radio and shuts her door with more care, the quiet draping the day like a shroud. Not even the trill of birds or the lap of water; the light green surface as she looks over it appears solid as glass. She throws her keys onto the duffel bag and strips to her swimsuit and dumps her clothes in a pile, kicking off her flip-flops as she trots to the water’s edge. It’s warm on her toes, but then the water is shallow there, barely to her ankles. Shady’s ready to swim. She’s supposed to wait for the instructor and the rest of the class but she just wants to go for a swim. Dr. Beck had made it a point of pride that each of his daughters were strong swimmers from childhood.

The road that once guided trucks hauling stone from the bottom is ground smooth as sand and disappears into the lake. Shady skips out on the steep grade, diving once the water crashes into her thighs. Her eyes close as she’s engulfed in the sultry mix of warmth and cold, exultant in the clamor of water as it fans and then slicks her thick hair down her back on the currents of her momentum, bubbles of air rolling the length of her body, nearly kneading her skin, one of her favorite sensations in the world. She doesn’t open her eyes until she surfaces, turns her head for breath, and then begins a languorous crawl, the entirety of her vision beneath the water encompassed
by a lime green made ecstatic by the ruthless sun, the heat of which still roasts her exposed skin. She swims some 300 meters to the far side without thought, immersed in the pure physical effort of her body, her ears getting nothing but the noise of her churning limbs and the air bulling out her nose and mouth. Which is more difficult: to think or not to think? She’s found the only time her mind empties completely is during physical exercise. When she pushes off the stone wall again she turns into the backstroke, eyes agaze on the gradations of blue and white in the cloudless continuum of summer sky that posts no markers. A falcon, or hawk, rides the thermal currents up there; a pleasing silty smell in the water flushes her face and feels extra clean, almost like soap. She swims on her back until the bird passes from sight. A few further strokes and it starts to feel like she’s been swimming a long time, and she starts to wonder how far she has gone, begins to doubt she’s traveling in a straight line and has fallen into some pointless zigzag pattern—for a moment she likes the strange lost sensation this doubt brings, and then she doesn’t like it and turns over.

She’s been on a long diagonal headed away from the drop road where she dove in. Her instructor Theo stands ankle-deep there with hands on hips giving her the affectless sunglassed stare of a lifeguard. The rest of her class has arrived as well, spilling from their vehicles, the men pulling equipment out of Theo’s truck while the women wait and chat and look around. From Shady’s position in the water their voices sound both near behind and far before her. She waves hello to Theo; he keeps his hands on his hips, jerks his fine chin in return. Shady titters and then starts a crawl in earnest, meticulous with her form since she is being watched, she doesn’t know why she should care what any of them think of her freestyle swimming ability but there she goes just the same, she wants anyone who sees to know Shady Beck can swim really well.

“You got here early,” Theo says, unflinching as she smacks a bit of spray at him.

“I did,” she says. She rises fully out of the water and snaps her thumbs beneath her suit to pop the Lycra from where it has sucked up onto her breasts. Theo turns to the others; he has that kind of
husky voice that makes her think of football coaches who yell so much they’ve ground their throats to sandpaper.

“It doesn’t matter how good of a swimmer you are, people, if you’ve learned one thing this week I hope it’s to never swim alone,” he announces for the benefit of all. Then, to Shady as she opens her bag: “What if you’d cramped out there? You’re alone, the water’s cold. . . .”

“Theo, please. At my age, fit as I am, if I’d’ve cramped up out there then I was supposed to die.”

She’s pleased the comment garners smiles from the students close enough to hear; they’re all either slipping on wetsuits or getting tanks filled. Theo’s only being half-serious anyway, one of the reasons he makes a good instructor is that he isn’t a fascist about rules for rules’ sake. Besides that he wants to sleep with her and Shady is pretty sure she’s going to let him, maybe even tonight after the cookout to follow the day’s final open-water certification dives. She’s up for a summer fling; she’s moving on soon.

Med school did not pan out. She finished the first semester and made it through half of the second before deciding to take a bow. It wasn’t the difficulty of the courses that discouraged her. Biochem, Histology, General Anatomy—the demands were fine (she likes studying). Basic Doctoring 1 raised the initial red flag. Over the past year she had learned something about herself (it seemed she was learning about herself all the time, like she was on some kind of three-month cycle of self-enlightenment, every ninety days or so came a series of revelations she couldn’t avoid if she were to remain truthful to herself, a phenomenon she figured was probably normal for everyone in their early twenties; yet in Shady it felt accentuated, she suspected the cycles were especially pronounced in her for some reason—her father and oldest sister agreed, though this hardly helped; she thinks despite all her gestures at living widely and open and willing to experience life outside her given social circle as a successful doctor’s youngest daughter, that somehow in spite of such willfulness she had lived a kind of naïve and sheltered existence so far). Okay—Shady likes people, she likes helping people in need, but what she learned last fall was that she did not like to examine the bodies of random strangers, especially strangers in pain or suffering from sickness. And these people weren’t
even the real thing, they were acting out symptoms for the first-years’ benefit. The result being another recall to the drawing board, another reassessment of the blueprints for the ongoing project of being Shady Elizabeth Beck.

Cole had disappeared on her as peremptorily and conclusively as his brother had disappeared on everyone before. She had arrived at Ponder’s condo on time, as agreed, and found him gone forever—leaving her with an Audi cabriolet full of diving gear she’d believed he would never leave behind; equipment he needed. Lyda said she didn’t want any of that stuff around if Cole wasn’t there for her to bitch about it being in her way. The problem with being sober, Lyda had told her later (Shady had tried again to return Cole’s belongings over the holiday break), was that it allowed you plenty of time to feel the sadness you were putting off by getting high.
I’m supposed to be making amends to people who aren’t here for me to make amends to,
Lyda said.
I don’t need more reminders telling me my boy isn’t here.

Shady had piled all the gear into the bedroom closet in her apartment, thinking vaguely that if he did ever come back he would want these things. It wasn’t too much in the way but there was enough stuff still to be a constant presence each time she slid back the two folding doors to debate what to wear. For a while school kept her too busy for the gear to be anything other than a nuisance. Then it became a conversation piece, her roommate bringing up the mystery of Shady’s stowed scuba equipment among fellow white-coats in the cafeteria, apropos of nothing, Shady’s roommate being the type who didn’t shy from borrowing clothes without asking. By semester’s end, the tank especially—its chipped and dinged red paint revealing the chrome beneath, suggesting one-time heavy use in a sea somewhere—had subtly turned into a kind of lure, a signal she felt forced to decipher, an invitation to adventure and a freedom she wasn’t getting from textbooks and lab appointments and brutal exams and running about with a stethoscope in her pocket.

Shady on her own, not feeling particularly happy; a rare snow day in winter, two inches of ice on the roads: she began to consider the confining nature of medicine, as opposed to the wider peripheries inherent to oceanography, marine biology—something down south directly on or at least very close to the beach.

At school, from time to time, she still got high alone. Less often than as an undergrad; too much studying to be done. And never again did the fabric of the moment break apart and display for her the secret workings of the world. Still, on nights when her roommate slept over at her boyfriend’s place, or was hitting the books with the group at the library until closing (Shady preferred to study at home on her own bed, in solitude, testing herself on flashcards of her own devising), she would open a window and smoke a bowl. Her routines had lost the feel of ritual there, they felt different in the heart of the city where you could never escape the feeling of enclosure, of being corralled. In her apartment the routines slanted more often to melancholy, Shady a ship heeling leeward, hollowed out by an absence she had not felt or recognized before. Sometimes to alleviate the symptoms she would carry out Cole’s things and arrange them as best she could into a human form on her floor. Two fins, a weight belt, the tank and regulator and buoyancy compensator (she didn’t know what it was called yet then), the hood and mask and snorkel. Gloves made of some material like mesh and neoprene simultaneously that she set at either side of the tank. Set out like that, the empty gear felt as a kind of connection to a dream of a friend she once had, or believed she’d had, a boy she had once liked without ever feeling certain exactly of how or why. Which was strange and uncharacteristic of her.... She would stare at these assorted objects, stoned, and wonder what had become of the person who was supposed to use them. She would wonder and come up with extravagant fantasies for his fate, futures entirely opposite of what Arley Noe or Grady Creed could do had Brother Ponder not helped him escape: Cole making a killing on the coast somewhere with all that weed, he fitted himself with the latest equipment you could buy and was on his way underneath the ocean seeing every day a different world from the one he’d seen the day before. That’s how she liked to imagine the ocean: protean, under perpetual transformation, the landscape and creatures living there changing almost perceptibly by the hour.

She thought up other lives for him, too. She thought of him taking another name, and wondered what he might choose. Something
normal and standard: Bill, Jeff, Sean. She imagined him becoming an entirely different person, someone she would not immediately recognize—Cole fattened up and in a suit swinging a briefcase, Cole tattooed and lean in swampy Florida shooting alligators, Cole bushy-bearded and long-haired taking tickets at a traveling carnival ride. All of it was possible; she believes that. Endless possibility, hardcore transformation—it’s what she believes it means to be young and American. Take off whenever and wherever you like, start over as somebody new, someone even
you
won’t recognize for a while. The essential right of a person is
to be
whatever she believes herself to be. The question is how you do it; how often you get the chance.

The class—nine of them, not including the instructor—make a day of it. The water is very clean for a quarry, visibility around thirty feet. She doesn’t wear her wet suit even though below twenty feet they hit a thermocline and the temperature drops dramatically. Their fifth and final dive is constructed like a scavenger hunt, requiring the divers to explore a number of items scattered around the bottom, sixty-five feet down, and retrieve from them a weighted tag. There’s the police car she remembered Cole mentioning as they waited to pay Arley Noe; a number of small sunken boats; a bathtub and commode behind an old school bus with a fake skeleton placed at the wheel. There are fish, too, bass and bluegill and supposedly carp who are fearless of the divers; she makes a note to ask Theo once they return to shore where the fish came from. They dive until their tanks are nearly empty while at the bottom, a task they must prove they know how to negotiate. Everyone manages to meet the NAUI certification, as expected (it seemed to her impossible to fail, as long as one showed up), and once on shore the mood turns celebratory. The coolers come out, the beer smokes with ice, Theo has burgers and chicken breasts to cook up on the portable grill. The quarry has been annexed in a way that keeps it closed from the general public, and the local dive shops pay the county for the privilege to use it. The group has the place to themselves.