Message From Viola Mari (13 page)

We held hands and swam beneath the rim of limestone cliffs. Through the murky blue depths, the stalactites and stalagmites looked like dinosaur teeth. We kicked along the jagged walls, touching the limestone and pointing our lights into crevices. It was so romantic swimming beside the man I loved, surrounded by the geology of the earth and the womby warm sea.

When our ten minutes of bottom time were up, we checked our gauges and began our ascent to the shallow sand bar. Joanne kicked briskly by, flailing her arms and legs. One of her fins struck my mask, nearly yanking it from my face. When she turned to see what she had done, her blue eyes widened with terror. Her eyebrows merged into a frightened crease as she used her hand to slice the out of air signal across her throat. Raoul lunged toward one of the reserve tanks he had left in the sand but it was too late. Joanne started kicking for the surface. Don’t do it, I wanted to scream.
Those carbon dioxide bubbles will explode inside of you and you’ll die writhing in agony.

Justin propelled himself toward Joanne, the power of his kicking, fin-tipped feet raising a cloud of sand. Fear momentarily paralyzed me and I watched the horrific scene play out like a movie in front of my eyes. “Oh my God, Justin,” I screamed through my regulator, which created only an echo of bubbles.

He swam up behind her and grasped her in a cross-chest hold, letting air out of his jacket to lower them back toward the sand bar. She thrashed and clawed at him until her regulator fell from her mouth. Their struggle stirred up a more sand and moved them dangerously near the precipice. I clenched my fists and my pulse pounded like a drum in my ears. I felt frantic to help Justin, but knew entangling myself in the struggle would only make the situation more dire.
Maybe if they break apart, I can intervene. Oh please, God, don’t let anything happen to him. I love him so much.
As I trembled with terror, I reminded myself to breathe.
Breathe. Breathe.
Regular breathing is a diver’s lifeline. Since pressure changes constantly with depth, even a few seconds of breath holding can fatally overinflate the lungs.
If she pulls him over the edge when he has no air in his buoyancy vest, they’ll tumble faster and faster into that well of midnight blue water never to be seen again.

As Joanne and Justin tottered on the edge of the crater rim, Raoul swam over and grasped the back of Justin’s BCD with one hand, holding the spare tank in the other. After he pulled them away from the edge, he attached Joanne’s regulator to the tank. It took both men to hold her still. Eventually, she stopped thrashing around and began breathing. Joanne’s sister motioned to go to the surface, but Raoul merely shook his head and pointed to his watch. We needed to release more dissolved gases from our tissues before we ascended. If we did, we would all live to see another day.

Back on the boat, a pall hung over the morning. We nibbled on snacks and sipped from water bottles but communication was restricted to the occasional grunt or nod. Joanne had been careless and in the process had turned what could have been a pleasurable dive into a terrifying nightmare. Now each of us lived inside our own heads.

Raoul broke the silence. “So I was thinking instead of diving again this morning, we could land on Half Moon Caye a bit early so you’ll have time to explore the island before lunch. Then we can dive the wall this afternoon. What do you say?”

“That would be really nice.” I detected an unsteady tremor in Robin’s voice. “To stand on dry land for awhile.”

Everyone else nodded or voiced their agreement. Every muscle in my neck and shoulders had stiffened from all the stress. I ached to spend some alone time with Justin. I wanted to hold him extra close, to show him how much I cherished every moment we spent together. That instant he’d been in mortal danger had frightened me to the core. I recalled the recent nights I’d slept so peacefully in the comforting cradle of his warm chest and shoulders. How the rise and fall of his chest, like the waves outside the boat, had soothed me into sleep. How his chest hair sometimes tickled my face.
I can’t lose him. Not ever.

Half Moon Caye was a waxing moon of white sand and towering palm trees. Justin and I slipped off our dive gear and stepped off the boat holding hands. The northern end of the one-and-a-half-mile-long island was all white sand, the southern end a tangled jungle. The morning’s stressful events were forgotten as we walked along a narrow shell-lined path beneath a canopy of trees, stopping to taste the salt on each other’s lips from time to time. Justin had this way of making me forget any other place existed, other than the world of him and me.

He kissed me again and again and we stumbled into the depth of the canopy away from the trail and fell into the sand and overgrowth, uninhibited by thoughts of snakes or possible discovery. His long fingers adeptly removed my bikini and I tugged off his shorts. His ready-for-action organ brushed against my moist thighs. I gasped with desire. His hand caressed the contours of my breasts, my stomach and tingly goose pimples ran down my flesh as he roamed his hands over my buttocks and thighs and nibbled and licked my nipples until I told him I wanted more. “Climb on top of me,” he demanded. He lounged back on the sand, his abdominal muscles rippling, his penis standing up like a pole. I straddled him, giving him time to slide his fingers in and out of my wet opening and stroke my clitoris before I raised my hips and lowered myself with a sinful moan over the length of his aroused penis. I cried out with ecstasy as we moved toward a frenzied rhythm. As I thrashed and moaned and cried out his name, he placed his hand over my mouth to muffle my orgasmic cry, which would have reverberated throughout the jungle. Before Justin, I’d only had sex in beds. Justin and I made love anywhere and everywhere.

After our lovemaking, he gently pulled my bikini straps together and as he tied them, his fingertips tickled my neck and back. We walked through the canopy of trees, holding hands and I looked into his face, wanting to commit every feature I adored to memory. His angular, sun-bronzed face, his tangled curls, and the dangling silver chain that hung slightly askew from one earlobe.

A platform stood at the end of the sandy trail. We climbed dozens of wrought iron steps toward the top. Above the canopy of trees, the entire island and the surrounding clear blue ocean extended for miles. In the surrounding trees, were myriad nests of the endangered red-footed booby birds. The birds looked so safe and comfortable in their large nests of grass and branches, the way I felt encircled by Justin’s strong arms.

As we strolled back, we mused over the differences between diving in La Jolla and the Caribbean.

“Diving here is like peering through clear crystal,” Justin said.

“That’s what I love about this place,” I answered. “The water’s so murky in California—the visibility isn’t ever very good. I love diving without a wetsuit, too--it feels forbidden.” The warm Belizean waters embraced, rather than chilling the body to the core.

“If all goes well, you might not be wearing anything by the end of the next dive.”

“In your dreams, lover boy.” I mock-punched him.

“Well, it wasn’t difficult to get that suit off earlier.” He gave the back strap of my bikini an affectionate twang. When I tried to grab him, he ran away. Sand flew from my heels as I sprinted after him.

Chapter Fourteen

Once Raoul and Michael piled their plates high with sandwiches and potato salad, they wandered down the beach, eating as they walked. The rest of us sat clustered around a cement picnic table shaded by coconut palms. I wiggled my toes in the warm white sand and listened to the arching fronds whisper in the breeze. John and Bob talked about deep-sea fishing and Justin chewed his way through a second sandwich while I bit into a fleshy chunk of mango, squirting sweet juice down my chin.

Joanne’s green eyes darted nervously from my face to Justin’s. She hunched over her nearly empty plate. “I was too upset earlier to thank you for helping me. I’m just so embarrassed. I’ve been diving for ten years and never ran into trouble before.” She pushed a chunk of pineapple across her plate with her fork. “But I think that dive was just too deep for me—at that depth I was so out of it, I completely forgot to check my gauge. Anyway, I really appreciate all you did—I would have drowned if you hadn’t rescued me.”

Robin patted her on the shoulder. Joanne sat up straighter.

“It was nothing really,” said Justin. “Just help me out if something goes wrong for me, okay?”

“You can count on it.” Joanne jabbed her fork into a triangle of pineapple and lifted it towards her mouth.

“Is your boyfriend this much of a hero at home?” asked Robin.

“He’s my hero,” I answered, leaning toward him until our shoulders touched. Our eyes met as he chewed another bite of sandwich.

“Where are you from?” Justin asked.

Joanne taught elementary school in Baltimore while Robin practiced tax law in Palo Alto. The two of them took an annual trip together since they lived so far from each other.

“Maybe next year we’ll dive the Great Barrier Reef,” said Robin.

“You should. It’s a spectacular place,” I answered.

After lunch, our boat roared out to the edge of Half Moon Caye Wall. At sixty feet, the wall began its plunge into midnight blue depths, but Raoul insisted that we stay above eighty feet. We didn’t need a lot of convincing—the morning’s extreme dive had saturated us with carbon dioxide and our dive computers showed that if we were going to do a repeat dive safely, we had to be conservative.

“It’s easy to lose track of depth on a wall like this,” he said. “We’ve lost more than one foolish diver out here. Pay close attention to your buoyancy and stay focused on that gauge. Is that clear?” He directed his gaze at Joanne.

Everyone nodded. Once Raoul gave the go ahead, we suited up and exited the boat. We descended along the buoy line to eighty feet and followed the wall’s contours. A multicolored palette of coral and sponges decorated the wall. Fans waved in the current. Coral looked like wintry trees or deer antlers in brilliant reds and purples or had grown into contorted shapes, like brains or oversized heads of cauliflower. The underwater garden flourished—there wasn’t a single sign of human disturbance. I jerked my head up when I spotted a flash of silver out of the corner of my eye. Above me, a barracuda frowned at me with razor sharp teeth. On the reef, colorful fish swam in schools, chasing each other or nibbling on plants.

We kicked along the edge of the wall, which slanted downward into darkness. I pointed to a series of bubbles rising from the depths. For a moment, fear constricted my chest. Divers release bubbles whenever they breathe.
Perhaps Joanne didn’t put enough air in her vest and plunged out-of-control to the bottom.

My panic turned to laughter when three dolphins spiraled into view, nudging each other with long noses and twisting through the water as if introducing themselves. These friendly creatures didn’t have to worry about decompression sickness—their bodies were designed to change depth rapidly. As we followed the wall back to the boat, they pursued us, their slippery gray bodies occasionally brushing up against us. Justin took my hand and we swam side by side with our new playful friends.

At the surface, the dolphins continued frolicking. Justin and I leaned over the boat and watched them leap into the air and hit the water with a resounding splash. Others joined them and soon dozens of dolphins leaped, flipped in the air, and splashed down into the water.

“I’m ready to put on some dry clothes,” I said, once I had rinsed my dive gear with fresh water and stowed it away.

“Wait for me, Beauty, I don’t want to miss the view.” Justin turned and winked at the group, which brought a round of whistles.

“Did you have to say that?” I gave him a playful shove.

“Actually, yes.” He laughed, then followed me into the bathroom, holding me tightly around the waist as he tried to untie my bikini strap with his teeth. Laughing, I stumbled over the base of the toilet and the two of us nearly tumbled into the tiny shower.

“As much as I’d love your company, I don’t think there’s room for two.” I pushed his sun-warmed chest gently away from me and handed him my bikini top and bottom before I pulled the shower curtain shut.

As I pulled on a pair of white shorts and a blue crochet tank top, Justin zipped up jeans, which clung tightly to his muscular thighs. Still wet, his dark curls dripped onto his chest. I licked my lips, imagining my tongue on his pectorals. The carnal pleasures we both craved would have to wait until later. Holding hands, we walked back outside to join the others. As we stepped onto the upper deck, Raoul handed us each a pineapple margarita. The others seemed to be comfortably numb.

“This day has been really awesome.” Mary slurred her words.

Don’s pale face flushed from sun and drink, he had one arm casually slung over Mary’s shoulder.

“That reef was spectacular,” I added. “I’ve never seen a reef like that anywhere except on the Great Barrier Reef.”

“Wow, you dove the reef?” asked John. The setting sun shone directly into his unprotected eyes so he squinted and held a plump palm in front of them.

“Yes, a few years ago,” I answered. “It was part of a research expedition I became involved with. We were studying meteorite impact sites. One was bigger than Meteor Crater in Arizona.”

“Far out,” John said. “I didn’t know there were meteorites underwater.”

“Two thirds of the planet is covered by water, so most impacts occur in the ocean.”

“But why is studying meteorite impacts important?” asked Don.

The strong drink loosened my lips. “Many scientists believe that mass extinctions, such as the one that killed off the dinosaurs, may have been caused by a sudden influx of meteorites or comets instead of a single impact. If we can establish a periodicity to these times when hundreds, maybe even thousands of projectiles hit the earth, we can predict the exact date when life on earth as we know it will end. Preliminary data suggests it’s sooner than we would like to think.”
You’re supposed to be careful what you say in case you’re being watched.