Finally, Sigrid smiled.
“If I do this, if I dive, will you take a bath?” I motioned washing myself.
She nodded. It was fun asking her questions when she was in this mood, knowing she would say yes.
“Is she doing okay?” Nora helped Sigrid ease the other leg of the suit over my pants. “That was rough the other night with Wyatt.”
“I think so.” Warmed by Sigrid’s smile, I felt like a parent who would do anything to make her child happy. “Do you guys want kids someday?”
Nora yanked a zipper across my thigh a little too hard. She took a few seconds to answer. “We had a son, but he died. It’s all we want—or it’s all I want, anyway—to try again, but it’s been a year and, you know, nothing.” Her face pale against her dark hair, her features tight, she wouldn’t meet my eye. “So, there. We’ve already done five steps on the chart, see here?” She pointed to each item for Sigrid’s benefit.
The clock read three minutes, thirty-three seconds. I still couldn’t believe a human being had dropped down into the ocean beneath us and now swam among narwhals, seals, walrus, belugas.
“I’m so sorry.”
She clicked on the mic. “Raj, darling, how’s it going?”
“Fine. Forty-three feet. Clearer now. Out.”
“Roger that.”
She clicked off the mic. “His name was Charlie. He was only two months old. He was born with a heart defect. They tried surgery, but he died during the operation. Can you imagine? Seven doctors huddled around our tiny baby, and none of them could…” She glanced at the clock.
Four minutes, twenty seconds.
“You don’t have to do this now,” I said. “Get me geared up, I mean.”
“It’s okay, I want to.”
I stretched my arms back so she could jigger the sleeves up to my shoulders. “Sigrid looks so happy, watching us get you geared up,” Nora said with a wistful smile. She worked the hood over my head, showed us on the chart where we were: step fifteen. “Raj hasn’t been able to put himself back together at all, really. He’s got some heart issues himself, blames himself even though that makes no sense; the defect wasn’t inherited. Sometimes I think grief affects everything, I mean, maybe his body at some level is saying no to mine.”
“How did you two meet?” My attempt to ease off the subject.
“In grad school. Doing a research project at Woods Hole. I came from London, he transferred from New Delhi.”
“Was it a coup de foudre?”
“Coup de what?”
“It’s French for love at first sight. Literally means a bolt of lightning.”
“Yes!” She smiled, finally. “Straightaway we were mad for each other. Still are. How did you guess?”
“It’s… the way you talk to each other, the way you are with each other.”
“Has that ever happened to you, Val—a bolt of lightning?”
“No. I don’t leave my house enough for that sort of magic to ever happen.”
“Well, you sure left it this time.” Nora hauled the big zipper across my chest and took a step back. “Look at that, you’re already at step eighteen, see?”
I felt like a sausage in the dry suit, which reeked of old rubber.
She turned back to the clock. Six minutes had passed.
“How many times has he been down there?”
“Oh, we’ve dived hundreds of times. All kinds of conditions.” She clicked on the mic. “Raj, how’s it going?”
His mic snapped on, but only static came through.
Nora tried again.
More hissing and clicking.
“Bloody thing.” She rubbed her forehead, her eyes beautiful without a trace of makeup. “Sometimes, when it’s this cold, we get crystals in the mic and this happens.”
Me half-amphibian, we sat on stools next to the slushy blue pit, watching the second hand tick into seven minutes. Sigrid sat cross-legged next to me on the floor, occasionally grinning up at me or hugging my rubber-encased calves. I wanted to keep talking to Nora, learn more about what it was like to be in love like she and Raj were, but it felt wrong, as if that would distract from our unacknowledged prayers that Raj’s voice would ring clear from the mic or that he would burst to the surface. Nora got up and paced around the hole, then back the other way, never taking her eyes off it. She smoothed back her gleaming black hair and tied it in a hasty ponytail; seconds later she yanked out the rubber band, jammed on her hat, and knelt at the pit, staring down into it as if she could will him up.