* * *
We arrive in the early morning—white mist on the ground like a trip wire, my mother’s house as yet untouched by the first of the light. Juna has driven at what seems to me a mad pace for a route she is unfamiliar with, but I can’t deny that when we round the elm grove that covers the headland and come down into the final stretch of road, I feel a sort of wild relief I have really not expected and I lean forward to tell her so.
“Nothing easier,” she says, waving a hand. “Do you think I can park just anywhere?”
At this point I haven’t been to the house in several years, have expressed the intention of selling it on more than one occasion and then failed to follow through. Selling it, in some way, seemed like the last thing, and so instead I gutted it of its useful attributes, stole its furniture, pulled its teeth, and left it standing as it was. Once inside, the main rooms carry a particular chill of disuse, blank spaces on the walls stained darker colors by the missing frames and photographs. In the main room, I pull the dust sheets from the sofas and briefly feel my mother at my elbow, though when I turn, her chair is empty. In the doorway, Juna clears her throat and I turn, find her leaning there with a shadow in the passage behind her, which, again, I take to be my mother, though in truth it is only the shape of Juna’s coat, which she has removed and hung from a hook on the door.
“We should get her out of the car,” I say, and she nods at me.
“And then I need a cup of tea.”
“I can turn the water on at the mains, but I’m not sure where you’re going to find a tea bag.”
We get Leah in, somehow, move her up to my mother’s bathroom, where I pour the salt water into the bath from the bottles we have brought before filling it the rest of the way from the taps. I unwrap her from her towels as gently as I can and maneuver her into the water, her hair like a halo and her bandage slipping down to reveal the wide dark space where her eye should be. I kneel down by the side of the bath and ask her to forgive me for moving her, for the car journey she had been in no position to approve. “It just seemed like the best thing,” I say to her, noticing as I do so that the remains of her face are weeping sideways in the water, becoming something less like flesh and more like liquid. “It just seemed like something I had to do.”
When I was younger, I think some glib or cavalier part of me always believed that there was no such thing as heartache—that it was simply a case of things getting in past the rib cage and finding there was no way out. I know now, of course, that this was a stupid thing to think, insofar as most things we believe will turn out to be ridiculous in the end.
* * *
The day is cold, too long because we started early, washed curiously blank by the rain that comes in off the sea and lasts well into the afternoon. For the most part, I stay in the bathroom with Leah, though at irregular intervals, Juna comes in offering cups of tea, a sleeve of Penguin biscuits, explaining that she took the car back up across the tops and stopped to buy supplies at a petrol station she had noticed on the way in. At some point, I suppose at lunchtime, she tells me she thinks I ought to come downstairs and eat something, and when I refuse, she comes and sits with me in the corridor outside the bathroom with a plastic plate of sandwiches and the door ajar, and tells me some of what she knows.
She tells me that when the craft surfaced, only Leah and one other crew member were aboard, that she isn’t sure of the other crew member’s name or condition.
“I have to assume the same happened to them as Leah,” she says, “or is happening to them. Whoever they were. Or maybe I don’t. Maybe they quarantined like Leah and went home just fine. Maybe they’re fine now. I don’t know how we find out.” I remember his name, I think of telling her, I remember Leah worked with him before.
She tells me that the Centre informed her via letter of her sister’s accidental death during the course of the dive and explained that, as was regulation, the body had been expelled from the craft while still submerged. She had not been encouraged, she said, to come down to the Centre, but did so anyway after several unhelpful phone calls, as she believed they might be in possession of various of her sister’s effects. She tells me, only as an aside, that during the long absence of the dive, she had grown increasingly convinced that someone with information was trying to call her on the phone. “You said it happened to you,” she says, “which is why I mention it. Sometimes I thought it was someone from the Centre, too, someone trying to warn me and losing their nerve. Other times I imagine it was all just a practical joke. The whole thing can feel like a joke to me now, a little, so I’m not sure I’d even be surprised.” On arriving at the Centre, she had been told that Leah and the other crew member were both in quarantine and that any personal belongings would be subject to the same restrictions. She tells me, calmly enough, that an altercation followed. This is how she describes it, too: “There was an altercation. I mean, you have to understand, my sister’s dead and here’s some bitch at what amounts to a front desk at this creepy place I’ve never visited before telling me I can’t have, what, her shoes? Her underwear? These weird fucking people—I remember Jelka when she first got the job, she just kept saying, These people are weird. So I start arguing, obviously, I tell them I’m going to go to the newspapers, or get a lawyer, that all of this sounds wrong to me, that they never told us what was happening when they went down and didn’t come up. I say all kinds of crazy shit, that I think they hired them under false pretenses—that my sister and the rest didn’t know what it was they were getting into, that it was all a sham, and on and on like that—until eventually some other guy comes out and I tell him no I don’t want a fucking supervisor I want whoever is the most senior person at this place. And then finally this guy appears, this guy who’s wearing a fucking sports coat, mind you, like a sports coat and jeans, and he tells me hey, my name is whatever—see, I don’t even remember his name—and he tells me that of course he wants to help.”