by Kim Hornsby
If anyone turned around, Tina guessed they’d see nothing but water. No apparition of Hank. The customers were facing a different direction, focused on the reef shark circling behind her. And Hank existed only in her imagination.
Slowly letting water into her mask, she cleared it, hoping that visual clarity would bring logic. But no. Hank smiled sweetly, like he’d wait until she was ready.
In the last months, she’d missed his smile; the one he used to convince her to close the shop early and come home with him. Just as she smiled back through her regulator, Jamey and the nurse who’d needed help came around the corner of the rock. Tina held her breath, but neither diver slowed and swam through Hank, oblivious to what she saw. Then Jamey stopped and made a full circle, looking for something where Hank stood.
You are my sunshine; my only sunshine…Tina looked at the customers. By now Bruce was gone, but she noticed a crown of thorns starfish on the sandy bottom, offering a distraction. The venomous and highly dangerous reef killer could not be touched without painful repercussions, and Tina weighed the danger of picking it up with shooting to the surface. Both could be fatal. As the group circled the starfish, Tina hoped she’d do neither. The diving signal for danger was a fist in front and after making the signal, she glanced back to see that Hank was now standing just behind the nurses. She whimpered into her regulator and her hand flew to her heart.
Mimicking her, Hank’s broad hand went to his heart. You’ll never know dear, how much I love you. He blew her a kiss with his free hand and as he turned to go, the left side of his head became exposed to reveal Hank’s skull gaping open and brain matter trailing into the water.
Tina screamed into her regulator. Someone grabbed her arm and spun her around. Jamey stared hard into her eyes. She gave him the signal to indicate she was going to the surface, and he took his extra regulator and handed it over.
No, she wasn’t out of air. The surface was needed for other reasons. Looking back, she saw that instead of Hank, the space was now occupied by a small school of goatfish, lazily hovering in the water behind the nurses.
Jamey signaled ‘danger’ and pointed to the goatfish. Had she seen danger?
She shook her head. What she saw was only a hallucination. Goatfish weren’t dangerous and beyond that nothing threatened— not anyone else, at least. Tina tried to keep the regulator in her mouth, biting the grip with her teeth.
How could she explain through hand signals that she’d just seen her dead husband’s body? She clutched Jamey’s arm and stared into his face in an effort to slow her breathing.
Jamey glanced at the group, and then back to Tina.
Oh God, this was bad. If she went for the surface, the emergency would include abandoning customers on a dive. Not anything like Dave needing to abandon the dive. This was more serious, because they were now in deep water, nowhere near the boat. If the divers surfaced safely and found their way back to the boat without her, it would be all over town that the instructor left them to fend for themselves on the ocean floor.
Jamey gripped Tina’s hand and locked eyes with her. She felt herself calming. Her heart wasn’t pounding on her chest anymore. Waving for the others to follow, she and Jamey took off hand in hand.
When I awoke dear, I was mistaken and I hung my head and I cried. Kicking rhythmically, she concentrated on finding the boat’s underside and listening to the bubbles racing past her ears. Kicking and breathing. Still tethered to Jamey, she glanced at the other divers. Bubbles gurgled by her ears.
Finally, the sight of the white hull in the distance gave her hope that disaster had been avoided and she let go of Jamey’s hand. She’d give herself to the count of fifty before heading up. One, two, three...
At forty-five, Tina pointed to the boat and signaled they could stay under the boat in pairs until they reached 500 psi on their gauges. At that point they’d have only five minutes of air at thirty feet under. Then they had to ascend slowly. This had always been the plan, but now they were on the honor system, without her. Jamey indicated he would stay with the group. Good. He was better than no one.
In a more controlled ascent than she thought was possible, she headed up, aiming for the boat’s swim step, no faster than her smallest bubbles. Breaking through the surface, she saw that Dave waited, watching for her. She swung her weight belt into his waiting hand.
“Everyone’s just under the boat,” she said, ripping off her mask and throwing it into the vessel. “Jamey’s with them but you’d better watch.” She rolled out of her scuba unit, pushed it over to the swim step, and then hoisted herself out, gasping for air.
“See Hank down there?” Dave asked.
“If you can call that Hank,” she said.
Chapter 6
Something was seriously wrong with Tina, and Jamey didn’t need to be a fricking psychic to realize that. She panicked on dives. A fat lot of good it did him to have this heightened intuition if he couldn’t help her.
She’d shrugged off ascending early as a cramp and the customers seemed to believe that’s why Jamey had to hold her hand. But later, when he told Katie that Tina dove, she was surprised.
“You’re kidding? Tina went in the water?” “Why is that surprising?”
“No reason. She just hasn’t been diving lately.”
Katie said something about a skin condition, but he knew his niece was lying. Besides, a rash wouldn’t spur a panic attack. What he’d seen and felt had been terror. Tina freaked out down there, and whatever set her off hadn’t been life-threatening for the others. Just her.
They’d unloaded the gear from the truck to the back room of the shop when Jamey requested ten minutes alone with Tina. She stopped what she was doing and stared straight ahead, presumably considering his request. “I’ll find you after I check the tank hookups,” she said. He’d been told why Tina monitored Katie when she did the scuba tanks. Four years earlier, Tina had lost track of time, overfilled a tank and when the tank exploded, she was lucky to escape with only the one laceration. She’d ended up with twenty-six stitches on her chin and two surgeries in Honolulu. So much had changed since he’d last seen the Kristina he’d once known and the thought of her life going on without him tugged at his heart.
The rock wall across the street was low enough to sit on. Jamey plunked down on the sun-warmed surface to wait. He watched a young man with a goofy hat, a macaw and a Polaroid camera take pictures of tourists with the parrot on their shoulder for a twenty. While he thought about if the bird liked his job, Tina emerged from the shop, smiled at the guy and sauntered across the street.
Wearing only a pink bikini and flip flops, she looked as comfortable as if she was wearing a business suit on Wall Street. Hell, this getup was her business suit.
“It’s sunny!” She held out her arms and offered her face to the sky. “Feels good.”
“Finally,” he said.
“You picked the wrong time to come to Maui, with this storm blowing through.” She sat beside him on the wall, four feet away, and closed her eyes, her face tilted towards the sky. “Are you just here for the week?”
He swung his sunglasses on top of his head. “Probably two or three weeks, but it depends.”
“On the weather?”
“Not really.”
“Should improve now and get back to normal.” She paused.
“We’ve been reduced to talking about the weather.”
The heaviness between them was gone for the moment, and he chuckled. “It’s a safe subject for you and me.” She smiled, still not making eye contact.
“You finally smiled.” His heart felt light.
“I do that a lot.” She sounded defensive.
“I haven’t seen it.” He paused, thinking how to proceed. “Is it hard having me around? I can dive with another place if I remind you of what a shit I was.”
“No, it’s fine. Don’t worry.”
Was this a good segue? “I enjoyed this morning’s dive...” Her gates closed. He almost heard the
click. “Those garden eels were something else.”
“Glad you came along.”
He rubbed his chin, took a different tactic. “I wanted to talk about how I left things ten years ago.” Jamey stared at her profile, hoping she’d turn to look at him, open the gate.
She watched an approaching truck turn onto the street. He wanted to smooth things over even if he couldn’t reveal everything. “I wasn’t free, as it turned out, to take on…you. To offer anything to you, in those days.” He swallowed the more truthful words. “I got home and realized my future involved Carrie.” Now he was stumbling all over himself and she hadn’t said a word. “I didn’t know when I was here that anything was still left in that relationship...” A gathering of noisy myna birds screeched from the trees behind them.
Tina cleared her throat and locked eyes with him. “I get it.” She stood. “I should see if Katie needs help.”
She didn’t trust him. “Wait.” How could he get her to talk to him without trust? She stopped. “It’s okay, Jamey. It’s in the past now. We’re done. But I did want to tell you that it helped to have you on the dive today.” She folded her arms across her chest. Jamey knew what was coming.
“I’m sure you heard that my husband is either missing or dead. It’s been tough. Time heals everything, they say.” Tina looked like if she’d had a hat on, she would’ve pulled it low to hide the pain in her eyes. Instead, she looked over his shoulder at the plumeria trees on the Baldwin museum property. “Did you ever get married?” Her voice was high, strained.
What answer wouldn’t hurt her feelings? He shrugged. “I’m divorced.” Tina flinched but there was nothing he could do about that.
“Kids?” She looked as though she was more interested in the stone building behind him, but he knew better.
“Twins.” He tried to hold back the smile that always accompanied thoughts of his children, thinking it might look like bragging. “Both girls.”
Tina nodded. “Did you know I was a twin?”
He was surprised to hear it. “No.” At one point in their relationship she’d told him all about her domineering parents back in Seattle, and how living in Hawaii was just far enough from them. Her father was a corporate attorney, very hard on her, never satisfied with anything she accomplished. Extremely disappointed to see his daughter waste her MBA in Hawaii, the father was a pain in the ass. The mother was rigid, from what he remembered.
“My twin brother died when I was four. Fell into our swimming pool,” she said in a far-off voice, as though she was remembering. “I still feel like a twin, even though he’s gone.” She looked back at the dive shop and cleared her throat. “I should go.” She started across the street, and then turned around. “It’s nice diving with you again.” “Yeah. You too.” How did they start with the weather and end with her feelings of abandonment from a dead twin, with only a few sentences in between? A strange feeling invaded his gut from the bits and pieces of conversation they’d had. Tina was hiding something but also reaching out, like she was a prisoner in her own mind, unable to find an escape route. He’d stay close for the next few days to see if an opportunity arose to finish what she started to tell him.
***
Tina entered the dive shop, her face hot. Bile rose in her throat at the thought that Jamey and his wife had twins. This piece of information was heartbreaking. After all she’d gone through to replace James, he’d gone off and not only married, but had babies. Two of them. At once. The realization made him seem selfish. Even if she wasn’t resentful of anyone with a baby these days, this was more than that. He’d gone home and made twins while she’d tried to pick up the pieces of her broken heart for years afterwards. A heart he broke. Selfish prick. Her feelings of wanting a baby so much it hurt, usually lived farther in her sub-conscious. Damn.
Staring at the octopus in the aquarium, she locked eyes with the creature. “You’re still here?” Dave needed to let him go. The octopus had to be miserable in captivity. What if he was a she, pregnant and worrying about giving birth in captivity?
Deep breath. She swallowed and willed herself to breath slowly. Jamey had two babies. She had none. But, every person’s baby was not the one she could have had. Maybe she’d waited too long for motherhood. Her plan to build the business first seemed perfect when she still thought she had years ahead with Hank. But Hank was gone. She had been left childless. If he was alive somewhere living an alternate life, she would hate him forever for doing this to her.
He’d gone out one morning to surf, either got himself killed or left for God knows what reason, and now here she was, expected to continue on. When would she accept there might never be a body to prove that Hank had loved her and simply died?
Glancing out the window, she saw Jamey still sitting on the wall, staring at the chaos of Front Street. Something still hurt in her heart when she saw him. Maybe he’d go home soon.
Katie walked by with an armload of rental gear. “Uncle Jamey said you did one of the dives this morning. I didn’t know your rash was better.”
“He’s a big help on the dives.” With Katie’s penchant for conversation, Tina wanted to keep her diving problems under wraps. Maybe she should have told Jamey to keep the disaster to himself. She doubted he’d have told Katie about their previous relationship. “Your uncle’s a good guy.”
Katie nodded. “Isn’t he? My family just loves him to bits. Everyone loves him, especially because of all he does for his country and everything. He’s one of the nicest guys I know. Everyone says so. Especially anyone who knows about…” Katie looked horrified. “About how great he is!” Her voice reached an unnatural high at the end of the sentence, confirming that she was the worst liar ever.
“Knows about what?” Tina stared hard at her.
“Oh, serving in the forces and stuff.”
Tina continued to stare. “What stuff?”
“Nothing, really. He’s on a special team or something. I don’t know because it’s secret, but once I overheard something. It’s not like a SWAT team or anything. Besides, I’ve said too much according to my new goal and I’m not supposed to talk about it.”
It rolled off her tongue so easily, poor kid.
“He’s on leave from Afghanistan, right?”
Katie nodded.
“And before that, he worked as a police officer?”
Katie nodded again, biting down on her sealed lips.
“It must be difficult with twin girls.” Tina followed Katie’s line of vision out the front window to a group of ladies gathered around Jamey, who looked like he was giving directions.
“Now the twins, I can talk about.” She and Tina tackled a pile of snorkel gear and fit fins into cubbyholes. “Seems like they were just born. And now they’re ten. Jade and Jasmine.” Katie sat on the floor and paired the lefts with rights. “They’re sweet. I love ‘em to bits. I personally do not like his ex-wife, Carrie, because she left him. Even though Dad said Uncle Jamey was better off without...a wife, it hurt him to lose his girls. But now everything seems to be fine, and Jamey is still really good friends with Carrie. It’s weird.”
Tina unloaded a bunch of masks onto the counter. “They’re ten, huh?”
“What? Oh yeah, the twins. He’s good friends with her new husband, too. Uncle Jamey goes over there for dinner when he’s home. They all go to the fair together; they invite him for holiday dinners. It’s nice for him. Carrie and her new husband have a son, Wyatt, and they just had a baby, who they named Mango, which I think is a strange name for a baby, but I really don’t care because Jade and Jasmine are my cousins really, not Wyatt or Mango.” She looked over at Tina. “I’m nice to Wyatt and of course Mango because she’s just a baby but I know the twins better. I got to see Mango before I moved here, and she’s got Carrie’s auburn hair, just like a little mango. But the twins look like Jamey. Exactly. It’s so weird.”
Tina stopped in her tracks. If Jamey’s children were ten years old, how did his wife’s pregnancy with the twins figure
into the relationship she’d had with Jamey ten years ago? She wandered into the back room, calculating numbers and sat at her desk.
She’d met Jamey in September of 1992—nine years and seven months ago. Was Jamey married at that time with newborn twins? A wave of nausea swept through her and she sank to a chair. Was that the reason James Dunn dumped her?
All these years she’d treasured her memories with James. The romance itself had been thrilling, like the first time at Disneyland. But his departure was heartbreaking. Confused about what happened to make him dump her, she went through a strange time that began one night when she cut off her long hair. Shortly after that, she asked people to shorten her name to Tina. Then she planned the dive shop and poured herself into making it happen, even though it would take years. James was later replaced by an Australian dive instructor who was a jerk, and then numerous tourist flings. Three years later she was finally able to trust again and had her first long-term relationship with a restaurant owner from Los Angeles. The distance thing was too much after a year of going back and forth, and they agreed to call it quits.
Had Jamey been married with twins when he was on Maui with her? A sob burst from her throat and Obi put his head in her lap. He knew the routine. This time though, she wouldn’t cry. Not over James Dunn.
This day was getting worse by the hour, and Tina wasn’t sure she could wait for her two o’clock appointment with Doc Chan to feel better. Blowing her nose into a tissue, she reached for the phone and a hand’s weight rested on her shoulder. “I’m okay, Katie.” The hand remained, solid, heavy. It gently squeezed, exactly like Hank. A chill shot through her body. “Hank?” she whispered and spun her chair around.
The shock of seeing Jamey’s face confused her. Of course it wasn’t Hank.
“It’s me.” He knelt in front of her, his head now level with hers, his worried eyes looking into her teary ones. His hand moved to her knee, the gesture familiar.
“I’m so sorry, Tina.” Had he mistaken her crying for grief over Hank?