by Terri Kouba
Ken settled into the lounge chair and gazed up at the stars. “I could never tire of this sight,” he said with a comfortable sigh.
“Me neither,” Tina agreed.
He pointed to the cup of tea on the table. “Marjeta said to make sure you drank that. You aren’t supposed to be out here, you know. The doctor said to stay inside when it was damp out, at least for the first couple weeks.”
He heard her take a deep breath and then hold in a cough.
“It’s a clear night. There’s no fog. It’s not damp out,” she argued.
Ken shook his head. “You’d quibble about whether the sun rose in the east.”
Tina smiled. “Well, actually, there is no east in space. It’s an irrelevant direction imposed by…”
Ken held up his hands. “OK, OK, you win.” He laughed. “How did you do today on the spirometer?”
“My ventilation rate keeps improving. After I sent the results, Doctor Eastwood emailed that he’s happy with the results and he’ll come up this weekend to check on me.” She turned to Ken. “He really just wants to eat a real meal at Viktor’s. I shared some of the meals Viktor brought to me in the hospital with the Doc.”
“Uh hu,” Ken replied. Doctor Eastwood really just wanted to see Tina again, outside of a work capacity, but Ken wasn’t about to say that out loud.
“He says that if my breathing keeps improving at the same rate over the next week that I just might escape without any lung damage at all.”
‘And your leg?”
“Oh man! My leg is like a magnet for every object I walk by. A tree can be two feet away and somehow I can hit my leg against it. And it’s only my wounded, leg, you know. The other leg doesn’t bump into anything.” She readjusted her leg on the lounge. “I smacked it a good one going around the kitchen corner.” She snorted. “I thought I was going to pass out.”
“You have to keep walking.” Her lungs needed to be flexed now so they didn’t scar. He heard her take a deep breath and hold in another cough.
He turned to look at her. He could barely see the outline of her head against the black forest behind her. “And how are you doing? Marjeta says you’ve been quiet all day.”
Tina picked at her fingernail. “What’s new with the find?”
Ken shook his head. She wasn’t subtle about changing the subject. “Matt is having a blast. He went down today with his scuba gear. It seems they’re having trouble finding lights bright enough to penetrate the darkness. They found a ship down there.”
“What?” She took another deep breath and held it.
“A ship. A very old, wooden ship.”
“In the middle of Tomales Bay?”
“Yep. They ran some deep-level sonar tests yesterday and found a narrow but very deep chasm in the middle of the bay, running along the San Andreas Fault. And in that chasm, down very deep and somewhere very dark, is a ship. Matt poked around and he said ship is well settled in there. The keel is covered in silt, in some places silt goes over the top of the deck.”
Ken snorted. “So now we’ve got the Drake Navigators Guild, the Point Reyes Preservation Community and the Oceanic Society squawking. Every Treasure Hunter Bob and his brother have come out to claim a piece of the ship.”
“You thought the press was thick when they found out that a friend of Ken Richards saved a little eight year old girl’s life?” Ken snorted again. “They are lining up layers deep to talk to you now that you’ve discovered what may be Sir Francis Drake’s lost ship.”
Tina lifted her hands. “Me? I didn’t have anything to do with this.”
Ken tilted his chin at her wrapped leg. “The speculation is that you scraped your leg against the broken mast of the lost ship. It’s the only thing we’ve found down there.”
“Uh uh,” she objected. “I read on the internet this morning that I survived an encounter with the Tomales Bay monster.”
Ken laughed. He had read the same article, with child-drawings for pictures and everything. “We really don’t know what you scraped your leg against,” Ken admitted. “The mast is thirty meters below water. Matt says there’s no way either of you could have gone that deep and survived.”
Tina shrugged. “Remember the tide was going out that night. That’s why we were pulled toward the mouth to the bay. The mast would be higher in the water at low tide than high tide.”
“That still doesn’t explain how you could have come up, from that depth, without blacking out.”
“I think I did,” Tina admitted.
“What?”
Tina stared at the stars. “I think I may have blacked out. There are parts I don’t remember very well.”
“Doctor Eastwood says it’s not uncommon for people to forget traumatic events.”
Tina shook her head. “No, it’s not like that. I remember going down and seeing Karen. She was caught in a deep underwater current and she tumbling through the water, slowly rolling over sideways.”
Tina took a sip of the tea before it cooled too much.
“I swam to her. I turned her around and hooked my left arm over her shoulder and under her right armpit. That’s when I felt it. The current. It was strong. And the water was cold. Really really cold.”
She shuddered and looked at Ken. “You have to remember, I had a drysuit on. It shouldn’t have felt the cold. But it was colder than frigid. It felt like ice, not water.”
She took another sip of tea.
“I kicked off, and that’s when I hit the mast, or the monster, or whatever was down there. I didn’t feel pain, it was too cold for that, but I felt my leg hit something. It caught for a moment and then I yanked it free and kicked toward the surface.”
She set the tea cup down as her hands started to shake.
“The only light I could see was the moon. And it was small, like a nickel. It was small and dim and so very far away.” She cradled her elbows in her hands.
She shook her head. “I kicked and I could see the moon getting a little larger, but I wasn’t getting to the surface fast enough. I desperately needed to breathe. I was fighting my body, trying to convince it not to gulp in anything because I knew I’d only get a mouthful of water. And then the moon started to turn orange, then pink, then red and then my sight started to go grey at the edges. And then I think I took a breath. And then...”
She looked away into the darkness of the forest of Bishop pines. “And then I saw him. I saw Jake.” She closed her eyes and smiled slightly. “God, he was gorgeous. His skin was tan and his teeth were white when smiled at me. There was a soft light behind him and his blond hair was long, down to his shoulders, and it wafted through the water, swirling around his head like a nimbus.”
A tear ran down her cheek. “I looked at him and he looked just like he did right before he died. Happy, Contented. Calm. But this time he had a smile on his face as if he knew something I didn’t know, but was about to find out.” She wiped at her nose. “And then he nodded. He moved his chin up and pointed to the surface.” She mimicked his motion.
“I knew what he wanted. He wanted me to go up. But that’s not what I wanted. I didn’t want to rise to the surface. I wanted to go to him.” She took a rattled breath and coughed slightly. “His smile changed, like he knew what I was thinking. But he knew something else, too. He knew the right thing to do and he knew that I would do it. With his chin he pointed to the surface again. And this time, I looked up.” She blew out the air raggedly from her lungs and coughed.
“And the next thing I remember, I saw the moon, big and bright in full clear air. I was up out of the water. Karen was still in my arms. Everyone was shouting and I couldn’t breathe and then Matt and Jiri were there, pulling both of us ashore. And then Matt was holding me as water drained out of every orifice.” She hesitated. “And Jake was gone.”
“Why didn’t you tell anyone? Before now?”
“Because they wouldn’t understand,” she motioned to the house where her friends were. “They would think I was doing what I’ve done for the la
st four years; holding onto Jake.” She wiped her eyes with the edge of her blanket. “They wouldn’t understand that I wasn’t hanging on. I was letting go.” She started to cry again. “For four years I hung on to Jake, not wanting to give him up. I didn’t want to live my life without him.”
“But down there,” she whispered. “When push came to shove, I had two options. Stay with Jake and drown, or live and leave Jake behind.” She shrugged. “We know which one I chose. Now I just have to figure out how to go on without him.”
Ken rose and squeezed onto the lounge chair with Tina, careful not to kick her wounded leg. She laid her head on his shoulder and cried lightly.
“I haven’t spoken to my wife and daughter since that night either,” he told her. It had been ten days since the full moon. He thought of them every day, but not with the same compulsion to clutch their memories and hold them tightly in his mind. “It was time for me to let them go, too.”
That night, on the water, his eyes had scanned the water surface for any hint of Karen or Tina. It had seemed like an eternity. And in that eternity, he had realized that he had been concentrating so hard on holding on to his dead wife and child, that the living people around him were slipping through his fingers.
That night on the bay he didn’t even know the child’s name before her father called it, but the thought of her death frightened him more than anything he had ever known. It wasn’t her death, not her specifically, but it was then that he realized he was trying to live in a world that didn’t exist any more. And, even worse, he was rejecting the world around him; the world that did exist.
He had been living in the past and that night, on the water, before Tina rose, it hit him. It hit him like a Mack truck coming out of nowhere at a hundred miles an hour. It hurt. Physically hurt. His entire body had felt like it had been jarred. He had been sitting in one spot and then, without physically moving, he was ripped out of that spot and was thrown into another spot. His head spun so violently that it had made him nauseous. And then Tina surfaced and a new commotion started and he was in a different world. He was no longer living in the past. He had been ripped into the present.
He pulled Tina closer.
The present wasn’t bad at all.
The End
Walk with God