*
We were off soon after, heading into the sun. The choppy water looked like icing on a cake, catching the light and giving the surface a silvery quality. Warm wind rushed against our faces, and sea spray covered us in a cool, misty cloud. I drove through the Haulover Bay Pass, opened up the engine, and headed for the ocean. The front of the boat rose and fell over the waves, pounding the water, making each landing louder and each lifting lighter than the last. There were sailboats marking the horizon. The sky still conveyed the tender, orange glow of morning; the air was salty-sweet and new.
Anchored on the reef, we sat in a circle along the edges of the small boat facing each other in silence, rocking with the waves. The plan had been simple and straightforward: place Del’s ashes on the reef. But having Khila there made me want to do something more, to make it all last a little longer.
I said, “So, I think it would be good if each of us told one story about Del. Would that be okay?” To Khila, I said, “Would you like that?” Khila’s eyes were filling with tears. Holding firmly to the side of the boat and looking down, she nodded. I turned to Gail and said, “You go first. What’s your favorite story about Del?”
Gail addressed Khila, and in an uncharacteristically gentle and loving tone said, “We played soccer together—Jenna, Katie, your mom, and I.”
Khila turned in Gail’s direction, her face slightly more open.
“Well! It was the last game of the season, and we were playing North Miami Beach for the regional championship. If we won,” Gail proclaimed, “we got to go to Tampa to play in the state tournament. We were ahead one to nothing, thirty seconds left in the game. The clock is ticking. All of a sudden,” to me and Katie, “that blond girl, the one with the red headband who we always had to double cover, broke away with the ball and started heading for the goal. There were only two people between the blonde and our goal. Our goalie and—well—your mom.”
Nicole clamped her hand to her head. When Khila looked at her, Nicole shrugged and said, “Del was good at a lot of things, but…”
“She sucked at soccer?” Khila asked.
Everyone nodded.
I was surprised to find myself laughing in that moment, my hand wrapped around the plastic container that held Del’s ashes in it, which was hanging from my neck on a long string and resting against my chest.
Gail was running in place, the small boat rocking harder. “Our goalie runs out to intercept Blondie, and Del, not sure what to do, goes into the goal and just stands there. The goalie, Susan, twists her ankle and falls, and the blonde cuts around her.” Gail cuts, cranks her leg back. “And then Blondie shoots at this wide-open space all the way on the other side of the net from where Del was standing. I swear, Del threw herself, literally flew—I’m telling you, she must have been four feet off the ground. She took the shot right in her stomach. We won the game because of her.” Gail sat down, gave one reassuring nod in Khila’s direction, and then stopped talking.
The waves cradled the boat, the air was still and warm, a seagull flew in close to us, let go a throaty caw, and then swooped upward.
Katie began, “My favorite story about your mom might be the time I saw her dancing at the Stevie Nicks concert.”
Katie glanced at me. It was the first time she had ever given any indication she had seen Del and me fooling around on the lawn that night. Khila was waiting for her to continue.
“Del was wearing this light gauzy tank top and this short jean skirt. She was barefoot and her hair was loose and a little wild. And she was watching the stage and dancing—kind of like she was dancing with Stevie Nicks. You couldn’t take your eyes off her, Khi. I mean, your mom was so graceful and beautiful.”
Katie dropped her chin and shrugged to say she was done. Khila searched around, landed on Ida.
“I have so many stories about your mom,” Ida said, “but my favorite might be when I first came to live with Pascale. Del made me so welcome. She just started calling me her sister, and she shared everything she had with me. She let me wear her clothes, play with her games. She even let me sleep with her.”
“Yeah, for like the first year,” Nicole teased.
Ida took a deep breath to keep from crying. “I remember being so scared and Del hugging me and telling me everything was going to be okay, that as long as she had a house, I had a house.” She swiped at a tear, brought her arms in close to her body, and focused her sight on her own feet. “Nicole, you go.”
Nicole began crying and talking at the same time. “I guess my favorite story about your mom was a few years ago. I had a bad car accident and I was in the hospital.” Nicole paused, grimaced slightly, looked at Khila, and said, “I was with Angie. I don’t think you ever met her.” Khila shook her head to say she hadn’t. “Anyway, Pascale was pissed as hell at me for having a girlfriend, and she wouldn’t let her visit me in the hospital.”
Ida said, “Angie was the one Pascale called the Refrigerator.”
Nicole nodded. “Yep.” Looking at Khila, she said, “She was a little thick around the middle.” We all laughed. “Anyway, Del snuck Angie in to see me, and then she stood guard, so I wouldn’t get caught.” Nicole was sitting back on the edge of the boat, her hands holding on to the sides like she was on a wild ride. She shrugged, smiled a little, and said, “Del never talked to me about her and Jenna, even though she knew I saw them together. So that was the only time she made me feel like she understood what I was going through.”
Khila watched me now.
“My turn?” A favorite story about Del? “Well,” I said, “there was the time we went searching for Kurma.”
*
The currents had been unusually strong that day, visibility was poor. It was the last weekend of summer before tenth grade, and we had wanted to get in one more dive before school started. I wasn’t sure about the plan, especially when I saw how choppy and dark—almost black—the ocean looked from the beach. Del was determined to make the dive. A guest at the motel had mentioned he spotted a sea turtle on the reef, and Del loved sea turtles.
“Let’s go,” Del said, “before Kurma figures out it’s not a real reef.” We were standing in waist-high water maneuvering to get our flippers on.
As we snorkeled out to the reef, I said a few times that the water felt rough. Del insisted it always felt rougher on the surface. We’d be fine, she said, once we went under. By the time we did reach the reef, I was already feeling the pull in my lungs and the burn in my legs. I had a cold, and on top of that, the tooth-grip in the regulator mouthpiece I was using was bitten through. I had taken it without really looking it over. Nevertheless, in search of Kurma we went.
Now I sat on the sandy bottom, cross-legged, communing with a yellow tang that seemed to find me interesting, while Del explored the submerged refuge. The tang came close to my face, turned a side to me, and watched me with its black marble eye. From where I was, I could vaguely make out Del by the bus, trying to get my attention with a wave. Then I realized she was signaling for me to follow her, I assumed because she wanted to show me some plant or animal she’d just discovered. Shaking off the ache in my temples and the pressure in my cheeks, I followed Del into the metal cavern. My mouthpiece swooshed around a bit, and I awkwardly used my lips to fix it in place, could feel the low-grade strain in my jaw.
I was moving toward the driver’s door to exit, still in pursuit of Del, when I noticed a blue ribbon eel poking out from a hole behind the steering wheel, where the speedometer must have been at one time. I looped to get a better look, hit the regulator against the steering wheel and knocked it from my mouth. It should have been no big deal, but I panicked and chased after it—like a dog after its tail. When I twisted, I jammed the steering wheel between the tank valve and the tip of the tank harness. Then, hoping to free myself, I twisted further, and the steering wheel wedged under the valve. I couldn’t move my upper body. Back then, tanks were held in place by bulky harnesses with shoulder and waist straps. So again, no big deal, pull the straps, take off the
tank. But then there was the BC, which had its own set of straps, not easy to distinguish in a panic. I was confused, my heart was racing, my head was pounding, I couldn’t breathe, and all I could think to do in the moment was try to grab around for my regulator, and when that didn’t work, struggle to get unstuck.
I must have looked like a turtle on its back when Del arrived. She moved quickly and decisively, handing me her mouthpiece to give me air and unhooking my straps in one motion. In my haste to breathe, I forgot to purge Del’s regulator, so when I breathed in, rather than air, my throat flooded with saltwater, and I started to choke. I dropped her regulator and shot out of the bus. I was craving the surface, thinking only about the cramping in my lungs, the dire airlessness seizing me. Del grabbed my ankle and yanked me back, then climbed my body and set her hands firmly on my shoulders. We twirled and rolled from facedown to belly-up while she pushed her regulator into my mouth, purged it herself, and then tightened her hold on me. I sucked in the air, felt her chest pressed against my back, her arms surrounding me. My lungs filled, the pounding in my chest softened. She hugged me from behind until I calmed down, and then she let me go.
At the surface, Del swam in close to me and removed the regulator from her mouth. “You okay?” she asked, as she inflated my BC for me.
“I am now.”
She had retrieved my tank, which she now handed to me, and then she inflated her own BC, so we could float together on our backs like otters. But with the strong current, the trek to shore was still arduous, and by the time I was in water shallow enough to stand, my legs could barely support me. I used what strength I had left to pull myself out of the water, my tank and flippers towing behind me, and then collapsed in the sand at the shoreline. Del fell onto the sand beside me and we sat there, leaning back on our arms, looking out at the ocean.
“You know,” Del’s tone was both matter-of-fact and poignant, “you can’t just race to the surface like that.”
“I know. I panicked.”
“Especially if you panic. You scared me, Jen.” She said this in a way I took to mean that I had her to consider in any decisions I made now. She was reminding me we belonged to each other. What happened to one, happened to both—our fates inextricably intertwined.
“I should have told you I didn’t feel good. I won’t dive like that again. Okay?”
She brushed the sand from her fingers and then used those same fingers to sweep the hair from my forehead.
I stared out at the ocean and felt the sadness of the best summer I’d ever had ending. “Do you think that going through hard things really makes you stronger?”
Del laughed once. “I sure hope so.”
*
“It’s funny,” I said to Khila. “Everyone thought of me as the athlete. But Del was stronger than me. When she sat on me that day, I wasn’t goin’ nowhere.”
Khila smiled, her first real smile of the morning, and I had the impression this idea of her mother as strong and competent deeply pleased her.
We were quiet for a few moments and then I asked Khila, “Do you want to tell a story about your mom?”
Khila shook her head to say that she didn’t, but she took firm hold of the small gold cross she was wearing on her neck, and I knew it was something her mother had given her.
“I’m going to take your mom’s ashes to the reef. Do you want to come?”
“Yes,” she said. “I want to go with my mom.”
Gail was already suited up and sitting on the side of the boat. She waved to me and then flipped backward into the water. I caught a glimpse of the edge of her flippers as they followed her overboard.
I went next.
Under and breathing, the water was clear and cool and carrying me. I let myself sink a little, listened to the sound of my mediated breath, as I waited for Khila to join me. My eyes followed streams of bubbles upward to the surface, where shards of white light marked the barrier between water and air. Khila entered legs first, shattering that light, sending its silvery refractions to the furthest mnemic reaches.
She was beside me now, and I waved for her to follow me. The bus and the surrounding debris lay out below like ancient ruins in a field of autumn. We descended slowly, moving backward in time and space, in defiance of much of what I know to be true about the physics of being human: breath cannot be drawn underwater; life moves toward light; time passes. It occurred to me, then, that none of this has ever held true for my friends or me. We were the lost girls. At fourteen and fifteen, standing at that precipice, overlooking the feminine fate awaiting us, we stepped back, joined hands, formed a circle, and danced.
*
Lemon Reef was once broken concrete slabs and rusting carcasses. Now it presented itself as a sophisticated and nuanced orchestra of light, texture, color, movement, depth. Schools of silver darted and dangled. Lawns of sea grass sprawled, canvassing the ground like a blanket of translucent green. Khila noticed a stingray moving along the sea-grass bed. She tapped me and pointed to it. I showed her an octopus slithering along the coral hedge, its tentacles coordinated like fingers playing a piano. Iron rods jetted from porous coral banks formed around haphazardly strewn concrete masses. Living tubular branches reached hither and yon, directing traffic, breathing the water, filtering the light, tying sprawled concrete to rusting metal. Sponge beds of red, yellow, and blue lined the inner spaces of the broken windows and empty tire hulls of the VW bus toward which we slowly, deliberately made our way.
By 1999, 90 percent of Florida’s reefs had lost their living coral cover, and the conditions that were killing the existing reefs made the success of artificially cultivated coral gardens, not yet firmly established, even more precarious. Lemon Reef had, against all odds, thrived. There were more varieties of fish and plants than I had remembered—life everywhere, color booming, danger lurking. It was no longer possible to swim through the VW bus covered with mollusks and urchins and anemones. The sharp-edged door frames had become nestling spots for dual-eyed cowards who crammed into corners at the first hint of invaders and watched from inside their shells. The windows and doors were masses of fiery coral, staghorn branches, and expansive elaborate fans. And within these, crabs scampered, starfish clung, and eels poked. A queen angel reigned majestic over smaller, simpler creatures. She fully expected admiration and deference.
With Khila and Gail beside me, I opened the container and placed Del’s remains inside the yellow bus. It was then that I saw it hovering over us like a flying saucer. Its powerful flippers moved like wings as it swam to the surface for a quick breath then angled downward and shot through the water in our direction. It swam past us, close enough for me to feel its wake, then circled around and stilled a few feet away, level with our eyes. Its own were onyx bulbs, set deep in its head like headlights.
Overjoyed, I laughed into my regulator, signaled to Khila that everything was okay, that the turtle wasn’t dangerous. She nodded as if to say she already knew that. I moved slowly toward it; it came toward me; we met somewhere in the middle. I was close enough to touch it. Then it moved closer, its beak and eyes growing huge in my mask. I lifted my chest, maneuvered onto my back; it swam over me, our bellies nearly touching. I righted myself, swam over it. Its shell was the color of fall leaves, fading easily into the background of rust and sand and sea grass surrounding us.
We tangled around each other a few more times, front to back, back to front, crossing over and around each other like a Möbius strip. I noticed the cobblestone-shaped markings on its head and the scaly texture of its flippers. It was an odd creature: old and new; a snail, a bird, a snake, a fish; graceful, yet clumsy; extremely vulnerable despite its considerable armor; ill equipped, yet prepared for anything. I fell in love with it, wanted to stay and play with it forever. But it trailed off after a final loop, ribboned once around Khila, and then swam away.
We watched it until it was no longer in sight.
About the Author
Robin joined the Bold Strokes Books family this
year with her debut novel Lemon Reef. As a psychologist who also has a law degree, Robin has worked with families experiencing domestic violence in both legal and clinical settings, and she has written numerous articles and chapters for professional books and journals on the subject. In Lemon Reef, Robin explores laws that may inadvertently force women to remain in violent relationships, lest they give up their children. Lemon Reef is also an exploration of childhood loves and losses, alternative sexualities, and the ways in which class, culture, and gender shape and sometimes limit who we are and what is possible for us.
Books Available From Bold Strokes Books
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Lemon Reef by Robin Silverman. What would you risk for the memory of your first love? When Jenna Ross learns her high school love Del Soto died on Lemon Reef, she refuses to accept the medical examiner’s report of a death from natural causes and risks everything to find the truth. (978-1-60282-676-2)
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