A Single Breath

by Lucy Clarke

  “I’ve got these,” Saul says, returning to the living room and handing her a slim pile of photos.

  The sofa dips as he sits beside her and she catches the smell of the lab still on his clothes.

  The first few pictures are of Saul, and her hands tremble as she flips through them: Saul on the back of a motorbike, a surfboard bag hooked over his shoulder; Saul and a friend backpacking through a verdant jungle; Saul on a dive boat in tropical waters; Saul wearing a black gown and mortarboard as he holds a rolled-up certificate against his chest like a sword.

  Her breath shortens as she looks through photo after photo, all evidence that Saul did the things Jackson had claimed to have done.

  The first photo she sees of Jackson is a shot of him standing in a boatyard. He is wearing faded blue overalls that are rolled down to his waist, and he is sticking an oil-smeared finger up at whoever was behind the camera. In the next photo his hair is cut shorter and he’s pointing toward a huge banner that reads TASSIE DEVIL BEER FESTIVAL! There are more photos of Jackson: on nights out with friends, skateboarding in a half pipe, kicking a football on the beach.

  She looks through the pile twice more and then lays the photos carefully on the coffee table. They confirm everything Saul told her, yet it still seems impossible. She shakes her head slowly from side to side, saying, “I don’t understand how this could be true.”

  Saul’s gaze travels to the dark bay outside. She watches his face, waiting for him to speak.

  When he says nothing, Eva asks, “What is it?”

  A muscle below his eye flickers. “Nothing.”

  Eva leans her head against the sofa. Maybe there were signs—things she’d ignored. She is thinking back to a party a few months ago when they’d been talking to a colleague of Jackson’s. The man had asked if they’d wanted to come to the Cotswolds the following weekend to celebrate his fortieth birthday. Without a moment’s hesitation, Jackson had answered, “Buddy, we’d have loved to, but Eva’s mother is in town. It’s her birthday, so we’re doing the whole dinner-and-a-show thing.” It was an outright lie, one that tripped off Jackson’s tongue with such ease that Eva had to pause for a moment to think, Is my mother going to be in town?

  But, was the occasional white lie reason enough to suspect a bigger deception? Her thoughts slide back to the plane journey when she’d first met Jackson. She’d found him cocksure but funny, and he’d interested her with his talk of hiking in South America and stories of working on a dive boat in Australia. But they had been lies—right from the start.

  Even if his lies began as a bit of fun, a game, surely there was a point when he must have thought: I need to tell her the truth.

  The picture Jackson created of himself on that flight was what had drawn her to him. Their conversation had flowed easily; in fact, Jackson had said most first dates last a couple of hours, theirs lasted ten. But what if none of it was real?

  She remembers something else he’d told her on that flight, something she needs to be sure of. “What made you want to be a marine biologist?” she asks Saul.

  He inclines his head slightly, surprised. “It was a book, actually.”

  She blinks, waiting.

  “I found it when I was a kid. It was tucked inside a backpack I bought from a secondhand store. I read it cover to cover and it made me see how we still have so much to learn about the ocean. I guess it was that—the mystery the book left open—that made me want to be a marine biologist.”

  Suddenly Eva is up on her feet. She lurches across the living room toward the bookcase. She has seen the book before. She knows she has.

  She crouches, running her hand across the spines of books: The Australian Fisherman, A Biography of Cod, Sea Fishing, A Reflection on Freediving, and then there it is: The Sea Around Us, by Rachel Carson.

  Eva slides it free. She feels the cold weight of the book in her hands. Slowly, she opens it.

  There, on the inside cover written in fading blue ink, is the owner’s name: Saul Bowe, age 13.

  The book slides from her hands and crashes to the floor, pages splayed.

  “Eva?” Saul says, standing.

  She hears the concern in his voice, but doesn’t answer. Her throat feels too tight. She can barely breathe; she needs air. She staggers past him and out onto the deck, where the floodlight flicks on, dazzling her. She grips the railing feeling the hard edges of the wood beneath her fingers, and she clings to it, gasping.

  She desperately wants to believe that the book, the story, belong to her husband—not Saul. But she can’t because already the trust between them has lost its strength, like a bridge cracking and splintering beneath her feet.

  As she feels everything falling away, what terrifies Eva most is that she’s no longer sure whether it was Jackson she fell in love with—or someone else entirely.

  You caught me in the act of lying once. It was a stupid lie, too. Unnecessary. We were in a bar and a colleague of mine asked us to the Cotswolds for the weekend. The man bored me with his talk of cars and golf, and all I wanted was to spend the weekend with you eating croissants in bed with the papers, making love, taking a lazy stroll by the river. I knew you wouldn’t want to go either, so I told the colleague that your mother was coming up for the weekend.

  I didn’t think it’d be a big deal—it was just one of those small white lies that couples make all the time.

  Only I did it too well.

  I glanced over at you and your head was tilted to one side, a quizzical expression making your brow dip, as if you were thinking: Is my mother going to be in town?

  When you realized it was a lie, your expression changed as quickly as if I’d slapped you.

  That look stayed with me; it felt portentous, a foreshadowing of how I might hurt you if I wasn’t more careful. I don’t think it was the lie itself that you disapproved of, it was that there was a moment where you couldn’t tell the truth from the fiction.

  Sometimes I couldn’t tell the difference myself.

  15

  Sleep eludes Eva for the third night in a row. She wipes the tears from her face, then gathers up the duvet and trudges into the living room. She sits on the floor with the duvet around her shoulders, and spreads out the photos of Jackson that Saul had given her.

  Images from her husband’s past stare back at her.

  She picks up the nearest photo, one of Jackson standing in a boatyard in a pair of blue overalls. Her heart contracts as she studies the familiar lines of his brow and jaw, his beautiful eyes. Yet nothing else about that photo is familiar to her.

  “Why did you lie?” she whispers, the words reverberating in the empty room.

  Her fingers tighten at the edge of the photo as she thinks of all the times he’d deceived her. She hears the sound of tearing before she realizes what she’s doing. When she looks down, the picture is torn in half. The sensation is so satisfying that she rips it again into quarters, and then again, and again. She holds a fistful of ripped squares in her hand and throws them to the floor. Immediately she picks up the next photo—the one of Jackson cocktail flairing—and shreds it into pieces. She doesn’t care that these pictures belong to Saul. She just wants them gone. All of them.

  She rips with abandon, her teeth gritted, anger pouring out of her. Eva doesn’t stop until every last photo is destroyed. Then she sits back, her breath ragged. Shreds of photos are scattered around her like debris after a storm.

  In her lap, a single corner of a photo lies there: Jackson’s mouth, his lips upturned in a smile. She picks it up between her fingertips and brings it close to her face.

  Jackson’s beautiful mouth. A mouth she’d kissed. A mouth he’d pressed against her neck, sending shivers of desire through her. A mouth that had spoken words of love.

  Surely, that was all real?

  Her anger recedes like a wave drawing back, and in place of betrayal, she feels a bewildering sense of compassion because, what leads somebody to wipe out their history and borrow someone else’s?

&
nbsp; “Why?” she pleads again. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  Something catches in her mind. A rainy evening in London. Jackson returning from a run. The slap of wet clothes on the bathroom floor. The hiss of the shower, then the damp warmth of steam against her skin as she slipped inside the bathroom to say hello. But then she’d caught sight of Jackson through the gap in the shower curtain, and had paused. His arms were locked over his head, his body hunched forward as if bracing for impact. Sobbing.

  She had wanted to pull back the shower curtain and reach for him, yet she sensed that it would be the wrong thing to do. Jackson had waited until he was alone to cry. Understanding that it was a private moment he didn’t want witnessed, Eva had crept from the bathroom and gone about starting dinner.

  Later, when Jackson came into the living room smelling of soap and deodorant, he’d smiled, kissed her brightly on the lips, and told her what a great run he’d had.

  If I’d pushed you to talk right then, would you have? she thinks. Is that all you needed?

  Why hadn’t she? What sort of wife lets that go? They’d made love so tenderly that night, but still she didn’t ask him what was wrong. Her heart breaks at the thought that he hadn’t trusted her with the truth.

  Eva hunches forward as sobs rock through her body. She holds her head in her hands as she cries, unable to look at the torn images of her husband.

  SAUL FINDS EVA ASLEEP on the shack floor. He doesn’t mention the ripped photos, or the chaos of the place. He just tells her that he needs her help. “I’ve got a day of squid tagging to do out at a test site on the east coast. My lab partner just canceled. Without the results, my project’s screwed. I need you to stand in. Would you?”

  She protests, saying there must be other people at the university who could help—and she’s right. But he insists that no one else is available. He’s firm and persistent, knowing he needs to get her out of the shack, get her active.

  Finally she agrees and they leave Wattleboon on the next ferry and drive up the east coast in a light drizzle to launch the boat.

  Now they’re on the water and a stiff breeze streams across the sea stripping away voices, thoughts, breath. Eva holds onto the side of the boat as they plow through the sea, her hair blown back from her face.

  When they get out to the test site, Saul throws down the anchor and they begin tagging. It takes them two hours to tag thirty squid, and when he fits the final tag, Eva angles the clipboard toward him saying, “We’re done.”

  Saul empties the two large buckets of tagged squid back into the sea and, for a moment, the water is seething with southern calamari. Last week he’d planted an acoustic receiver in the seabed and now the microchips in the squid will send data to the unit every time they pass within a two-hundred-meter radius of it.

  He fills the empty buckets with water and sloshes them over the deck to run off the worst of the squid ink. “Thanks for your help,” he says to Eva, who hooked half the squid he’s tagged.

  “Thanks for making me come.” She smiles for the first time that day and the sun spills over her face, lightening her eyes. He feels something stir in his chest. He turns away, setting down the bucket and then tidying a lose rope tangled on the floor.

  “Have we time for a free-dive?” she asks.

  “Definitely,” he says, pleased. “There’s a great spot on our way back over a giant kelp forest.”

  He takes the boat down the coast until he sees the rocky cove where the kelp forest lies. He anchors, sets down the ladder, then pulls out masks and fins from beneath the seats while Eva puts on her wetsuit.

  When he straightens, he catches a flash of her tanned, lithe back as she arches, pushing her arms into the sleeves. He watches for a moment, unable to turn away. Her hand reaches for the zip, and as she pulls it, sunlight glances off her wedding band like a wink.

  Saul steps back. Seeing that ring and all the promises that it encircles, he feels a stab of fury at Jackson. He’d taken so much that wasn’t his to take. Saul can’t even begin to understand the reasons behind the decisions he made.

  A cautious friendship is growing between him and Eva, and he’s come to care about her in a way he didn’t expect. That’s why he owes her the truth. It was easier to put it off before when he didn’t know her and thought she would only be passing through.

  He wipes his hands over his shorts, his heart quickening at the thought of what he must say. He exhales a long, low breath, then says, “Eva, I need to talk to you.”

  She looks around. Her face is lightly tanned, but there are dark shadows beneath her eyes. She leans against the boat’s side as she puts on her fins. “What is it?”

  His throat tightens around the words he has to say. “It’s about Jackson.”

  She freezes, her foot half in the left fin. “Can we not?”

  “Sorry?”

  “I don’t want to talk about him right now. I can’t. I just need to be in the water. Not thinking or going over and over everything.”

  He looks at her, surprised. She used to want to talk about Jackson all the time, finding ways of weaving him into conversation just so she could say his name aloud. But as he looks at her now, it’s as if a shutter has been yanked down.

  “I’m sorry, Saul. I’m just exhausted by it all.”

  He could make her listen, insist that she did. And that’s exactly what he should do. But instead he nods and says, “Okay.”

  EVA DESCENDS THE BOAT ladder, mask on, fins wagging awkwardly on the rungs. She remembers the last time she was holding this ladder, streaks of blood lining her thighs. She can’t think about the miscarriage, just as she can’t think of Jackson. It’s too painful right now. As memories start pushing forward, Eva lets go and drops into the sea.

  Underwater, her thoughts disperse. She is weightless. Her eyes adjust to the blue light and the great depth below her. She kicks lightly away from the boat and feels the groundswell as the sea surges beneath her. She likes the sensation: the drag as the swell sucks her toward it, then the feeling of being lifted and rolled gently forward.

  She surfaces to adjust her mask, pushing aside a lock of wet hair breaking the seal.

  Saul drops from the side of the boat and swims to her. He treads water. “You okay?”

  She nods. “The visibility is great.”

  He explains the dive path they’ll take, swimming straight out to the giant kelp forest against the current, then coming back with it along the cliff line and over reef and weed beds, then returning to the boat.

  She follows Saul, who swims a few strokes ahead of her, his long fins making only the slightest fizz in the water. Now that Eva is beginning to learn more about free-diving techniques, she can appreciate his skillfulness. With seemingly little effort, he propels himself forward as if gliding.

  When they reach the giant kelp forest, Eva dives down to look at the tall branches growing from the seabed. Thick, ribbed fronds sway in hues of chestnut and amber. Where the light catches it, the kelp glistens and Eva runs her fingertips over the glossy surface. It is as if she’s swimming in the canopy of a rain forest.

  Saul is treading water when she comes up for air. “I’m going to make a deeper dive,” he tells her. “You wanna come?”

  She nods and prepares her breathing, relaxing for a moment at the surface to slow her heart rate.

  Saul dives first and she follows, filling her lungs with air before falling headfirst through the blue silken water. Her hair swirls around her mask and she kicks down with a light flex of her fins. She loves the feeling of the descent, her body and breath working against gravity, taking her deeper into the heart of the sea.

  The underwater world opens up to her and she sees a wrasse, brightly colored with a puckered mouth, lazily weave in and out of the kelp. She feels the temperature turning cooler as she descends, swallowing to equalize the pressure in her ears every few feet.

  Saul drops through the water ahead of her. He angles himself toward a large stalk of kelp and holds onto it, gla
ncing back at Eva to do the same.

  She grips her hands below his and they hang about fifteen feet under the surface, resting there. Her eyes begin to pick out the detail in the kelp, its different patterns as if scalloped by the sea.

  Saul makes a circle of his thumb and forefinger, asking if she’s okay. She returns the signal and nods, smiling. It’s strangely intimate to be suspended beneath the sea together, their heart rates slowing as they drift beside each other. Somehow it is here that she feels safe, calm—as if they’re in a cocoon, sealed off from the rest of the world.

  Eventually her lungs begin to tighten and she looks up and kicks.

  At the surface a smile passes between them. Water drips from Saul’s eyebrows and lashes, and glistens in the creases of his smile. Eva feels her heart quicken.

  They continue diving through the kelp, then over reef and craggy rock. Later they come to a weed bed that looks stunted and dull after the kelp forest, but she enjoys seeing the brightly colored fish darting through it.

  There is a tap on her arm and Saul is pointing toward something in the weed bed. She follows the direction of his hand, straining to see what has caught his attention.

  As the seaweed sways, she notices a glimpse of color ahead. She waits a moment for the seaweed to stir again—and then she sees it.

  Her body fires with excitement at the otherworldly sight: a sea dragon drifts before them. Its body is a reddish color and looks as if it’s been lit from the inside, electric pinpricks of blue and yellow spotting and striping its surface.

  It glides with the current, graceful and poised. She is enchanted by its shape, the arched neck and dragonlike head, and the proud curl of its tail. She watches, caught in a moment of intense wonderment. Her lips turn up into a smile around her snorkel and she feels the sea wash against her teeth.

  The sea dragon continues its slow dance through the water, drifting right past them. It is only when it disappears behind her that Eva realizes she needs air.