What We Lost in the Dark (6 page)

Still, he was literally concave.

According to Rob, Wesley’s secret was that he didn’t eat on a regular basis, and what he did eat, he ate at Gitchee Gumee Pizza or at Sprouting Life, the natural food store. He lived in a cabin on the backside of Torch Mountain that was half ruin and half rehab. It had no electricity or plumbing. He had paid nine hundred dollars for it. He did, however, have great teeth (gift of a concerned mother, I would bet) and a great smile, which he turned on me as he held out one big hand.

“Last time I was diving, was with Gary,” Wesley said. “You know Gary Tabor?”

“Kind of,” I said, feeling electricity sizzle along my legs
and pounce across the space between us to Rob. I could barely stand still.

Wouldn’t it be?

Wouldn’t it just be?

“A great man,” Wesley said, and I could almost hear Rob’s silent groan at the unsolicited endorsement of my future murderer. Still, Wesley seemed good-humored and genuine, and was not by far the first to be hoodwinked by Tabor. “It’s a coincidence that we went diving that day last summer, because you guys have the sunlight thing, right?”

“Yep, we’re from the dark side,” Rob said.

“Because Gary was telling me, there’s all new work he’s doing on XP. He’s at the head of that.”

“Hardly at the head of it,” I muttered. “He’s just a nurse who does a little lab work. His father and his uncle are the real researchers.” I sounded like a brat and couldn’t help myself.

“But he puts in the time,” Wesley said. “He really cares.”

“So you went diving? Free diving?” Rob said, in a fast attempt to diffuse the tension and slice through the rind of animosity coming from me. Wesley didn’t seem to feel it at all.

“Scuba,” said Wesley. “We went into some of those caves under the old boathouse where the condominiums are. Where Gary lives.” Serene with the power of the virtuous, I only smiled. Ah, the sweet irony: having promised not to speak Garrett Tabor’s name, only to have somebody do it for me. “And then we looked over the Gracie J., that old boat they sank when the part of the cliff went in? The boat and the old boathouse, that’s awesome structure for fish. About sixty feet down. You could make that a goal. It’s quiet there, with those two arms of rock making a cove.” He spread his own arms side. “We saw a sturgeon, must have been seventy pounds, man.”

I grimaced. “I sure did not sign up to see that,” I said. Sturgeons are huge, ancient creatures, pebbled all over like alligators. The thought of them cruising around under me, or worse, past me, made me want to jump back in Rob’s van and go back to his apartment and hide with him under the covers.

“They aren’t sharks!” Rob said, trying not to laugh.

“Do they know that?” I squeaked. He did laugh then. We all did.

“Let’s go for a dive, huh, kids?” Wesley said. “No sturgeons at the Y, I promise.”

A HALF-HOUR LATER, Rob and I were suited up and in the water, which was freezing. I couldn’t stop shivering, even though both of us wore body suits and scuba masks. Wesley wore cutoffs. He was chatty. Maybe he wasn’t used to being here all alone in the middle of the night, because he seemed to get a kick out of it.

He also told us that he’d gone to high school with “Gary” Tabor.

“I thought you were a lot younger,” Rob said.

“No, I probably just look it. It’s because I don’t have a mortgage or kids. If you sit light on the land, it’s usually pretty easy on you, too. I’m not like a professional man. When it comes times for me to fade back into the land, well, I won’t have much to leave or far to go.”

I hate it when people say shit like that. Still, Wesley had a kind of irresistible sweetness about him that overrode the eye roll that is usually my reflex response.

“Are you friends now?” I asked, trying to remember if I was supposed to pinch my nose or push down to clear my mask. I was sure that I was supposed to pantomime blowing
my nose to depressurize my ears, and do this every few feet, even in the pool.

“We go way back. He’s a busy man,” Wesley said. “Very busy man.”

“I’ll say,” I agreed.

“He coached the Everson twins,” Wesley went on, referring to brothers from Iron Harbor who now skied on the Canadian national team. “And that poor kid, Juliet Sirocco.”

I resisted the urge to cry out. Murderous now on my own, I turned to stare at Rob, who kept his eyes on Wesley. I knew what he would say if I challenged him later, asking how Wesley,
who had taught Rob his open-water diving skills at the same time Juliet died
, didn’t know about us in relation to Juliet? He would say what he always said.
Guys don’t talk about stuff like that
.

Wesley walked away to get weight belts.

“You are an asshole for not telling me he knew our friend ‘Gary,’ ” I whispered furiously to Rob.

“Because I didn’t know he knew him? Guys don’t take out their phones and compare all their contacts to see if they match.”

“So what do guys talk about?”

“What’s in front of them,” Rob said. He grinned. “Like a hot girl. Or, like, kinds of beer.”

I scowled and turned away. Frustrated, I made the choice to wad up all the thoughts of resentment like damp paper and stow them.

“Now, the first recorded free diver did his thing maybe sixty or seventy years ago,” Wesley said, rejoining us at poolside. “In the Aegean, I think, there was this guy who dived for an anchor and everybody thought he was dead, when he came popping back up. With the anchor! He was submerged for
something like six minutes. Nobody had ever really measured that, although sponge divers and pearl divers were familiar with it, of course. This guy had two busted ear drums and a heart about three times the size it should have been for a little-sized guy.”

“And?” I asked, puzzled. I wasn’t following.

“Well, large hearts pump slower, and the slower your heart goes, the less oxygen you use. Right?”

“Oh,” I said. “So it shouldn’t be that bad, if you’re fit. And we’re pretty fit.”

“If it was just your heart and your lungs and your legs, and your flexibility and your strength, it wouldn’t be bad at all,” Wesley said.

“What else is there?” Rob guessed. “Your ears?”

“What’s between your ears. It’s all about your head. Because the fear factor is real. You have a whole lot more oxygen in you than you realize, but if you start to freak out, your body is going to demand to breathe. You have to overcome the buildup of carbon dioxide that makes you want to … well, gasp for breath. Any person in good shape can endure apnea for two minutes or more. But after that, when your body tries to take over, it’s a head game.”

Rob nodded. “That’s why people hyperventilate before they free dive. I saw it in a French film.”

“You watched a
French film
?” I said. “You watched a
French film
about diving? Because knowing you, the only kind of French film you’d watch …”

“I’m a cultured person,” Rob replied, batting his long lashes at me. “These divers were world champions. And they basically huffed and puffed multiple times …”

“That was a movie. Divers do that if they’re extremely stupid instead of just extreme, if they want to die,” Wesley
said. “You can throw off carbon dioxide that way but you risk an SWB.”

“What’s that?” I said.

“A shallow water blackout,” said Wesley.

I asked the obvious, as I was slipping into the blade-like fins as long as my arm. “Why did it happen in shallow water, like … why would you fall in the last part of the race?”

“The body is tired. You’re depleted mentally. And there are other science reasons.”

Wesley’s use of terms like “other science reasons” didn’t exactly inspire soaring confidence. The side of the ledger with black marks ticking off
Ways I Definitely Do Not Want to Die
began filling up.

“You can have a deep water blackout, too. Either way, you just drown.”

Hmmm.

Either way, you drown. For every point in the ledger of going water wacky with my beloved, there were now ten points in the other column.

Wesley smiled. “That’s why you’re supersafe when you free dive for more than a couple of minutes. That’s why you have someone with scuba gear to check you out as you go down, and stay with you. No one’s going to let you drown, Allie.”

Hmm. This removed maybe … one black mark.

Lake Superior’s Titanic-sinking coldness was actually to our advantage. If you put your face in a bowl of cold water, or even splash cold water on your face, your heart rate and circulation slows, because of this evolutionary inheritance called the mammalian diving reflex. It’s the reason that small kids can sometimes be revived after long minutes at the bottom of a pool. In cold water, the need to breathe, at least the physical
need, is actually decreased. I thought for a moment of the little boy in the shallow lake. That had been cold water; nobody was even supposed to be swimming. The fathers were fishing, hoping to catch dinner in water that was crisping at the edges with ice. It would have seemed such a simple matter for the older guy to jump in and pull the little kid out … how could the older boy have died so quickly in such cold water? With the family all there thrashing around? The mammalian body knows how to conserve the oxygen for the tissues that need it most—mostly the brain. Hence the autopsy, I guess … I dragged myself back to the water at hand.

Wesley was saying that if we were going scuba diving, we’d need dry suits to withstand the epic cold down there because we’d be cruising around, looking at the ribs of dead boats. But for a free dive, we’d only need ordinary wet suits, masks, and these huge blade-like fins to get us the farthest down with the least amount of kicking—which depletes oxygen.

For now, we just practiced sitting on the bottom of the pool with a weight belt on that wasn’t heavy enough to keep us from kicking to the surface. Which I did. I kicked to the surface after fifty seconds and air never felt so good.

“Rob must have unusually large lungs for his body size,” Wesley said, as Rob edged past a minute. “What he’s doing is what you have to do, Allie. You have to clear your mind to the edges.”

As if.

Another twenty or forty points in the
Do-Not-Want-to-Die
column.

As I stood there shivering and staring at Rob, sitting contentedly
underwater
, Wesley told me about a Russian diver, Natalia Molchanova, who could hold her breath for eight minutes. In 2009, she finally became the first woman to break
the record of free diving a hundred meters (that’s more than three hundred feet, folks). She actually dived
one hundred and one
meters, just for insurance. According to Wesley, an American woman, Sara Campbell, had done it first. But Campbell didn’t get to keep her record. The rules say (and who made up these rules?) that you have to remain conscious for sixty seconds on the surface after you make your dive. Sara Campbell got back to the surface, took two breaths, and passed out.

Fifty more points in the
No-Way-in-Hell
column for that kind of anecdote.

“As breath holders go, Sara Campbell isn’t really great,” Wesley said. “Five minutes maybe.”

“What about you?” I asked, teasing, trying to avoid thinking about Rob, who had now gone over two minutes without breathing.

“Me? Three minutes maybe? I’m about the dive and what you see, not the immersion.”

Wesley reached into his pocket for his phone and showed me a picture of Sara Campbell at the bottom of the sea, wearing a dive suit that had a single huge fin. She looked exactly like a mermaid, but with a sleek hood and mask instead of the fabled flowing locks. She was looking straight at the camera, calmly. It was like one of those pictures where you try to find the hidden drawing of a shell or a ruler except instead of there being something there that shouldn’t be, there was something missing. People photographed at the bottom of the sea usually have on a breathing apparatus or are in agony or are obviously dead.

“If you read about Sara Campbell, she passes out pretty often,” he said, shoving his phone back in his pocket “She doesn’t really mind it. She says she kind of likes the feeling.”
He paused. “She says that she thinks of being in an Alpine meadow. Puts a whole new perspective on death, doesn’t it?”

And ten more black marks in the Ixnay ledger.

“That woman who can do it for eight minutes? What does she think about?” I asked.

“Nothing,” said Wesley.

“Like meditation?”

“No, really nothing at all. You have to be so still that some people free dive with their eyes closed.”

“Now, that sounds like a ton of fun.”

“Not for me, but they dig the concentration experience. Thinking about nothing is not easy,” he said. “Like, during meditation, you’re free. You can breathe or move. It’s only frustrating if you break out of your trance state.” Why had I ever doubted that Wesley was a meditator as well? He could probably meditate while holding
Vrksasana
. “When you free dive, if you break the focus, you don’t just get annoyed. You could get hurt.”

That we were able to have this whole conversation while my boyfriend was underwater, not breathing, seemed only to prove to me that Wesley was in his own trance state. Just when I felt I would scream, Rob finally surfaced, not even really lunging. He slapped the water as though he’d medaled in the 200-meter free.

I stretched out to kiss him. “I was a little scared, honey. How did you do it? What’s in it for you?”

“Power,” Rob said. “I have power over this body that’s always had way too much power over me.”

I never loved him more than right then.

SO, ALTHOUGH I wasn’t psyched the way I was with Parkour, I decided to start trying to build up my own—this
sounds weird—daily apnea practice. I was ready to try something new, something that really did have nothing to do with Juliet or Garrett Tabor, or the death I encountered nightly at my volunteer job. There is something undeniable about the dream of youth, of being young. I saw it in Wesley’s eyes, the way he looked at us with wistful longing. You can store old pain that pulses new every day, like a solar cell—and, at the same time, spellbound by your own body and blood, you arch eagerly toward the future.