第5章 Sounding

By the second morning the storm had turned, and the sound of it had changed from a hiss to a hammer. Nessa woke before light with the wind working the cabin the way a hand works a lock. The stove had burned down. Isaak was already up, standing at the window slit with the canvas lifted a finger's width, watching the channel, and he had made coffee, which she had not expected and did not comment on. "The mooring," he said. She looked past him. The Merganser rode at the crib dock, but the sea had built in the channel overnight, and a dead log the size of a man had washed in on the swell and fouled the starboard mooring line. With every surge the log swung against the float, and the float was the only thing keeping the aircraft off the rocks. "I see it." "Can you pull it in?" "Not with that surge. Someone has to go in the water and cut the line off, and then it will drift and the plane will swing." She was already moving, pulling the dive bag from the locker. "That is a five-minute job when the water is calm. It is not calm." "Then wait for it to clear." "It will not clear. The wind is going to keep building until tonight." She laid out the drysuit on the floor and began to pull it on, and her hands were steady, and her mind had already gone somewhere narrow and quiet. "If the line parts on a surge, the log drives the float into the rock and we lose the plane, and if we lose the plane we are two people on an island with no way off and a storm that does not care." He watched her dress for the cold, seal by seal, and did not argue, and she understood that he had already calculated it himself and reached the same answer, and that the arguing he was not doing was a kind of respect. "I will hold the shore line," he said. "Whatever you tie to me, I hold." "You have never done this." "I have held a rope in cold water before. Not on a rescue. For work." He rolled his sleeves. "You will tell me what to do." She took him down to the shore. The water at the edge of the channel was black and moving fast, and the cold came off it like a field comes off fire. She waded to her waist and felt the shock climb her legs and settle in her hips, and she told herself the numbers, the six minutes, the calm, the task. She tied a shore line around her own chest and the other end around a spruce, and she put the second line in Isaak's hands. "When I pull twice, you haul. Not before. If I go under and do not come up in ten seconds, you haul anyway, both lines, and you do not come in after me. Do you understand?" "No." She looked back at him. "I understand the instruction," he said. "I am telling you I will not follow it, because I am not going to stand on this rock and watch you go under. That is all." The wind took the words and carried them off. She turned and went into the water before she had to answer. The cold was the same as it always was, total and immediate, and then her training took her and she was working. She swam along the plane's flank to the starboard mooring, feeling the hull surge beside her with a violence she could not see. The log surfaced and dropped. She timed it, took a breath, and went under the float with the knife. The line was wrapped twice around the log, tight as a knot, and she sawed at it in the dark with numb hands. Once. Twice. The log rolled and the line bit into her glove and the whole world turned over. She had a moment of pure disorientation, no up, no down, only cold and the pressure of the surge and the hull somewhere above her like a ceiling, and in that moment she heard her brother's voice in her own head, patient, ordinary, saying: do not fight it, go with it, find the surface on the other side. She found it. She broke into the air two strokes from the float and got a hand on it and hauled the log free with the last of her cut line, and the plane swung away from the rock and rode the surge clean, and she lay on the float for a second with her forehead on the cold aluminum and breathed. Then the second surge came in and slammed the float up, and the edge of it caught her forearm and rolled her off into the water. She had not seen it. She had been breathing. That was the whole error, and she knew it in the instant it happened, and there was nothing to do but be in the water again, the shock now doubled because the first exposure had already taken her reserves. Her legs did not answer. The float was a dark shape above her and drifting, and she reached for the line she had tied around her chest and could not find it. Two pulls. She could not even make one. Then the shore line went tight and she was hauled, dragged, scraped across the edge of the channel and up onto the rock, and Isaak Sayer was on his knees in the shallow water pulling her by both arms, and then by the front of her drysuit, and then by anything he could reach, and when she was clear of the water he sat down hard beside her and did not let go of her wrist. She lay on the rock and coughed and looked at the grey sky and felt the cold coming out of her like a slow leak. "You went under," he said. His voice was uneven. "You said ten seconds." "How long?" She could barely get the words out. "Thirty. Maybe more." She closed her eyes. She had been under for half a minute in water that gave a person six, and she was still alive, and that seemed to her less like luck and more like a debt she had not yet been asked to pay. They got her to the cabin and he built the stove up and did not leave her, and she sat wrapped in every blanket on the island shaking in a way she could not stop, and he made her drink something hot and held the cup when her hands could not. "You should not have come in," she said. "You said that already." "You could have drowned." "So could you." He sat across from her, watching her with those flat grey eyes. "You went into that water for a log. Under it, actually, for a log." He shook his head slowly. "They told me you were a diver. They did not tell me you were like this." "Like what." "Like a person who has decided the water owes them something." He said it quietly, without judgment, and it was worse than judgment. "Who was it? Your brother. You said you lost him on a call. You did not say it was your call." The cold in her chest stopped being cold for a second and became something else. "The night he drowned," she said, "I was the one who said go. The boat was going down and there were two people in the water and there was a window, and I told him the window was open, and I was wrong, and the window was not open, and he went anyway because I said go." She looked at the stove and not at him. "So when I go into cold water for something small, I am not being brave. I am settling a debt. You should know that about me before you decide what I am." He was quiet for a long time. The wind worked at the walls. "I decided what you were on the dock," he said, "and it was not that." He stood and put another piece of wood in the stove and looked down at her. "Rest. The plane is safe and so are you. Tomorrow we will argue about the rest." She slept then, which she had not done in two days, and did not dream. ---