Kiss River (21 page)

Dave banked hard again, and looking nearly straight down from the plane, Gina could clearly see what had caught Clay’s attention. Beneath the surface of the ocean, something captured the sunlight and sent it splintering into the water in shards of light.

“That has to be it,” she said, although it was impossible to make out the shape of the object. But something was there. Something that glittered beneath the calm surface of the water.

“I think you’re right, Gina,” Dave said, and she jumped when he suddenly tossed a red buoy and chain from the plane. She watched it fall to the water, not far from the object. And then they were past it again.

“Ready to go back?” Dave asked through the intercom.

“Right,” Clay said, and Gina held her thumb high in the air. She had found her lens.

C
lay leaned against his Jeep in the Kiss River parking lot, waiting for Kenny to arrive. They were going to dive the lens this afternoon, or at least they were going to try to, and he’d left Sasha in the house so the dog wouldn’t follow them into the water. The more he thought about it, the less sure he was that what they had seen from the plane had actually been the lens. The image from fifty feet up was still with him: a large, shapeless object made of or containing glass or some other light-bending material. It could be pieces of the windows from the lantern room. Even so, even if the object was not the lens, he was determined that he would find what remained of that giant glass beehive today.

He eyed the gray sky. Gina had said it was sweet of him and Kenny to wait until she got home from work before diving the lens, so that she could be there. It may have been sweet, but it had also been stupid. Conditions had been much better earlier in the day for this. Now, at three-thirty, the clouds hung low above Kiss River, and the water visibility would be lousy, at best.

Gina had looked perplexed at first when he told her he’d wait until she had finished her shift before making the dive. “Why are you doing all this for me?” she’d asked him. “Taking me up in the plane. Diving to find the lens. Why?”

He’d told her that she’d made him curious about the condition of the lens himself, but the real reason was simply that it made him feel good to get his mind off his own problems for a while. Gina’s genuinely happy smile was rare and wonderful. He would do anything he could to see it. Since there was no way he could help her get her baby girl from the Indian orphanage, this seemed the closest he could come to making her happy.

Kenny arrived, and by the time they had unloaded the diving gear and walked over to the lighthouse, Gina and Lacey were sitting on the tower’s concrete steps, waiting for their arrival.

“Two very white women,” Kenny said under his breath as they walked.

He was right. Both women were wearing bathing suits he recognized as Lacey’s, and neither of them looked as though they’d ever seen the sun. Lacey, with her fair, freckled skin, always had to be cautious about how much sun she got, but Gina had the look of a woman who simply didn’t care that her legs were the color of skim milk. They were beautiful legs all the same, not as toned as his sister’s, but long and slender and thoroughly distracting. She had on a red tank suit that Lacey hadn’t worn in years, not since their little sister told her it made her look like a giant bottle of ketchup because of her red hair. Lacey’s suit today was green, and her hair was up in a long ponytail.

“Hey, girls,” Kenny said as he and Clay reached the water churning around the base of the lighthouse.

“Hey, guys,” Lacey said in return. “The ocean looks cloudy today. Are you going to be able to see anything?”

Clay climbed the stairs to get out of the water, setting his dive bag and tank in the open doorway leading into the tiled foyer. “We’re sure going to try,” he said.

“You two are looking mighty hot today,” Kenny said, climbing the stairs to the foyer himself.

“It’s not that bad,” Gina said. “There’s a nice breeze.”

Clay grinned to himself at her intentional misunderstanding of Kenny’s meaning.

Gina turned on the top step to watch Clay unzip his dive bag.

“Do you need a wet suit?” she asked. He and Kenny were wearing their bathing suits and T-shirts.

Clay nodded, pulling the light, short-sleeved suit from the bag. Gina watched as he unloaded his BCD and regulator and other paraphernalia. He raised his head to look at her. The red bathing suit dipped softly over her fair-skinned breasts.

“You two have sunscreen on, right?” he asked, shifting his gaze to his sister.

“Yes, Daddy,” she said.

“I’ll be happy to rub sunscreen on either of you,” Kenny said, and Clay joined the women in rolling their eyes. He’d tried to fix Gina up with this bozo?

“Is that some kind of harness?” She pointed to the BCD, which was lying next to his bag on the top step.

“It’s called a Buoyancy Compensation Device,” he said. She watched while he put the BCD on his tank and attached the regulator. Then he reached into his dive bag again to extract an extra set of snorkeling gear and handed it to Gina.

“This is for you,” he said. “Kenny’s got a spare set for Lacey.”

Lacey laughed at the look of surprise on Gina’s face.

“What am I supposed to do with this?” Gina looked at the fins and mask and snorkel in her arms.

“You and I can watch from above,” Lacey said.

“Though you may not be able to see anything today.” Kenny handed Lacey her own set of fins.

“I have no idea how to use this thing.” Gina held the snorkel in the air.

“Come on,” Lacey said. “I’ll teach you.” She jumped from the side of the steps into knee-high water, her ponytail flying in the air. She looked like a little kid in a woman’s body.

Gina hesitated, hugging the snorkeling gear to her chest.

“Go on,” Clay said as he zipped up his wet suit. “You’ll get the hang of it.”

Gina stood up, descended the three steps and followed Lacey into the water.

Once Clay had hooked up the inflator hose to the BCD, he clipped the bright-yellow octopus to his vest. The octopus was used in case another diver was in trouble and needed to share his buddy’s tank. But Clay had another plan for it today.

“If we find the lens,” he said to Kenny, “I’d like Gina to be able to go down to see it.”

Kenny looked up from his work on his own BCD. “She’s never even used a snorkel before,” he said.

“I know, but she really wants to see that thing. It might be her only chance.”

Kenny hesitated a moment, then nodded. “All right. But let me be the one to take her down,” he said, and Clay reluctantly agreed. He knew Kenny was making the suggestion not because he wanted to be close enough to Gina to share a tank of compressed air, but because he was the more experienced diver. It would be better if she was with him.

Clay moved to the bottom step of the tower and put on his fins. Standing up, he let Kenny help him into his gear, then hooked the clasps together on the front of the BCD.

“Where’s the buoy?” Kenny asked, looking past Clay to the ocean.

“Straight out and a little to the north,” Clay said. He searched the water himself, but he couldn’t see the buoy from where they stood.

Once they were backing into the water, though, he was able to spot the buoy over his shoulder. “Way out there.” He pointed. “Must be about a hundred yards out.”

“Man,” Kenny shook his head. “Can’t believe the storm whipped that thing way the hell out there.”

“Well, the beach had a whole different configuration then,” Clay said, letting the smooth surface of a wave pick him up and set him down on the sand again. “And if the lens is in pieces, as I suspect it is, it would’ve been easier for the waves to knock it around.”

Once past the breakwater, he and Kenny lay on their backs and kicked out to where the women stood in chest-deep water, snorkels in their mouths.

“How’s it going?” he asked as they neared them.

The women took out their mouthpieces, and he could see the look of accomplishment on Gina’s face.

“It’s fun,” she said. Her eyes were hard to see behind the goggles, but she was smiling.

“Would you be comfortable in deep water, Gina?” He stood up.

“I can swim,” she said. “But how deep are you talking about?”

“See the buoy out there?” He pointed toward it again and she turned to look at it. “I’m guessing it’s about twenty feet deep, out that far.”

“More or less,” Kenny added.

“Gulp.” Gina turned back to Clay, her smile sweet and sheepish.

“Get her one of the life vests from the back of my Jeep, Lace,” he said.

“Good idea.” Lacey caught the next wave and rode it into the beach.

“You won’t be able to submerge with the vest on,” he said to Gina, “but you’ll feel a lot more secure while you’re floating on the surface of the water.”

“I haven’t had a lot of experience with ocean swimming,” she said, then added with a laugh, “None, in fact, except for that day I came out here looking for the lens. And there were barely any waves then.”

“You know, that’s been worrying me ever since you told me you did that,” he said, feeling a little paternal. “Please don’t do that again. Swim alone, I mean. It’s dangerous, okay?”

She nodded. “Okay.” Looking out toward the buoy again, she said, “What about sharks?”

He would have liked to reassure her that stumbling across a shark was an impossibility along this coastline, but a man had been killed by one just the previous summer, and there had been other sightings.

“Highly unlikely,” Clay said.

“Except for the sand tiger sharks,” Kenny added. “And they won’t hurt you.”

Lacey returned with the life vest and helped Gina put it on.

“We’ll head out,” Clay said. “You two have fun.”

He and Kenny slipped beneath the surface of the water and
began kicking in the direction of the buoy. Visibility was even worse than he’d thought, no better than six feet, and he tried to remember how close to the object Dave had managed to drop the buoy. Before he could replay the scene from the plane in his mind, though, he found himself face-to-face with a wall of algae and seaweed. He ran his hand over the wall and felt tiers of glass beneath his fingertips.

Kenny caught up to him, and Clay could see the awe in his friend’s eyes behind the goggles. Turning on their dive lights, they moved back a few feet to get a good look at the object. It was enormous, dwarfing them. Somehow, even though he’d known its size and weight, he hadn’t expected the lens to tower above him.

The lens was deep in the sand, perhaps four or five feet under, and resting at an angle so that the brass couplings cut across the glass prisms at a diagonal. He swam around the lens, touching it, wiping seaweed from the surface of the prisms until he could feel the smooth glass beneath his fingers. One panel of the lens was missing, but he seemed to recall that it had been missing even before the storm. The opening was large enough for him to swim into, and he was quickly cocooned inside the lens with a school of black-and-silver-striped spadefish. From what he could see—with the exception of the missing panel—the lens was entirely, incredibly, intact. He pictured the furious sea grabbing it from the lighthouse, tossing it on the waves as if it were a huge beach ball instead of three thousand pounds of glass, and dropping it to rest here, on this sandy bottom.

Kenny came into his field of vision. He had the underwater camera to his face and was snapping pictures. They would have something to show Gina.

Gina.
He motioned to Kenny that he was ascending, then inflated his BCD and rose to the surface of the water. Kenny was quickly beside him, and they spotted Lacey and Gina treading water near the buoy.

“It’s over here,” Clay called to them, and the women swam toward him.

“You found it?” Gina asked once she’d reached him.

He nodded. “And it’s in one piece, as far as I can tell. It’s partially buried in the sand.”

“It has a missing panel, though, right?” she asked.

“Just one,” he said. “You want to see it?”

“How?” she asked.

“Kenny will take you down.” He looked at his sister. “I can take you, Lace, if you like.” Lacey had dived before, but she had never fallen in love with it, as he had.

She shook her head. “I’ll stay up here with Gina’s life vest,” she said.

“But how would I breathe?” Gina asked.

Kenny unclipped the octopus from his BCD and showed her the regulator. “This is attached to my tank,” he said.

Gina bit her lip, and Clay could see the war going on inside her.

“I want to,” she said, “but I’m afraid I’ll panic.”

“You won’t panic,” Kenny said, moving close to her. “You’ll hold on to my arm, and if you get the least bit scared, you just squeeze my arm and I’ll bring you right back up, okay? It’s not that deep.”

“All right,” she said. She took off the life vest and handed it to Lacey. Her teeth were chattering, but Clay thought it was more from nerves than from the cold. He would make sure she didn’t stay down there long, no matter how much she loved it.

Kenny showed her how to use the regulator, and she put the mouthpiece in her mouth and practiced breathing for a minute or two, her hand wrapped around his wrist. She nodded when she felt ready, and in a moment, the three of them were under the water.

Gina did well. When they reached the lens, she let go of Kenny’s arm to explore the glass with both hands, but Kenny was having none of that, and Clay was relieved when he took her hand and fastened it once more to his wrist. They ascended after a few minutes, Kenny calling for the ascent rather than Gina. Clay thought she could have stayed down there forever.

On the surface of the water, she was euphoric.

“How was it?” Lacey was now wearing the life vest, floating on the water as she waited for them.

“Incredible, Lacey!” Gina said as soon as the mouthpiece was out of her mouth. “Now I want to raise the light more than ever. It’s in one piece! How can we let it just rot down there?”