Unbroken Connection (11 page)
We stop sinking at 150 feet. Start back up. She wants to rush. Dangerous. I keep it slow. I motion with my hands to calm her down. Check her eyes. Kind of wild. I tap her facemask and then mine. She shoves her computer in my face and focuses on my eyes. The computer is going nuts with alarms and flashing numbers. I nod. Slow. Reassuring. I know how to deal with this. Trained long hours to deal with this.
My computer signals me to stop at 80 feet for our first decompression stop. Karen is over buoyant now without half her weights and the empty tank. I can tell she’s getting freaked. Maybe she’s narc’d. I don’t think she understands why we’re stopping here. Remember your training, Karen. Our blood is chocked full of nitrogen. If we hang here nice and calm for a few minutes, it can come out of solution in tiny bubbles that won’t hurt us. If we skip this extra deco time, the nitrogen bubbles will be too big. She’ll get the bends. You know this, Karen. Come on. Remember your training.
I hold up my computer and show her the timer—point to the seconds ticking down.
She shows me her air supply gauge.
Almost gone. Okay. I reach to hand her my octopus, the spare reg rigged to my tank. I’ve got plenty of O2 for her.
Instead of taking the mouthpiece like she should be trained to do, she lets go of me and shoots to the surface.
Freak. This can’t be happening.
I swim after her. No way can I stay down here safely decompressing. If she panicked and held her breath, she could be unconscious and hemorrhaging on the surface from an embolism—exploded air sacs—in her lungs. Or bent pretty bad. Crap. This could kill her.
But on the surface, she’s laughing. “Gosh, we made it. That was close. Damn this old vest. Do you have an extra rental?”
“Breathe from this.” I stick my octopus in her mouth. I’m diving with Nitrox—extra oxygen in the mix. She hasn’t qualified for it yet. She needs all the O2 she can get to minimize whatever damage all that nitrogen is doing inside her body. “I’ll get you on oxygen back on the boat.”
“What do you mean? I’m fine. I exhaled all the way.”
“Just a precaution. You might get bent.”
She laughs it off.
We’re behind the Zodiac following the main group so they don’t see us on the surface. I fumble to find the emergency whistle clipped to my B.C., blow it and then blow into my long, orange safety sausage. Freak. I should have done this underwater. It just takes a puff of air at depth. Good they see us.
Karen’s fingers and the side of her face tingle by the time we get to the Queenie N. Bad sign. She’s got decompression sickness. The nitrogen bubbles are already blocking capillaries, starving her tissues. We’ll have to get her to a chamber for treatment. I hope the pain doesn’t get too bad. The faster we get there the less permanent nerve damage she’ll have.
I get Karen on O2 while Captain Jean calls everyone in. And we motor out of there at top speed. She stays really calm—scared, but not in a knot screaming from the pain. The oxygen must be helping.
Freak, her right thigh goes numb twenty minutes later.
The tip of my nose itches, but it’s nothing.
The closest decompression chamber is in Phuket Town. Freak. Who knows how many hours that’s going take?
We get to the dock at Rangon in two and a half hours. Jean really booked it—kept the old girl at top speed the whole way. We wait another thirty for the helicopter.
As we shift Karen onto a gurney, she grimaces and says, “All this fuss. I’m sorry.”
I pat her hand. “Do you want me to come with you?”
She watches the Thai EMT strapping her onto a gurney. “Please.”
Claude tosses me a shirt, and I follow the EMTs off the Queen N., duck as I run to the helicopter and climb in.
I squat down by Karen as the tech places the helicopter’s O2 mask on her face. I take her hand and stroke it. She squeezes mine.
“Just breathe.” I glance at the tech, and he nods. “Nice and slow. Deep breaths. Good. Now blow it out, slowly, slowly. Now breathe in deep again. Hold it if you can. Let the oxygen go to your brain. Good. Again.”
Karen closes her eyes against the sun streaming through the helicopter window. I think her head hurts. I shift to block it. “You’re going to be okay.” I pat her hand.
She’s not going to end up screaming at me with Isadore in my dreams every night like my mom did. I knew what to do this time.
Karen moans.
I lean over and whisper, “You’re going to be okay.”
LEESIE’S MOST PRIVATE CHAPBOOK
POEM #56,WHERE ARE YOU TONIGHT?
Roomy conference. Subject? Tawni.
Lily starts. “She drank all my soy milk.”
Dayla and Cadence look at me.
Roxi grins, can’t resist—
“Maybe she has a death wish.”
Lily’s fat bottom lip gets fatter.
“Not funny.”
My laptop is open in front of me.
Tawni does eat everyone’s food.
And that’s definitely not funny.
When I run out; I’m out—same with
everyone else. Except Tawni.
An idea blooms across Roxi’s face
like the sun this morning as I stood
by myself at the temple gates and prayed
I’d get Michael through them some day.
Roxi is always dawn.
“Google this for me.” She scribbles.
I delete, “Myanmar scuba diving”
from my Google search box.
Not like I need to do that again.
Been there.
Done that.
Bookmarked it all.
Memorized the video of long narrow boats
full of orange robed monks;
children with shining black hair,
filled with as much life as their
brown eyes and brown bodies, wiry thin,
crawling, pushing, laughing for the camera.
Then a boat, white men, a tree-topped stone.
Striding off the back. Their self-confident splash.
Sinking, sinking, pulling me along to an underwater vision:
Silvery mass undulating around pink coral walls.
Warty black octopi duo scrambling away.
A spiny princess decked out for a ball
floating slow motion in her splendor—
And then one lone diver.
I tell myself it’s not him.
Those long strong legs kicking long strong fins.
Not his.
“Leesie? Type this in.”
Roxi shoves a scribbled scrap at me.
“Hey, girl—are you with us?”
I pass my laptop over to her.
She gets googling.
My arms take its place on the table.
I bury my head, close my eyes,
conjure that vision again.
Is that him right now?
Swimming so alone,
wishing I was there
like I wish he was here?
Where are you tonight?
Or is it today?
Are you in the future or past?
I can’t keep it straight.
Can’t locate that sense that I know
is you. The missing is too loud.
The hunger too strong.
The wanting too great,
tonight.
TREATMENT
MICHAEL’S DIVE LOG—VOLUME #10
D
IVE
B
UDDY
: Karen
D
ATE
: 10/31
D
IVE
#:—
L
OCATION
: Phuket Town
D
IVE
S
ITE
: hospital
W
EATHER
C
ONDITION
: sunny
W
ATER
C
ONDITION
: calm
D
EPTH
: 0
V
ISIBILITY
: 0
W
ATER
T
EMP
.: 0
B
OTTOM
T
IME
: 0
C
OMMENTS
:
The EMTs whisk Karen into emergency. The hospital’s dive medicine specialist is standing by. I stay with Karen until a gaggle of tiny Thai chick nurses come in and start helping her into a hospital gown. I back out of the draped bay. Fast. Poor, Karen. All she’s got is a swimsuit. I should have had someone pack up her stuff.
I look down at myself. Swimsuit. That’s me, too. And Claude’s smelly T-shirt caked with three days of French sweat. The guy doesn’t seem to know antiperspirant exists.
The doctor stalks up with a clipboard and a lot of questions. “You the son?”
“No.”
His eyebrows rise. Creep.
“I’m the dive instructor from the Queen Nautica. I took care of her.”
“Good. Good. I see. She’s been on oxygen the whole time?”
“Yeah.”
“What happened?”
I recap the accident.
“Oxygen is good. Saved her life.”
I nod.
“We’ll get her in the chamber as soon as it’s free. Four hours tonight. She’ll have some nerve damage in her leg, but nothing serious. We’ll put her back in the chamber a time or two to minimize that.”
I rub my nose. “Great.”
The doctor stares at me. “You ascended with her?”
“I’m fine.” I will my hand to hang loose by my side.
“Tingles in your nose? fingers?”
“Not much.”
“And you haven’t been on O2?”
“No need.”
“We still better check you out.”
“I’m not bent.”
“Not much—but, I think, enough.”
A nurse in pink floral scrubs comes out of Karen’s space. “Is there Michael? Karen ask for Michael.”
I bolt away from that wack doctor.
Karen’s pale, but she’s resting and calm.
“Hey—how you feeling?”
“They gave me something nice. Head aches. But now woozy getting.”
“Enjoy it.” I pat her hand. “You need to rest.”
“You saved me.” Her eyes close.
I shrug. “Just doing my job.”
Her eyes open, “Thanks. Never thought anything like this would happen to me.”
“Me neither.”
Karen’s eyes close again. Nurses descend filling the small space around Karen’s bed with bustle. Two start taking her vitals. Three hustle me into my own draped space.
“You change,” the nurse in pink floral says.
“No.”
She nods. “Can.”
I shake my head. “Can’t.”
A cute skinny one wearing purple with “Ning” on her name badge picks up the stuff they want me to wear. “We help?”
I grab the soft bundle and wave them off and put the freaking stuff on. At least they gave me bottoms to go with the gown. My butt won’t be flashing if they make me walk around.
A minute later, Ning’s voice comes from outside the curtain. “Okay?”
“Sure.”
She comes back in and smiles at me. Freak, she’s tiny. “You pee?” She holds up a plastic specimen cup.
I pretend to not get it. “Sure. How about you?”