Chapter Two

 

I started making calls, I knew sleep would not come. I got the heavier duty equipment ordered, paying any price to get it to rural Montana in two days’ time. Metal, welding equipment, an engine I could alter and a hoist for it, pullies and winches. I was not concerned with comfort, or visuals, no temperature control and no life support. The sub would not need to be lived in for extended periods of time, nor survive high pressure. It just needed to be airtight, it needed to have arms and grip controlled from inside, and it would need to have a deep freezer chest, to keep the girls’ bodies from further decay. I was already on a tight schedule. The girls would be unrecognizable by the time I found them, but they might still be whole.

The first night, my body and mind were exhausted as I laid out on the lovely queen bed in Tommy’s guest room. There were flowers on the quilt, flowers on the wallpaper, doilies on the nightstands. The bed was an old iron frame and reminded me of the one in my first house in Reading. I closed my eyes and tried to shut my brain off. I reached out and touched the cold metal. The pole in my hand rotated freely in place, squeaking.

James Bender and I put that bed together the first night we lived in the house on Bailey Street, falling into it as soon as it was done. We didn’t get anything else assembled or unpacked that night. It felt like the bed was all we needed. Was it fifteen years ago? Was that possible?

James was passionate, intelligent, honorable. He was strapping and bearded and his head was covered in thick, dark waves of hair that I loved to stroke, pull, run my fingers through. I loved finding his hair on my pillows. I didn’t even mind cleaning it from my shower drain, it was so beautiful. We met in college and stuck together like glue. I was going to be an engineer, and he was going to be an architect, and maybe teach someday. He came from money and was always planning trips for us over breaks, to Portugal, to Thailand, to New Zealand to see the locations from the Lord of the Rings movies.

He doted on me; he treasured me. It was the storybook love I never knew that I wanted. Planning for a future with someone else instead of only having to look after myself was an adjustment, but I thrived in the challenge of shifting my lifestyle. Then the pregnancy scare happened, and everything changed. In no uncertain terms, James did not want children. It had been a maybe, but suddenly it was a no. And when the test came back negative, my maybe became a screaming, careening, life’s-trajectory-altering ‘yes’.

I went after a better job, I moved to California, I had my two babies on my own with the same anonymous donor’s material. I never regretted it for a second. I missed James every day, in some quiet moment or another, in the early morning before I went to wake Astrid and Josie up, or after they were in bed as I sat alone with a glass of wine.

My cellphone was turned off. I wasn’t ready to field dozens of inquiries about my health, explain the deaths of my children and, therefore, my failure as their mother. I found it and turned it on, and its light blinded me for a second in the dark room. My fingers were typing his number before I had even thought of what I would say, or what I wanted to get from the conversation.

James answered on the second ring. Of course he was awake. He had always been a night owl. “Ceely? Oh my God, I’ve called you ten times.”

His voice sent a pang through me. He was going to pry more tears out of me without even trying. “My phone was off,” I managed, and my voice was already breaking.

“But you’re okay. Thank God.”

“I’m-.” I tried to say that I was not okay, but I had already dissolved into tears.

Listening to me sob, James was attentive and patient. “Oh no. Ceely, I’m so sorry.” It seemed he knew without me having to say. He knew I had two daughters, he knew their names, how happy they made me. We kept in touch on holidays. He knew me; he knew that I would not have broken down over just my house sliding into the ocean.

I tried to talk before I was quite finished crying, sputtering and gulping down breaths. “I- I was in Helena… I was working. They- they were home with a- with a nanny. I shouldn’t have-. I should’ve-.”

Over my next cascade of sobs, James tried to reassure me. His own voice was tight with emotion. “It’s not your fault, Ceely, you can’t blame yourself. It’s a terrible tragedy. Nobody could have seen this coming… I’m so sorry. Let it out. It’s okay. I’m right there, with you.”

His familiar voice, his reassurances eventually helped smooth me over. Even when he was not speaking, just hearing him breathe and knowing he was waiting on the other end of the call soothed my spikes of pain into manageable little barbs. I blew my nose with no modesty, mopped up the mess I had made, and rolled to the other side of the bed.

“I don’t know what I’m doing,” I sighed. My voice was raw and husky. If I told him about my idea to build a submarine, he would be frightened for me. Maybe even concerned enough to interfere. Maybe I wanted him to.

“Where are you?”

There it was. I had known it was coming but it still made my heart start to pound, the idea of seeing him. I could fall back into our life together too easily. The Ceely of the past led a life that was less full, but it was familiar. “I’m in Montana. On a little farm with a pilot I met this morning, when I was still trying to get home. Tommy.”

“Are you safe?”

“Yes.”

“If you need someplace to stay, to figure things out, to heal, you should come to Reading. Get the first flight out that you can, I’ll come get you. Just come home, Ceely.”

I pressed my eyes shut. Every cell in my body hummed at the idea of James, home, even mom. Familiar streets, familiar buildings, landlocked, mundane, Reading. He still lived in our old house, as far as I knew.

“Aren’t you seeing someone?”

“I am…” I could hear the indecision. “But I think you need me. I’ll do whatever I need to do to help you get through this, just come. Please. I want you to come.”

It would be too easy to say yes. But my equipment was on the way. My girls were still under the water. If I left them there, they would waste away or end up in the creature’s stomach, dissolving, eventually be shit out and become ocean sediment. Or maybe their tiny particles would mingle with the water and be evaporated, enter the water system, and I would feel guilty every time it rained for the rest of my years.

“I can’t.”

“Okay… Why don’t I come to Montana, just to be with you for a little while?”

“I don’t think we should. I’m throwing myself into a new project, I don’t think I can find the time.” It would hurt him, but it was the only way. He would understand my need to work on something, and in the end, it would only hurt more if he came out and I had to send him away.

We stayed on the phone a few hours, late into the night. Neither of us wanted to say goodbye. Eventually I must have drifted off with him still on the line. I woke up to the sun shining in the window, and the phone still in my hand, and a text from James wishing me deep sleep and peaceful dreams.

I turned the phone back off, after that, and left it off.

I worked like a woman possessed. Sleep would not come, not for more than a couple of hours and only when I physically collapsed. Tommy brought me coffee and meals a few times a day, I stopped to eat with him and joined him inside for dinners at his request. We didn’t talk much, but I felt his concern and tried to assuage his fears. Soon I looked forward to his visits to the barn. When he asked about my progress, and I repeated out loud to him everything that I had accomplished, it helped to fight back the nagging fear that I was moving too slowly, that I would never finish in time.

I did not call James again. I did not bother answering messages from friends. If I came out on the other side, I would deal with it all then.

A week passed and I had mostly assembled the crude, metal body of a tiny submarine. The engine and propeller were in place and functional. The ice chest and single overhead light were wired to the battery. The arms with contractable prongs to grab with were giving me the most trouble. Their composition was significantly more complex than anything else on the vessel.

In a normal assignment, I would be of more than high enough caliber as an engineer to create such a machine. But the sluggishness of my brain and the desperation were both weighing on me. I don’t know how long I had been leaning on my work station, staring into the wiring of their slender arms when I shifted my weight to my other side, and just that small movement managed to knock over my empty coffee mug and send a box of screws toppling to the ground. It exploded on impact, black screws danced across the wooden floor, seemingly to every far corner of the room.

I felt a surge of disappointment, puffed out a big breath, then my hand shot up to my chest. Those hints of anger and sadness were only the tip of a long, cold blade of rage and grief and guilt that worked its way deeper as tears welled in my eyes. I sank to my knees once again and a sob tore its way out of me. Just a spilled box of screws, but I was weeping again, unable to rise, unable to drag myself out of swirling, crashing despair until minutes had passed, my tears had run dry, and my pain had faded to a numbness once again. Then I thought that I was ridiculous, sitting on the floor, crying over screws. I started scooping up the runaway screws, swore to myself that I would not break down like that again. But I knew -deep down- I had no idea who I was and what I was capable of anymore.

Tommy stepped into the barn. Looking past him, I realized it had gotten dark outside.

“You didn’t come in for dinner. It’s Taco Tuesday.”

He set a plate of three hard-shell tacos and a beer down on my workbench beside me. Reached down and took hold of my arms, pulling me up.

“Thank you…” I steadied myself, my knees were shaking. I stuck my hands back into the guts of the mechanical arms. Its wires, like arteries, would leave me dead on the table if I left them for even a minute; I couldn’t do it, I had found the metaphorical bleeder and needed to seal it off before it darted away like a fish in a river. “I have to finish this, I’m sorry.”

“I understand.” He went on standing there with his hands in his overall pockets, watching as I soldered the loose wire. Then he spoke his mind when I finally took a bite of taco. “You don’t look well, Ceely. You should come inside and get a full night’s rest.”

“I can’t.”

“I know it seems like you need to keep working, but your brain is no good when it’s exhausted. It only thinks it is.”

My shoulders slumped under a weight I wasn’t even previously aware of. “You’re right. I’m too tired. That’s why I’m not making the progress I should be.”

“You’ll get some sleep?”

“Yes.”

I did try, even if it was in and out, tossing and turning, bad dreams filled with darkness all night. I was out in the barn again before dawn, with a large mug of coffee, and I did feel like I had a clearer head. And by the end of the day, the prongs were closing on my mechanical arms, they were welded in place along with a full circle of spotlights.

The final pieces of my submarine were in town, waiting. Tommy took me in his old Chevy truck. One massive, custom windshield twice as big as any you’d find on a vehicle and more than five times as thick, and two of the largest harpoon guns that money could buy, shipped in a wooden crate.

“I don’t think that’s a good idea, Ceely.”

“I knew you wouldn’t approve,” I said. “But it’s better to have it, and not need it, than to need it, and not have it.”

I had no way of knowing, of course, whether the massive spear tips would even puncture the white, calcified-looking skin of the creature. It could withstand heat, that was obvious by the way it shook off the lava as it burst out of the fault. But the way it moved was also perfectly fluid, the skin was not really rock, although it gave that appearance. I supposed it was possible that down there, it had no natural predators, that it would not have evolved to withstand something sharp.

I also asked Tommy to take me to the local branch of my bank. I made a withdrawal of the money I would be leaving with him, sliding it into my purse in an envelope and not mentioning it to him as I climbed back in the passenger’s seat. It was late in the afternoon by then.

“Should we grab a cheeseburger?” I asked, putting my sunglasses back on, brushing my brown hair behind my ear. In my boardroom blouse again, I was the most glamorous thing on the streets we rolled through; I knew that it would have made me happy at some point, to attract stares, to think of myself that way. I didn’t care about any of it anymore, but Tommy beamed with pride whenever he waved to somebody he knew. I was no A-lister, not model material, but in this place, I would have been a beauty queen.

Cheeseburgers, fries, and strawberry milkshakes, eaten in the cab. As long as I was eating, with my gaze trained out on the grassy hill and trees of the lot next to the parking lot, I managed to keep my mind blessedly empty. The warm breeze blew over my face, carrying scents of cooking food and fresh cut grass, and it felt almost peaceful; I hardly existed. Then a child screamed as its sibling chased it around a picnic table, and my moment of blissful nothingness was shattered. I was a mother without a child, again.

My girls should be here with me now, I thought, and that is the most unnatural part of all of this. At least to me. More fundamentally wrong than a creature clawing its way up from the center of the Earth, shifting entire cities into the sea, killing millions, eating their bodies.

Tommy must have noticed my face pinch. He sighed. “I wish you wouldn’t do this,” he said, for probably the dozenth time. Then, ignoring the judgmental gazes of generations of strong, silent men who had come before him, he dug deep to try and make me understand. “I know you feel like you have to, but burying Jessica didn’t make it hurt any less. It didn’t make any of it make any sense. It certainly didn’t bring her back.”

I just cleaned up our wrappers. “We have to get back. I still have to mount the guns and windshield, do some final system checks. -Are you finished?”

He sighed again, started the engine, and drove us back to the farm without another word. I worked through the night. Lit by a single bulb overhead swaying in the cool wind blowing in the open barn door, and the faint glow from my torch. A final touch, I took a can of bright yellow spray paint to the body of the submarine. I drew my girls’ names, stared at them for a long moment, and then covered them up like they were never there.

The yellow made the thing look a little bit like a toy. I had sudden fears that it would sink like a stone when lowered into the water. Worse, I would be a mile down among the wreckage of the city and I would spring a leak, or the engine would stall, and I would fall to the bottom, powerless.

I could swim to the top, probably. Abandon ship. There had already been reports of arrests; grave robbers rowing out on little boats, holding onto stones to sink down and find abandoned valuables. Scuba divers, too, popping up and being caught by roaming spotlights of the Naval vessels stationed nearby. But then, they were young. I was almost forty, exhausted, I hadn’t gained too much weight with either pregnancy but was certainly not the hard-body I had been in my youth; hadn’t been to a gym since Josie was born more than five years ago.

Damn. Astrid’s birthday was in less than a month. She would have been eight.

Letting the paint dry and trying to trust in my own skills, I laid my jacket on the hard ground and stretched out. Cradling my head, I tried to sleep for a few hours, and must have drifted off at some point, because beeping of the flatbed backing up woke me before dawn. The sky had begun to lighten to a periwinkle blue. My body felt heavy at first as I dragged myself up, had a brief discussion with the driver that was meant to take me to the coast, and watched as he and two other men set up the straps and winch that would haul my submarine onto the truck. They were young men who all called me Ma’am and seemed delighted by my little vessel; asking to take pictures with it.

Tommy came out with a to-go mug of coffee made for me, and offered it without saying much.

“Thank you… Can I convince you to take the five thousand that I offered you?”

He had a small smile, and shook his head. “No, you cannot.”

I had already left it tucked up under the visor in his truck. He would find it eventually. The sun would shine in his eyes one day as he climbed in, he would lower the visor, it would fall into his lap, and he would know. It was a nice thought to take with me, never expecting to see him or his farm ever again. He could sell off the tools I had left him with, too, and scrap materials.

Tommy held out a hand when we had nothing left to say. I pushed it aside and gave him a hug. I felt next to nothing in my waking moments -it had become like walking through a dream- but in my logical mind I knew that I had hardly been shown such kindness at any other point in my life, and certainly never by a complete stranger who wanted nothing from me. And I thought Tommy had found someone to care for when he needed someone, something.

Sometimes, things work out that way. He closed his arms around me and patted me on the back.

“Take care of yourself, Ceely.”

“You too.”

I rode in the front of the truck’s king cab, while one of the movers drove and the other two sat in the back. We crossed Idaho as the sun rose behind us, and I kept stealing glances over my shoulder to make sure that my submarine was still there, that it hadn’t fallen off the back of the truck or been a figment of my imagination. Every time I looked, there it was, glinting in the sunlight.

Down the coast of Oregon, to a little town at its southernmost point. With some difficulty we unloaded the sub into the water; it bobbed when it finally slid in, but it stayed afloat. A bit of tension dropped from my shoulders. Still tethered to the flatbed, it couldn’t drift away. I shook the hands of the three men in the moving crew, they wished me luck although they had no idea what it was that I was planning.

I got the sense that I would be discussed around the water cooler, maybe a strange story to tell their families: “Once I brought this woman from a farm in rural Montana to the coast in Oregon with what looked like a homemade submarine. She was some big-shot engineer. She was never seen again. Pass the potatoes?”

My boots tapped the wood of the dock. I had brought my purse with me on my voyage, not having a reason to but being a woman it was unnatural to be out in the world without it. I slid its strap high on my shoulder. If it all went wrong, it would be good to have identification near my body. The sun was hanging in the western sky, out in front of me. Sky blue, with sparse, white clouds. The water of the Pacific was a deeper shade, rippling gently. It was fair weather for sailing, or submarining.

With one foot on the dock, I reached out the other, got it on the gently rounded top of the hull. Centering my body, bracing myself, I swung and leveraged my weight to get over. The sub drifted slightly with my momentum; I went down on my hands and knees to keep from toppling over. I undid the last tether, opened the top hatch, and then descended the ladder down into the chamber.

Closing the hatch, sealing myself in, I felt a crushing fear, a prickle of excitement. The ceiling of my metal tube was low, I had to hunch to move forward -past the ice chest, under the single light bulb- to get to the pilot’s chair. It was a ripped old leather office chair I had taken from Tommy’s barn. I took the wheels off and welded it to the floor at their four points. The control panels were simple, a wheel attached to the rudder, an ignition switch, two joy sticks which correlated to the robotic arms I could see tucked against the body of the submarine in front, through the broad windshield. A harpoon gun mounted to each, controlled by a single switch.

Settling into the utilitarian captain’s chair, I pulled my legs up, crossing them, centering myself. My knees weren’t what they used to be, but they would afford me a few minutes. I tossed my purse under the console. I shut my eyes and listened to the sound of my heart beating.

I reminded myself that I could climb out, swim to shore, let the submarine drift away. I could start over. Attend group therapy, learn to cope with my grief… I could have more babies, or adopt if that ship had sailed. I could get hired to a team working to kill that thing, be the one who designs the net that ensnares it and rips it from its watery wonderland, hauls it into the sky, dripping, screaming if it can scream.

I could do it all. I could do anything. I could buy a 1964 Aston Martin DB5 and road trip across the country, or down to South America. I could hot air balloon around the world. I could open a burlesque club. I could go home to Reading, marry James Bender and we could flip dilapidated houses, which he liked to do in his spare time. I could start mainlining heroin. But no matter what I chose, my girls would stay down there. Until the thing came and ate them, or a million little fish did it, piece by piece.

I flipped the switch to start the engine, thinking just to test it out. But the thing whirred to life, the submarine started to propel through the water, still at the surface with the gentle waves lapping at the top of the glass, but moving, humming, filling me with frenetic energy. I gripped the controls, opened the ballast tanks to let water into them, and dove.

The sea floor was not far, so close to shore. Greyish sand illuminated white by my ring of outward facing spotlights. Tufts of green seaweed rising a few feet up, washing inward and outward with the tide. Picking up speed, fish becoming aware of me and darting away, I found myself smiling as I dove through the Pacific, a yellow knife slicing through the increasingly dark waters, heading south toward home.