Their twenty-seven year tryst was coming to an end. She’d come back, of course, but she wondered if she’d still feel the same towards the giant star in the sky. Three years of constantly whitening skin and eight-hundred international units of vitamin D at every breakfast—melatonin at night.
James said that of all the things he missed, the sun was not on his short list. He had shrugged his thinning shoulders, the lowest part of him she could see on the large communications TV in the shore side station, and thrown her an unbalanced smile through an accumulation of stubble. His teeth would have been whiter in the sun, she thought, but the grin would have been just as uncertain. He had been the first. She would be the second. She imagined one of the blank hallways that interweaved through the station, and a portrait of James, just the way he looked now—blue ribbed sweater, boney jaw, a single dimple—with some inspirational caption underneath. “Deep Sea Explorer.” Then she imagined herself, framed next to him for eternity. What would she look like three years from now? He had left shortly after offering his reassurance that the sun was not necessary. A giant stone slab was behind him, a kaleidoscope of the beige and grays of compressed sand. It held one of the largest tentaculites ever recovered. James was a fossil guy. She admired him for that—for being interested in things long gone. “There’s the knocking again,” he said and looked around as if he could pinpoint it. She wanted to ask him what was causing it—she couldn’t hear anything—but he just shrugged as if there was really nothing he could do about it, and it didn’t seem too bothersome—just bothersome enough for him to wave quickly while leaning forward, reaching with a hand to turn the transmission off.
She had been left alone in the dark Com room; folded her arms and stared at the neon “no signal” in the upper right corner for a few moments. The dim light from the blank screen matched the monochromatic shade of light filtered through the twenty feet of water that separated her from the surface, slipping through the enormous reinforced glass windows. She had sighed.
That had been two weeks ago. James hadn’t been in communication since, and the safety cameras had been thrown off line last may during a storm. Kim had left James a series of more and more frazzled video messages. She was a brittle sixty-four who, like a childless woman, was involved with each of their lives. She had interviewed, along with Hendricks and Kaori, also in their sixties, all the current researchers who operated out of the Monterrey facility. And when James had volunteered to man the observation deck implanted in the coastal shelf a few hundred meters out at sea, by himself, she had wholly supported him—Kim had gone into an abandoned library of yellowed cookbooks in her basement to find a carrot cake recipe for the party she threw for him. Invited his family, too, because she had met them all when James had told her to stop by his sister’s wedding along Davenport beach, an hour and a half north. And when he had broken up with his girlfriend a few days before going down, she had consoled him. “Three years is too long,” she had told James as he paced the reading room. And Kim knew he had always had an eye on Zia anyway. He was upset that he’d be unable to hold a conversation with her, as they sometimes did in the break room after everyone else had gone home, about far fetched but still plausible solutions for global warming that slowly devolved into teasing each other about their dissertations.
Kim was a generation older than these new recruits; she was annoyed that they still seemed so ignorant, but pleased that she could offer advice not limited to the marine sciences. She wanted to be more than just the research director or the funds appropriator. She wanted them to excel. She wanted them to love her.
Zia found Kim that morning leaning her head against the glass window in one of the many hallways. Zia had expected Kim to turn and look at her. Kim continued to look out at the rise and run of rock formations and the kelp tied here and there, gently rocking with the push of the incoming tide.
At first spending half of her day underwater had made Zia uncomfortable. She imagined that minute cracks would bury themselves in the steel and glass until the whole thing shattered.
They were only twenty feet down. Today she’d be committing herself ten times deeper.
There had been a time in her life, sometime during grade school, when her current project would have scared her to immense excitement. She had woken up today tired.
“Kim?” Zia loomed over the woman she considered a mentor.
“Sorry. I’ve called him twelve times since last Tuesday.” It wasn’t an invitation for conversation. Kim, with her eyes sinking into the deepening dark circles on her face, looked up at Zia. She studied the softly slumping shoulders, the almost bushy eyebrows arched over concerned black eyes, the lips that naturally fell into an upturned smile.
Kim could know why James was tentatively in love with her. She prayed he still was.
Everyone else was happy to see Zia when she pushed open the door to the common room, a stoic Kim filling in after her. Their smiles made Zia more sure she would be okay. Miriam, the stick thin African from Australia’s east coast had hugged her nearly three times before she had gotten to the center of the room. Tom, the heavy set Hawaiian had been popping popcorn in the microwave, and now as he sat on the green couch pushed up underneath the mural of a rainstorm painted by somebody’s niece, the room smelled like hydrogenated oil; imitation butter. Someone, probably Keri, had pirated the TV a few weeks ago to get cable, and now the soft yells from a crowd at a college football game spilled into the room, flooding momentarily after a big play. Zeke and Jacen had been watching—they were still young—still connected to civilian culture—still not fully committed to the scientist’s lifestyle. They turned away from the screen and joined in the circle forming around Zia.
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