The Salt Hand

The line fouled before I knew I was in trouble. I felt it go slack against my hip, then snag hard on something below. The current had shifted in the last four minutes. I kicked once to test the drag, and the sea answered by pulling me sideways along the bottom, my fins cutting through a cloud of stirred silt. The surface sat thirty feet above me, a gray lid I could not reach. My regulator clicked. I stopped kicking and let the riptide take me, counting seconds, reading the bottom by feel. Cold worked through the suit at the wrists and ankles. My left hand found the dive knife before I told it to.

The line snapped taut and spun me. I hit a rock ledge with my shoulder and tasted blood inside the mask. The current pushed me against the stone and held me there, patient, while my air gauge dropped below 900 psi. I reached back to cut the line and found the tether wrapped twice around my weight belt. The knife slipped in my glove. I tried again, got the blade under the braid, and the current rolled me off the ledge before I could pull the cut through.

I went end over end. The bottom disappeared. I grabbed for the line and missed. My mask flooded at the left seal. I stopped breathing for four seconds, then made myself exhale slow through the regulator. The sea does not care if you panic. I learned that at nineteen, in a wreck off Cape Ann, with my brother's voice in my ears telling me to breathe, Ines, breathe, we're going up, we're going up.

He had been wrong then. He was dead now. I was going to die on a working island off the New England coast, tangled in my own line, because I had come here to find his bones and had not waited for the tide.

A shadow crossed the light above me. A hull, small and heavy, moving against the current. I heard the engine through the water, a low knock that vibrated in my chest. Then a hand came down through the gray. Not a pole, not a hook. A bare hand, thick-knuckled, reaching into the water past the wrist.

I took it.

He hauled me out in one motion, my weight belt catching on the gunwale. The mask came off and clattered to the deck. I lay on my side, coughing, spitting seawater, my legs still half over the side. The sky was the color of old pewter. The boat rocked. I heard him cut the fouled line with two short strokes of a deck knife, then the soft thump of the rope falling away.

I pushed myself up. The deck was white fiberglass, scrubbed clean, with a coil of orange line at my knee and a rusted gaff hook by the stern. He stood with his back to me, tying off the wheel. Broad through the shoulders, a gray wool sweater with a hole at the left elbow. His hair was dark and wet at the neck.

"You cut that line too slow," he said.

I coughed again. "The current had it wrapped."

"You should have cut the belt."

He turned. I expected a lecture, or a question about what I was doing out there alone. He looked at my face and said nothing. His eyes were a color I could not name in that light, blue gone almost black. He read me the way I read a dive chart, line by line, no hurry. I had the feeling he had already decided something about me before I opened my mouth.

"Ines Calloway," he said.

Not a question. The hair on my forearms lifted. I had not told anyone on the island my name. I had rented the cottage under my mother's maiden name, paid cash, told the woman at the store I was a photographer. I had told no one why I came.

"Who are you?"

"Bram Teague." He picked up my mask and set it on the bench beside me. "You're diving the wrong bottom. The wreck you want is two hundred yards south of where you went down."

The cold moved from my wrists into my chest. I pulled the wet gloves off and dropped them on the deck. "What wreck?"

"Your brother's." He said it the way a man says the tide is coming in. "The Calloway boy. The one who went down off the north ledge three years ago in a twenty-two-foot Mako with a bad fuel pump and a sister who cut her own line to get to him."

I stopped breathing.

He held out a dry towel. Gray, folded once, still warm from the engine box. "You came on the ferry Tuesday. You've been