The Diving Bell

I drove up to the cottage on a Thursday in late April, and the first thing I saw was the lake, gray and flat as an ironing board. The second thing I saw was the water pooled against the back steps, which was wrong. Water should stay in the lake. Lakes are all about that.

I'd inherited the place from my aunt Cindy two years ago, back when Dale and I were still married, and we'd sunk a stupid amount of money into renovating it. New plumbing, new furnace, the works. Dale did half the work himself. Then we sold our house in town, split everything down the middle, and I got the cottage because he said he couldn't look at it without feeling like a failure. He was thirty-five then. He's thirty-six now. I'm thirty-four, and last month I cut my hair short and dropped fifteen pounds, not for anyone, just because the old hair felt like hers, the wife's, the woman who found the auction receipts.

I am divorced as of fourteen months ago, and I still think about him every single day, which makes me furious.

I let myself in through the front door and the smell hit me right away. Damp, earthy, that basement smell that means something has gone very wrong. I went down the hall to the cellar stairs and flicked the light. The bulb worked. The stairs went down into black water.

"No," I said out loud, to nobody. "No, no, no!"

The water was maybe two feet deep, brown and still, with a deck chair floating upside down like it was dead. My aunt's old fishing gear was on the shelves, thank God, up high enough. But there were boxes down there. Photo albums. Christmas stuff.

I stood on the top step and did the math. I did not know the first thing about sump pumps or drain tiles or whatever had failed. I had exactly one name in my head, and I hated that my stomach did a little flip when I thought it.

Dale.

I sat on the top step and called him. He answered on the second ring, which somehow made it worse.

"Lia?" He said my name like he'd been waiting for it, which was probably just him being polite. "Everything okay?"

"Hi. Yes. No. The basement's flooded. The cottage. There's two feet of water down there and I don't know anything about pumps and you're the only person who..." I stopped myself. "I shouldn't have called. I'll find someone."

"Lia, wait. Where are you right now?"

"At the cottage."

"Give me an hour. I'm still in Kincardine, I can be there before dark."

"You don't have to."

"I know I don't have to," he said, and there was a pause. "I'll bring the shop vac."

He hung up before I could argue, which was always his move. Four years of marriage and I never once won an argument with that man, because he just quietly did the thing before we finished fighting about it.

* * *

He pulled into the drive forty minutes later in his gray Tacoma, the one he'd bought the year we split up. I watched him get out and my chest did that thing again. He looked older around the eyes. He looked at me and I watched his face do something complicated.

"You cut your hair," he said.

"It was time."

"It looks good." He cleared his throat. "You look good, Lia."

"Save it." I turned and walked inside so he wouldn't see whatever my face was doing. "The water's about two feet deep. There's a floating deck chair and about six boxes of my aunt's things going soft down there."

He came in with a toolbox and a pair of hip waders over one shoulder, and he went straight down the hall and looked at the stairs the way I had, except he knew what he was seeing.

"Floor drain's backed up, most likely," he said. "Spring thaw, water table's up. The sump pump died on us the last fall we were here, remember? I said we should replace it."

"I remember you said a lot of things."

He didn't rise to it. He pulled off his boots, stepped into the waders, and went down into the water. I heard him wading around down there, cursing softly, and then the sound of him prying at the sump cover.

"Hand me that flashlight," he called. "And there's a second pair of waders in the blue bin by the door. Yours, probably."

They were mine. He'd remembered that too, that I keep my boots in the blue bin. I pulled them on over my jeans and went down.

The water was cold through the rubber, and the light down there was greenish and strange. And there, in the far corner, half in shadow, sat the diving bell.

I'd forgotten it was still here. Dale bought it at an estate auction years ago, this big riveted copper thing from some old resort on the lake, and he kept saying he'd restore it. It was part of why his private investigation business went under, all his money going into rusted iron and old photographs. He loved that stupid bell more than he loved the marriage, some days I thought.

"Still haven't sold it," I said, wading toward him.

"Don't start."

"I'm not starting anything. It's just sitting there taking up half the basement."

"It's worth money," he said, without looking at me. "More than you'd think."

We worked. That was the strange part, how easily we fell back into working, him hauling the wet boxes up to me at the stairs, me spreading newspaper on the kitchen floor and laying albums out to dry. We talked over each other the way we always did.

"So how long are you staying out here?" he asked, passing me a soaked box of tangled Christmas lights.

"Just the weekend. I've got the front desk Monday morning."

"Still at the hotel?"

"Still at the hotel. Somebody has to tell tourists where the good beaches are." I pulled at the lights. "How's the investigating business?"

"Gone. You know that. I do insurance claims now, mostly water damage, ironically." He laughed, and I hated that I laughed too. "Actually, call me next time a pipe bursts at your hotel. I'll give you the friends and family rate."

"We're not friends and we're not family."

"You called me."

I didn't have an answer for that, so I didn't give him one. I went back down for another load.

The water had dropped maybe four inches by then, the pump he'd rigged roaring away in the corner. The floor was starting to show, brown silt over everything. I waded toward the far corner to get the last box, and my hip bumped the diving bell. I reached out to steady myself and my hand caught, and I felt it, the little tug on my finger.

My wedding ring. I'd kept wearing it, which I'd told myself was about finger size and nothing else, and now it snagged on a bolt head along the bell's rim and slid off and vanished into that brown water without so much as a plop.

I stood there with my hand out, stupidly, like I could catch it in the air.

"What?" Dale said, from behind me. "What happened?"

"My ring came off." I heard my own voice go thin. "It's gone. It's in the water, it's..."

"Okay. Okay, don't move." He was beside me in two steps, wading, and he put a hand on my shoulder to turn me. "Where did it go in?"

"Right there. It caught on that bolt, it just slid off, I didn't even feel it until..."

"Here, sit on the edge of the bell. Don't put your feet down, you'll kick it into the silt." He guided me back and I sat on the cold copper rim, my hands in my lap, staring at the water that had swallowed the last four years of my life in about half a second.

He rolled his waders up higher and knelt down in the murk, feeling along the bottom with both hands, his head down, his shoulders working. Silt rose around him in brown clouds.

"Dale, don't. It's just a ring. It's not even..."

"Give me a minute." His voice came up muffled from somewhere around knee depth. "It's a gold band, half a size seven, there's a scratch on the inside from when I sized it down in Peterborough. I'd know it if I touched it."

I sat on the diving bell with my bare finger pressed against my palm and watched my ex-husband feel around in the flooded basement of the cottage we used to share, and I did not know what I wanted him to find.

He went under twice more before he found it. The third time he came up blowing water out of his nose, holding his fist over his head like a prizefighter. "Got it." Then he opened his hand and his face fell. "Ah, hell."

He climbed up next to me on the bell's rim and put the ring in my palm. It was broken. The gold band had split clean along the old scratch, right where he'd sized it down in Peterborough all those years ago. Two pieces of metal in my hand, and something about that felt too neat, like the universe had a sense of humor I didn't ask for.

"It snapped," he said. "The crack was already there. It's been going for a while."

"How long?"

"Hard to say. Years, maybe."

We sat there in the dim green light with the pump roaring and the deck chair drifting past us upside down, and his hand was still on the rim near