The black water is unforgiving, barely allowing us to bounce-skim across the choppy surface. I’m eight years old in an ivory knit cardigan and cut-off shorts, curls whipping against my face. I blink into the wind, icy tears streaming toward my ears.
My dad is behind me, steering the bright orange Zodiac.
And it’s night.
The docks we hum past are over twenty feet high, towering far above our little rubber boat. We ride alongside cavernous darkness, where the waves continue under the dock into some forbidden shadowy area that can only be perceived by soft, crashing echoes.
Then we pass a chunky fishing vessel, her rigging silhouetted against the stain of floodlights above us. Rust and paint and barnacles along her hull. A woman’s name in carefully stenciled lettering at the bow and on the stern. I avert my eyes.
“Look,” my dad says, slowing to an idle. I push onto my knees, my bare skin sticking to the cold rubber. I feel the shifting muscle of the water’s surface below me.
“What?” I don’t really want to know why we’re stopping.
He points and I turn, squinting until I make out what looks like a big pencil sticking out of the water, tip pointing to the stars. I start to ask what I’m looking at, and then I sink quickly, sitting on my heels, trying to shrink. I hold my breath as we drift toward the pencil.
Because it isn’t a pencil, it’s the tip tip tip top of a radar tower. And below it, in the cold, dark deep, the tower sits on a pilothouse. A pilothouse full of water. A pilothouse towering above an entire vessel nested against the sand and the muck at the bottom of the harbor. A dark vessel full of water.
Water soaking leather seats. Water seeping into the carpet and the dials and the cabinets and the bunks.
We aren’t drifting fast enough.
I can’t see what’s below me but I feel it. The deck. The lines floating and swirling on the tide, growing thick and mossy with seaweed. I sense her hulking down there in the water. What if we catch on something, what if we touch it? What if it touches us? What if she pulls us down?
I start to cry, but I can blame my tears on the cold wind.
When our little engine revs back up, I swallow and close my eyes. I shake as we motor out of the empty-full space between two sleeping, moored boats and that drowned tower reaching out of the dark.
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