Something to Treasure

by Virginia McCullough

  “It’s easy to say that now, because that’s what you see. But if you asked Rob and Wyatt, they’d tell you the truth about me. For the first six months after Augusta and Dabny were killed, my precious little three-year-old had a nanny—and lucky for her, Rob and Wyatt and others on my staff were a substitute family.” He kicked at the stones on the ground. “I was barely able to function.”

  “Maybe so, but from the outside, it seems you’re doing really well now.” She took a few steps back and raised her hands, palms out, her way to create an even wider boundary separating them. “I completely misread the signals.” Not really, she thought, but no matter. She had to take the blame and escape. “Forget I said anything. Write it off as my mistake.”

  She managed to glance at him, but quickly looked away. “We should go.” She rubbed her bare arms. “It’s cooling off and it could get buggy, too.”

  “Dawn, really, you need to trust me on this.” It sounded like a plea. “I don’t know that I’ll ever get past what happened to my family. But except for the way I am with Carrie now, I’m like a stone inside.” He lowered his head. “That’s all I can say.”

  He wasn’t a stone when he’d had his arms around her. His eyes weren’t stone, either. She squared her shoulders and lifted her chin. “Okay. It’s over and done with. We’ll go back to having a friendly consultant-client relationship.”

  Still gathering her thoughts, she turned toward the path back to the yacht club. Keeping her voice even, neutral, she said, “My son admires you, and I enjoy working with you.”

  “I don’t want anything to change, Dawn. Not in the least.”

  “Then let’s pretend we never had this conversation.” Or act as if he’s never gazed at her—more than once—with soft, hungry eyes. The near kiss, the intimate conversation. That had fueled her stupid idea of laying her cards on the table. Maybe he’d meant nothing by the kind of attention he gave her, but he was still wrong to deny it.

  She gave herself credit for putting on a good display of how well she could handle rejection. Wasn’t that part of being so special? Correction, it wasn’t rejection, only a misunderstanding. A much nicer word they’d both use now by silent agreement. But she fumed inside as she led the way on the path, an obvious departure from their earlier side-by-side stroll. When they reached her car she didn’t trust herself to say much more than a quick good night.

  “I’ll see you next week for the radio interviews,” she managed to say in a reasonably normal voice. “We’re meeting at nine in your office to do some prep for them.”

  “I’ve got it in my calendar,” he said quickly. “It’s a tour day, and I’m letting Wyatt and Rob handle it. And you were going to let Gordon dive with us next week. Is...well, is that still okay?”

  “Absolutely,” she said, head held high. “Like I told you, he admires you. I would never interfere with that.” She opened her car door and waved. “See you.”

  He waved back. She put the car in Reverse and backed out of the spot. Wow, she thought, pulling onto the street. When she made mistakes they were almost never insignificant little nothings. No, not her. This was a real whopper.

  Her emotions surprised her, though. She might have been really hurt—oh, she was bruised, all right—but wasn’t humiliated or in pain from rejection.

  Maybe because she didn’t believe him.

  Chapter Eleven

  “YOU’RE GETTING YOUR local start with a trip to the Alice Swann, a hardworking schooner in her day,” Jerrod said as Rob motored away from the dock. “Sleek, too. She was considered a beauty.”

  “I saw the picture on your website. You’ve got a lot of good stuff posted.” From their spot at the rail, Gordon glanced around Wind Spray and nodded approvingly. “It’s really cool. I didn’t expect to be out with you and Rob by myself.”

  “We didn’t expect that, either,” Rob said with a laugh. “You got this lucky because we didn’t have guests scheduled this afternoon.”

  “We don’t have that many free days,” Jerrod explained, not wanting to sound like they were wanting for business. “The weather’s been so good we haven’t had to hand out too many rain checks.”

  “You’re getting the platinum trip,” Rob called out from the wheelhouse. “Besides, I’m not diving. Someone stays with the boat, even when we’re close to shore in shallow water.”

  “I could be on boats all day,” Gordon said, his eyes lighting up. “I kayaked a lot up on Redwing Lake when I was staying with my dad. We went out almost every day. Sometimes my friend Evan and I put our kayaks in the water right in front of his house.”

  “Kayaking will build your muscles. Do you play football in the fall?”

  He shook his head. “Mom is too afraid for my head... I mean my brain. She thinks about concussions way too much. That’s ’cuz her friend Lark wrote a bunch of articles about kids and head injuries and now my mom worries about that.” He smirked. “Like she worries about everything.”

  “I don’t blame her,” Jerrod said in Dawn’s defense. “I thought you were a hoops guy, anyway.”

  Gordon nodded. “That’s right. I never liked football much. I’m into chess. Evan and I started a club.” He tightened his mouth. “Some of the guys on our basketball team call us nerds.”

  “Ah, let ’em. I got those labels slapped on me, too.” Jerrod felt for the kid. He was smart, maybe a little gangly, but he was showing signs of growing into those long arms and legs and being a tall young man. “But I was the one who got a scholarship to Penn State. Without that, I’d have had to take out big loans.”

  “What did you major in?” Gordon asked.

  “History. US history was my favorite.” He’d been a loner as a young person. Bookish, not a team sport kind of kid. Maybe a little too quiet. Gordon seemed sort of the same, but with more friends, which was good.

  “Those guys are just talkin’. Don’t mean anything by it.”

  Good to know, Jerrod thought, jumping ahead to imagine Carrie at thirteen when everything was more complicated. Reaching that far into the future had the power to bring on heavy dread, even in his imagination. But he couldn’t freeze time. He glanced at Gordon standing next to him, leaning on the rail, staring back toward the shrinking shore.

  Rob reduced their speed as they approached the site. Jerrod was almost sorry to move on to the next thing. He liked talking to Gordon. He was bright, for sure. But more important, curious. Like his mom, and maybe his dad. Jerrod couldn’t say anything about Bill. Well, except that he’d hurt Dawn. When she put the facts out of how he’d left her, her emotions had been raw. Like the other night. She was pretty raw, then, too. Jerrod couldn’t stop the vague feeling that she’d seen right through him.

  Suddenly, Gordon said, “So how did you get into diving?”

  “I’d already been a recreational diver for years. I had a buddy in high school whose dad liked to dive and he taught me. Later, I worked as a commercial diver during summer breaks. But during my short stint in commercial diving, I saw some strange things.”

  “Like what?” Gordon asked.

  “Well, I once went down with a team to examine a railroad car.” He laughed, recalling the sight of that rusted relic. “The thing had just rolled off the tracks when it derailed and it kept going until it was in pretty deep water. It had junk metal in it, so it was a pile of rust. I’ve seen the corpses of old refrigerators and washing machines sitting on the bottom in the sand. All kinds of stuff like that.”

  “Weird. Like dumping toxins in the water or something dumb like that,” Gordon said.

  “Your generation is smart enough to know that,” Jerrod said. “My parents’ generation was beginning to figure that out.”

  “Maybe there’s going to be a need for marine biologists...you know, in the future. We had a guy come in to talk to the science class about Lake Michigan and all the things that could change it. And not in a g
ood way. Knowing how to dive might be good for a scientist.”

  “Good thinking. You’ll see one of those hazards today.” Jerrod filled in a little background about how he and Augusta started their diving business when he was a commercial diver in Milwaukee. “Early on, we realized we didn’t want to spend our lives in regular jobs. You know, doing the same thing every day.”

  “I get that. That’s what my mom says about her business. She’s her own boss and gets to do different fun stuff. And she never liked the idea of being stuck behind a desk.”

  An amusing picture came to mind of Dawn getting in and out of her car many times in the course of a day and checking her phone and scribbling in her notebook, doing research on her tablet. “I got that impression the first day I met your mom. When my wife and I went to Florida we got regular jobs only long enough to save our money to start our own business.”

  At one time, Jerrod choked on the words when he tried to recite the most basic facts of their story, but not so much anymore. As he’d grown closer to Carrie in the last few months, the memories of Augusta and Dabny weren’t erased, not at all. But they were easier on his heart. He couldn’t explain any of it. He’d hoped the change of location would help, but he hadn’t anticipated feeling so at home here. He’d told Dawn he was emotionally dead, like a stone inside. But here with Gordon on the boat, at the yacht club with Dawn, and making small talk with Miles, he’d been present, as alive as anyone else.

  “Our dream grew from there,” Jerrod said, eager to finish the story, “and our girls eventually came along.”

  Gordon lowered his head and stared at the cockpit floor.

  Jerrod sensed he’d said too much, been too personal. Jerrod wasn’t even sure how much Dawn had told him about what happened to Augusta and Dabny.

  “Let’s get the anchor down,” Rob called out. He circled Wind Spray to put the bow into the wind and shifted the engine to neutral while Jerrod lowered the anchor. Following Jerrod’s hand signals, Rob put the engine in slow reverse to increase its hold. They were in only about eighteen feet of depth and just behind the outer edges of the wreck.

  Rob put out the diving flag on a buoy line. They were already in wet suits, but before they finished getting into the rest of the gear, Jerrod said, “I know this is going to sound like a history buff talking, but every wreck, no matter where it is, Thailand or right here in Lake Michigan, is its own time capsule. It’s what hooked me in the first place.”

  “A time capsule? I like that,” Gordon said, nodding.

  “It’s true. A wreck is like a museum that puts on display a little part of what life was like a long time ago. And in this case, nine people survived and two died when the Alice Swann capsized. We’re like marine archeologists when we explore a site to see what was left behind, not either salvaged or destroyed. Nowadays, we don’t bring any of the treasures back up with us. Wrecks are preserved, not pillaged, if you know what I mean.”

  “I hadn’t thought about people dying here, but I guess they did.”

  “I don’t mean to be morbid about it, especially because most survived the capsize that sent the schooner to the bottom. With the other site we explore, the Franklin Stone, the men had a chance to get into lifeboats and start heading for shore. Some people on land came out to help. The ship burned up and sank to the bottom, but all the men made it home. When I look at a site, I also like to remind myself that so many things we take for granted weren’t invented the day this schooner went down. On the other hand, we still use a compass and anchors and line.”

  “My grandpa tells lots of stories about when he was a kid,” Gordon said, looking like he was trying really hard not to laugh. “They didn’t even have their own phone in the house. There were, like, five TV channels.”

  “Hard to believe, isn’t it?” Jerrod feigned an astonished expression before adding, “Hey, my dad told me all those stories, too.” He guffawed. “Tell you the truth, I used to groan when he started one of his anecdotes. They were like mini lectures.”

  “My dad’s not too bad that way. Just Grandpa Keith.” Gordon shrugged. “He’s really old, but he tells funny stories about sneaking out of the house at night and diving in some quarry where they weren’t supposed to go. He claims he only got caught once, but I don’t know.”

  “Oh, right,” Jerrod said sarcastically. “Trust me, old men always say they did dangerous stuff and nobody ever got caught. Or hurt. And they came back with huge fish, bigger than any of us have ever seen. They don’t even make fish that big anymore.”

  Gordon started laughing. Jerrod had to admit it felt pretty good to make a young teenage boy react like that. Carrie was easy. She giggled if he made a funny face. But older kids? They could be a tough audience.

  They finished with all the gear—the weight belt, the buoyancy devices, the tanks, regulators, dive computer. Impressed with how smoothly and respectfully Gordon managed the equipment. Jerrod’s confidence in the thirteen-year-old went up a notch or two. This boy had the ability to handle himself on a dive with adults.

  “Only one more safety reminder,” Jerrod said. “We don’t touch anything, and not only because we don’t want to disturb this archeological site, but because sites can have broken glass and jagged sharp metal edges. Especially with the zebra mussels covering things up, you don’t really know what you’ll find. I don’t want anyone getting hurt. No trips to the hospital for tetanus shots.” He almost said, especially you.

  “Got it,” Gordon said. But he started to pull at his suit and fidget with the dive computer.

  He needed to stop talking and get the kid in the water, Jerrod thought.

  Preparations done, masks in place and fins on, he signaled and they jumped off the side and began the descent, adjusting the pressure as they went. Jerrod pointed to his own ear, his signal to Gordon to make sure he wasn’t feeling a squeezing pain in his ears. Gordon gave him the A-OK sign back. He watched Gordon closely, signaling to stay close and follow him.

  The rudder on the bottom came into view first in the midst of a mix of mussels and clumping underwater plants swaying in rhythm with the water. It was as if it had been waiting for Gordon to see it. Alice Swann had been loaded with shingles and cord wood, but much of that cargo had been salvaged.

  Curiously, the masts and booms, and even the bowsprit, were intact. For Jerrod’s money, these functional, but still sleek pieces were the treasures of this particular dive. They wouldn’t be salvaged now, or Jerrod would have wanted to see them assembled in some kind of replica. It remained a mystery why these pieces had been abandoned on the bottom for almost one hundred and fifty years.

  He’d told Gordon about the ship’s two anchors, pointing to the rusty one deep in the sand, set apart from the other pieces. The other anchor was on display in a park in town, along with pieces of the hull. Gordon had probably seen it but not known what he was looking at. Now he would.

  Jerrod watched as Gordon lingered over the anchor with him and knowing time was short, pointed back to the large pieces of the intact hull where small fish disappeared and then suddenly reappeared. Some of the ship’s planking had fallen in a pattern that created tunnellike spaces that played to some instinct in the fish that led them to dart through these passages as if chasing each other in a game of tag.

  Through the mask, Jerrod saw Gordon smiling as he pointed to the booms as they passed, but then frowned as he called attention to the colonies of invasive mussels. Today’s kids knew nature wasn’t static. Nothing stayed the same for long. Gordon already understood more about toxins and threats to the water than Jerrod had learned in four years of high school.

  Jerrod signaled it was time to ascend, and they soon climbed back on the boat and began removing their gear.

  “So what did you think?” As if he didn’t know. Through his body language and calling attention to what he saw, Jerrod could see Gordon was fascinated by this underwater world.


  “Cool. I like it. Can I go out with you again? I don’t mean alone. I know you usually take a bunch of people.”

  “Sure you can.” He held his hand up and paused. “I’ll rephrase that. It’s up to your parents, but as far as I’m concerned, you can come out whenever we have space. Looks like you had a good instructor on Redwing Lake.”

  “Oh, yeah, my dad asked around and checked the guy out. My mom talked to him, too.”

  “Well, good. We’re glad to have you.”

  Later, when they’d gone back to the office, Rob immediately left to pick up an order at Donovan’s Marine. Jerrod was ready to tackle some paperwork, but Gordon hung around like he was reluctant to leave. He was tempted to ask what was on his mind. Instead, he waited.

  Finally, Gordon shifted his weight from one foot to the other. “Do you ever need any extra help around here? Like, maybe I could clean your boats or help in your office. I could maybe post things on your website. I’m good with tech stuff.” He spoke fast, but finally had to stop to take a breath. “See, that way I could pay for my diving. I go to my dad’s house on weekends, but I’m with my mom during the week until school starts.”

  Jerrod really liked this boy. His parents might be divorced, but however they’d handled it, the good result stood in front of him. “I think we could arrange something.” He ticked off a few of the jobs that had to be done, pushing back worries about how Dawn would feel about her son hanging around him. “We get a few walk-ins and if we’re out on the boats we can miss them. They usually text or call, but maybe you could give them brochures, take their names—talk about what we offer.”

  “Sure, I could do that.”

  “I bet you’d be good at doing what marketers call ‘selling the experience.’”

  The way Gordon nodded, it was clear he liked that compliment and nodded without any trace of false modesty. “I know how to talk to people...adults.” He shifted his weight from one foot to the other. “I mean, I can learn.”