What We Bear in the Deep

The last thing Marcus saw before he died was the water rising above his head. We were thirty meters down, welding the pylons for the new bridge, when his oxygen line failed. I tried to reach him—I still dream about his eyes widening behind the mask, the bubbles streaming upward like tiny prayers.

That was six months ago. Tonight, I sit in a dive bar near the harbor, staring into my whiskey like it might offer answers. Some friend I turned out to be. The investigators called it equipment malfunction. I call it my failure.

The construction company fought the wrongful death suit like a wounded bull—aggressive, reckless, incapable of acknowledging fault. Their lawyers grilled me for hours, demanding to know why I didn't save him, why I didn't try harder, why I surfaced alone. They made it sound like a choice.

"You can't bear the weight of another man's death," the therapist told me last week. But she's wrong. I do bear it. Every morning when I wake up gasping for air. Every time I turn on the faucet and watch the water flow, remembering how it looked swallowing him whole.

Marcus was the one who got me into underwater construction. Said he liked the silence down there, the way the ocean muffled the world's noise. We'd work for hours, communicating through hand signals, the only sound our own breathing and the distant hum of machinery above. He was forty-two. Left behind a wife who doesn't speak to me anymore, and a daughter who asked me at the funeral why her daddy didn't come home.

I still go down to the water sometimes—just stand at the edge of the pier at night, watching the black surface. The way the lightning strikes during storms, illuminating everything for a split second before plunging it back into darkness—that's how it was with Marcus. One moment we were working side by side, the next he was gone, and the world kept moving like nothing had happened.

The company offered me a settlement. Two years' salary if I signed an NDA. I told them to shove it. Some things can't be bought.

Tomorrow, I'm driving up the coast to visit his wife. She finally returned my call. Says she has something of his she wants me to have. I don't know if she'll forgive me. I don't know if I'll ever forgive myself. But I owe her that much—the truth, at least, about who Marcus was, and how hard I tried to save him.