It happened all at once. The groaning became a scream of tearing steel, and the hold turned on its side around him, and the water came down out of the dark like the whole sea had been poured into a bucket and he was the thing at the bottom of the bucket. His light went out. Something struck him across the back. He was tumbling, deep, he had no idea which way was up. He would remember thinking, with absolute clarity, that the compass rose had been a stupid idea, and that the drunk chief in Coronado had been wrong about everything.
And then, somewhere in the dark, a hand closed on his ankle.
* * *
Lucas Chardi had been awake since 0430, a full hour before reveille. He'd shaved twice. He'd shined his shoes until he could see the overhead lights in them, and then shined them again, until Midshipman Candidate Okafor in the next rack had leaned in the doorway of the head with a toothbrush and said, "Chardi, man, parents are easy. Go stand in formation and sweat like a normal person."
So now, at 0945, he was standing at parade rest in the third rank of Charlie Company on the edge of the lawn with the sun on the back of his neck and a drop of sweat working its way, slowly and maddeningly, down the inside of his collar.
He could see the seating area from here if he moved his eyes and not his head. The white chairs. The families filing in. He'd been looking for them for ten minutes. His mother would be easy to spot; she'd be in blue, because she always wore blue to things that mattered, and she'd have that ridiculous little silver camera in her hand. His father would be harder. His father had a gift for not being noticed. He could stand at the back of a crowded room in a red flannel shirt and people would walk right past him looking for him.
Then, there. Front row. Just left of the aisle, right where the usher had promised. A flash of blue. And beside her, an olive shirt, sleeves rolled to the elbow, a grey head, shoulders that were broader than they looked and set a little higher than they needed to be, as if he were bracing for something.
Lucas felt his chest loosen in a way he hadn't let himself expect.
He came. He actually came.
It was a stupid thing to have doubted. His father had never missed anything. Not one swim meet, not the night Lucas had wrecked the Hallorans' skiff on the ledges off Crotch Island when he was fifteen and had called home from the harbormaster's office shaking so hard he could barely hold the phone. His father had come down to the town dock in his slippers at two in the morning and looked at the skiff and looked at Lucas and said, very quietly, "Are you hurt?" and when Lucas said no, he'd said, "Then we can fix the rest," and they had. Every weekend for two months, in the boatyard, in the cold, with his father's big scarred hands showing him how to scarf in new planking and how to fair it so you couldn't see the joint.
His father had never missed anything. But he had never said one word, either, the night Lucas had come home with the envelope from the Naval Academy Preparatory School and set it on the kitchen table between the salt and pepper.
His mother had cried and laughed and hugged him so hard his ribs creaked. And his father had picked up the letter and read it all the way through, every word, twice, and then set it down again very precisely with its edges squared to the edge of the table, and looked at Lucas for a long time with an expression Lucas had never seen on his face before and couldn't name. Then he'd said, "Well. Congratulations, bud," and gone out to the shed, and Lucas had heard him out there until almost midnight, running the bandsaw.