“About a dozen times. I just haven’t had time lately. You kind of get used to the ache.”
“You might damage your hearing.”
“What?”
She slapped his shoulder.
“When I was in college, my sister talked me into taking scuba lessons with her,” he said. “During the training, the instructor casually mentioned that a small percentage of people are incapable of diving because their inner ears can’t handle the pressure changes.”
“What does this have to do with your ear?”
“I think I would have liked diving if it hadn’t hurt so damned bad.”
“You were one of those people?”
“Yeah. I went exactly twice. The first time was in Lake Minnehaha, to a depth of twenty feet for my open water certification. It nearly split my ears to go that deep, but I forced myself. The water was murky, and I followed a line down to the dive platform as slowly as the instructor would let me, trying to get my ears to equalize. I pinched my nose and blew, tilted my head back, and swallowed hard against the regulator, all the tricks they taught us, but nothing worked. Once I was down long enough, things evened out and I was fine. When we were out of our wet suits, I told the instructor about my problem, and would you like to know what he said to me?”
“Tell me,” she said, dabbing at his ear again.
“Small eustachian tubes.”
“Diagnosed you on the spot.”
“Yep.”
“That’s all he said?”
“Well, that and ‘Don’t ever dive again. Sorry you wasted your money.’ ”
Vidonia laughed and poured another lidful of peroxide into his ear. “But you did.”
“With my sister, about a year later. This time in a flooded rock quarry in Indiana. I forget what they called the lake. I took a bunch of decongestants, hoping it would open my pipes enough to equalize the pressure. There was supposed to be an old school bus at the bottom we were going to explore.”
“What was a school bus doing at the bottom of a quarry?”
“You know, I’m still not sure. But it was in forty feet of water. My sister heard about it at a dive shop and bought a map of how to find it. God, the place was beautiful—sheer rock slopes, clear green water.”
“Clear green water?”
“Like I said, it was Indiana. Green is about the best you can hope for. The other option is brown. It was a beautiful day. We climbed down, suited up, and paddled out into the middle. My sister could drop like a stone if she wanted to. I don’t know if she even knew what equalizing was. Her ears did it by themselves.”
Vidonia poured the peroxide again and dabbed at the foam with the towel. Silas noticed that the roar was getting quieter every time.
“I had to go so slow, looking down at the top of her head, watching the fish go after her hair. The decongestants helped, but the pinch started at about eighteen feet or so. By the time I was down to thirty, I had to stop for five minutes to let my ears catch up. The last ten feet felt like an ice pick in the sides of my head.”
“Why didn’t you just stop?”
“A Williams doesn’t throw in the towel simply because of pain.”
“What about possible debilitating injury?”
“That, either.”
“You didn’t want to give up in front of your little sister, did you?”
“How did you know she was younger than me?”
“Lucky guess.”
“Anyway, we found the bus at forty feet, and my ears finally settled in. The bus was sitting on the bottom like it had been parked that way. We stayed down until our clocks told us it was time to head up.”
“Running out of air?”
“No, we still had a thousand PSI, but at forty feet, you have to keep an eye out for the bends.”
“Lovely sport, diving.” She dabbed his ear again with the edge of the towel.
“That’s when the real fun started for me. It seems that the decongestants I’d taken had worn off. My ears had adapted to the pressure at forty feet and wouldn’t equalize at all on the way up. The trapped air made my head feel like a new helium balloon. I thought my eardrums were going to blow out.”
“What happened?”
“One of my eardrums blew out.” Silas smiled. “Well, sort of. I heard the tear as a little squeak of escaping air from behind the drum. Then came the pain. I knew I’d done some damage.”
“Were you okay?”
“I was lucky. After a few weeks, the hearing came back, although it felt like I was carrying a gallon of water in my head.”
“Is your hearing the same as it was?”
“Twenty-twenty.” Silas smiled again.
She pushed the towel hard against his ear. “You’re done. Roll over and let it drain.”
Coolness slipped from his ear in a trickle. The ache was still there, but at least his ears were clean now. His head felt strangely empty and hot.
Vidonia lay down beside him and ran her fingers through his thick hair. “So are you still close to your sister?”
“Yeah. We get together every couple of months. She lives just outside of Denver.”
“What about your parents?”
“They’re dead.”
“Tell me about them.”
“There’s too much to tell about one of them, too little about the other.”
“We’re a lot alike, then.”
Silas’s hand found the groove at the small of her back, and he rubbed the slickness that had accumulated there. He allowed his hands to wander, and they found her constructed of gentle curves—the slope of a hip, the sweep of a thigh, the full roundness of a breast. Her shoulder was just another bend beneath his fingers as he stroked her arm.
“Mother was well-stirred Looziana Creole,” he said in his best New Orleans accent. “But probably at least as French as black, I think, by the look of that side of the family. She was a teacher for thirty years. Died a few years back.”
“What about your father?”
“He died in a refinery fire off the Gulf Coast when I was young.”
“You’re an orphan.”
“He was an engineer on the Grayson platform.”
“I heard of that.”
“Yeah, not quite as bad as the
“Did they ever determine what actually happened?”
“Yeah, roughly. A profitable flow of flammables met an unlucky spark. The specifics went up in smoke along with the dozen or so lives.”
They were silent. The night and the darkness seeped between them, and they became breathing for a while. Silas thought she had slipped off to sleep when she said, “Keep talking. I like your voice.”
“What do you want me to say?”
“Tell me something you’ve never told another woman before.”
There was silence again. He thought of giving her a smart-ass answer, but when he spoke, the words that came surprised him. “The state gave me a broad track early on: math and science without any sort of specification. I was lucky; my scores qualified me for almost everything without being quite good enough in any one area to pigeonhole me.”
