“Do you often walk around the Loch at night?”
“I go out after the bagpipers leave,” he said. “We’re not the first team to go on such an expedition, you know. Dozens of research teams have searched this lake and all of them came up empty. I like to see what might happen when nobody else is looking.”
“Maybe there’s nothing in the lake.”
“Science is missing something.” He stood, releasing a gray cloud from the corner of his mouth. “We’re missing that thing I feel when I’m underwater.”
“And what is that?”
“The feeling that the entire submarine could vanish at any moment.”
“What does Sarah think of your theories?”
He smiled. “My wife is very patient.”
“I wish I could say the same about the man who used to live with me,” I said. “Although I’m not even sure what it was he grew impatient with.”
“Well,” he said, no longer smiling. “One could argue that Sarah’s been more patient than she should have been.”
I asked McKay what he had planned for tomorrow. He said they would be repairing one of the underwater cameras attached to the submarine.
“And the next morning?”
“We’ll begin the descent at eight.”
“I might walk down and watch,” I said. “I’ve never seen a submarine in action before.”
He took out his watch and dangled it in front of his face. The smoke around him had thickened, and I felt like I was speaking to him through a screen. I rose and brushed the creases from my slacks. “Going inside?”
“Not for a while,” he said.
“Goodnight, then.”
As I was leaving the porch, McKay asked if I had time for a short drive. He said there was something he wanted to show me.
“I’ve got nothing but time,” I said.
He went into the inn to retrieve the van keys. When he returned, we departed for Urquhart Castle. There were no streetlights lining the road, and the sheen thrown from the car looked strange against the deep dark of the land. When we got to the castle, McKay pulled onto a gravely shoulder and parked.
“Did you bring a flashlight?” I asked once we were outside.
“Don’t need one,” he said. He wrapped his fingers around my elbow and guided me over a low wall and down a hill. As we walked, I looked all around; even the silhouette of the tower and the mountaintops were barely visible in the thick darkness. When we reached level ground, McKay stopped in front of a dark object and released my arm. He leaned toward the object and pulled off a covering. I heard something that sounded like a door opening and then a clicking noise. Two circular headlights beamed on. We were standing in front of the mini-submarine. The submarine rested on a box-shaped metal grate, and a white tarp was heaped on the ground. I touched the side of the vessel; the metal was cold. The top of the submarine had been opened.
“Go ahead,” McKay said, helping me climb into the submarine. The interior was even smaller than I had imagined, barely enough room for me to turn my body. The control panel stretched out in front of me, the dials and compasses rimmed with green light, and there was a small black screen to the left of the panel. Cold air gusted through the open door. I looked up and saw the heavy black of the sky. In the distance, I heard the bagpipers.
“Close the door,” I said to McKay. I listened to the creaking metal, the whoosh of air leaving the submarine. When the door was shut, I touched the rectangular window above the control panel. The glass was tinted, slick.
I knocked on the side of the submarine. The sound echoed around me. A few minutes passed before McKay knocked back. He said something, too, but his voice was muffled by the metal walls. I shouted that I couldn’t hear him, and then the door sighed open and I felt the cold on my face. McKay hung over the opening, looking down at me. When I stared up at him, I noticed the gray swatches of hair at his temples, the little creases around his lips. Though he wasn’t an old man, he looked, in the light that rose from the inside of the submarine, weary, a little wizened.
“Are you all right down there?” he asked.
“I could stay here for hours.” I moved my hands over the control panel, the smooth faces of the dials. The moonlight shifted, and the metal interior suddenly gleamed silver. I asked him about the screen to the left of the control panel, and he said it was a sonar, used to track the underwater sounds. He said it could indicate how close the noise was and where it was originating from.
“I’ve been trying to get Sarah in here for weeks,” he said. “I’ve always wanted her to know immersion.”
“It must be like another world down there,” I said, pointing at the water ahead. “Underneath the Loch.”
Being down in the submarine made me feel calmer, less restless. I forgot about the earlier unpleasantness with Theodore, and I did not think of Peter until long after we had left Urquhart Castle. When McKay reached into the submarine and extended his hand, I was reluctant to take it.
I was not prepared for the storm. Excited from the trip to Urquhart Castle, I’d gone to bed late the night before and, annoyed with myself for getting a slow start, I’d rushed out of the Craigdarroch without a raincoat. A heavy spurt soaked my long-sleeved cotton shirt; water dripped from my ponytail and strands of hair stuck to the side of my face. By the afternoon, the sun had broken through and the rain had lightened, although water still fell, cold against my cheeks and white-knuckled hands.
The geography of Reelig Glen turned greener and shadier as I trekked further into the forest, mirroring the leafy and shadowed habitat the twinflower preferred. There had been several false alarms — two flowers growing close together that, from a distance, resembled the double bell of the Linnaea borealis. As I stepped carefully through the wet grass, the straps of my backpack digging into my shoulders, I wondered what, if anything, McKay had told the other men or Sarah about our outing last night.
At first, I thought the flower ahead was another false alarm. It was too slight to be a twinflower and the color was different. But as I drew closer, I saw the unmistakable bell-shaped blossoms sagging underneath the weight of the rainwater. The blooms were wilted and the color was lighter than it should have been, almost white. It seemed to be leaning forward, as though the roots were separating from the soil and the entire flower was in danger of collapsing. It looked nothing like the twinflowers I’d seen in photographs and slide shows, and I was absent of the feelings Dr. Edgevale had described: the exhilaration, the sense of purpose.
I tucked the wet strands of hair behind my ears and set off to find another twinflower, walking several miles. As I searched the woods, I thought of the calendar I once purchased at a gardening shop in Dupont Circle and kept tacked to the corkboard in our kitchen. Poppies in May. Snapdragons in August. Columbines in November. Moth and ghost orchids marked the gray and icy winter months. And then, in April, the twinflower: two bright pink bells affixed to a sturdy green stem growing from a smooth mound of black soil. I remembered the entries for that month so clearly, reminders for faculty meetings and dinners and theater tickets printed in black ink — the evidence of a life that no longer belonged to me.
I continued the hunt until daylight slipped away and darkness, which seemed to rise from the forest floor, took over. Only then did I return to the twinflower. I unzipped my backpack, pulled out a flashlight, and aimed it at the ground. As I watched the blossoms struggle to sustain the blows of the large raindrops falling from the tree branches above, it seemed not even the most vigorous preservation effort could coax such a delicate species through the centuries to come. Still, it wasn’t until I reached for the flower, with the intention of placing it in a plastic specimen bag, that the wave rolled over me, that I realized I could continue looking for the brilliant specimen I’d envisioned, could still have everything Dr. Edgevale had described.