What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us

inverness

All evening, the men spoke only of the monster.

Although I sat at their table in the quaint hotel bar — known as the malt shop, due to the hundreds of malt whiskey selections — and was a scientist myself, I wasn’t a part of the conversation. In truth, I thought their pursuit unworthy. The four scientists had been commissioned by the BBC to debunk the legend of the Loch Ness Monster, while I, a botanist who specialized in the preservation of endangered plant life, was working with the Botany Institute of Britain to perform field research on rare plants.

I had been in Inverness for a week and had experienced little contact with anyone at the Craigdarroch except Sarah, the proprietor, and the monster hunters, as they were called. Three of the men were from London. The fourth man, McKay, operated the mini-submarine, a steel contraption that resembled a large gray egg. He was a native of Inverness, a local expert on the Loch Ness Monster, and had learned about submarine technology as a young man, during his army days. He dressed shabbily, his pants often torn at the knees, and whenever he checked the time, it was his practice to take out his pocket watch and swing it in front of his face, as though he was trying to hypnotize himself. He was also Sarah’s husband. They’d been married for fifteen years. This afternoon, when I returned to the Craigdarroch after a day of field work, I’d come upon them arguing in the lobby. Their voices were low, but there was tension in their expressions, in the sweeping gestures of their arms. They fell silent after seeing me in the lobby, and I’d hurried past them and up the stairs.

That night, as I drank my second glass of merlot, I listened to the men, who were outfitted with sonar sensors and giant nets and aquatic cameras, discuss their findings. Or, as it were, the lack thereof.

“The sonars have picked up nothing,” Ian said, adjusting his round eyeglasses. “Not even the slightest disturbance in the water.”

“Did you actually think you were going to find a plesiosaur?” Theodore emptied his glass before turning to me. He was the tallest of the men, with a long nose and high cheekbones. “The most common Loch Ness theory proposes the monster is a plesiosaur, a species that was extinct sixty million years ago.”

“An elasmosaur,” Dale said. “A member of the plesiosaur family.” He was the shortest of the scientists and wore flannel shirts with the sleeves cuffed to his elbows. “And they became extinct seventy million years ago. Not sixty.”

The Loch Ness Monster — although I’d given it little thought before coming to Inverness — now seemed much like the fog that hung over the lake and hills: suggestive and hazy and constantly present. The locals lived peacefully with the legend, profited from it even, with gift shops that carried Loch Ness Monster tee-shirts and coffee mugs.

Theodore stood, knocking back his chair, and skulked over to the bar for a refill. Sarah was working in the malt shop that evening, occasionally refilling our glasses and polishing the mahogany bar. After tending to Theodore, she pulled a chair up to our table; when our eyes met, she smiled. We were, for the time being, the only women residing in the Craigdarroch.

It was then McKay looked across the table at me and said, “They aren’t underwater like I am. Nothing shows up on the sonar, that’s true, but near the bottom of the lake, I’m telling you, there’s something strange.”

“He’s never been able to stay away from the Loch,” Sarah said. She was petite and fair, her cheeks ruddy from the weather. Her wedding ring was a plain gold band which, I’d noticed, she had a habit of pushing around her finger. “I joke that it’s his first love.”

“Why don’t you tell Emily about the underwater caves,” Theodore said, raising his glass. “May be that’s where Nessie is waiting.”

“You should go down with me sometime.”

Theodore shook his head. “I prefer dry land.”

“Have you ever been down with him, Sarah?” I asked.

“No.” She reached across the table and picked up McKay’s beer. She held it in her hands for a moment before taking a sip. “I suppose I prefer dry land too.”

“Are there really underwater caves?” I imagined dark holes where aquatic weeds and ferns flourished, hornwort and eelgrass clinging to slippery gray rocks.

“Yes,” Ian said. “There are.”

“But our sonars are so sensitive, if there were anything in the caves, we’d know,” Dale said.

“Absolutely,” Theodore said.

Ian nodded. “Without a doubt.”

“You think you know so much,” McKay said. “You think everything can be measured.”

Sarah began to say something, but he shook his head and she stopped. He said that he didn’t want to start an argument, that he’d said all he had to say for tonight. True to his word, he did not speak for the rest of the evening.

After we decided to retire, he helped Sarah clear away the glasses. When they were both behind the bar, I noticed her pausing to touch the space between his shoulder blades, or to run a hand down the side of his body. He had a strange way of polishing glasses. He jammed the little towel inside and twisted it around, then held the glass to the light and repeated his method three or four times before adding the glass to the shelf, as though he was able to see imperfections that weren’t visible to the rest of us.

Later that night, back in my room, I listened for the bagpipes. The music usually began around midnight and ceased at two in the morning. When the weather is good, Sarah had said while checking me into the Craigdarroch last week, a trio of bagpipers stand on the edge of the Loch and play in hopes of rousing the monster. On some nights, I’d closed my eyes and listened so intently that, for a moment, I mistook the music for a prolonged and ragged wail.

The Inverness weather was the perfect habitat for what I was seeking: the Linnaea borealis, or twinflower. I should have felt exhilarated by the variety of plant species that thrived in the lush forests and by the esteemed botanists on the research team (all of whom were from Scotland or elsewhere in the UK and, if not ensconced in their own homes, staying with friends or relatives; I was the only one in need of a hotel). The population of twinflowers had declined in recent years, due to an increase in the mechanical harvesting of timber, but even in the protected areas, they still weren’t flourishing, and I had been given the opportunity to help understand why life had become such a struggle for them. Yet I could not shake the loneliness that had settled in months earlier and clung as stubbornly as the fog to the hilltops.

I had called Peter once since coming to Inverness, sitting at a desk in the corner of my room and staring out the window, bending my calling card in my hand. He had left me three months ago, though I was often surprised by how much time had passed, the pain still so immediate. When the phone rang and Peter’s answering machine came on, I breathed into the receiver and struggled to think of something casual yet significant to say, all the while watching McKay’s mini-submarine gradually emerge in the center of the lake. Water slid off the dark metal and, in the later afternoon sunlight, the machine gleamed. I hung up the phone without leaving anything on the machine except the sound of my breath, too transfixed by the movements of the submarine to feel the sense of defeat and embarrassment that would descend upon me later in the day.

Lying on my back in bed, the covers bunched around my waist, I thought of the underwater caves hidden in the Loch, of McKay piloting the submarine into one of the caverns, his face tightening as the water darkened and shadows passed over the submarine. He was odd-looking, slight and a little dead-eyed, a contrast to Sarah’s airy beauty. But there was something electric about him too, something inviting. I wondered if he was frightened when the submarine disappeared beneath the surface, or if a part of him wanted to remain there always.

In the morning, before Sarah delivered me to Reelig Glen, where I would continue my search for the twinflower, I took a walk along the bank of the Loch. The fog was thickest in the morning and after drifting farther from the hotel, I realized the white haze had surrounded me. I knew I was late for work; in the distance, I thought I heard Sarah calling my name. I kept walking.

D.C. always looked hazy at the start of the day, although it was not white like the fog of Scotland, but gray, a mixture of early morning mist and smog. After leaving our DuPont Circle apartment in the mornings, Peter and I would go to a coffee shop for tea and pastries, then ride the metro to Georgetown University, where we taught in the graduate programs. We had lived together for four years. For a long time, I had believed we would one day marry.

I stopped to pick up an object lying in the dirt: a portion of a cigar, damp and leafy, the tip bitten down to a dull point. Left by one of the bagpipers, I assumed, inhaling the scent before flicking it back onto the ground. When I rose and stepped forward, the shock of the wetness, which traveled halfway up my calf, sent me reeling backwards, landing on the bank of the lake. Through the fog, I could not see where water met shore, but I surely had gone farther than intended. I jumped up and walked briskly toward the Craigdarroch. My breathing slowed as the landscape became more visible, the hills and mountain peaks. Once I was free of the densest fog, I spotted a figure approaching the lake. I raised a hand. The person stopped, but didn’t gesture toward me. When I was close enough to recognize McKay’s face, I called out his name.

His hair was more disheveled than usual, his hooded eyes rimmed with pink. He didn’t speak until we were face to face, until he looked down at the dark leg of my jeans.

“What were you doing out there?”

“Went for a walk,” I said. “I couldn’t see properly.”

“Looks like you got too close to the edge. Not sure I’d do that again.”

“I’ve heard the Loch Ness Monster lives deep in the lake, that it never attacks people on the shore.”

“Then you haven’t heard all the stories.”

“What have you planned for this week?” I asked.

“We’ll be reviewing new data and doing repairs for the next two days,” he said. “And then I’m taking the submarine to the bottom of Urquhart Bay.”

I was familiar with that section of the Loch. I often passed the ruins of Urquhart Castle, which overlooked the lake, while leaving and returning to the Craigdarroch.

“It’s the last step,” he continued. “Going to the bottom.”

“Then it’s all over?”

“If we find nothing, the others pack up and go home.”

“How long have they been in Inverness?”

“Eight weeks.” He paused, pushed a hand into the back pocket of his jeans. “The lake is twenty-one miles long and a mile wide. Two months was barely enough.”

I looked toward the Craigdarroch and saw Sarah standing by her van, waving. After I waved back, she pointed at her wristwatch and then raised her arms.

“Late for the laboratory?” McKay asked.

I nodded. “The other members of my research team work in the mornings. Your wife has been kind enough to drive me.”

“What are you looking for?”

“The twinflower.” I described the appearance of the flower, two bell-shaped blossoms that hang from a slender stem. “They’re very rare now, so I suppose I’m looking for the extraordinary.”

McKay smiled a little before turning away. “Aren’t we all.”

I watched until he disappeared into the fog like an apparition, never once looking back at me or his wife. I walked over to Sarah’s maroon van and climbed into the passenger seat. My wet pant leg stuck to my skin, the denim cold and rough.

“Sorry to be so slow.” I pointed at my jeans. “I had a mishap at the lake.”

She started the car. “Hopefully it didn’t involve anything that would require the attention of the monster hunters.”

“No,” I said. “Just my own clumsiness.”

“I don’t go down to the water very often,” she said. “That’s my husband’s territory.”

I mentioned McKay had just been telling me about Urquhart Castle and his plans for the mini-submarine.

“When I first met my husband, he was living in a camper on the edge of the Loch,” she told me. “He started coming to my inn for meals. He had quit his job and left his fiancé to find the Loch Ness Monster.”

“I see he hasn’t given up his search.”

“Not at all,” she said. “And he finally got the attention of the BBC, of all things. I hope, for his sake, that they find something the next time he takes the sub down.”

I watched the silver charm in the shape ofaship’s anchor jingle from the rearview mirror. Sarah told me that the first summer they were married, he spent all his nights in a tent outside, so he could watch for the monster.

“That’s how I know about the bagpipers,” Sarah said. “He befriended them.”

“Has it ever bothered you?” I asked. “His obsession?”

Sarah kept her eyes on the road. She wore a fuzzy sweater and corduroy pants. The inside of her car smelled like lavender. I worried I had pried too much, been too direct in my questioning.

“Some things you can get used to, and some things you can’t,” she said. “I’ve left men over much less, but, for whatever reason, I was willing to get used to this.” She braked lightly as she negotiated the sharper curves in the road. “I think, one day, he’ll find something that satisfies him and the quest will be over.” She went quiet for a moment. “I’m not even sure what that would be like,” she said. “What that would mean.”

I looked out the window. Clouds, marbled with gray, loomed like mountains. I wondered what it was about me that Peter had decided he couldn’t get used to. When we passed Urquhart Castle, the crumbling stone walls and fallen-in tower reminded me of a forgotten city.

I wandered through Reelig Glen, the dense vegetation brushing my knees, the shadows cast from the enormous Douglas Firs darkening the ground. The twinflower had eluded me on this excursion, but I had collected samples of pilwort, a small fern. I’d only covered a portion of Reelig Glen and would continue my search tomorrow.

As I walked toward the edge of the glen — where I would meet Sam, who also worked at the Botany Institute — I started thinking of Peter and the night he told me he wanted to move out. He had stood at our living room window, tall and slack-shouldered, his tie loose around his neck. He had taken up with someone in Georgetown’s zoology department, though, despite my repeated inquiries, he wouldn’t tell me her name.

“I’ve learned something about myself in the last few years,” he said. “I don’t do well with repetition and routine.”

“So you plan on going through the whole university, then?” I sat down and wedged a pillow between my knees. “For variety?”

“Emily,” he said. “This would be a good time to start taking me seriously.”

“What about our trip to Virginia Beach in February?” I felt my voice drop. “We’d talked about getting engaged.”

“That was a mistake,” he said. “I’m sorry, but it was.”

I remained on the sofa, legs pulled to my chest, gaze averted. The spring semester had just ended. Out of professionalism, he explained, he had waited until the end of the term to leave. I wondered how long he’d been planning his exit, how long other people had known about the turn my life was going to take, while I carried on, oblivious to the way things were shifting beneath me like the tectonic plates before a quake. I remembered a time, during one of my childhood summers in the countryside, when my cousin fell into a well. I had been the one to hear the faint bleating of her voice, to find her crouched in the stone bottom of the well, wet and cold and in darkness — an image I would, in the days following Peter’s announcement, be unable to shake.

That night, Peter left the apartment and didn’t return until morning. I stayed on the sofa all night, my face blotched and puffy from crying. He moved out two days later. A week passed before I was able to pack away the little things he’d left behind — his wash cloth, a blue bowl, an empty picture frame, an encyclopedia, a miniature globe — and push the Tupperware box underneath the bed.

After Peter was settled in his Cleveland Park apartment, I called the director of the Botany Institute, who I’d met when she was a guest lecturer at George town, and said I would be pleased to join the Inverness team over the summer. Before leaving Washington, I met Peter for a drink and he offered his new phone number.

“We’ll keep in touch,” he said, as though he had decided for both of us. “No reason to not be civil.” And, because I wanted so badly to not lose him in a completely permanent way, I had taken down his number on a cocktail napkin without argument.

I stopped, pulled a notebook and pencil from my backpack, and sketched the tear-shaped leaves that clung to a tree trunk: quick gray lines across the graph paper, on which I had also charted the proximities of different plant species. I photographed and measured the vines, as I did with all the specimens, and then returned the supplies to my backpack and stepped out of the forest.

I left the shade of the trees and entered a long field, the grass tall and curved from a light wind. In the distance, I saw Sam standing at our agreed meeting place. Every afternoon, he took my samples to the lab and then drove me back to the Craigdarroch.

“Find anything good?” he asked when I reached him.

“Not much,” I said. “Just a little pilwort for the lab.”

As we walked to his car, he mentioned seeing the monster hunters on his way to Reelig Glen. “They were crossing the lake in a motorboat,” he said. “One of them was looking at the water through some kind of telescope.”

I asked if it was McKay, but Sam shrugged and said he had been too far away to tell.

“The chances of you finding a thousand twinflowers are better than their odds,” he said. “If something is in that lake, I don’t think it wants to be found.”

“Maybe the twinflowers don’t either,” I said, eliciting a smile from Sam. When we reached the car, I glanced back once more at the dark thicket of trees and the shadows the shifting clouds had cast across the field.

After a dinner of oatcakes and salmon, which I took in my room, forgoing a meal with the monster hunters, I sat on the edge of my bed and dialed Peter’s number. It was late afternoon in Washington; there was a chance he’d be home if he wasn’t teaching a summer class or attending a meeting. I didn’t leave a message when the machine came on, but hung up and dialed the number again. After two rings, a woman answered, her voice soft and unfamiliar. I heard the boom of a television in the background.

“Am I speaking to 32 Hilyer Point?” I asked.

“No,” the woman said. “You’re not speaking to a house.”

“Is Peter around?”

She paused. “I don’t think he can come to the phone now.”

I sifted through the clatter of female voices from university parties and commencements, but couldn’t place hers. Before I replied, the volume of the television increased and I caught an actor’s familiar baritone; I recognized the voice from an old movie Peter liked, the one we periodically watched when there was nothing interesting in the theaters. I pictured him on the sofa, his long arms crossed behind his head.

“Are you watching The French Connection?” I asked the woman. “Has Hackman gotten to his ‘never trust anyone’ line yet?”

I stopped for a moment, pressed my fingertips against my cheek. The silence on the other end didn’t break.

“When the line comes, you should remember it,” I said. “It’s one of Peter’s favorites.”

I heard whispers and static before the dial tone buzzed in my ear. I dropped the phone onto the mattress and checked the clock that hung over the dresser. I’d passed Ian in the hall after returning from Reelig Glen and he had extended a late night drink invitation. They would all be in the malt shop by now, expecting me. Before leaving, I wrapped a shawl embroidered with gold and brown flowers around my shoulders. I scrubbed my face and combedmy hair, pushed my lips together and dotted them with red.

When I found the men in the malt shop, they were laughing loudly, apparently in response to a joke Theodore had told, though, despite Dale’s urging, he would not repeat it. I asked where Sarah was, and McKay said she was balancing the books in her office, that she often worked late into the night. Sarah had left an open bottle of wine for me on the bar. I poured myself a glass and joined the men at their table, where we all toasted the Craigdarroch.

“One more day, and we’ll be on our way home.” Ian pushed his empty glass toward the center of the table and leaned back in his chair.

“If everything goes as planned at Urquhart,” Dale said.

“We’ve been here for nearly two months. We’ve checked every inch of that lake, with military strength equipment for christsakes. There’s nothing there. Just some trout and sturgeon.” Theodore paused, looked at McKay. “And a few unusually large salmon.”

“We haven’t checked Urquhart Bay,” McKay said. “We haven’t gone to the bottom.”

Theodore left the table to get another drink and, upon returning, drained the glass. “Come on, McKay,” he said. “When are you going to shut up about the bottom?”

Dale and Ian looked uneasily together, then at me. Ian, seeming anxious to change the subject, asked how my work was coming along.

“It’s going fine,” I said. “The weather has been good for field work.” I brushed my lips with the tip of my index finger, as if to make sure the color was still in place. I was unaccustomed to wearing lipstick; the tube of Ruby Rush in my room had been an impulse buy at the airport.

“What will be done with the specimens you’ve collected?” Dale asked.

“They’ll be analyzed,” I replied. “And we’ll determine precisely what habitat the endangered plants require.” The chemical analysis was Peter’s specialty. Perhaps he was alone now, or maybe he and the woman had gone out for the evening. I took a long sip of wine and felt my face grow warm.

“I don’t understand your work.” Theodore didn’t speak directly to me, but addressed the group, his voice rising. “Where’s the science in preservation?” He leaned toward me, his chest nearly flat against the table. “Where’s the advancement?”

The other men were silent. To avoid provoking Theodore, I told myself, staring into my half-empty wine glass. All my training and experience, the multitude of ways I could illustrate the importance of my work, in those tensely quiet moments, vanished from my mind. I could only think of Peter and how his evening might be unfolding. Had they finished the movie by now? Were they preparing to leave for a restaurant, Anna Maria’s or Café Citron, or having a drink on the front steps of his new building? I couldn’t let go of the idea that Peter was simply transferring the customs we once shared to this new person, that within a few months the woman would grow into the very space I once occupied, as though I had never been there at all.

When I looked up, all the men, even McKay, were tilting forward, wide-eyed. I finished my wine in two gulps, then pressed my lips together, certain that by now all the color had been transferred to the rim of the glass.

I pushed back my chair and stood. Ian rose and began to say something, but I turned from the table and left the malt shop. I stepped onto the porch, where I sat on a wood bench and gazed into the Loch. The bench was next to a window and I heard the men’s voices, although I could not distinguish the words, only the alternately high and low pitches. I assumed they were talking about me.

The night was clearer than most and I was able to see stars, bunched together like handfuls of confetti. After nightfall, it was difficult to tell where the land disappeared into the water, but I could distinguish the boundaries of the Loch by the geography: perfectly smooth, a long sprawl of darkness.

I didn’t hear McKay approaching the porch, and only realized he was there when I looked up and found him standing next to the bench. He wore a denim jacket, the fabric thin around the collar and elbows. He sat next to me, crossed his legs and rested his hands on his knees.

“You shouldn’t listen to Theodore when he drinks,” he said.

I shrugged. “I suppose preservation isn’t the most exotic of the sciences.”

“It’s not so different from what I do,” he said. “This is just a job for the others, but not for me. I’ve spent a lot of my life looking.”

“Sarah told me about your search,” I said. “She said you were living by the lake when she first met you.”

McKay told me that one evening, many years ago, he saw the Loch Ness Monster footage Tim Dinsdale had shot in the sixties on a TV program. He said it was like a switch inside him was turned on, and he knew that the life he had been leading, the job at the IT firm and the fiancée, was over.

“After a month on the Loch, I ran out of food,” he said. “The Craigdarroch was the closet place to go for meals. I’m embarrassed to say that several months passed before I even noticed Sarah.”

“What finally got your attention?”

“She took me into her office one afternoon and showed me the photos that visitors to Loch Ness had taken of the monster over the years.” She had framed them and hung them on the walls, a little something for the tourists. She had all the famous ones, the pictures taken by Hugh Gray and Robert Wilson and Frank Searle, but she had several others that he had never seen before, images that were vaguer, capturing only dark blotches or hazy shapes in the water — but, to McKay, no less exciting.

“That day in her office, she took down all the photos and gave them to me,” McKay said. “She took them out of the frames one by one and put them in my hands. And I saw what I needed to see.”

I was reminded of something from my graduate school days. It concerned one of the professors, Dr. Edgevale, who spent much of her career studying Sebastopol Meadowfoam, a rare species found in the forests of Northern California. I shared with McKay the story Dr. Edgevale told me one afternoon, in her office overlooking the campus quad. It was about the first time, after months of searching, she located a stand of Sebastopol Meadowfoam, how she had stood in the forest clearing for the longest time, staring at her discovery in disbelief; the stand she’d located sprawled on for several feet, the flowers bright white, the short stems plump as green slugs. How her world, in an instant, became as simple and small as petals and stems and rough-edged leaves.

“She said it was like looking at her life through a microscope,” I told McKay. “The way everything blurred for a moment, then got sharp and distilled.”

“I know just the feeling,” he said.

“I wish I did,” I said. “I really do.”

We watched the Loch for a while. He mentioned this was one of the few summer nights he’d been able to see stars. Then McKay asked me if I knew about the first recorded sighting of the Loch Ness Monster. I shook my head.

“The first sighting was recorded in the manuscripts of St. Columba,” he said. “Columba found a man who was being bitten to death by a water monster, and he made the sign of the cross, sending the creature away.”

I crossed my arms; the shawl was draped across my thighs and waist, and I studied the arrangements of the gold and brown flowers as I listened to McKay continue, his voice papery and rhythmic.

“There was nothing for a while. Then a story was discovered in journals from the early 1800s. The author and two friends were boating in the southern part of the lake and suddenly a creature appeared and rushed the boat, sending huge sprays of water into the air. The man wrote that it looked as though the monster was coming through a tunnel of water.” McKay spread his arms and raised his hands. “The swells overturned the boat and the man thought he and his friends were all most certainly dead. But, and this is the strangest part, the monster disappeared and in no time the lake was calm again and the men swam safely to shore.”

“Are you frightened when you go down in the submarine?”

“You can’t fear what you seek.” He reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out a cigar. “Got a match?”

I had a matchbook in my pocket, for lighting the candles in my room. I struck a match and cupped my hand around the flame. As he leaned in, I recognized the musky smell of the cigar.

“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.

I left Reelig Glen that day without collecting any data from the twinflower. When I met Sam — he caught my attention by waving two flashlights, the beams, for a moment, resembling large yellow eyes — on the outskirts of the glen, I told him I had been unable to locate a twinflower. And later, when another member of the research team discovered the very twinflower I had abandoned, I acted shocked and said I hadn’t been able to see very well through the rain and night.

The bagpiper did not play that evening because of the weather. The ground floor of the inn was quiet, as the other scientists had declined another night at the malt shop, completing final equipment repairs and packing instead. After returning from Reelig Glen, I had wandered around the Craigdarroch, hoping to bump into Sarah or McKay, or perhaps to even see them together, to witness some private moment of their marriage, but no one was around.

Later in the evening, I sat at the desk in my bedroom and stared out the window. I had discovered in the desk drawer a thin stack of Craigdarroch stationery, envelopes, and a black pen with the hotel name embossed along the side in gold. I placed a sheet of paper on the desk and picked up the pen and began to write.

July 20^th

Inverness, Scotland

Peter:

Today it rained. Today I found a twinflower. It was, like so many other things, not at all what I had hoped. But it is a flower and only a flower and how could I have grown to expect so much from it? Perhaps this is the origin of disappointment. When we give something more power than it could ever possibly possess.

How is it that you are already leading a different life?

I cannot say that I wish you well. Maybe one day I will.

E

I sealed the letter in an envelope and returned it to the drawer. I planned to send it the next afternoon, after I had returned from watching McKay’s descent into the Loch, not yet knowing that I would forget the letter altogether until I had left Inverness and was flying back to Washington, that I wouldn’t speak of it until I saw Peter at a botany convention in Chicago a year later, where I would press my legal pad against my chest and say, After we parted, I wrote you a letter, but I left it in a desk in Scotland.

I folded my arms on the desktop and rested my head against them. I listened to the rain beat the roof and watched it coat the glass — the panes looked like they were melting — until it eased and the night turned still. There was a knock at the door. It was Sarah, coming to deliver me a bowl of soup and some bread, which was wrapped in a paper towel. I thanked her and set the tray down on my desk.

“I wanted to make sure you got a proper dinner,” she said.

“You’ve been very kind,” I said. “You and your husband both.”

“I heard he took you to Urquhart Castle last night.” Her hair was pulled back, and she wore thin gold bracelets on her wrists. “That’s where he’ll depart from tomorrow morning.”

“For the last time,” I said. “Unless they find something, of course.”

“The last time for now,” she said.

I sat in the chair. “Does it worry you when he goes down in the submarine?”

“I’ve gotten used to that too.” She looked down at the floor for a moment. “One afternoon, last summer, McKay went diving with an underwater camera. Did he tell you about this already?”

I shook my head. Sarah told me that she had been in the lobby when he came running into the Craigdarroch, still in his wetsuit, wild with excitement. He said he’d seen the Loch Ness Monster, that he’d captured the creature on tape, that he finally had proof. He called two marine biologists he knew at the University of Aberdeen and they drove up to Inverness the next morning.

“While we waited for these men, he told me what the monster looked like,” Sarah said. “He said its fins resembled gossamer, that the color of its skin was deep green, like peat moss.” But, she continued, when the biologists arrived and watched the tape, there was nothing to see, just footage of lake water. McKay had protested, said something must have gone wrong with the recording, but they didn’t believe him and left.

“He doesn’t think I believed him either,” she said. “He’s still angry about it.”

“Did you believe him?”

“I wanted to.”

“And there was really nothing on the tape?”

“Not a thing,” she said. “I watched it several times by myself, pausing and rewinding, looking for just the smallest sign.”

She sighed and pushed up her sweater sleeves. She apologized for taking so much of my time, said I must be anxious to get some rest. We wished each other goodnight. After she left, I stood by the closed door and listened to her footsteps going down the stairs.

I woke early the next morning and set out for Urquhart Castle. The sun was rising when I started down the road; the landscape seemed so different than the one McKay and I had passed in the night. Gold light crept through the fog that was draped across the mountains, and the treetops poked through the haze like spears.

Once I reached the ruins, I stopped beside the tower and looked over the stone wall. The men stood on the bank, holding radios and backpacks full of equipment; the mini-submarine was already floating in the shallow waters of the lake. I wandered around the ruins, the hunks of stone, the slanted tower. I climbed the chipped steps, stood at the top of the structure, and gazed into the Loch. The surface of the lake was rippled like silk.

McKay waded into the water and climbed inside the submarine. Then Ian slapped the metal top and the men pushed the submarine into deeper waters. I noticed a figure sitting on the grassy hill between the castle and the water’s edge. It was Sarah, watching her husband’s descent with a pair of small binoculars. She sat with her elbows resting on her knees, the binoculars wedged between her pale hands. I wondered how many times she’d watched McKay disappear into the Loch, how many more times she would watch him before her patience ran out. There was unhappiness, I could tell, and yet I longed to know what held them together, as though that could give me some sense of how to set about repairing my own life.

The submarine disappeared gradually, like a vessel that had sprung a slow leak. I wondered what McKay was seeing through that tinted window. Murky water, shimmering fish darting past? The wind increased and it looked as though the breezes might lift the water like a dark curtain. Ian, Theodore, and Dale spread across the bank, occasionally speaking into their radios. Sarah was as still as a sentinel, and I wondered if this was an accurate portrait of their life together: he goes, she waits. I watched until the small waves closed over the dome of the submarine like a mouth. I had three more weeks in Inverness, and I imagined the days stretching before me like the clean gray lines of my graph paper.

I went down the tower steps and over the stone wall, moving toward Sarah. Fog was nestled in the crevices of hills, as though the clouds were unraveling. A gust of wind blew my hair across my face; strands stuck to my lips. When I reached Sarah, I sat next to her and pressed my palms into the grass.

“I’ll wait with you,” I said.

Without lowering the binoculars, Sarah asked what it was like being down in the submarine. “The other scientists brought it with them from London,” she said. “McKay’s been after me to sit inside it, but I didn’t want to.”

I told her about the control panel and the window above it, about the sonar screen and the creaking noise the door made when it closed. “It seems like a lonely place to spend so much time.”

“Lonely,” she repeated, placing the binoculars in her lap. “That’s one thing my husband’s never been afraid of.”

I leaned back on my hands. “So now we just watch the Loch?”

She wiped her cheek with the sleeve of her sweater. “Doesn’t it just look like the kind of thing that could swallow a person up?”

“If he really does see something, I hope the recording equipment works.”

“Oh, god.” She rested a hand against her forehead. “Me too.”

We were quiet for a while. The sun had fully risen, turning the sky into a clear expanse of blue. Sarah passed the binoculars to me, then lay on her back and closed her eyes. Her hair fanned around her head; the light hit the elegant line of her cheekbones. I wished McKay was here to witness her beauty.

I raised the binoculars to my eyes. Up close, the water was choppier, dappled with light. I scanned the Loch, but I didn’t see any sign of the submarine preparing to break through the surface and rise into the open air. I thought back to the night McKay took me to Urquhart Castle. What I had told Sarah, I realized, was not actually true; the submarine hadn’t struck me as a lonely place to be. It was removed, it was its own dimension, and that was what I had liked about being down there — that the whole mess of my life had felt so very far away. I wondered if this same feeling was what kept drawing McKay underwater, if that was, perhaps, the essence of what he and Sarah had been arguing about the morning I interrupted them. I was making things up now, I understood. For all I knew, I could have gotten it all wrong.

I increased the focus on the binoculars, wishing it was possible to see beneath the surface and all the way to the bottom of the Loch. I imagined it was me, not McKay, that was moving through the water in the submarine, the headlights piercing shadows, the interiors of caves. I imagined seeing the lines on the sonar screen shoot up and down, and then discovering the sound wasn’t originating from a particular place, but coming from everywhere, all at once. I imagined the sound passing through the walls of the submarine, a great hum that made the metal shudder, as though the vessel was being shaken like a toy. When a dark something moved in front of the window, the object was too large to identify; I only saw pieces and parts of a giant mass. And it was not fear that I felt, but a wanting. You can’t fear what you seek, McKay had told me on the porch, and I would want to know what the world held. That was one thing I felt sure of. I put down the binoculars and looked at Sarah. Her eyes were still closed. I shut mine, joining her in that darkness.