I have been diving the old flooded quarry outside town here in the Soo for about ten years. Half the county swims there all summer, clear cold water, and I know that bottom like the back of my hand. Every ledge, every sunk log, every old tire somebody rolled in. So last week, when I saw something big down deep that had never been there before, something dark and shaped wrong against the pale quarry floor, my gut went cold before I even swam close. You do not get new things on a bottom you have dived a hundred times. Not big ones.
I finned down toward it, my light cutting through the green, and the shape came clear out of the murk. A car. An old one, sunk down there, and here is what stopped me, it was covered in algae and silt, grown over, the way a thing gets when it has been underwater a long, long time. Years. But I had been down here a hundred times and never seen it. Either I had missed a whole car all these years, which I could not have, or something had shifted it up from deeper down where the quarry drops off into the dark.
I swam up alongside the driver window, wiped my mask, put my face close to the clouded glass, and looked inside. And I hung there in the water, frozen, and then I kicked for the surface hard as I could, for the light, because that car had been carrying someone a very long time.
I will not describe it. I will tell you instead about a woman named Ruth, eighty-eight years old, who had waited by a telephone for twenty-nine years.
Her daughter was twenty-two when she vanished. Told her mama she was driving up north to think some things over, and never came home. No note, no trace, no goodbye. The police always figured she had just run off to start fresh somewhere, the way young people do, and Ruth spent twenty-nine years believing her girl was out there alive and unwilling to call. She kept the same phone number the whole time so her daughter could always find her. She never moved. She never gave up the waiting.
That car in the deep part of the quarry was her daughter. She had gone off the old quarry road in the fog that long-ago night, into the water, into twenty-nine years of her mother watching a phone that would never ring.
They told Ruth gently. And that old woman, who everyone thought would be destroyed by it, wept and then went quiet and then said the thing I have not been able to forget.
She did not leave me. All this time I thought she chose to stay gone. She was trying to come home. My girl was trying to come home.
Ruth got to bury her daughter before her own time came, which was not long after. She got to stop waiting. She got to know, at the very end, that she had not been forgotten, that her child had loved her all along.
I still dive that quarry. But I say a little something now, every time I go down, to a girl who was trying to get home, and to the mother who never once stopped watching the door for her.