I cut the wrapping open there in the daylight, water running off me, and I hollered up at the boys to shut the compressor down, because it was not the thing you brace yourself for when you pull a wrapped bundle up off a piling in fifteen feet of cold dark water. It was a mason jar, sealed with wax, dry as a bone inside, and packed full of letters and photographs and a thin gold ring.
The photographs were a young man and a young woman, black and white, dressed the way people dressed back in the fifties. And the letters, when I got them out careful and dried my hands, told the whole story. They were kids, in love, the summer of nineteen fifty-six, and they used to meet at the end of that yacht club pier, and the night before he shipped out, the two of them sealed up this jar, their letters and their picture and a ring he could not yet afford to make real, and they lashed it to the piling underwater, where the lake would keep it safe, and they made a pact. Whoever came back first would bring the other one down to raise it, together, and he would put that ring on her hand for good.
He did not come back. Not to that pier. The last letter, tucked in separate, was from her, dated two years later. He had made it home from the service, but his family had moved him downstate, and her folks had married her off to somebody steadier, and the two of them never did stand on that pier together again. So she came down alone, one last time, and read her letter into the jar, and sealed it back up, and left the whole of their young love tied to a piling at the bottom of the lake, because she could not keep it and could not throw it in the water and could not let it go.
If they ever pull this up, let it be the two of us who do it, old as we will be by then. And if it is a stranger, then mister, know that two people loved each other terribly once, right here, and the lake kept it for us when the world would not.
Well, I was that stranger, sixty-eight years later. And I am a stubborn man, so I went looking. And I found her. She is ninety-one years old, in a home outside Marquette, sharp as a tack. Her young man passed some years back, married to somebody else his whole life, same as her, both of them good long lives, both of them, she told me, never quite forgetting that one summer on the pier.
I brought her the jar. I put it in her old hands, her own letters, their picture, the ring he could not afford. She held that ring a long time, and she cried, and then she laughed, and then she asked me to do one thing. She asked me to take the ring back down and lash it to the piling again, and leave it there, because that was where it belonged, at the bottom of the lake that had kept their secret for a lifetime. So I did. It is down there right now, where two kids left it, where it will stay. Some things the deep dark water is supposed to keep.