Is that how Caddie would remember him when he was dead? Would she, should she come across a photograph of him, need a minute to remember exactly who he was, as Ben once had when a picture of his father had fallen from a box of old papers he was carrying from his garage to the garbage can? Looking at the unsmiling face staring up at him from the ground, Ben’s first thought had been that it was a photograph of one of the more humorless American presidents, perhaps Hoover or Johnson. Only after recognizing the dog sitting beside the man, a surly shepherd that went by the name of Prince and that had once bitten Ben, requiring seven stitches to his hand, did Ben remember his father. Even then, the memory was more about the dog, which his father had refused to get rid of following the attack and which Ben had feared until its death nine years later. He recalled, too, that a framed photo of Prince had hung beside his own school portrait in the hallway between the bathroom and his bedroom, where he passed it several times a day.

Although warm enough during the dive, Ben realized that he was now quite cold. He got Angela’s attention and indicated that they should begin their ascent to the surface. She nodded, looked back at the wolf eel, which had retreated into its den, and the two of them resumed their circling of the pinnacle.

They moved more quickly now, decreasing their depth at a steady but unhurried pace. When they arrived at the layer of algae, they rose to fifteen feet and stopped there, pausing three minutes as an added precaution against complications from decompression. Unable to see, the minutes passed slowly as Ben checked his computer repeatedly, waiting for the counter on his display to reach zero and free him to surface. Finally it did, and he kicked up through the last dozen feet, breaking the surface not far from the Zodiac. Angela followed shortly after.

“I think your computer cheats,” she said as they made the short swim to the boat. “You always seem to have a shorter safety stop than I do.”

“But you always have more air left than I do,” Ben joked. “So that makes us even.”

Still in the water, he removed his BC, inflating it to keep it afloat while he gripped the rope running along the Zodiac’s side and heaved himself into the boat, propelling himself up with his fins. Then he turned and retrieved from Angela the two cameras and her BC. A moment later she slid gracefully over the side.

“How come I look like a walrus when I do that and you look like a mermaid?” Ben joked as Angela deftly removed her fins and stowed them in her mesh dive bag.

Angela started to speak, but Ben cut her off. “Don’t answer that,” he said.