We dive past the grocery store with its looted aisles and rusted shopping carts, over to the tall brownstones where conchs cling to the waterlogged plush of sofas and hold tight to the walls. Dad and I take out our knives, slice their grip and drop them into the nets, taking a good haul. There’s a machine on a bookshelf that Dad stuffs into the mesh alongside the winter coat, and I wonder if he’s getting worse. Sometimes I think he’s doing fine, but then I’ll find him sitting outside in the rain, his clothes soaked, and I’ve got to take him back in and heat up tea because he’s shivering. Dad starts pulling at the objects beneath where the machine sat and their paper covers come apart like fish food. Maybe his mind really is gone, and he’s envisioning those black round discs he’s stuffing into the net as flounder, the puffy jacket as the arms of an octopus.

I fill my bag with conchs, probably a haul of twenty before Dad flashes his light on me and we kick off, leaving the submerged neighborhood behind with its lawns of seagrass and eels. Then we follow the road as it curves uphill until finally the ground is beneath our flippers again, and we walk backward from the water, our tanks heavy with gravity.

I sit down on the truck’s flatbed and strip out of my diving suit in the spitting rain. Out over the ocean there’s still that thin patch in the clouds where you can almost see blue. Maybe this is the start, I think. Maybe the rains are ending. But I always think that, and it never happens.

Dad lifts our haul into the back of the truck. “Why’d you take all that stuff?” I ask. He doesn’t answer, just pulls a pack of cigarettes from the dash and lights one. Then he bungees the tanks into the back, and I feel the fat drops against my face, the incoming storm already drumming onto the roof of the cab.

“Time to head home,” Dad says and starts up the truck, leaving me with all my unanswered questions, just like he always does.