Reel Problem

"Carl, let Gerry call them. You have enough on your plate."

"Nope, my circus, my monkeys. I will deal with it!" Just then my phone buzzed. Looking down I saw it was Tony. So I picked it up.

"Hey Carl. Just back from the marina. They towed Reece's boat in while I was there. Low in the water, but at least you didn't sink it! I saw Sarah and she looked pretty embarrassed and more than a bit peeved. I let her know I saw her, so that cat is out of the bag. My guess is she should be home in the next few minutes, so expect a phone call. I'll talk to you on Monday when I can get to the courthouse and file the papers. Do you want them both served right away?"

"Might as well. Serve the asshole at the dealership if you can, but serve Sarah at home. I don't want her to have to deal with that shit at the hospital."

"Done. You OK there?"

"As ok as I'm gonna be for a while, I guess. Thanks for all the help."

"Oh, I'll send you a bill! I am a scum bag lawyer after all!" Tony laughed at his depiction of himself. "Talk to you soon Carl, say hi to Gerry."

Sarah phoned fifteen minutes later, just after I got off the phone with my dad. I debated answering but I knew I had to face this sooner or later and it wasn't likely to get easier.

"Hello Sarah, what do you want?"

"What do you mean? Where are you? We are supposed to be having a barbecue, remember!"

"Well, seeing as how you got out ahead of me and barbecued our marriage this afternoon I figured maybe you'd rather keep cooking up a storm with that asshole Reece!"

It got really quiet for a minute and I wondered if she was still there. Then I heard a faint. "Oh God," and a click as the phone went dead.

I am not much of a drinker. Alcohol and diving are a very bad mix, but Gerry and I get pretty blitzed on a bottle of eighteen year old scotch that night. I think Dianne poured us both into bed, but I'm not sure. I woke up Sunday morning to a really awful headache that I knew was self-inflicted. That knowledge however did not improve my outlook in any meaningful way! After several cups of coffee, two Tylenol, and some dry toast I felt relatively close to a human facsimile. Gerry didn't look any better, but he was willing to drive me back to the boat so we could move it to his friend's dock down river. It was mid-afternoon by the time we got back, but we caught the last half of the Saints game before unloading my utility trailer into his garage and shoving it into the back yard and out of sight.

I crossed the Biloxi Bay Bridge in the early morning and made my way to the Gulfport Biloxi Airport to catch the helicopter ride out to the rig in the gulf. The next ten days were all work. Doing saturation diving requires full concentration and that is what I gave it. We actually got the valve replacement done nearly two days ahead of schedule, which earned me a nice bonus. I was making two thousand dollars a day for a guaranteed twelve days. It was a nice payday, but as I said they don't come along every week, so I had learned years ago to live well within our means to cover dry periods. Sarah is an X-ray technician at the Pascagoula Hospital, so with her income we'd been comfortable and we'd been starting to plan for a family.

There were quite a few messages waiting when I got back to Gerry's place. A couple were for jobs, but there were three from Tony and about thirty from Sarah. She was sorry. She never meant to hurt me. She wanted me to come home. She wanted to talk. All the usual bullshit, I guess.

I called Tony first.

"Hey, how'd the job go? You back safe?"

"Yeah, job was ok, got done ahead of schedule. No injuries. Platform is back running smoothly. How are things at your end?"

"Oh, pretty interesting, I'd say. All the papers were served and the excrement hit the oscillation device fairly promptly. Reece denied everything, then had the gall to threaten a counter suit over his missing prop! When I couriered the pictures over to his old man things became much more interesting. You see, good old Reece owns twenty percent of the dealership, and George was not one bit thrilled about having the publicity and the liability hanging over his head. They are offering to settle quickly if you'll sign on to a non-disclosure order ensuring this stays quiet."

"That's bullshit. Not going to happen."

"Listen to me for a minute you damn hothead. You want the money quick and easy? This is the way to get it. All you agree to is that you won't divulge any details about the settlement. I can't either, but word will still get around about what happened and they can't go after you for the fact Reece got caught with Sarah, only the settlement details are covered by the gag order."

"What are they offering me?"

"One hundred thousand dollars."

"Nope, I want the hundred grand and his fucking boat! He doesn't get to keep the Malibu he used to screw my wife on! Does Sarah have any legal right to the settlement? Do I have to give her half?"

"Hell no! She gets zilch."

"Have you heard anything from Sarah?"

"Yeah, she called wanting to get a message to you. I told her you were out in the gulf somewhere. As far as I know she hasn't lawyered up yet. I think she is really hoping to patch things up with you. She talked to Jill for a long time one night. She swears it was a one-time thing that she wanted to get out of her system before you guys settled down to start a family. Sounds like Reece was after her for a long while. I think he just wanted to show he was still better than you. It really pissed him off when she chose you over him. He's not used to losing. Jill says Sarah had told her about him before but she had always managed to walk away. She said he played on telling her how much he still wanted her and missed her. She told Jill it was to be a one off that no one would ever know about and then she'd be ready to start making kids with you."

"Until the next time that slimy bastard came back for more! Sorry, I don't believe her. She knew damn well how I felt about that son of a bitch and how I felt about adultery. We had a long discussion before we got married because we both knew there would be times I'd be out on jobs for weeks at a time. Shit, she couldn't even wait for me to leave town, she had to fuck him while we were supposed to be on the golf course. How do I know if it was a one-time thing? Does it even matter? She still crapped all over our marriage and disrespected me with the one guy who would piss me off the worst! How do you hold a marriage together with no respect and no trust?"

"I understand, Carl. God, I've done this often enough. These situations are almost enough to make me give up family law altogether, especially when it is a friend. Look, you are going to have to sit down with Sarah at some point. I know you probably don't want to, but believe me, it is for your mental health as much as hers. I am not saying you can patch things up, although I think if you can get over your hurt and your pride it might be the best outcome in the long run. I've known you for a long time Carl, and I am now speaking as your friend, not your lawyer. I know how much you loved that woman, I'm guessing you still do. I know she loves you too, even though right now it doesn't seem like it. In spite of how mad you are, and how hurt, I want you to think about something. In the long run, are you going to be better off working to fix this mess and having a repentant Sarah in your life, or do you think you'll be better off without her."

"Tony, the truth is I don't know, but right now the thought of being with Sarah turns my stomach. I don't know if I can get over this, even if it was a one-time thing. She admitted to Jill that he's been after her for a while. If so, why didn't she come to me? She knows damn well I would have shut that little prick down in a heartbeat. The obvious answer is she enjoyed the attention more than she was committed to me. That's a damn big hurdle to get over and I don't think I can take that step. At least not right now."

I drove back to Moss Point three days later. It was Thursday and Sarah should be at work, but I phoned the house from a few blocks away just to be sure she wasn't there. I had written her a letter telling her how I felt and how hurt I was. I admitted that I had seen her on the boat with Reece and that I knew he had been pursuing her for some time and that she had hidden it from me. I told her I wasn't ready to see her or talk to her but she could email me or write me through Tony. I didn't give her my address, which was actually very close to her job in Pascagoula, where I now kept my boat. I left the letter on the kitchen table, picked up my golf clubs, my stock of scotch and wine from the bar, and my humidor with my cigars, then left. Quietly.

Well, it turned out the next day that I now still had a boat in Moss Point because Tony informed me that George Potter had forced Reece's hand to settle with me in full, including the damn Malibu. One last stipulation I had made was that Reece was not to be in any contact with Sarah until such a time as our divorce was final, should that go ahead.

Sarah sent me a long email that weekend, more or less confirming everything she had told Jill and apologizing profusely. Reece had slowly infiltrated her confidence, pretending at the onset to simply wanting to be a friend with no agenda. The bottom line was, she was still attracted to him but thought it was safe to just flirt a bit. One thing led to another and she had agreed to spend that fateful Saturday afternoon with him on his boat. Sarah admitted that while her head had denied that anything would happen, her emotions had been primed for the excitement of a little fling before we settled down to start a family. She secretly wanted to know that she was still hot enough to get another man's attention, especially someone like her old boyfriend, who was well off, good looking, and a known playboy of sorts on our small stage. The very thing that had driven her away from him four years ago, the fact that he was a player and skirt chaser, now made him the desirable 'bad boy', a contrast to me 'the good husband', the steady reliable guy who loved her unconditionally and with whom she felt safe starting a family. It was to be a one-off thing that no one would ever know about. On the boat they had agreed that they would enjoy just an afternoon of recreational sex with no strings attached and no plans to ever repeat it. She didn't want a divorce, she wanted me back and would do anything I asked if I would somehow find a way to forgive her.

Jason found me a buyer for the Malibu pretty quickly. He wondered if I would insist that it leave the marina but I told him I didn't care, because I had. He was sorry to see me go, as I had been a steady customer for nearly eight years, but he knew he'd find a new renter for my slip in no time. They were in high demand, and I was happy to have been able to make a long term arrangement with Gerry's buddy to take over his slip in Pascagoula. It took me a bit closer to the Gulf, but still on the Pascagoula / Escatawpa river system that was my bread and butter.

It was three weeks after my last communication with Sarah. I'd just gotten back from a six day job up parallel to interstate 10 putting a new water main under the West Pascagoula River and Creole Bayou. There were several new emails including a pretty nice job off for a rig repair down near Horn Island that could give me nearly a month's work. There were two Emails from Tony and one from Sarah begging for a meeting. It was now nearly six weeks since I'd seen her last that fateful Saturday morning. My emotions weren't quite as raw as they'd been, but they were far from healed over. I Talked to Tony for a while to get settled down, then texted Sarah that I would meet her at a big family restaurant a couple of blocks from her hospital. I figured it would be a safe place where we'd both have to keep our emotions somewhat under control.

She was sitting at a table waiting for me when I walked in. She looked a mess, but she was still Sarah, and I wasn't prepared for how hard it hit me to see her. She was wearing very little makeup, he eyes were dull, and she couldn't look me in the eyes. I noticed she kept her hands on her lap except to reach for her cup of coffee and then they were shaking. She was still wearing her scrubs from the hospital. Frankly she looked more like forty than the thirty-one I knew she was.

"Hi Sarah," I said as I sat down. "You doing OK?"

"No," she answered quietly, "but I expect you can see that for yourself. Thank you for coming and agreeing to see me. I know it must be very hard for you. I'm sorry." She looked up at me then and began to cry softly.

I just sat there and watched her. I wondered how I had gotten so hard that I could sit and watch her cry and not feel much of anything. That bothered me more than her crying. What was I becoming?

Sarah dried her tears and started again. "I know I have explained what happened and I know that my explanation is woefully inadequate. I wish I could tell you why it happened, but I just am not sure. I guess that sounds like bullshit, but I have asked myself over and over again these past six weeks what the hell I was thinking, and how I could get my life and our marriage so messed up. I can't claim an insanity defence, the psychologist I have been seeing tells me that is just an excuse to stop me from accepting my responsibility and dealing with my guilt. I'd like to push all the blame on Reece, God knows he deserves a bunch of it, but so do I. I lied to myself, I cheated on you, and I stole something from you that I can't give back. I know you don't want to hear it, but I am terribly sorry and I still love you."

"Sarah, it worries me that you can't figure out why it happened, because if you don't know why it will probably happen again. Until you can wrap your head around the why of your adultery we have nowhere to start from. I think that I believe that you are sorry for what happened, more than just sorry that I caught you with that son of a bitch, but until you know why you cheated, why you hid his advances from me, there is really nothing else to say." I tossed a five dollar bill on the table and walked out as she sat and sobbed.

It was nearly a week later that I got an email from Sarah. She'd been back to see her shrink and had forced herself to examine those weeks and months leading up to her betrayal. She'd had to admit her residual feelings for Reece, not love for him, but an attraction for the slightly hedonistic lifestyle and the sense of naughtiness that he portrayed. She wondered if I was too safe, too secure, and too ready to please her. The lure of the fast lane of Reece's lifestyle had become more and more appealing over time, and she had thought she could have just one whiff of it before she settled down to raising a family. The timing of Reece's advances had been a perfect storm. We had begun discussing kids and to her it signalled the end of her as a young desirable woman. Reece skillfully played on that and she gradually was convinced she needed to prove one more time that she was still a hot chick, not a mom in waiting.

That was what she had tried to run from. She wrote that she was sure it would not satisfy me, but it was all she had to offer me. Again she apologized and told me she now understood herself and what happened better, and knew she had been wrong all along, that she hoped she had not thrown away everything she truly held dear.

I received her email the day before I was to head out into the gulf on the project off Horn Island. I needed time to digest her words and a day was not going to cut it. I had left the divorce proceedings on hold for nearly two months while I tried to find a way forward. I decided another month wouldn't change anything so I prepared to send both Tony and Sarah an email. I emailed Tony but decided at the last minute to phone Sarah instead.

"Sarah, its Carl. How are you?"

"About the same I guess. Did you get my email?"

"Yeah, that's why I am calling. Look, Sarah, I don't know where we are going, but I want you to know I appreciate the fact you've at least tried to figure out why this happened. I still need some time to work through this, and here's the thing. I am leaving tomorrow for a job in the gulf. It's a pretty extensive overhaul on an older rig. There's a bunch of work to do on one of the legs. So we will be saturation diving on and off for maybe a month. It's the longest project I have taken on since before we were married. I have always said no these the past couple of years because I felt it wasn't fair to you. I accepted this because I didn't know if there was any reason not to. I know it's been just about two months, but I need to know if you are willing to leave things in limbo for another month while I'm gone."

"Carl, I will wait as long as it takes. I am not going anywhere."

"Sarah, I need you to know I am not making any promises... I may come back and want to finalize the divorce."

"I know," she said quietly. "I will live in hope that you find a way in your heart to forgive me, but I won't count on it. Please be very careful out there. Take care of yourself. Thank you for calling me." She sobbed then for a moment. "It is so good to hear your voice. Good bye Carl, I love you."

I couldn't say it back, but I wondered if I didn't want to.

The rig job was far from smooth sailing. The first week went well enough. We had three divers on the project and we rotated throughout the day with two of us being down at all times. Allan Forbes was senior. I'd known Al for a while and we had worked together before. He was good, conscientious, and he was a safety nazi. The third guy was a youngster, still in his mid-twenties, named Corey Houseman. He was ok, but his lack of experience showed up from time to time. We were in the middle of our second week on the project when the trouble started. We'd had brisk winds for three days, not enough to keep us out of the water, but enough to make it a bit miserable at the surface or in the upper water column where we'd get banged around a bit. It was day seventeen and I was in the sphere on rest cycle. Allan and Corey were working on a big patch weld on the number three leg when something went tits up. I was half asleep when I heard Allan yell something unintelligible and then heard Corey start screaming. I was up and in my rebreather gear in minutes and dropped through the bottom hatch.

When I got down to the three hundred foot level where we were working what I saw just about turned my stomach, which can be a very bad thing on a closed system rebreather. Corey was tethered to the leg of the rig with a jagged sheet of plate wedging him up against it. His welding torch was still in his lifeless hand and red swirls of blood were circling his face where his mask ought to have been. Allan was holding what looked like a crushed left hand and seemed to be in a state of shock. I knew in just those few moments that there was nothing I could do for Corey, but I needed to get Allan into the sphere at the surface and call up for the portable decompression chamber and a helicopter.

It was pretty bad. The wind had come up and the surface was rougher than was really safe, but we had no choice. Once I had Allan out of his gear I went back to retrieve Cory's body before the sharks got to him. I now had an injured diver and a corpse in the sphere. They finally got everything ready and I had to first push Corey's body out into the attached chamber so they could clear it away. When they got the decompression module attached again I helped Allan crawl over into the small chamber so he could be flown to the mainland. I sat back to start a slow decompression and desaturation. Because we were working at three hundred feet it would take me four days before I could safely come out. Fortunately we had constant video monitoring of the work site so I didn't need to provide information on the accident. In fact, I probably knew less than the rig supervisors did.