The Limits

The following is from Nell Freudenberger's The Limits . Freudenberger is the author of the novels Lost and Wanted, The Newlyweds, and The Dissident , and of the story collection Lucky Girls , which won the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story and the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She lives in New York. She was already underwater when the sun came up. Twenty-five meters down, the first light hit the rose garden in patches, like a hand-colored photograph. Plated clusters of Montipora resolved from gray to green, brown fingers of Acropora blushed pink. The fish woke up, like birds. You could hear them snapping and grunting, crunching the coral between the steam puff and gurgle from the regulators. A trio of black-tipped reef sharks passed in the distance, propelling themselves with subtle, muscular flicks. They ignored the divers, who were so close to each other that Nathalie could feel the surge from Raffi's fins. She put space between them, then indicated some coral outcroppings a little farther on, where the coastal shelf descended, then dropped off sharply to blue. Nathalie would have preferred to dive alone. This was her favorite hour of the day, when her time was completely her own; something was lost, even with Raffi. But things were done correctly at CRIOBE, and she was scrupulous about protocol, as well as the research station's equipment. No pleasure on earth was worth risking the place she'd made for herself here. They backpedaled a moment to admire a school of yellow-tailed demoiselles wake up and start to feed. The damselfish avoided the white patches among the green, yellow, and purple of the reef, but the bleached coral wasn't dead. It was only empty. Either the tiny algae that lived in its transparent tissue would return, restoring the coral's healthy color, or that living tissue would shred away and die, leaving the calcareous skeleton. Raffi touched her shoulder: a moray was emerging from underneath a rock. It was the same muddy green as the kelp and she had […]