Tuesday. May 28. 1991. The moon peaked full at 1:36, bare minutes before a rock pinged off my bedroom window. I opened it and stuck my head out to see Tig Simms, hungry and shining with moon madness. He whisper-called, “I need a pork chop,” and I went down to meet him. The moon set us in motion, and we zoomed through its light-drenched hours, driving toward a darker morning.

I used to think about it all the time, this night that started every evil in my life. It led me down a chain of bad, black days and sickened me, left me unable to eat or sleep. I was on medication for high blood pressure before I could vote. It was, quite literally, killing me.

Junior and senior years of high school, it was like living with a tapeworm in my gut, a lithe and sentient foulness gobbling any goodness I might hope to own. I believed that no one could truly know me unless they knew my worst. I thought that in order to forge any new friendship, have any hope of love, I’d be required to lay the live, vile beast of my past upon an altar, belly-creep, and plead my case.

I couldn’t do it, so I kept to myself. When I graduated, I ran west to California like a million lost girls had before me. There I tried drinking too much, I tried a variety of drugs, I tried losing myself in the sun-browned bodies of surfer boys and boat rats.

It was diving that saved me. One of the boat rats offered to take me out for a “discover scuba” dive. I agreed, thinking it would fill a couple of hours, or maybe it would be an escape, or maybe danger. It wasn’t any of those things.

It was prayer. It was a meditation. It was a stillness and a silence.

Afterward all I could think about was getting certified so I could go back down into that wordless world. I stopped getting high, because no one would let me dive high. I cut my drinking down to a beer every now and again, maybe two. I started exercising, to build my strength and stamina, and I started eating food again. Healthy food, in healthy portions, so I stayed fit for going under.

Sixty, eighty, a hundred twenty feet down in the deep blue, weightless, my breath a thrumming, bubbling rhythm in my ears, I was emptied out, quiet inside. I’d hang suspended in schools of fish who wheeled in perfect tandem, like a living tide. Sea cucumbers and starfish crept blindly on their own slow business. Turtles sailed past, heavy with majesty. Ocean creatures had no eyebrows, no mobile mouths, so each face was set forever in a single shape. Every dolphin smiled, every eel looked faintly angry, every seahorse seemed surprised to see me. They all had such blank, unjudging gazes, and the deeper blues beneath me felt like an infinity. The truth was in the water with us, but it didn’t matter; the sea could swallow anything.

In that beauty, so vast and varied, I felt my own smallness in the wide, wild world. It let me forget myself and yet be wholly present. It let me stop trying to die. If I hadn’t ever stepped off that first boat, truly, truly, I would not be breathing now.

My life on land got better, too, though it didn’t come like a lightning bolt. It was more like the turning of a long, slow tide. I practiced letting any thought about the past sink out of my brain, slide down my spine, and disappear into my own deeps. My history lived below my words, under my thoughts, even lower than my knowing, though it was still as much a part of me as the red-meat organs in my abdomen. I never thought about my liver, but it was always there; it did its silent, dirty work in the dark of me, necessary, unexcisable, but not a thing I thought about. Not ever.

Now when I saw certain news stories, or sometimes on Ash Wednesday, I’d remember it was there, but that was all. I never went down deep enough for words or images. Not even when I found myself inside an echo of my past, like the night that we told Maddy I was pregnant.

Davis was anxious about it. Maddy’d been an only child for thirteen-plus years. Still, she said the right things and smiled. I don’t think he saw the worry flash across her face.

Afterward I couldn’t sleep. I went down to the kitchen for hot tea, and there was Maddy. She was framed in the open door to the backyard, her feet still on the righteous side, touching the tiles. The rectangle of night I saw around her was teeming with regrets that could last her whole life long, and she was walking right out into it, fearless and young-stupid and so dear.

She looked over her shoulder with the caught face of a small animal, frozen in the center of the road. But I wasn’t headlights. I was only her Monster, who loved her so. I went to her, took her hand off the knob, closed the door. I could feel my worst things, sunk deep, yet still alive inside me. I wanted to dredge it all up, show her, and then ask, Do you see how high the stakes are, every minute? But she was just shy of fourteen. She had every wild young animal’s faith in its own immortality. The only thing my history had the power to change was the way that she saw me.

“Who are you meeting, girl-child?” I asked instead, quite stern.

“Just Shannon,” she said, and I believed her.

I said, “Go text her. Tell her you got busted and she better get her butt in bed or I will call her mother.”

“Are you going to tell Duddy?” she asked, nervous.

“Of course. I tell your father everything,” I said, and this was almost, almost true. “But I’ll also tell him you and I had a good talk and that you won’t do it again. Because you won’t, right?” She nodded, but she still looked worried, so I gave her a line from The Princess Bride, our favorite movie. “‘Buttercup doesn’t get eaten by the eels at this time.’”

She grinned and kissed me, saying, “You are the best monster,” before running, light-footed, for the stairs.

I let the mass inside me sink and settle, unexamined. Just as I had three years ago, when Char came down with the flu while her husband was out of town. She had a fever over 102 even on Motrin, and she was sweaty and so shaky she could hardly stand. I moved into her house, minding teeny-tiny Ruby, keeping Char hydrated with juice and broth. When her fever finally broke, she grabbed my hand and said, “You’re my best friend. Isn’t that stupid to say out loud? We aren’t nine.”

I looked at our clasped hands, and I thought, Char, you have no idea what you are holding. The urge for confession was so strong—to be wholly seen by my dearest friend—that I felt it move through me like a cold and salty wave made of every unnameable feeling. I saw that moon, fat and full, centered in my mind’s eye. But it was not Charlotte’s job to forgive me.

All I said was, “We should make each other bracelets,” and we laughed.

The closest I ever came to letting it rise was almost five years back, when I went over to Davis’s house for dinner and found that Maddy was at a sleepover. We only spent time at his place when she was home, the three of us watching PG-13 movies, ordering pizza. Later he’d walk me out to my car. We’d been dating almost a year, but sex had only recently begun between us, and always in my studio apartment, lights off, blinds drawn. He never stayed the night. When Maddy woke up every morning, her dad was there alone, scrambling her eggs.

That night he made dinner for me. Oven-fried chicken, steamed green beans, salad, mashed potatoes. Davis cooked like a man who’d gone straight to Betty Crocker for advice after his wife had left him with a second-grader. Basic American meat and three, seasoned with salt and pepper. It wasn’t bad, but he pushed the food around on his plate like a TV actor pretending to have dinner.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

He shook his head. Swallowed all the nothing in his mouth. He looked so grave, so sad, that if I hadn’t understood him so well, I would have assumed he was breaking up with me.

“I’m going to say yes. To you, to Mads, the whole package,” I told him, but he sat there staring down at his uneaten food. I added, quietly, “I’m not the kind who’ll ever leave you.”

He met my eyes then. Nodded. Still solemn, he pulled the small velvet box out of his pocket and slid it across the table to me. The ring was simple and elegant, a rose-gold band with a modest marquise-cut stone. His ex-wife’s was smaller and cut round. I’d seen it in the picture of her that Maddy kept in her room.

“Yes,” I said immediately, and then, blushing, “I mean, did you want to ask?”