The Reef

Warily, he kept his eyes averted from the plate of cookies on the table. “I hear Bowers is having a great time finding new ways to describe pork to Dart.”
    “Hmm. Bowers and I, and a few of the others, enjoyed quite a hardy breakfast this morning.” She laughed. “Rest easy, Hayden, I won’t describe it to you. Have a seat?”
    “It’s embarrassing for the team leader to lose his dignity this way.” Grateful, he lowered himself into a folding chair. “Too much time in the classroom, not enough in the field, I guess.”
    “You’re doing okay.” Happy to have company, sheturned away from the monitor. “The entire film crew’s down. I hate to be pleased with anyone’s misfortune, but it’s a relief not to have them hovering for a couple days.”
    “A documentary will pump up interest in this kind of expedition,” he pointed out. “We can use the exposure, and the grants.”
    “I know. It isn’t often you have the benefit of a privately funded expedition, or one that pays off so successfully. Look at this, Hayden.” She lifted a gold watch, complete with chain and fob. “Beautiful, isn’t it? The detail of etching on the cover. You can practically smell the roses.”
    Lovingly, she rubbed a thumb over the delicately etched spring of buds before carefully opening the clasp.
    “ ‘To David, my beloved husband, who makes time stop for me. Elizabeth. 2/4/49.’ ”
    Her heart sighed over it. “There was a David and Elizabeth MacGowan on the manifest,” she told Hayden in a voice that had thickened. “And their three minor children. She and her eldest daughter survived. She lost a son, another daughter, and her beloved David. Time stopped for them, and never started again.”
    She closed the watch gently. “He’d have been wearing this when the ship went down,” she murmured. “He’d have kept it with him. He might have even opened it, read the inscription one last time after he said goodbye to her and their children. They never saw each other again. For more than a hundred years, this token of how much she loved him has been waiting for someone to find it. And remember them.”
    “It’s humbling,” Hayden said after a moment, “when the student outstrips the teacher. You have more than I ever did,” he added when Tate glanced up in surprise. “I would see a watch, the style, the manufacturer. I would note the inscription down, pleased to have a date to corroborate my calculation of its era. I might give David and Elizabeth a passing thought, certainly I would have looked for them in the manifest. But I wouldn’t see them. I wouldn’t feel them.”
    “It isn’t scientific.”
    “Archeology is meant to study culture. Too often we forget that people make culture. The best of us don’t. The best of us make it matter.” He laid a hand over hers. “The way you do.”
    “I don’t know what to do when it makes me sad.” She turned her hand over so that their fingers linked. “If I could, I’d take this and I’d find their great-great-grandchildren so I could say—look, this is part of David and Elizabeth. This is who they were.” Feeling foolish, she set the watch aside. “But it doesn’t belong to me. It doesn’t even belong to them now. It belongs to SeaSearch.”
    “Without SeaSearch, it would never have been found.”
    “I understand that. I do.” Needing to clarify her own feelings, she leaned closer. “What we’re doing here is important, Hayden. The way we’re doing it is innovative and efficient. Over and above the fortune we’re bringing up, there’s knowledge, discovery, theory. We’re making the Justine, and the people who died with her, real and vital again.”
    “But?”
    “That’s where I stumble. Where will David’s watch go, Hayden? And the dozens and dozens of other personal treasures people carried with them? We have no control over it, because no matter how important our work, we’re employees. We’re dots, Hayden, in some huge conglomerate. SeaSearch to Poseidon, Poseidon to Trident, and on.”
    His lips curved. “Most of us spend our working lives as dots, Tate.”
    “Are you content with that?”
    “I suppose I am. I’m able to do the work I love, teach, lecture, publish. Without those conglomerates, with their slices of social conscience, or eye for a tax write-off, I’d never be able to take time for this kind of hands-on fieldwork and still eat on a semi-regular basis.”
    It was true, of course. It made perfect sense. And