he water will be smooth and calm, dark gray. Still shrouded in morning fog, the oil rig called Heidi pokes up like something preternatural at the south end of the bay. The boat thumps against the choppy waves tossed back by the breakwater. The wind whips your hair into your mouth. You taste salt on your tongue, your lips. You pull your hood over your head, watch the low, bruise-gray clouds, the gunmetal sheen of the water, the white flecks of foam. So far, okay.

As a child, you were fearful of the ocean, frequently nauseated on boats. Gripping ropes you knew were too thin to hold you back, you stared between them at the heaving sea, its color inpenetrably dark like the skin of some animal, its swells undulating. "Nothing worse than this," your father would say, holding your shoulder as you vomited over the edge, and then, "Keep watching that horizon, I've got to go help tack."

Five years in a valley, your father pursuing new, inland hobbies, his divorce from your mother finally final, and you got over it. But as you sit to pull on your booties, your eyes level once again with those ropes, that gray water, you remember the terror of the old predicament, the entrapment you felt on the open sea. Now you move easily on deck, swing a leg over those ropes as if they were nothing at all. You scan the water's surface with a pro's calculating squint, watching for the channels of blue into gray that mark the movement of the tide into the bay, the possibility of herring, glittering and alive below. As if you'd made it all up.

Mats loves the freighters, the cruise ships, the abandoned oil rigs named for women. "Is so American," he says. "So unapologetic. So ugly it is beautiful." His first morning at the lab, you showed him the closet of aprons, beakers, calibrated droppers with soft rubber bulbs, lightly dusted, like a row of newborn mice. That afternoon on the boat you read him movie star gossip and advice columnists from the L.A. Times, and he said your voice soothed him. A week later, he made you matjes herring, his grandmother's recipe, and you were impressed, a man who kept family recipes alive, a man whose smooth skin and nearly hairless legs and arms belie thick brown hair, a beard shot through with white and orange and blond, as if dappled light had been caught there, bristly to the touch. You are worried about him.

He stares at the clock as if he were watching grains of sand fall between his fingers, his own life trickle from ample opportunity into lost potential. You wait through two minutes, the red dots reconfiguring new numbers, and then reach across him and turn the clock upside down. "7:14" reads like a flash card, a foreign abbreviation. It's Saturday. "'HIL'," you say. "And in one minute, it'll be 'SIL.' Does that mean anything in Swedish?"

"Seven o'clock on November 18, 1994."

You throw back the blankets, stand up. "I'll make us pancakes. Cloudberry delight." One of his grandmother's specialties, he told you the night before. You loved his description of cloudberries--a fruit you've never seen, a fruit that sounds like a fairies' meal out of a children's book: small, golden lobes boiled to opaque softness then folded into cream. Mats gives you a look that approaches pity. You kiss him on his brow, his eyelid, the tip of his nose, his chin, his ear, his neck, his collarbone. You know that epidermal cells regenerate every seven years. You have shed the skin of the girl who was afraid of the ocean, the touch of your father's hand on your shoulder, the embraces of past lovers. You keep kissing Mats, all over his body now, pushing seven years farther away second by second, kiss by kiss keeping touch alive. He smiles. "Woodpecker is a strange bird. We have in Sweden too."

In the water, the familiar weight of the tanks on your back is a presence more than a burden. The boat's hull will loom, ominous and intrusive. You never let it out of your sight. Over the roar of your mouth hose, you can hear when the engine is cut. Herring, turning as one, do not break rank. You check your watch, check your air, empty your BCD in a cascade of bubbles, lower your body. The deeper you go, the darker the water, but by the time you are aware of this, feel its coldness against your cheeks, you're already completely in it.

You went into the cabin willingly although you'd known since childhood it was where the boat's pitching was the worse. You lay back on the lumpy life preservers, you turned your head, you lifted your legs. It happened more than seven years ago, but it has never been sloughed off your skin. It went to a place deeper than touch, punching through superficial layers of skin like a fist through paper. You didn't feel pain until he pulled out. You asked if he was okay. A day later, bruises bloomed on your forearms, fists, ankles. His back was to you as he buttoned his jeans, climbed out the cabin hatch. You turned and threw up onto the life preservers. You left your pants where they'd been thrown, over a greasy, coiled rope, and dug through the locker of wetsuits, pulled on an Extra Large. The coast guard office,a small trailer with a huge antenna like some hyper-sensitive insect crouching at the edge of the marina parking lot, carried all the reassurance of dry land in its molded plastic chairs, its Formica countertop, its fluorescent tube lighting. At the hospital, they scraped skin from under your fingernails and scolded you for not bringing in your pants and underwear as they sliced off the wetsuit in long, black strips.

"All that time," Mats says. "Gone."

"That's the way it is. There's nothing we can do."

"But we do not have to give in." He frowns. "I think I discover now you and I are philosophically different on this matter."

Cloudberry delight no longer seems an option. "How could I not give in to time? Time is beyond my control. It's a fact of life. Like the tides. It's inconvenient to have high tides at four a.m., but that's when they are sometimes. We can't change them to fit our schedule. Or like seasickness. I'm a good diver, I know, but I get nauseated. As soon as the boat gets past the breakwater, I lose it. Sick as a dog."

"Dog?"

"It's just an expression."

"Have you tried transdermal patch?"

"No."

"Is magnificent. If you try it, you will be fine. It corrects the balance. It's all in your ears."

Quietly, because you wish it were, you say, "Okay."

"See? You can control." Mats smiles. "In Sweden we have little daylight in winter. So we have festivals. Is form of control. Candles everywhere."

Mats' grandfather was a fisherman in Falkenberg for sixty years, plying the waters of Kattegat for herring and cod in summer, repairing nets in winter. He had a heart attack at the wheel of the Lillemor one summer Mats was home from university. Mats brought the boat in, tied her up, rinsed her hull and deck with fresh water. "I still remember nothing from the ride in," he tells you. "Nothing." You stroke the smooth skin on the inside of his elbow. The clock shows new numbers, numbers that mean nothing upside down but still show a change.

The mist will have burned off, Heidi shining in the morning sun. You will blink and squint, wince at the noise of the motor, of gulls squawking, of sea lions barking. You will sit on salt-stiffened cushions, pull off your gear, sip ginseng tea. "How you doing?" he will ask, his pale hand next to yours on the rope. You'll close your eyes and begin to hum. Your father would sing to you from movie musicals, strongly at first then quieter as you started to drowse off, able at last to close your eyes. "Nothing Comes from Nothing," he'd sing, and in its words you'd hear the promise of redemption, of ground beneath your feet that did not move.

"Somewhere in my youth . . . or childhood," you'll begin, and then laugh, open your eyes. Mats will look puzzled, but when you start to explain he'll lift his finger to your lips. "Keep singing," he'll whisper, and you will, starting in the beginning and going through the whole song. You won't look up. You won't need to. He's not going anywhere. Mats is right here.