Free Find Me by Laura van Den Berg

sleeves are cuffed and I can see the muscle in her arms. Her hair is an inky knot at the base of her neck. She points the walkie-talkie antenna at something off in the distance. The chief engineer nods.
    This captain, she is striking, serious. The more I look at her, the more I can’t stop looking.
    I get on the floor, on my hands and knees. A primal feeling takes hold and I move closer to the TV on all fours. The paper lei swings from my neck. I get close to the screen, so close I can feel static on the tip of my nose.
    There are things aging changes and things it preserves. It’s like looking into a mirror and having my future self projected back at me. Still, it takes me the entire episode to believe what I am seeing.

 
    8.
    In an hour of TV, here is what I learn about my mother:
    Her name is Beatrice Lurry. She is an underwater archaeologist, a member of the Institute of Nautical Archaeology. A ship detective. She is the person who is called in after a ship has gone missing and the coast guard has failed in their pursuit. She has a special talent for searching.
    A special talent for searching, for finding, but not for holding on. I am proof of that.
    A Russian ship, named after an old film star, that vanished on its way to the Dominican Republic—recovered by my mother off the coast of Newfoundland. A cabin cruiser that disappeared in the Gulf of Mexico. That vessel had a unique gravity weight, was designed to be unsinkable, but my mother discovered that it did in fact sink, as did the yacht that went missing in the Indian Ocean, drowning its sixteen passengers.
    Of course, it’s not every day a ship goes missing. When she doesn’t have a live case, she searches for the wrecks, the long lost—the cruise liner that disappeared in the Arctic Ocean a hundred years ago; the merchant vessel abandoned in the South Pacific in the fifties. The wreck that made her famous was found near the Wallabi islands: in the hold she uncovered a mass grave, the casualties of a mutiny.
    She got her start on the wrecks, but it’s the live cases she loves best, the urgency of the search.
    In that hour of TV, I learn about her first expedition, when she was part of a maritime team looking for a steamship that sank in Lake Michigan a century ago, during a storm. They found the ship nearly intact, thanks to the freezing lake water. She was one of the technical divers, in charge of taking photos. She dove two hundred and fifty feet below the surface.
    Once she was down that deep, she never wanted to leave.
    I learn that she takes medication for migraines. When she is struck by one, she has to lie down in a dark room with a wet towel over her eyes. When she’s not at sea, she lives on an island called Shadow Key, just beyond the coast of Key West. The only way to reach the island is by boat. There are images of a red houseboat with porthole windows docked in a still harbor. She can’t sleep in a regular house, can’t sleep in anything that doesn’t float.
    â€œWater is neutral,” my mother tells the camera. “It doesn’t have wants.”
    On this voyage, she has a live one: The Estrella , a freighter that vanished en route from Miami to Argentina, an episode filmed when a memory-destroying epidemic was still something that existed only in the apocalyptic corners of our imaginations or didn’t exist at all.
    The Estrella was last spotted near Las Tumbas, in the Gulf of Mexico. When the vessel never reached its destination in the Argentine province of Santa Cruz, the cargo and the crew unaccounted for, including the captain’s wife and teenage daughter, my mother got the call.
    On the ship deck, she watches the sky and I notice the long grace of her neck. In the Common Room, I extend my neck, feel the muscles in my throat stretch, and search for resemblance. Midway through the episode, a storm blows through and the clouds shimmer with lightning.
    During the storm, my mother works in