I was the one who fished Izabella out of the sea.

It was just like her to do something like that, convince me to help her row out for an adventure, then dive too deep and come up too fast. “Beware the Bends,” everyone warned when we registered for diving lessons, but Izabella never listened. She lept before I could act and swam deeper than I could see. Minutes later, her hands splashed atop the water, but her legs hung immobile.

I knew what happened, even before ambulance lights danced across the sand and the official doctor’s verdict. A bubble of air in her spinal cord exploded during her rapid ascent—the Bends.

She couldn’t even think about her paralysis, only the dragon skeleton, the answer to her riddle. “It was so beautiful, Anita,” she kept repeating. “I almost didn’t come back until I remembered I needed to take care of you.”

That was two months ago, and she still hasn’t shut up about her skeleton.

For Izabella, diving connects her to our parents. For me—they haunt me, just beyond the view of my diving mask. Each time I come back, and they don’t is a blank puzzle piece to an unknown picture.

Their death was one of those accidents everyone warns you about. They went on a tour to explore deep-sea reefs. When the guide loaded up the boat again, they weren’t there. They weren’t missed until he counted the oxygen tanks he lugged off his boat. When he rushed back to the reef, all he found was their emergency life vests bobbing in the waves.

“They saw something so beautiful they couldn’t stand to leave it,” Izabella determined. Then she began searching for whatever was so beautiful our parents would abandon their children for it. I let her think it, for what else was I supposed to do? It was happier than my theory.

When Izabella heard the rumors of a dragon skeleton, she was positive her search was over. Now that she’s seen it, she’s even worse: “They saw the dragon,” she repeats every night as I lift her out of her wheelchair and lay her in her bed, straightening her legs and tucking them in. “It called to them. They were so enraptured they couldn’t leave.”

“Dragons aren’t real,” I always retort. “If they were, their skeletons wouldn’t talk to people and demand they leave their children behind.”

“You’re just jealous I saw it, and you didn’t.”

“You’re using your imagination to explain away something that shouldn’t be okay, Izabella! They were hundreds of miles away from your stupid dragon.” I huff. Izabella should know better than to believe in enchanted dragon skeletons. “Are you really willing to think that our parents abandoned us over bones rotting on the ocean floor?”

She doesn’t respond after that, just leans back into her pillow and stares at her ceiling. She’s not in the room anymore. I know she’s under the water, reaching out for our parents as they swim together alongside the dragon’s carcass. I’m never sure if I’m swimming along with them in her mind or not.

But then, one day, instead of staring up toward the ceiling and diving into the water she imagined there, she reached under her pillow and pulled out a folded sheet of paper. “Here,” she said, thrusting it towards me.

I unfolded a hand-drawn map. A red crayon line led from the docks out to the ocean, around a shaky island to the cliffs on the far side. ‘Dive here’ was scrawled near an X. A smiley face resided next to the X.

I stared at her. “What—”

“So you can find her too,” she said earnestly. “So you can understand why they had to leave us.”

“I don’t want to find her,” I told her, holding it back out to her. “I don’t want to understand.”

She crossed her arms and turned her eyes to the ceiling. I was left holding the paper out until finally I sighed, folded it carefully back up, and slipped it into my back pocket.

I was honest when I said I didn’t want to visit the dragon. But the paper itched in my pocket, and it whispered from my drawer. I tried throwing it in the trash but Izabella’s sun-yellow face convinced me not to. I tucked it back in my drawer and turned up the music to drown out my thoughts.

I managed to resist it for an entire week. But Izabella stopped talking to me after I told her I threw it away, and my curiosity made me peek at it again and again. Finally, I couldn’t stand it anymore.

I waited until my aunt worked a night shift and Izabella was watching TV, then slipped out the front door, down the dock, and into the rowboat. At Izabella’s “X-marks-the-skeleton,” I grabbed my underwater headlamp and checked the air in the small tank before peering over the edge of the rowboat.

So what if it was dark? If there was no one to pull me out of the water if I got the Bends too? Maybe the dragon would speak to me, show me its beauty like it did everyone else. Maybe I would die here, and Izabella could live peacefully knowing her imaginary dragon held her entire family.

I gulped my last breath of fresh air and dove.

I was expecting a rock formation vaguely resembling a dragon for Izabella to project her imagination on. Instead, deeper than I ever dived before, teeth as large as my arm filled my flashlight-lit vision. The eye socket was next: void, craterous, unseeing. A blue tang swam through, then, seeing me, darted back in.

I swam further along the skeleton, over her wing bone stretched out across the rock, and reached the ribcage Izabella couldn’t shut up about, where the fish lived and invited her to swim among them. They darted back and forth, only taking on color when they ducked near my headlamp.

Coral filled the dragon’s stomach, and the fish darted between the bones and through the dancing sea anemone. A lobster sat where the heart should have been on an outcropping rock, watching me. His claw raised like a hand, seemingly waving me in.

I touched a rib bone, rough and strong. Suddenly, with one flash, the fish turned as one and fled, twisting and diving into the coral. The lobster dove backward into the rock, till all I could see was the tip of his claw. The water around me darkened so that I could see the skeleton and nothing more.

Then, she spoke. The dragon.

Little Anita, have you finally come to see me?

Her voice echoed, rough like beach pebbles scraping against my skull but addicting, a creeping invincibility crawling up my arm. My hand stuck to her bone.

Now you understand, don’t you? My power, my glory. I sit here and wait for the extraordinary to find me—for you. I wait for you and then I rebuild you, into all that you can be.

My breath came faster and faster. The thump of my heart—her heart?—was a drum in the background. Bubbles from my diving mask rose faster before my eyes. Somewhere, from the recesses of my memory, there was an instructor from the island, begging me to not hyperventilate and burn through all my air. He was a whisper, the dragon a roar.

You’ve tried to be strong on your own for so long now. And what has it come to? Do you think you can protect Izabella forever?

I wanted to respond, but it felt as if the force of her voice pulled the thoughts, the words, directly from my mouth. Jealousy seeped in, replacing my stolen thoughts. I wanted the power to drop people speechless.

You couldn’t protect her that night—and that’s why she’s in a wheelchair. Because you were powerless. But, my little Anita, you don’t have to be.

I tried to scream but there was no sound, just a burst of bubbles from my mask that filtered in front of my eyes.

Little Anita, remove your mask and enter me.

Suddenly, I became my parents, so enraptured I could see nothing else, feel nothing else. Izabella was so far away, sitting beyond the reach of my thoughts. If I swam up, was there a surface? Air? Who needed it? I could breathe water—I could live forever. I had the dragon.

The water was a smothering blackness surrounding me. Her heart continued pulsing through the water, drumming inside my head. My fingers brushed the edges of my mask, reaching to disengage it, open it, enter through the cracks in her rib cage, and sit next to the lobster by her heart.

My watch beeped—steady, sharp. It pierced through her voice, stealing back my thoughts. My air was running low, the pressure into the red. Just then, I saw it bobbing just at the edge of my vision, pressed against her backbone: a fish, upside-down, dead, trapped.

Like my parents.

Like Izabella’s legs.

Her skeleton suddenly repulsed me. I kicked off, pushing myself as far away. Everything around me was dark. The water still pulsed with the beat of her heart. Gasping bubbles led the way up, and I forced myself to keep pace with them.

Little Anita.

Anita.

Anita!

I focused on the bubbles and rose. When my head broke through the surface, I yanked off my scuba mask and gasped in the air. I was about 100 yards away from the rowboat. I butterfly kicked my way over, and hauled myself over the side. I crashed onto the seat, and lay there, gasping. Every once of adrenaline had drained out.  Every muscle ached.

You aren’t strong without me, are you, Anita?

“Yes, I am,” I muttered. With the last ounce of determination I had left, I slouched up on the rowboat seat and drug the paddles toward home.

I beached the rowboat and slogged to the house. At the door, I paused. My heart still trembled with a pound bigger than myself. An incessant itch tugged at my eyes, dragging them back to the water, to the moonpath that led back towards her.

It’s not too late, my little Anita. Her voice was a claw now, digging into the crevices of my brain. Come back. Come back to me.

I closed my eyes and grabbed the handle. Blindly, I staggered in and slammed the door behind me.

All at once, she was gone. I opened my eyes. I stared out the kitchen window at the sea. A cloud rolled across the moon and the path across the waters faded.

She was gone.

A tear rolled down my cheek. Joy? Sorrow? Fear? Perhaps it all. I turned and forced myself up the steps. A water trail followed me to my bedroom.

“You saw the dragon tonight, didn’t you?” Izabella’s voice came out of her bedroom doorway. She sat in her wheelchair and rested her chin in her hands, delighted.

I paused. “I did.”

“She was worth it, wasn’t it?”

I knelt at Izabella’s side. Her wheelchair’s wheels were nicked by pebbles on the trails we forced it across searching for the best views. Sand clung to the frame from when she wanted to go to the beach and got it stuck and I rescued her and lugged it to the ocean so we could sit in the water. Flowers haphazardly covered the seat from the day she tired of its grim grayness and decided it needed color.

The dragon was only a faint memory now, a slight scratch across the recesses of my mind. It throbbed, but it healed.

“She wasn’t worth it,” I said, holding Izabella’s hand. “She will never be worth it.”

– Daleen Cowgar