Even though three months had now passed since that chance encounter with Tom Middleton, Elliott was sure she would never forget her first time driving over the bridge from the Swedish mainland onto Öland. She’d taken a deep breath and felt her chest expand and a tension loosen that she hadn’t known she’d been holding. A swimming concoction of joy and nerves roiled in her stomach. She wanted to sing, to laugh, to yell. She had a job! In a fabulous location! With a celebrity!
She tried to hold on to that feeling every night when she found her eyes straining at her laptop, in preparation for yet another board meeting or budget presentation. Until they’d filled out the rest of the team, Elliott had at first been swamped with near-daily dives, and later been stuck doing odd jobs and endless administrative work. So much had changed since that first autumn day, and not all of it for the better.
When she’d finally arrived at the busy compound, Ellie found that she was both impressed and intimidated. The property was far larger than she’d expected, and she struggled to orient herself among the thick trees, winding paths, and the many outbuildings. When she finally found Nik, he was bent over wide architectural plans, negotiating in German with a contractor over which trees to remove and which ones to leave. When he saw Elliott haunting the periphery, he’d smiled and introduced her and the man by first names, then left him to take her on a tour of the compound. She found that she was the first of the team to arrive, and that some of them had not yet agreed to come on board, but within a few weeks their ranks would be complete, Nik was sure. She had no doubt in his ability to recruit serious talent for the project, and she told him so.
He quirked a funny smile at her and continued his orientation as the walked.
Once the renovations and repairs were complete, he explained, there would be a dozen full-time staff on the site, including Nik. The compound would serve a dual function: something like an archaeology field camp for university students, and a base camp for professional projects, for which Nik charged a pretty penny. Nik was the executive director of both ventures and would also have the title of excavation director. He was in charge of the funding, the hobnobbing, and the publishing. Working for him was his assistant, a young attorney called Anders, who was in charge of the legal logistics of Nik’s crazy plan; the permits, the contracts, the construction, and he also arranged Nik’s schedule and travel plans.
Elliott met Anders later that week and was immediately put off and a little intimidated by his no-nonsense efficiency, and a fastidiousness of manner that easily overshadowed her own. He was pedantic, arrogant, and obsessively committed to having the last word. When she’d asked if he was excited to work as Nik’s assistant, he’d informed her that he preferred his official title of Compliance Liaison. He’d been responsible for instituting the fika, a Swedish coffee break, as soon as he arrived and was relentless in his insistence that everyone attend. Elliott wouldn’t have minded, except that back then it was just the two of them, and he sniffed a lot. She left as early as possible whenever she could, silently begging the universe to send her more colleagues, quick.
Nik had decided to split the island into three thematic sites and appoint three site administrators to oversee them. Elliott was the head of the marine sites, because of her background in diving. He’d assured her that this would mostly involve supervising the dive teams, and that her time in the water would be minimal. He seemed apologetic about this, but she had been secretly thrilled. Elliott was probably the only marine archaeologist in the world who hated diving. But, in those first weeks, Nik had taken on a few contracts before they’d managed to assemble any dive teams at all, so she soon found herself prepping to go out nearly every day.
People describe diving as peaceful, relaxing, calming, tranquil. They enjoy it for the opportunity to explore the unknown on their own, to feel like the first and only person to discover a new world. The last of the earth’s great, unexplored frontiers. Something to do on vacation and brag about to your friends.
For Elliott, diving was as close to hell as she could imagine. She was somewhat claustrophobic by nature, and not even her graduate school fieldwork had cured her of that constant, itching anxiety. Of course, all her dives back then were near-shore settlement sites that had sunk after the last glacial retreat thanks to isostatic rebound. It was a peculiar and almost counterintuitive process that plunged settled shorelines underwater as the centers of landmasses, finally freed from the glaciers that weighed them down, rose up again. In some places around the Baltic, it happened quickly enough that entire village complexes were preserved in just a few feet of water.
But Öland was a completely different story. Sure, there were plenty of near-shore sites that awaited documentation, but those were boring, and the board that funded Nik’s venture insisted that the marine sites be limited to the myriad of shipwrecks that littered the Swedish coastline. Elliott was under instruction to document and remove as quickly as possible from as many sites as possible. Those were their specific words. Document and remove. She had grown to regard the board as little more than opportunistic vultures. Desk pirates. Corporate thieves.
After three months of going out with just one partner nearly every day, looking at a wet suit started to make her stomach lurch. Thinking of stuffing her face into a mask made her want to scream and thrash. She grew to hate the awkwardness of fins, the nonsensical acronyms thrown around like secret, insiders-only code, the constant weight across her chest of the diving vest like vast rubber bands, pulled tight by her own hands. And the increasingly bitter chill of the November cold.
Usually, when people meet a marine archaeologist, they envision glistening shipwrecks covered in dreamy corals and curious fish, maybe the odd encounter with a shark or two. On the few social outings she’d had those first few months, normal people asked questions like, Aren’t you afraid of finding a body? or What’s the deal with the Bermuda Triangle? and she would laugh and take another drink, resigned to another night of talking about a life that she was growing to resent.
The people she appreciated the most were usually other academics who ask the right questions like, What period do you specialize in? or Which was your first passion, diving or archaeology? or, most astute of all, How in the world do you find enough funding for that? This tended to occur at conferences and workshops, or on the occasions she’d been invited to nearby universities to pitch the field school to the archaeology departments around the Baltic, an unexpected part of the job she had really enjoyed so far.
The worst were the people who had some dive experience of their own and thought it was their job to give her advice, or make their experiences into a competition with Elliott and anyone unlucky enough to be listening, Well, when I was diving in the Red Sea, totally deadly you know… or Oh, you simply must go to Ataúro— that’s in East Timor, by the way, lovely country, totally undeveloped— I’m sure there’s something you can dig up there. She largely ignored these people, unless they were board members.
While she waited for Nik to recruit the rest of the team, Elliott counted the passage of her life in minutes and meters underwater, and how many minutes until she could go under again. She spent her days sifting about in gloomy muck, unable to see more than an arm’s length away, unable to communicate with her dive partner any more than an occasional reassuring touch in the gloom, unable to communicate with the surface at all.
Every aspect of the dig was shockingly well-funded, but Nik simply refused to spend the money for full-faced, radio-equipped masks. “You never know who might be listening,” he said, and she couldn’t tell if he was joking.
“It’s practically winter,” Elliott reminded him, “The weather is unpredictable. There’s already ice on the shore. I don’t know the Baltic. I need to be able to reach the boat.”
Not to mention I’m freezing my ass off out there, she’d thought sullenly.
“Ellie, you know this is just temporary. Just try to make do.” End of conversation.
Earlier, in October, Elliott and her temporary partner, Andy, went down on a calm, sunny day. Andy had been an acquaintance of Tom and Inga’s who badly needed the work and Elliott had been happy to finally have an experienced partner. Andy was fascinated by wreck diving, eager to learn, and she had been pleased at his easy temperament and steadiness.
It was unseasonably warm for late autumn. The water was tinted a gentle, ancient green by the mid-morning sun, and everything seemed normal. But by the time they re-emerged, the waves were grey and foaming, flecked with ice. It was impossible to board the tiny boat with the weight of all their equipment and sopping wetsuits. Andy finally struggled onto the deck, but Elliott tried and tried to get a grip on the ladder and haul herself up, until eventually a swell sideswiped the boat, pulling her under. The last thing she remembered was thinking that she was too smart to die so young before the bottom of the boat knocked her clean out.
She learned later that the crew had used a boat hook, a glorified stick with a blunt hook on the end, to fish her from the water like a piece of floating debris. The resulting damage to her wetsuit and equipment had cost thousands, and in the chaos she lost the mesh bag that held her finds for the day. All her work, all that pain and fear, for nothing. But she was grateful too. The incident had kept her out of the water for a few days. And, of course, they could have left her there to die. The crew still talk in hushed tones about the sound of Elliott’s head hitting the hull. Andy didn’t dive again after that, and quit the dig soon after.
Getting knocked out by a boat should have been the worst diving experience Elliott had ever had, but just three weeks later she was proved wrong. The new contender for worst experience was re-emerging during another autumn storm to find that the cheaply-contracted Estonian crew that Nik had inexplicably insisted on hiring had unhitched the dredging hoses, thrown them into the water, and buggered off. On this day, Elliott had been diving with Sofia, a flighty, energetic grad student from Stockholm. They had known something was wrong when the hose pressure had suddenly dropped to nothing, but from the wreck, the divers had almost no idea what was happening on the surface. Elliott and Sofia didn’t know if the boat had been lost or if they’d simply been left, so they lashed themselves together, cut away their dive weights and air tanks and tried to stay afloat, crying and praying, for what seemed like hours. When the storm finally calmed to the point that they could inflate their emergency buoy, the Swedish Coast Guard picked them up half-drowned and delirious with cold and fatigue.
Elliott had nothing against Estonians personally, but after that Nik made sure that all the crews had been hired out of Sweden. Sofia didn’t speak to anyone after the ordeal and returned to Stockholm before the end of the week.
As director, Nik had received an official reprimand from the Swedish government and been forbidden to order any dives during the winter season by his own board of directors. Elliott had been relieved, but only for a short time. Nik had scheduled a meeting with the board, where he charmed and seduced and pointed out that commercial dive shops offered ice diving tours during that same time that they’d forbidden his dives. They’d relented. Elliott was crushed. Nik had requested that she write a revised budget.
On the night of the dramatic rescue, she took a hot shower and finally lit the ancient stove in her dim, cozy cottage. Alone, snuggled into a bathrobe and sipping a glass of scotch whiskey left behind by Andy, she took stock of the first few months of what she’d been sure would be her dream job. Since she’d arrived, she’d been horribly injured, abandoned at sea, and was sure that she’d never feel warmth again. This wasn’t what she signed up for, and she had to make sure Nik knew it. She began to catalogue a list of her demands. Less diving, more digging. Fewer budget reports, more academic articles. More coworkers. More teaching. More people.
But how was she going to present this to Nik? She felt that she knew him well enough now, but didn’t want to jeopardize her security in what still promised to be a prestigious position. She would send him an email, she decided, and spent the rest of the evening trying to decide what to say. Eventually she gave up and returned to her budget report.
She was saved from having to confront Nik about her discontent the following morning when he appeared at the mid-morning fika.
“Ellie,” he began, “I want you to clear your schedule for today. You and I need to have a meeting, and I’m afraid it cannot wait. Is that alright?”
She thought of the dive prep that she had planned for the rapidly diminishing daylight hours and the budget reports that still waited for her and immediately agreed.
Anders’ eyes were wide with jealousy, but he sniffed loudly to conceal it.
“You’re unhappy, and I’m afraid it’s my fault,” he began.
Elliott nearly fell out of her chair. They were seated in the elegant sitting area opposite his chaotic desk. He had made her a cup of very good tea and now crossed his legs casually and clasped his hands as he spoke.
She tried to muster the energy to mumble some denial, but he stopped her.
“No, do not argue, I can see that it is true. I have asked too much of you, too soon, and this cannot continue. We must make some changes. I have let the board steer this ship for too long and I do not want to lose you as a result. So, first, no more dives until we have a proper team assembled, and an ongoing contract with a supplier.”
She could have wept.
“Second, I would like to have you on the hiring committee. Well…” he actually looked a little bit sheepish, “truthfully the committee is just me. I would like for you to assist me. I have put together files on the people I’m interested in and I want to have offers out on every position by the end of the year. Do you think you could help me by narrowing the field of candidates? I think I have chosen too many, and would like to hear your recommendation.”
She was stunned.
“Of course, that sounds great!” she agreed immediately. She knew it would mean a lot of work, but it also spelled the end of diving for the foreseeable future.
“Excellent!” he handed her a large stack of personnel files. “I have two more items to discuss with you. First, I want to have the field school running by March, and I want you to teach. Do you think we could get a group from your alma mater at Leiden in such a short time?”
“I’m not sure,” she replied, “And the Dutch don’t really do Spring Break like some other countries. March is right at the beginning of their regular term.”
“Ah, that is alright,” he said, “Just reach out to your contacts there with a proposal and let me know how it goes. We need to get some students around here! Fresh blood!”
He laughed in a way that made Elliott feel cheerful but vaguely confused.
“Alright, we’ll do our best with all these things, and the final demand I have of you is that you take a very long winter holiday. Write some papers, see your family, get embarrassingly drunk and kiss lots of people, but come back before the princess’ birthday, because I want to have a big party. Are we agreed to these terms?”
What in the world? What princess? she thought, but laughed and agreed to the terms.
“What about the investors?” she asked weakly.
“I will worry about the investors,” he said firmly. “We already have their money, so they will just have to wait. We are free from the tyranny of the board, at least for a little while.”
After wrapping up a few more particulars, Elliott floated back to her little cottage and threw herself into outlining a paper she’d been wanting to start for months. She’d hadn’t had a spare moment to write in ages, and she was so energized and hopeful after her meeting with Nik that she channeled all her joy into that blank page. The personnel files, the vacation plans, the emails; they could wait until tomorrow.