The Girl of the Sea of Cortez by Peter Benchley

her something fine. So he had decided he would have to make the gift himself. And whatever he determined to make wouldhave to be made in secret—he could not hope to deceive Miranda as he had deceived Paloma about the pirogue. And if it must be a secret, it must be small enough to conceal.
    Yet it could not be a wood carving or a clay figure or a decoration fashioned of seashells. Anyone could carve wood or collect seashells. It had to be something that only he could do, so that for Miranda it would be a gift direct from his heart to hers.
    Once he had found the answer, it seemed obvious: pearls, a necklace of natural pearls. Of all the islanders, only he (and, through his teaching, Paloma) pursued the ancient skills of diving for and identifying and collecting and opening pearl oysters. He had maintained the skills only for his own amusement, for pearling was no longer profitable. The pearl beds had been depleted more than a generation ago, but even if they were to come back, the market for natural pearls had all but disappeared. People now preferred cultured pearls; they were rounder, had more luster.
    Jobim did not like cultured pearls. “They are prettier, and they do come from the sea, and they make a nice necklace,” he told Paloma. “But they are not natural. They are man trying to improve on nature. Nature is one miracle after another. Man can’t improve it; he can only change it.”
    Jobim had found only five pearls before he died, but he had helped Paloma refine her pearling skills. And so she had taken upon herself the task of completing the necklace. She and Jobim had begun something; he had gone away before being able to complete it; she would complete it for him.
    She thought often of how she would give the necklace to her mother. She didn’t want to seem overly sentimental, but, on the other hand, she wanted to be sure that Miranda knew the necklace was a gift from Jobim, no matter who had gathered most of the pearls.
    One of Jobim’s earliest lessons to his children was that truth was almost always preferable to lies. It was not only a moral conclusion; truth was usually easier. For one thing, it was easier to remember. But here truth was impossible, so Paloma had decided to weave the simplest lie she could. She would tell her mother that Jobim had collected the pearls and had hidden them with the intention of stringing them just before the anniversary date.
    “Thank heavens,” Paloma would say. “One day he swore me to secrecy and told me where they were, in case something should happen to him.”
    There would be happiness and sorrow and nostalgia and tears. The important thing for Paloma was that all the emotion would be directed not at her but at her father—at his memory or his spirit or whatever image Miranda still held of him.
    Paloma tucked the pearl into a narrow crack in the wood on one side of the pirogue, so it couldn’t roll around or spill out if the pirogue should tip. Then she lay back to rest for a few minutes, for she had found that to dive too soon after eating was to invite a painful knot in her side or, sometimes, to bring up bile in her throat, which could be very dangerous and was inevitably very frightening. If bile was rising, vomit would follow soon behind, and there was nothing worse than to vomit underwater. The gag reflex would force a spasmodic intake of breath, which would bring salt water into her lungs, which would force a violent cough and another breath and would drown her.
    She fell asleep. When she awoke no more than half an hour later, she recalled vividly that she had dreamed of a gull flying round and round her pirogue and laughing at her.
    It was a recollection more curious than uncomfortable, for she associated nothing whatever with any of her dreams—except those about her father, which were sometimes disturbingwhen she couldn’t separate dream conversations from genuine ones.
    Paloma slipped overboard and cleaned her mask. She grabbed the anchor line and