Abby Brooks

I’d given her my solemn word. That’s how I found myself diving under the murky water, unearthing handful after handful of the ocean’s floor, praying that the ring would somehow emerge with the pebbles and grains of sand. My friends laughed at me, ass up in the water, wearing a pair of goggles I’d borrowed from an 8-year-old. I felt like Kim Kardashian searching for her diamond earring. Unlike Kim, the only value this piece held was not monetary but sentimental.

I’d lost my mom’s ring in the ocean. My grandmother had bought it for her on a
cherished family vacation when she was a little girl. By most standards, I suppose, the ring looked fairly ordinary: a plain silver band with an olive-green stone in the middle, tarnished from age.

“You can borrow it if you promise never to lose it, my mother had said. “Promise?”

“I promise,” I kept repeating.

Whenever my mom saw the ring on my finger, she’d remark how, one day, I might give it to my own child. I’d shrug it off as a silly remark with the same eyeroll whenever she mentioned my future.

Plunging into the water, over and over, I felt this dream my mother envisioned for me being swept away with the tide. No matter how long I combed for that ring, all that kept resurfacing was tremendous guilt. My mother birthed me into this world, endured my temper tantrums, put up with my bratty adolescence, loved me unconditionally, and I repaid her by losing her cherished ring.