then I hit the water.
Or more like it hit me.
I’d tilted a bit on the way down—and so I smacked the surface pretty hard on my side. It felt like a weird combination of plunging into water and getting smacked by a wooden board.
I could have anticipated that, if I’d thought to anticipate anything.
I hit the surface, then plunged below it, then continued downward and downward, knowing, very clearly, in my wide-awake brain, that I needed to stop that downward momentum and start kicking my legs and pumping my arms to fight my way back up to the surface.
But I couldn’t.
I couldn’t move.
It made no sense. I knew I had to kick. I knew I had to swim up toward the surface, where all that air was waiting for me. But for longer than I could possibly believe, I let myself sink farther and farther down into the black ocean.
How long can you go without breathing? A minute? Five? I had no idea. I was still frozen, still sinking, when my lungs started screaming for me to breathe.
Underwater.
And it was the desperate act of stopping them—of ordering my diaphragm to stop—that put me back in motion. Your lungs are balloons, I remember thinking. And balloons float.
It was a wildly unscientific notion. But it turned out to be exactly the encouragement I needed. My beautiful, air-filled lungs were going to float me back up to the surface. All my arms and legs had to do was help.
I kicked and pulled and fought my way toward the surface while my diaphragm cramped and stung. Everything stung, actually—like the oxygen deprivation was individually hurting every cell in my body.
I had no idea how far it was up to the surface. It wasn’t like I could see a finish line. It could be five feet up or half a mile. I had no clue, and I was just starting to think it was hopeless, that I was too deep to ever get there, that I was going to drown before I reached the surface, when I broke through.
Hitting the air was just as surprising to me as hitting the water had been.
But this time my body knew what to do. The second I touched air, my lungs drank it in, panting and coughing in desperate heaves.
Before I had my bearings, I heard Duncan’s voice somewhere nearby at the surface of the water. “I’ve got you,” he said.
I felt his arm wrap around my rib cage.
Duncan said, “Lie back. Be still. Keep breathing.”
He leaned us both back so we were floating faceup. Then he started kicking us back toward the beach.
All I could do was stare up at the stars and breathe like crazy until he got us back to the shore.
I had salt water in my eyes—in my mouth—stinging the back of my nose.
In the shallows, he left me kneeling, breathing hard, in part just because I could, knees digging into the wet sand and waves rolling over my thighs, as he rose from the water and paced away. As my breathing returned to normal, I looked up and watched him.
It’s hard to describe what I saw, but let’s just say that the version of Duncan that had found me in the water and kicked us back to shore had been patient and calm. Almost peaceful, in a way.
But the version of Duncan now pacing the shore as the waves crashed against his calves?
That guy was pissed.
“Are you bleeding?” he shouted at me from ten feet away.
It sounded more like an insult than a question, but I answered it, anyway. “No.”
“Are you hurt in any way?”
There were a lot of ways to answer that question, but I went with, “No.”
Then, as a kind of grand finale of his questioning: “Are you fucking kidding me?”
At that, I stood up. My legs were shaking—and so was pretty much everything else—but I did it, anyway. We faced each other in the surf. Duncan was hunched over, like he was clenching every abdominal muscle. His hands looked clenched, and so did his arms and shoulders for that matter. He wasn’t looking directly at me, just near me, as if he were so mad, he couldn’t even see.
“What”—he demanded, his voice tight with rage—“in the hell were you thinking?”
It didn’t sound like a question that wanted an answer.
“What the hell”—he said again, this time louder—“could you possibly have been thinking?”
“Not my best decision,” I said.
But Duncan was now telling himself the story of what had just happened, every word