My face burns. My stomach burns. I didn’t expect everything about the ocean to burn. It seems like it should do the opposite.
I try to do as Cameron says. I lie back, but my hips dip first, and then the rest of me, like my body mass is off. Over the last year, I’ve traded in most of my curves for muscle, most of the give of my body for a tense resistance, but people don’t notice under the nondescript clothes. The doctor comes every year after my birthday. She has not seen what I have become yet.
Everyone has seen me run—my soul is understandably restless—but I’ve hidden the fact that I do nothing but push-ups and sit-ups and lunges in my room, deep into the night, and I hide the results even more. I thought it would help me escape, but it’s weighing me down. I haven’t done a thing on my own.
His arm is around my chest again, and I’m on my back, and he’s swimming on his front, cursing repeatedly under his breath. He pauses and pushes me against the rocks. I reach around and dig my fingers into the crevices, supporting myself for once.
A person’s head, covered in black material, rises up beside us. I assume this must be Dom. His hand rests on my shoulder. His lips smile around the breathing apparatus in his mouth. But he stops abruptly when he sees Cameron beside me.
“She can’t swim,” Cameron says through clenched teeth.
Dom has a face mask over his eyes and, with that thing inside his mouth, I can’t tell the level of his annoyance or disappointment—not like I can see on Cameron.
Like it’s my fault.
“Excuse me for not spending the last seventeen years anywhere near a goddamn swimming pool!” I slap at the water with one hand, the words pouring out before I have a chance to weigh them, like I usually would, and I momentarily lose my grip on the side. I dig my hand back into the slick rock. “I don’t even have a bathtub.”
“I have to go back for Casey,” Cameron says, but looking at the slick rock, at the concave cliffs, I know it’s impossible. He knows it, too. I think he just needs someone else to tell him he can’t.
So I do. “You can’t,” I say, as my fingers tremble to keep me above water. No one can. It’s a prison, which nobody seems to understand but me. He knows it’s true, but he focuses all his anger at me.
Dom looks at the sky, points to his watch. I hear his breath, slow and loud, through the device. He hands Cameron a face mask, a set of flippers, and an air tank with a hose attached. “She’ll be fine,” Cameron says, but he’s saying it to himself, I’m sure.
Dom disappears under the surface, but not before holding out a long piece of rope. I feel him under the water, like a shark brushing against my skin. His hand grips on to my bare ankle. And then the rope tightens, which is more than anyone here has ever done to me. They don’t need to. When I used to act up, to fight, to push back, all it would take was a sedative shot. And when I trained myself to bury it—to hide it—instead, they mostly stopped needing the shots as well.
In the water, where I can’t swim, with a rope held by a stranger, I fear what I have traded everything for.
Dom gives a thumbs-up, and Cameron comes very close.
He shows me the breathing device, and he straps the tank onto my back. “Five breaths. Slow and steady. Then pass it back.” He hands it to me, and I place it between my lips, nodding at him.
“And whatever you do, don’t let go.”
I remove the mouthpiece for a second and say, “There’s always the rope.” It may be to hold me, but it will also keep us from getting lost, being left behind.
But he turns away and whispers, “For you.” And I realize the power I have, as I wrap my arms around his neck, and my legs around his waist, preparing to dip under the water. If I let go of him, he could be stranded in the middle of the ocean with nothing.
“Do not let go,” he says again, trying to be stern. But he is asking. As he lowers the mask around his face, I see it in his eyes. He is pleading.
“I won’t,” I say. I have never held on to something so tightly in my entire life.
The muffled sound of blades cuts through the wind. I know that noise. They came for me once before, when we were in the path of a hurricane. They didn’t even need a rope then—just a shot beforehand. But it didn’t help with the motion. I threw up in the back of the helicopter. I feel Cameron’s pulse pick up through my palms that are pressed so tightly to his chest. I feel like throwing up again, because this time they are not coming to save me.
He drops us both under the surface, into the dark.
From the cliffs, from my home, the water looks clear. A blue calm stretching into the distance. But Cameron has the face mask, and my eyes burn and see nothing when I open them. There’s nothing to guide us, nothing to direct us, but the rope stretching before us. Cameron breathes slowly, calmly, and my lungs start to ache long before he hands the device back. And then I take breaths too quickly, too desperately, and have to give it back too soon.
I keep my eyes squeezed shut, trying not to hear the blades over the surface or the sound of the air I’m draining from the tank. I try to picture my mother, like she looked in the newspaper clipping. Not the photo from after she was arrested.
I did not print that one out.
I imagine her humming a song, as she shushes me with a lullaby, as she cuts into my skin. In my head, I do not scream, even though I’m sure I did. I was just a baby. In my head she takes out the tracker and holds me to her, wrapping a blanket around my body. In my head she tries to run.
In my version they do not arrest her at home, like the article claims.
In the article, they say she put the tracker in the garbage disposal. That she knew they would come for her. That she must’ve been hoping they’d come for her. That she didn’t want to be responsible for the soul of June Calahan.
Like June’s family did for their own safety, severing ties, taking new identities, leaving the country, so they would never be associated with her name again.
I wonder if they would’ve let me grow up there, with my mother, with my father. If she hadn’t been so blatantly defiant. If he hadn’t held a pillow to a baby’s face and then changed his mind, unable to go through with it in the end. He brought me to the hospital. They never returned me.
I hold my breath and press my head into Cameron’s back, imagining a time before all of this, before I was June—that first day, when I could’ve been anyone—before the needle in my back. I can hear my mother, and only her, as if my ear is pressed to her chest, as she sings me to sleep.
Duérmete, mi ni?a … and the pain, the cold, the entire world falls away.
Something is wrong.
We’ve stopped moving. Cameron’s body shifts to vertical, and he pulls me toward him, and then past him, until I feel my forearms scrape against cold metal—we’ve reached the steel net.
My fingers tangle with the metal wires, and I press my face against them as my lungs beg for air. Cameron moves the mouthpiece to me, and I breathe too much. Too fast. We’re trapped.
I feel the tank being pulled away from me, off my back, and I start to panic. I claw my way up the netting toward the surface. I need air. I need out. But someone grabs my leg, trapping me between his body and the netting. He puts a mask over my face. A new breathing device in my mouth, and turns me around to strap it on my back.
But I still can’t see. The mask is full of water. He’s trying to tell me something, tapping at my mouth, tapping at my mask. I think he means to use the air to push the water away, but when I remove the device, he puts it back in my mouth. Then he taps my mouth once more, traces his finger up along my cheek, to my forehead, down my nose—tracing the path the air might take. He presses against the top of my mask, and I understand. I take a breath through my mouth and let it out through my nose, and the water pushes out the bottom, and I see Cameron in front of me, nodding.