I continue treading water, pushing and pulling my hands through the lake around my body, kicking harder with my legs to spin myself in a circle. I search the edge of the entire lake, the dock a few feet away, and the path back to the prison. I look for a face hiding in the trees or a glimpse of someone running away, finding nothing but empty land and shadows. My eyes have grown used to the darkness of night but it’s hard to see much of anything out here. Yet I know someone is there. I can feel eyes watching me, hiding in the shadows where my vision can’t penetrate. Let the bastard watch. See that I can’t be gotten rid of this easily. Realize that all that was accomplished by pushing me into the lake was to wake up the corner of my mind that remembers that being in the water makes me feel alive.
Dunking my head backward to smooth my tangled hair out of my face, I twist over onto my stomach and easily slide my arms through the water, right, left, right, keeping my face tilted to the side so I can breathe as I glide smoothly to the east bank of the lake. A few feet before the edge, I dive under, flipping and twisting, pushing off the muddy bottom until I’m zooming back up to the surface in the opposite direction. I swim hard, and I swim perfectly, like I’ve been doing it all my life, because clearly I have. I swim until the adrenaline from fighting for my life quickly fades away, and I have a hard time keeping my eyes open, even though I want nothing more than to stay in the water forever. I let the sounds of my arms and legs splashing through the water soothe me as I swim to the end of the dock and pull myself up, collapsing on my back on the uneven panels of wood. I gaze up at the stars as I catch my breath, no longer caring if someone is out there watching me, no longer afraid of whoever lurks in the shadows.
“My name is Ravenna Duskin. I’m eighteen years old, I live in a prison, and these secrets and lies will not kill me; they will only make me stronger.”
Chapter 10
Sneaking quietly back upstairs to my bedroom, I strip out of my sopping wet nightgown and hide it at the bottom of my dirty clothes hamper. Throwing on a dry gown, I grab a towel from the bathroom and tiptoe back downstairs, wiping up the trail of puddles and wet footprints I left behind. I realize what I’m doing is not normal behavior. I know that a normal eighteen-year-old girl, after being shoved by someone into a lake and almost drowning, a week after she suffered an unexplained accident in the woods, would probably be scared to death, running right to her parents and waking them up so they could make everything better.
It’s time for me to stop pretending I’m a normal girl, and it’s time for me to stop waiting for my parents to be normal parents. They argue and keep secrets, lie to me, and look at me in fear. Nothing about our relationship is normal.
Something clicked inside of me out in that water. For the first time since I woke up confused and disoriented in my bed, I felt alive, and I didn’t feel crazy. Something I dreamed of and something I felt deep in my bones turned out to be true. I know how to swim, regardless of what my parents told me, or something I saw written in a photo album. I don’t know why I never told them or how I learned without their knowledge or why I let them continue to believe that something that happened to me when I was little still traumatized me today.
It doesn’t make sense that not only can I swim, I can swim exceptionally well, like I’ve been doing it every day of my life. I know I could have swum a hundred more laps and never run out of breath or felt like my arms and legs would turn to jelly. My muscles never grew tired and they never burned like I hadn’t used them that way before. My body knew exactly what to do once I forced the panic away. I didn’t even have to think about the motions: they came naturally—freestyle, breaststroke, backstroke, diving underwater, and flipping around to push off in the opposite direction. It was exhilarating, and as I swam, I could suddenly picture other times I spent in the water. I couldn’t remember everything. I didn’t remember where I was or whom I was with; I just remembered being in the water and knowing it was the only place that gave me peace.
There are still so many unanswered questions, but I’m finished trying to make myself believe that my dreams and memories can’t possibly be real because they don’t make sense. I’m no longer scared of the images and memories that flash through my mind—I crave them. They are the missing pieces, and I know they will all click into place.
After I finish wiping the stairs and the floor, I climb into bed and wince when I flop onto my back. The excitement of realizing I can swim overshadowed the fact that I was pushed into the lake. I didn’t imagine the hard shove against my back, and the soreness I currently feel in the center of my spine as I gingerly turn onto my side proves it. Lying here in bed, I think it’s pretty telling that my first instinct wasn’t to go running to my parents; it was to hide the evidence. The truth of the matter is that I don’t trust them. They haven’t gone out of their way to figure out what happened to me in the woods, so why would they behave any differently if I told them someone tried to drown me? They would probably tell me I imagined it, remind me my head still isn’t quite right, and I should get some more rest and forget all about it.