“Excuse me, but are you fucking kidding me?” said the voice, from the darkness. I opened my eyes. The sky was dim light, above, through murky water.
What? I thought, and I was kind of reeling in shock, I’ve tried to echo it by putting in the swearword when normally I star it out, to try to give you an idea of how that voice poked sharply through the darkness, how loud and intense it was, but I don’t know, it’s not something I can really convey.
“Is that all you’ve got?” said the voice. “Are you ******* serious? You’re just going to give up and DIE? You ******* coward. You weak ******* *****. Enough of this ****, Cass. Go. There’s a rope right next to you, can’t you feel it touching your shoulder? It’s a tether rope, hanging from the pier. Grab it and haul your *** out of this water. Right now.”
Leave me alone, I thought.
I closed my eyes again.
For just a fraction of an instant, I thought about giving up, giving in, to the black. Forgetting. Forgetting Paris being gone and Mom and all of it. But then the voice said this:
“After all your weak-*** whining, THIS is how you’re going to let it end? You’ve got this. You’re in control now. You can still make things right. Haul your *** out of this water and go and get him, and tell him you’re sorry. Are you really going to let him go?”
Confused, I thought of you.
Let him go? I wasn’t meaning to—
“Come on,” said the voice. “Get up there. Breathe. Get him back.”
He won’t want me back, I thought.
“Well, if you die, he won’t have much choice,” said the voice.
Huh.
“For him,” the voice continued, “it’ll be like you when your mom died. When Paris disappeared. You’ll be gone, and there’ll be nothing he can do about it. But if you fight …”
If I fight, I thought, then I can at least give him the choice.
But the sky was so far above, and I was so tired.
“Look,” said the voice, almost reluctantly. “It’s not your fault, what happened to your mom. Or Paris. How were you supposed to save them? But if you breathe in this water and die right here, then what happens to him, how he feels about it, will be absolutely, entirely your fault. One hundred percent.”
It was that 100 percent that got me, just like the voice knew it would. Your words, in the apartment.
I thought about how you’d always been there for me, always tried to help me, even when I hurt you. At least, I figured, I ought to try to be there for you too.
Oh screw it, I thought.
I could feel rope, rough against the skin of my arm. I twisted in the water and there it was, simultaneously friction-heavy and slimy, and I turned my head up and saw it rising into light. I seized it with my hands, my fingers wrapping around the rope almost without my asking them to.
They closed around its clammy surface; it was as taut as a cable, almost resonating with the pull of the pier above and some weight below—a boat, long-since sunk?
Whatever: it was a rope hanging from the pier and I was going to climb up it.
I was going to live. And I was going to ask you to forgive me.
I wasn’t going to be competing in Nationals. I wasn’t a Navy SEAL, but my dad taught me to swim when I was three years old, and I could do our house to the end of the boardwalk when I was seven, and I was not going to die in the ocean.
Slowly, hand over hand, I pulled myself up and out of the water—my head broke free and I took a long, rasping, hitching breath. It was half-ocean, that breath, and I coughed as the acrid cold water hit my throat, but there was air too, and it filled my lungs. I felt instantly less like I was going to burst, less like a balloon on the verge of popping.
Greedily, I gulped down air, felt it filling my lungs, wheezing. I had never been so hyperaware of my chest, my diaphragm and bronchioles, the simple mechanics of being alive. The stuff I took for granted.
For a long time, I just breathed in and out, relishing it, enjoying it. I couldn’t tell what was rain falling on me and what was sea spray, whipped by the wind from the waves. It was still dark, and then FLASH, everything was lit.
I glanced all around, getting my bearings in the light of the lightning.
Good news: whatever happened when I fell, whether a few planks had broken or the end of the pier had collapsed or what, there was still some of the structure remaining, a dark frame against the darker sky, rising up like a promise.
Bad news:
It was high.
For a moment, I just clung to the rope, in the cold, cold ocean, gazing at the far-off safety of the pier, mind spinning.
Gym ropes was the absurd phrase that kept repeating in my head, like a prayer, like something to hold on to.
Gym ropes.
I was looking up at the impossible five feet between the surface of the water and the top of the pier, the rope glistening, leading up to the wooden bollard it was tied to above, and I was thinking about gym ropes and how in gym class I had never been able to climb them.
“But in gym class you weren’t in danger of drowning,” said the voice. “You’ve got this. It’s going to hurt, but you’ve got this.”