Chapter 1
One
They drowned with their eyes open.
That’s how it works, the cruel poetry of drowning.
Forget what you think you know. It occurs in stages, seconds, time and space folded over.
That’s the madness of it. A second feels like an eternity just before the spirit detaches from the body and darkness closes its fingers around the soul.
Then the eyes widen in surprise as the spirit takes one lasting look at life.
I wish I didn’t know this.
Three pairs of eyes bored into me as I swam by each lifeless face.
More there than here. I wanted to hide from their gazes, evade the familiar vacant expression that accompanies death.
I didn’t want to see it, bear witness to their last thoughts, peer into the depths of their souls.
Mama used to say that the eyes are a window into a person’s soul.
And now I know she was right. The eyes don’t lie, even in the grip of death.
There are no curtains to conceal us in shadow, no secrets left untold.
You see it all. In Officer Manziel’s eyes, I glimpsed the regret over the birthday party for his son he would never attend.
In Officer Downey’s eyes, a sadness at the unspoken apology to his daughter he would never give.
And in Loretta, the only other prisoner, the innocence she would never prove.
They died where they sat, suspended above their seats. Upright. As static as an oak.
It was a wonder we’d survived the fall. The bus careened off the cliff’s edge, its wheels screaming as it cartwheeled and tumbled down the deep ravine.
It crashed and slammed against the jagged rocks, the sound of metal tearing through stone, before plunging into the water.
The surging river, wild and hungry, wasted no time and swallowed it whole, filling the bus and submerging it within seconds.
There wasn’t enough time to shake the shock, to act, to think, to move.
And now three pairs of eyes, frozen, snagged on me, trailing me like an echo.
There was nothing I could do.
I guess here is as good of a place to start this story as any.
I call this portion of my life the in-between.
Like drowning, the in-between lands in a dreaded space, a place of suspension between life and death.
For me, the in-between represented the place of limbo between my two lives—every moment after what happened, every moment during my trial, every moment I spent in prison a time when life didn’t feel fair.
But we don’t get to decide what haunts us, no matter how hard we try.
Some cuts, some memories, can’t be avoided. There are many. This is one of them.
And this. This is the end of my in-between.
Drowning.
Five years ago, I could have saved them all, with air to spare.
Because I am a Wilde, I could swim as soon as I could crawl; Daddy made sure of that.
He made sure of a lot of things for our survival.
By five, I could open my eyes beneath the waves of the Santee River; by seven, exhale below the surface; and by ten, hold my breath for minutes on end.
I was great in the water. Lila, better. We spent our childhood there, toes upward and eyes on the sky.
We swam in the sunshine. We swam in the rain.
We called the fish by their names. In the water, the sounds from the trailer couldn’t reach us; the cries and moans sank in the muddy banks.
Now, in this water, a sharp pain clawed at my lungs, demanding a fresh breath. I was long out of practice.
Three pairs of eyes watched me, not four.
Officer Madison held on the longest of them—floating there motionless, her black hair waving like dark silk above her head, her brown face cast in shadow—as if to hold her remaining breath in her chest. The more you panic, the more oxygen you burn.
Unlike the others, she’d bought herself time by not panicking, not gulping water instead of air.
Like me, she’d inhaled deeply just before the bus filled.
But none of that mattered in the end. She was stuck, her legs wedged under the twisted iron partition that had separated the guards from the prisoners.
She would do what nature forced upon her.
We come into this world on a breath. It’s the first thing we learn how to do, our first lesson, our first act of existence.
We breathe in. We breathe out. Officer Madison would take one more breath.
Just one more. She knew; of course she did. I knew it too.
I could have left—should have left—kicked past her toward the door and up to the surface because it’s every person for themselves and self-preservation trumped prison sentences.
Even if I freed her, I couldn’t save her.
It had been five minutes since Officer Manziel swerved to avoid hitting a deer and lost control of the wheel.
Three minutes since the prison transport bus dove off the road.
Over a minute since we all took our last breaths.
And yet I tried anyway. Despite the ticking clock and the growing ache in my chest, I pulled her legs as hard as I could.
It was guard versus prisoner even when the situation wasn’t life or death, but Officer Madison had reminded me she wasn’t just a guard and I wasn’t just a prisoner.
Guards were taught boundaries—friendly, not familiar with inmates.
That was the rule. Friendly turned a blind eye to an extra-long hug during visitation.
Familiar loosened handcuffs and unlocked those around your ankles, granting comfort for a six-hour drive.
The wrong familiar got inmates pregnant or led to guards sneaking in contraband.
Those were fired or sentenced to a fate similar to ours.
Some might consider Officer Madison familiar, but it wasn’t like that.
She had a walk and a talk that didn’t belong in a prison, an echo of life meant for open skies and gentle lessons, not the steel bars of a prison.
In a better world, under kinder stars, she might have been anything else—a teacher, perhaps—but her curse was geography.
She lived her whole life anchored within Richland County, South Carolina, where jobs were few and the prison paid the highest and employed the most.
She took a liking to me the first day we met almost five years ago. “Nah…” she said, sizing me up from head to toe, her dark eyes bright. “You ain’t gone be no trouble, are you, Leandra?”
I was fluent in silence those first few months.
Didn’t have much to say. Day by day, with her gentle persistence, she found a way to stretch what little I offered into a sentence, and then paragraphs, until we moved from friendly to something else.
Officer Madison didn’t see the numbers—not of the bodies I’m responsible for, nor the one printed on my chest. She saw me.
And she kept seeing me, kept pushing past what she knew or read, what she’d heard.
Officer Madison instead saw the woman who picked wildflowers in the yard, who angled her neck to observe the sun, whose wrist and ankle restraints always left their mark, my pointy bones rubbing against the cold steel.
She knew these things because she made it her business to know, to care.
It wasn’t familiarity; it was kindness, mercy for a lonely prisoner whom she never escorted to the visitors’ room and barely spoke.
So it didn’t surprise me that she loosened my cuffs early in our long journey, left them tight enough to restrain but loose enough, I learned, to slide off.
I pulled again, fighting against the crushing weight of time and inevitability, my fingertips grasping at shins, at the partition, willing anything to give; then a hand touched my shoulder.
Light as a feather. Officer Madison was telling me to go.
The softness of her eyes told me so. I paused, floating there with her, inches from her face, and took her hand in mine.
I knew I should go. It wasn’t my time. Water will not be what kills me.
But it was coming for her. Death, relentless and impartial, was coming for her.
Maybe she knew this too. Didn’t want me to witness it.
Officer Madison would not be the first person I’d watched die.
It was something I knew how to do, walk the edges of this curse like a tight rope.
I still can’t seem to escape it. I know the motions by heart, as a matter of habit, more automatic than a blink.
How to step around death and not touch it, how to rub shoulders with it and avoid the hand it extends for me.
Officer Madison twisted and jerked, almost pleading.
The water between us rippled with the weight of the moment.
Her breath was shallow, each exhale a quiet rasp.
Her grip faltered. But I kept our eyes locked and my hands tight around hers, as if that could keep her from slipping through the cracks of the world she was drowning in.
This was what familiar looked like on the other side of the bars, a flicker of humanity amid the chaos.
Even though my lungs burned, I had more than enough air and zero fear for this, for her, to be with her in her last moments.
This was how I repaid her for her familiarity, for making every day of the last five years tolerable.