Emma #2
The cold hit me all at once. Full-body immersion. The water closed over my head, and the shock seized my muscles for one terrifying second.
Then, my arms cut through the water, my legs executed a powerful kick, and I broke the surface in under two seconds. I blinked the burning water from my eyes, treading water as naturally as breathing.
I looked for James.
He was less than a yard away, and it was a horror show. His arms were windmilling wildly, his palms slapping the surface in a frantic frenzy.
His head sank under, bobbed up, and sank again. His eyes were stretched wide with a primal panic that erased the sophisticated man he pretended to be. His mouth opened and closed in desperate gasps, gulping air and water in equal measure.
He couldn't swim.
Three years. I had lived with this man for three entire years, shared his life, and I had never known he couldn't swim.
He'd never mentioned it. He'd never suggested a weekend at the beach, never accepted the summer pool invitations from our friends.
I had always assumed he just hated the heat or didn't like the mess of the ocean.
It had never once occurred to me that he was terrified of it.
For one suspended, breathless moment, I just treaded water and watched him drown.
I watched the man who had dismantled my self-esteem until I could fit inside his palm. I watched the man who had picked apart my wardrobe, my appetite, my friendships, and my identity with surgical, gaslighting patience until there was nothing left of me that he hadn't touched and diminished.
I watched the man who had sat in a warm, dry apartment while I shivered on his porch, confident that I would always break.
He sank again, his hand breaking the surface one last time, fingers clawing uselessly at the humid air. A sound tore out of him, high and raw and wordless.
I could have turned away. I easily could have swum to the aluminum ladder, climbed out of the pool, and dialed 911 from the safety of the dry pavement.
Not a soul alive would have blamed me. Nadia wouldn't. Theo wouldn't. Ralph wouldn't. The universe had delivered James to the one exact coordinate where he was helpless and I was infinitely powerful.
Justice, if you believed in that sort of thing, looked exactly like a woman turning her back on her abuser.
But I couldn't do it. My humanity wouldn't let me.
I dove.
With three powerful strokes, my arms sliced through the water with a speed resurrected from another life. I reached him in seconds. My hands gripped his soaking shirt, trying to get a secure hold from behind—exactly the way the old lifeguard manuals taught you.
Approach from the rear, secure under the armpits, keep your torso out of their panicked reach.
I never got the chance.
The instant my fingers brushed his skin, his hands locked onto my shirt, my hair, dragging me toward him like a life vest. He tried to climb my body to reach the air.
His dead weight pushed me straight under, his arms locking tight around my neck, his legs thrashing against my ribcage.
He didn't know it was me anymore. I was just something solid to stand on, and he drove me down toward the blue concrete floor.
He pushed my head down so he could lift himself an inch higher. Every millimeter of oxygen he gained above the surface was an inch of life I lost below it.
I was trapped underneath him.
The glowing pool lights were far above me now, wavering and distorted, and James's body was a dark shape blocking the light. My lungs were burning, screaming. I had only managed a shallow half-breath before he dragged me under, and it wasn't nearly enough. The pressure was building.
I tried to break free. I twisted my torso, pulled back, tried to duck underneath his iron grip the way I'd practiced a thousand times in youth clinics.
But he was far heavier than me, and his panic had turned him into a mindless machine with a single function: survival at any cost. And the fuel for that function was my body.
The edges of the pool began to darken, my vision shutting down.
The shadows crept in from the periphery, the brilliant blue water fading to a dull gray, and the gray dissolving into black.
My limbs grew sluggish, the strength draining from my arms, my kicks turning weak and useless.
My lungs screamed; the surface was only eight feet away but might as well have been on the moon.
Then, the hallucinations came. I saw faces in the dark water.
I saw Theo sitting across from me at our childhood kitchen table, sliding the last slice of pepperoni pizza onto my plate because he always let me have the last bite.
I saw Ralph, crouched on that rainy porch, his giant hand extended toward mine, pulling me up into his warmth.
I saw my mother's face from last Saturday, her soft hands cupping my cheeks as she whispered,
My baby, my sweet baby. I saw my father's strong arms holding me tight for a full minute without saying a single word.
The faces began to blur, melting into the shadows. The water was taking them all away.
My body finally went still. The last thing I saw through the darkening depths, through the sting of the chlorine and my fading consciousness, was a massive silhouette cutting through the surface above us.
It was a body I would have recognized in total darkness. Broad, powerful shoulders. Long, sweeping arms. A magnificent form sculpted by a lifetime in the water, diving straight toward me with everything it had left.
Navy blue eyes, wide open and fiercely focused, found me in the deep.