Chapter 43
Chapter Forty-Three
We hit the water and the water is a wall.
The airbag fires in the same instant, a white blow out of the dash that slams me back into the seat. Already it’s sagging, spent, a wet, slack thing across my lap as the lake comes in.
The water crashes through the front of the car in one blow, a fist the size of the whole lake. The windshield that burst on the barrier caves inward at one corner. The cold comes with it, so fast my body understands before I do.
The rain, the engine, the scream of metal, all of it cuts off at once. In its place comes a low, enormous pressure that is everywhere, in my ears, behind my eyes, filling the space where the noise was.
The car goes down nose-first, tipping me forward into the belt, and the black water climbs the glass on every side.
Something in the dashboard has cut a line of pain down my shin. The water is already climbing over my ankles, then shins, then thighs. It doesn’t move like water. It comes in heavy and total, as if the lake means to fill the whole cabin before I can think.
I know this. That is the thing that comes up through the panic, awful and calm.
My body has done this before. The cold at my feet first, then my knees, then the belt biting into my shoulder, then the dark coming up over the glass.
It knows the order. It’s been waiting two years to finish what it started.
Henry is there in the corner of it. A shoulder, an arm thrown across the wheel, his head turning.
His mouth opens and lets go of a rope of bubbles.
They climb past his face and are gone. I can't read anything on him.
The water has taken his face like it took the sound.
His hand comes toward me through the water, slow, opening, and I can't tell if it is reaching for me or for nothing at all. Then the car rolls a little farther, and he slides out of the little light. There’s only dark now where he was.
My hands go to the belt. They’re already clumsy with cold. The button won’t give. I press it and press it while the water comes up my chest.
Then it gives. The belt lets go, and I’m loose in the dark, floating up against the roof where the last pocket of air is shrinking fast. I put my face into it and take one large breath that is half water and burns all the way down.
The window is black. Far above it, gray light shifts on the surface. The storm is up there, the last of the world. I get my hands on the door. It won’t move against the water. The whole weight of the lake is leaning on the other side. I throw my shoulder against the door, but it won't budge.
The water keeps coming. It takes the last of the air. It closes cold over my head. I hit the glass with my fist, once, twice, hard enough to send pain up my wrist, and it does nothing, not even a crack.
Then something bites against my skin.
The band. Julia's band, black around my wrist, the little bead pressed to the bone.
It could save your life.
Her voice isn't a memory so much as a hand on the back of my neck.
I drag it off. My fingers are clumsy, thick with cold, and the band slips once before I get it stretched between both hands. I press the bead to the side window, close to the corner, and pull the band back and let go.
Nothing. The bead skids off and the glass holds.
Something white opens in my chest, and it is not air.
I pull again, all the way back until the band cuts into my fingers.
This time the bead strikes true. The window goes to pieces.
The lake punches through in a rush of glass and black water.
It takes me in the face and turns me over.
For a second, I don't know where the car is or where Henry is or which way the surface lies.
Then my hand finds the broken edge, and I pull myself through.
Behind me, the car is all water and dark. I can't see Henry anymore. I can't see anything moving. I don't wait to find out. I kick up toward the broken gray.
The surface is a long way up. It doesn’t come closer no matter how I climb. My arms have stopped being fast. The water seems to thicken around me. Every kick moves me less than the one before.
The burning in my chest has become a hand, squeezing. It tells me to open my mouth, to just breathe, that the water will be kinder than this.
Faces come as I go, quick and bright and gone. Kelsi in the road, David on the floor, Julia on the cold boards where I left her, the wheel under my hands, the gray light breaking overhead like a thing I could reach in one more kick.
One more kick.
But then something closes around my ankle.
For one impossible second, I think it is the car, a belt, a strip of metal, something torn loose and drifting that has caught me by chance. Then it tightens, slow and deliberate, like a hand.
It pulls.
I kick at it, at the dark, at whatever it is. I twist and pull toward the gray. For a second, the surface is closer, close enough that I can see the rain still pocking it from underneath, pale dents against the night.
Then the pull wins.
It draws me back down, foot-first, the gray light shrinking above me to a coin, to a spark, to nothing.
The last of my breath leaves me in a knot of bubbles and rises without me.
The dark comes up as the water did once before, cold and complete, and takes me with it.