Waiting todie.
The green-eyed stranger in the seat across from mine is gesturing wildly to get my attention, the whites around his irises flashing like surrender flags on a battlefield. He’s scared, too. I can’t see his mouth beneath the mask, but his eyes are screaming indecipherable instructions at me. When I see him pulling a neon bundle from beneath his seat, his messageclicks.
He’s telling me to put on my lifevest.
Panting hard, I pull the deflated plastic over my head. I do my best to get one over Sophie’s blonde pigtails, but it’s hard to control my limbs, the plane is jerking somuch.
The stranger is gesturing again — this time at my feet. In the turbulence, the compressed life raft has rolled my way, coming to rest just beside mybackpack.
Grab it! The stranger’s eyes are flashing.Grab theraft!
I watch my hands like they belong to someone else as they close around the straps and pull the thick roll of yellow fabric up into my lap. It’s surprisingly heavy. I cling to it with desperation, afraid another bump might make me lose my grip. When we hit — because, in these horrid, frozen instants, it has become increasingly clear that impact is not a matter ofifbutwhen —it may be the only salvation from the crushing embrace of darkwater.
I should be crying, by my tear ducts refuse to cooperate. I cling to the emergency pack, my mind empty except for a single thought I repeat over and over, a prayer to any god who happens to belistening.
I don’t want todie.
I don’t want todie.
I don’t want todie.
I want to go back — back to that curb at Boston Logan international Airport, to wrap my arms around my mother one last time. Back to before I got on this plane. Back to that simple town I couldn’t wait to escape. Back to that picture-perfect future I dismissed with suchdisdain.
But Ican’t.
The only thing I can do, here and now, is adjust my grip on the raft and reach out for Sophie. I feel her small fingers slip into mine, and squeeze hard to tell her I’m here withher.
You’re notalone.
Looking straight ahead, my gaze locks on a steady sea of green within the chaos. It’s strange that the last thing I’ll ever see are the eyes of a stranger, burning intomine.
My final moments, shared with an utter asshole I met at theairport.
If I could muster any sense of humor, I’d have to laugh at the absurdity offate.
We approach the Pacific with all the optimism of a bug on a crash course with a car windshield. And in that free-fall, his eyes are the only thing holding me steady. They never shift away, even as our descent picks up speed. Even as I discover that I was wrong — my tear ducts are perfectly capable of producingmoisture.
A single tear streaks down mycheek.
OneMississippi.
TwoMississippi.
ThreeMississippi.
I never make it tofour.
Chapter Five
U N D E R T OW
Ilove the water.
I spent six summers teaching sailing lessons — instructing New Hampshire youth on the finer points of wind direction, tying square knots, capsizing two-person SunFish. You don’t take on a job like that voluntarily if you don’t enjoy gettingwet.
I lived for those salt-skin summers. Bronze limbs, sun-bleached hair. Fingertips turned to prunes from too many hours in the ocean. Each morning, I’d swim from the dock to my small sailboat in under a minute, half across the harbor in the same time it would take anyone else to affix oars to a dinghy. Submerged beneath the surface, my strokes effortless, I’d imagine myself a mermaid, or a selkie from the Irish fairy tales Mom used to tellme.
I love thewater.