Breathless Rescue

The water held me like something that wanted me to stay. Not the pool itself, but the deep end, where the light from the underwater lamps turned the tiles a sick, shimmering green and my lungs had already begun to forget their purpose. I wasn't fighting. That's the part I think about now, the part that keeps me up some nights. I wasn't fighting. I was sinking, and it felt like the most natural thing in the world, like sliding into a bed that had been waiting for me for years.

My chest burned. A dull, faraway burn, the kind you feel when you've held your breath too long on a dare and you know you're about to break, except I wasn't going to break. I was going to open my mouth. I was going to let the water in, and then it would be over, and nobody would have to know that I'd been sitting at the edge of that pool for an hour before I finally let myself slip in.

I remember thinking about my mother's kitchen. The yellow tile. The way the linoleum peeled up near the stove and she never fixed it, just kept a rug over the spot. I remember thinking I should have called her. I remember thinking it didn't matter.

Then a hand closed around my wrist.

It was small. That's what I noticed first, even underwater, even with my brain going soft and slow. A small hand, and it pulled with a strength that didn't match its size. I felt my body jerk upward, felt the water rush past my ears, felt the pressure in my chest shift from a burn to a scream. My head broke the surface and I gasped, and the air was so sharp it hurt, and I coughed, and water came up, and I coughed again, and someone was saying something but I couldn't hear it over the sound of my own body remembering how to live.

"Breathe. Just breathe. You're okay. You're okay."

A girl's voice. Young. Maybe sixteen, maybe older, it was hard to tell with the water in my eyes and the chlorine stinging my throat. She had her arm around my chest, holding me up, kicking hard to keep us both afloat. I tried to tell her I was fine, but the words came out as a wet rasp, and she just kept saying it, over and over, like a prayer she'd memorized.

"You're okay. You're okay. I've got you."

I don't know how long we stayed like that. Long enough for my breathing to slow. Long enough for the pool lights to flicker once, the way they did every night around ten, a brownout that the management never bothered to fix. Long enough for me to realize that I was crying, which was strange, because I hadn't cried in years. Not when my father died. Not when I lost the job. Not when I sat at the edge of this pool and decided that the water looked soft enough to swallow me whole.

She towed me to the shallow end. I found my feet on the bottom, and the tiles were rough and cold, and I stood there, dripping, shaking, alive. She stood in front of me, chest heaving, water streaming off her dark hair and down her shoulders. She was wearing a red one-piece, faded at the seams. Her eyes were brown, almost black in the dim light, and they were angry.

"What the hell were you doing?" she said.

I opened my mouth. Nothing came out.

"I saw you," she said. "I saw you go under. You weren't swimming. You were just... you were just letting yourself go down."

She said it like an accusation. Like I'd done something to her personally.

"I'm sorry," I said. It was the only thing I could think of.

"Don't be sorry. Be alive." She wiped her face with the back of her hand, smearing water and maybe tears, I couldn't tell. "God. You scared me. You really scared me."

I looked at her. Sixteen, maybe seventeen. Skinny arms. A small silver cross at her throat. She was shivering, and I realized she'd been in the water long enough to get cold, long enough to pull me from the deep end and hold me up and drag me to the shallow end, and she hadn't let go until she was sure I could stand.

"What's your name?" I asked.

She blinked. "Nadia."

"Nadia," I repeated. "Thank you."

She stared at me for a long moment. Then she did something I didn't expect. She laughed. A short, wet, incredulous laugh, the kind that comes out when you don't know what else to do with your face.

"You're welcome," she said. "You're welcome, you idiot."

The pool closed at ten. We were the last ones there, and the manager, a tired man named Sal who'd been working the front desk since before I started coming, came out to lock up and found us sitting on the edge of the deck, wrapped in towels from the lost and found bin, neither of us saying much. He looked at me, then at Nadia, then at the wet trail of footprints leading from the deep end to where we sat.

"Everything okay here?" he asked.

"Fine," Nadia said. "My friend just got a cramp. I helped him out."

Sal nodded slowly. He didn't believe her. But he was tired, and it was ten o'clock, and he wanted to go home. He told us to lock the gate on our way out and disappeared back into the office.

Nadia turned to me. "You're not going to try that again, are you?"

I thought about it. The water. The yellow tile. The linoleum peeling up near the stove. The way it had felt to stop fighting, to let the weight of everything pull me down.

"No," I said. And I meant it. Not because I'd suddenly found a reason to live. But because she was looking at me like my answer mattered, and I couldn't stand to lie to her.

"Good," she said. She stood up, towel wrapped tight around her shoulders, and held out her hand. "Come on. I'll walk you to your car."

I took her hand. It was still small. Still cold from the water. But it was steady, and it didn't let go until we reached the parking lot, and by then I'd already started to wonder what it would feel like to hold it again.