Don, I Left as You Wished novel · Chapter 26 of 32

Chapter 26: Open Water

Four.

My feet touched nothing.

There was no bottom under me, only down.

Five.

I found the buckle with my right hand, the way I'd found it fifty times by the drain in his mother's pool.

Six.

It was a different buckle, stiffer and cheaper.

Seven.

I got two fingers under the lever and pulled.

Eight.

It didn't open.

My chest was starting to burn.

Nine.

I put my thumb against it and shoved with everything I had, and the buckle gave.

The belt slid off my hips and fell away under me into the black, and I didn't feel it hit anything.

Ten.

I stopped sinking.

The sundress was still wrapped around my head. I tore it off over my arms and let it go.

Eleven.

Above me the white circle of the searchlight was sliding along the surface, left to right.

I didn't swim up into it.

I swam up behind it.

I came up in the dark, ten feet outside the edge of the light, and took one breath and went back under.

When I came up again, the boat was forty yards away, its white hull glowing.

Dino was on the top deck with his hand on the light, swinging it slowly back and forth.

He wasn't calling my name. He was waiting.

I let the current have me.

It was running hard toward the ocean, and I went with it, flat and quiet, kicking under the surface where nothing splashed.

The light swept past me once, and once more, a long way off.

Then it went out.

I heard his engine start.

The boat turned and went back up the channel toward Brooklyn, its lights getting small.

I was alone in the Narrows in a racing suit.

The Staten Island shore was on my right, with a line of streetlights along the beach.

I turned toward it and started to swim.

I'd swum a half mile a thousand times, but never at night in a current going the wrong way.

Something in the water bumped my leg and was gone.

I thought about my stroke, long and slow, breathing every three.

The lights didn't get any closer.

I swam until my shoulders burned, and then I swam until they stopped burning, which is worse.

Make sure she's tired first.

I was tired now.

I put my face back in the water and kept going.

At some point the lights got bigger.

The long fishing pier at South Beach came out of the dark ahead of me, low on its posts, sticking out into the water.

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