Dawn over the lake breaks with a hum, soft and musical.
Every summer, the town of Brookline hosts outdoor concerts a few blocks from our house. The sound of their revelry was always just within range, though the finer details were lost, swallowed by the street noise. Only the echo of something faintly instrumental ever made it to my window.
This sound is like that, but couched in blackness. It grows louder, building and building until it fractures the silence, this dark, eerie hour—everything. The cold snaps up my spine like a jolt of electricity. My face and fingers are numb. My nose is crusted in ice. I try to lick my lips, but my tongue feels fat and dry, and my muscles won’t respond to the command.
The hum is now a drone. A roar. An engine.
A plane.
My vision takes an agonizing moment to clear. Colin’s eyes are closed, his lips tinged blue. The boys are still curled up in our laps, their bodies warm—warm!—to the touch. I don’t have the time or forethought to rouse them. I just go.
I try to kick open the door, but snow is everywhere. Four, maybe five feet high, surrounding us on all sides. My first thought is an avalanche—How else could there be so much snow? Then I remember the storm’s final phases: the lightning, the hail, the violent gusts of wind. We must be buried in a snowdrift.
Placing both hands on the roof, I push upward with my back, legs, and shoulders. The fuselage barely moves. I try again, fighting the electric pain in my hands and arms, the relentless ache in my ribs. For what feels like hours, this process continues. Finally, something shifts and one of the slabs gives way. I clamor up and out and into the snow.
Dawn. Calm, scarlet skies, the snow-capped peaks casting shadows on the valley below. Everything is breathlessly clear. Not a cloud in the sky.
In this scene of perfect stillness, the hum has gone silent.
No. No. I want to cry. Scream. Hurl myself into the abyss of this godforsaken lake and succumb. After all we’ve been through, how much we’ve survived . . .
I drag myself toward the water’s edge, no longer knowing why or how or for what purpose—something simply draws me there, an invisible force tugging at my soul. My body doesn’t feel like mine anymore. I’m so cold and tired. So utterly spent after days in a wilderness that hasn’t shown a shred of mercy.
Then, of course, I see it. The orange duffel bag floating an impossible distance from shore. The blowing ice and snow scratched my corneas, and it’s hard to see much of anything. But I know it’s out there. That stupid bag and the unreachable cabin are the only constants in this savage, ever-changing place.
Cold, clear water laps at my feet. I’m not the teenager who swam across Otsego Lake, a placid but solid nine miles. I’m not the eighteen-year-old who swam to Alcatraz on one of our family vacations out west. I’m weak, and exhausted, and as close to death as I’ve ever been.
But as Colin would say, I’m still a swimmer. A distance swimmer. And there is a distance before me now, a deathly stretch from here to there.
I have to do this. For the families we left behind, for the one I found out here. Tim, Liam, Aayu.
Colin.
The air smacks my bare skin as I peel off my heavy layers: gloves first, then hat and boots and everything else. The stinging lashes don’t affect me as much anymore. I’m numb. My legs wobble as I shuffle toward the water’s edge, my knees giving way as the icy water meets my toes. For so many years, this sensation was entirely different; getting wet was like coming home. Now it feels like my final act. A battle waged against a cruel mistress who doesn’t care about all those years, all those memories. I never belonged in the water. I never belonged here.
My brain squeezes like a fist as I dive in, recoiling against the cold. The first few strokes are a desperate, ugly effort. Shoulders aching, chest splintering with each breath. It’s more than pain; it’s agony, visceral and electric. An icy blackness encroaches my vision, stealing my ability to form a coherent thought. My first and only urge is to sleep—how sublime it would be to sleep.
Somehow, I find my rhythm: arms reaching, hips rolling, the two-beat kick. These motions sustain me onward, across a body of water so expansive it seems never to end. I’m nearing the limits of my reserves when the orange bag floats into my grasp.
The bottom is charred black, but the label is somehow intact: EMERGENCY. I loop one of the straps around my ankle, but it must be snagged on something because it resists me after a few strokes. I pull hard, thrashing and yanking and treading water, trying to set it free while staying afloat in frigid temperatures. Numbness gives way to fear. A vacant sky littered with distant stars and a crescent moon mocks my efforts. I want to scream, but my muscles are numb, my lungs cold and raw and failing.
You’re going to make it.
Colin’s voice sweeps through me, and although it’s just a memory, it feels real, heightened somehow. It reminds me of the last time he made that promise—and the fervor with which he kept it. It makes those thoughts of giving up a little less visceral.
So I keep fighting it, until finally, finally, the strap gives way—
And the bag rips open.
I’m too clumsy with cold to catch the contents: Bottled water, packets of food, medicines. Something plastic and angular that feels like a flare gun. I will never know for sure. All that matters is that hope, once again, is lost.
I tread water for a precious few seconds. My head throbs, my muscles ache, and it feels, impossibly, like I’m burning alive. Another ten minutes out here, and I will freeze to death, then drown. A swimmer’s worst nightmare—and certainly mine, since that day fifteen years ago when my father sat me down at the kitchen table and explained what it meant to die.
Ahead of me, the opposite shore looms in all its impossible, terrifying mystery. I never thought I could make it, but I’m halfway there now. Three-quarters of a mile to that damn cabin, maybe a little less. Fifteen minutes if I swim to the point of exhaustion. If it takes me longer than that, I won’t make it at all.
Every stroke is harder than the last, and my rhythm deteriorates into clumsy, disjointed movements. My legs float behind me like deadweight, a motor with no engine. I can barely breathe. The frigid water fists my heart, hard, and takes hold. I wait for my lungs to give out and my arms to stop working.
In the meantime, I keep swimming.
The shore draws closer, but not fast enough, because the cold finally wins, and my body sighs with exhaustion, and my legs sink—
And hit stones. Soft, polished stones.
Land.
Then: music. A soft hum cresting the mountains and rolling into the valley like an approaching train. Or no, not a train—a plane.
My legs refuse to carry me, so I crawl through snow to the tree line. My blood must have frozen because my fingers are a stony white, my skin dusted with ice crystals. And yet my heart keeps beating and my lungs keep breathing, which gives me purpose. The cabin is just ahead. Reachable. Real.
I punch open the tiny window and crawl inside. A brief search yields flares—a dozen of them stacked in piles like orange cigars. I carry the box back down to the water’s edge and into the open. It takes only a second to set the first flare, and a second more to let it go.
It rains across the sky in a dusting arc, a blaze of color that reminds me of Boston’s epic fireworks display. I set off another flare, and another, even after the plane—or no, it’s a helicopter—changes course. It sails over the black surface of the lake, suspended in boundless skies as it accelerates in my direction. Its approach fills me with a strange sense of undeserved accomplishment. It doesn’t feel real, like I’m dreaming someone else’s dream, imagining someone else’s rescue.
As it lands, the world in front of me starts to break apart. Distant shouts, then voices, filter into my consciousness, but everything seems so far away. I know this feeling; I’ve experienced it many times before, in what feels like a hundred different lifetimes.
I’m underwater—drowning, drifting.
Gone.
•
I wake sometime later to the sound of churning propellers and shouting. A team of people are unloading me off the helicopter onto the roof of a building.
“Wait.” I manage to grasp someone’s arm. “Wait!”
No one hears me. I palm the oxygen mask and rip it off my face.
“The others,” I rasp. “The others, please . . .”
The gurney I’m lying on jerks to a stop. A female doctor with startling gray eyes and a midwestern accent leans in close, her ear nearly touching my lips.
“What did you say?”
“The others.”
She gives me a blank look that haunted me then; it haunts me still.
“What others?”