“Travis!” Dad yelled as I breached the surface, a smile splitting my mouth.
The panicked tone of his voice shot through me like an arrow. Treading water, I spun in a circle as Charlotte emerged beside me.
She laughed, oblivious. “I’m going to kill—”
She was cut off by my mom’s terror-filled screams.
“Get him! Tommy, get him!”
“What the hell?” I breathed as my sixty-year-old father dove into the pond.
My pulse spiked as my mind struggled to piece the situation together. I couldn’t see anything. But maybe that was the most telling of all. The dock, where my son had just been standing, was now completely empty.
“Where’s Travis?” Charlotte asked beside me, her voice bearing the slightest of trembles.
And then the world rushed to an immeasurable speed. Slingshotting my life into fast forward while I remained utterly still with no way to catch up.
My dad’s hand shot out of the water, catching on the wood beam at the corner of the dock. My son’s lifeless body in his arms.
“Help me!” he roared.
Suddenly, my chest caught fire, and less than a second later, my body exploded.
There had been exactly one other time in my life when I’d swung my arms that fast, kicked my legs that frantically, or prayed that hard.
Time moved at an agonizing pace as I once again waged war with the water in that fucking pond. I couldn’t remember if I took a breath the entire way, but regardless, my lungs were on the verge of collapsing when I finally reached them. They were worthless to me anyway, because I died a thousand deaths at the sight of my son unconscious and unmoving in my father’s arms.
“What the fuck happened?” I barked, wrapping Travis around the shoulders and pulling his back to my front. I bargained with any and every god that he would gasp for breath or start laughing that it was some sort of sick joke.
But he was utterly still.
“I…I don’t know,” Dad replied. “He was reeling a fish in and just collapsed into the water.”
Charlotte finally appeared in the water in front of us. Her face was pale and her hands were shaking as she tried to check for a pulse. “He’s not breathing. We have to get him out of here. Now!”
“I’m trying,” I replied, struggling to get his limp body up onto the dock, but it was too high for me to be able to lift him.
The tiniest fraction of relief ruptured inside me when Tanner arrived on foot.
“Give him to me!” he shouted, dropping to his stomach and hanging over the side.
My stomach rolled and my muscles strained as I shifted my son in my arms and then hoisted his limp upper body as high as I could. Tanner was able to catch him under the arms and pull him out of the water.
In any other situation, that would have meant safety.
But getting him out of the water was only the first hurdle we’d have to face.
As soon as he was out of my arms, Charlotte’s caught my elbow. “Help me up!”
Her eyes were wild, but she didn’t delay in using my body to climb on to the dock after him.
“Call nine-one-one!” Tanner screamed at everyone and no one as he moved out of Charlotte’s way.
“Please. Please. Please. Let him be okay,” I chanted to myself as I scrambled up, slicing my foot on a splintered edge of the wood. But the pain didn’t even register among the agony in my chest.
Tanner moved to the side, and together, we helped our father up.
“Travis. Baby. Please!” Charlotte cried, tears dripping from her chin as she started chest compressions.
“What can I do?” I asked her, dropping beside them to my knees and brushing his dark-brown hair off his forehead.
“Move!” she barked before starting rescue breathing.
I lifted my hands in surrender and fell back onto my ass as my nightmare played out in front of me.
There was a bustle of activity around us. But my eyes never left Travis.
I aged at least fifty years as I watched her fevered efforts to revive our son, but nothing seemed to be working. And, as the seconds turned into minutes, I became more and more panicked that they never would.
I couldn’t be sure how long it had been since he’d collapsed, but a surge of adrenaline and relief slammed into me when the paramedics finally appeared.
Charlotte rose off his body—and it killed me to admit it, but that was all it was at that point. She started rambling off orders and stats. Even as tears streamed from her eyes, she was able to list his medications and all of his health information.
Meanwhile, I could barely think.
My body was numb, and the air around us felt too thick to breathe.
I’d just gotten him back. We were supposed to be a family. Together. Forever.
This wasn’t allowed to happen. There had been only one option with his heart condition, and dying was not it.
We were happy.
We were supposed to stay happy.
With hollow eyes and an equally hollow chest, I watched them load him onto a gurney, and then he was gone. Charlotte jogged beside him.
But I was stuck. Physically unable to move.
I blinked at the ground. The chair he had sat in only minutes earlier had been shoved out of the way, his fishing pole lost in the pond and his tackle box spilled out, various lures and hooks scattered around. But it was the wet silhouette of his body that tore my heart from my chest.
What if that was all that was left of him?
The sun still hung bright in the sky, but midnight fell all the same. And, in that moment, I feared I’d never escape it again.
The darkness was going to be my executioner.
It was going to crush me, suffocate me, and then devour me.
“Porter,” someone called.
I snapped out of it long enough to see that it was Charlotte.
Hooking her arm in the air, she yelled, “Let’s go! He needs you!”
Needs was present tense.
Hope roared to life inside me.
And only then did my feet become unstuck.