The leash on Muffin is the problem. If I can untangle that, I can get the animals to the surface.
My chest hitches with the automatic need to inhale.
I fight instinct.
Closing my eyes, I will away the pain that the animals’ claws cause on my forearms, going by feel to separate them. The water is warm and salty, not chlorinated. One collar—no leash. A second head and collar—no leash. Teeth sink into my hand and I shake them off.
My lungs spasm.
Finally, I find Muffin’s collar and free the leash, shoving him up with a push. Mere seconds have gone by, maybe twenty, but more than I can bear for much longer.
Chuckles’ basket is twisted in the leash with Muffin, their bodies impossible to disentangle, and someone bites me again.
Black spots begin to fill in my vision, yet my eyes are closed.
The serene simplicity of this underwater world stands in stark contrast to the calamity above, and as my hands slow down and find the leash, unweaving it until, alas, Spritzy floats up and away, allowing me to shove Chuckles up, too, I feel a stillness.
They’re free.
I kick my legs hard, willing my body up. Time for me to be free, too.
The animals are rising in the buoyant waters, but I am not. I reach back to my waistband, to find the hooks and buttons to undo my skirts. The fasteners are a network of laces and metal, of buttons and fabric, old combined with new to make beauty.
I kick.
I try to breathe in.
I fight the impulse.
Panic sets in, my hands more frantic as I hold on to the pattern in my mind for how to organize my own ascent, the orderly steps of actions to take to get sweet oxygen, to rise back to the surface and just breathe.
Just breathe and be.
And then I inhale water, my muscles too powerful to battle.
There is a point where instinct overrides self-preservation.
A loud splash at the surface makes me hope someone got the animals, and I bite my lips to stop from breathing in again, my chest going concave, the struggle to hold my breath one I am losing.
My fingers fumble and then strong arms grab me, wrenching my shoulder with a tearing sensation that makes my neck scream. One of the stranger’s arms slides under my bare armpits, pressing my breasts flat as the stranger’s second arm pulls the water down, down, down to drag me up, up up—
Ah.
Air.
He freed me.
“Hold onto the side. Hold onto the side,” a man’s voice urges. He’s kicking the water, treading next to me, one hand on mine as he guides my fingers to the curled cement edge, my hands shaking but capable.
“Get the paramedics!” he booms to the crowd, who I can’t see or hear, but know surround us.
Hacking and coughing, spitting out water, I try to breathe. My windpipe feels like it has shredded pieces of melted tires hanging from it, and I can’t cough hard enough to get the water out. A giant lily pad covers my shoulder, and as I finally find some semblance of a pattern for getting a thin, striated hole of air through my throat, I realize I’m still bare breasted.
In public.
“Jesus, Amanda, please say something,” says Andrew, who is the man, drenched and next to me, holding my hand, his dark hair soaked and wrapped like feathers around his forehead, his white shirt clinging to his shoulders, the only part of him I can see. “Please. Oh, God, please say something.”
My vision begins to focus, the blackness fading, lingering only at the edges of what I can see, like a shadow that doesn’t know what to do with itself.
“Chuckles,” is all my hoarse throat can choke out.
“We got ’em!” James bellows back. “All three of these little stinkers are just fine thanks to you!”
I’m shaking, still trying to breathe, as a uniformed paramedic bends down and offers me a hand.
“Ah, no.” I look down. “Naked.” I move one hand and start to sink again.
Andrew winds one arm around my waist and holds me up, his fist filling with the thick cloth of my wet skirts. He looks at the paramedic.
“Got a knife?”
“A knife?”
“A blade. Anything. I need to cut her dress off.”
In seconds, the guy hands Andrew a knife and he cuts loose the wool tartan overlay, which slides down around my legs like a mermaid shedding her tail.
I take in a deep breath and cough. The next breaths feel more regular. Andrew’s hands are on my face, my shoulders, my back and waist, an endless sequence of touches that seem less about checking my status and more about verifying that I am above water and safe and really here.
Really here.
Wait.
He’s really here.
“You’re outside!” I gasp.
“And you’re insane!” he says with a finality that I can’t argue with. “What in the hell did you jump in the pool for?” His voice shakes with a kind of post-trauma agony that makes me wince. With a caring hand, he holds my waist, his strong legs kicking for me. Salty water drips into my eyes, the stinging bringing on more tears.
“To save the cat and doggies,” I croak out.
“You nearly died. Don’t you ever, ever do that again! What in the hell were you thinking?” A crack in his voice, then a deep, sharp inhale and he starts to breathe hard, his eyes boring into me like he can only keep me alive if he looks at me.
He can’t stop touching me, his steady kicking keeping him afloat, my own legs too weak to move. I’m clinging to the edge of the pool, one hand too sore to grasp anything. I look at it and see puncture wounds swelling at an alarmingly fast rate, the salt water lapping at them and hurting. My torso is smashed as far up against the cool mosaic of tiles as possible. I’ll probably have an imprint of that pattern permanently etched into my boobs and belly.