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I knew she was close to them, and she’d always watched the games with them in years past. She’d mentioned what fans they were, how they’d always especially loved swimming from her childhood days on a recreational swim team. Sometime I’d have to see photos of that. Little Emma in her cap and goggles, she must have been so freaking cute. I knew she’d love seeing her parents and watching the games with them, and I couldn’t wait to see her face when they arrived.
I’d been to the games before, eight years ago, so I knew some of what to expect, but this experience felt so different. It still had all the palpable excitement in the air, the thrill of being among athletes of the highest caliber from all over the world. But I felt it more this time around. Back when I was 18, I really had been more like a robot, switching myself on to race. This time around, I had Emma to look for up in the stands. I couldn’t actually pick out her voice amidst the roar, but I felt like I could, and I could see her standing there, cheering for me, with me every second.
I knew coach had worried about me getting distracted, and he was right, Emma was on my mind a hell of a lot. But that wasn’t working against me. I’d always thought blinders would make me faster, but it turned out having someone I really cared about on the sidelines was the real key. She fueled me, pumped new life into me, gave me a crazy new burst of energy in my swimming. With her, I felt unstoppable.
But on Monday I won my first silver. I know it sounded ridiculous, but it was a letdown. I had that event, the 200 Freestyle. I could swim it in my sleep. But for some reason I hadn’t brought it, or at least not as much as the guy next to me who’d managed to touch the wall a full second and a half before me.
Afterward, I just wanted to get back to the house, eat a big meal and see Emma. She wouldn’t care that I’d missed gold. She’d cheer me up.
But then one of the PR handlers came into our team room, spoke briefly with one of our assistant coaches and then approached me. “You should look at the link I just sent you,” she said, sounding grave. “I’m sorry to bother you with this kind of thing, but it’s better if you see it straight away. Rip off the Band-Aid. We’re working on a response, so you don’t have to worry about it.”
I opened my email, clicked on the link she’d forwarded and just like that, my vision went white with hot rage. Someone had run a smear story on me, accusing me of having crippled my friend in a boating accident years ago. Far from the wounded kid I’d been portrayed as in the press, I was to blame. I’d abandoned my friend Ian right when he’d needed me most. Because of me, he’d spend the rest of his life in a wheelchair.
“Fuck!” I exploded, hurling my phone to the floor. Thank you Lifeproof case and carpeting, it did not break. But goddamn it I felt like something inside of me had. I’d just read my deepest, darkest shame, the secret guilt that still tormented me, plastered across the internet.
Emma walked in, finding me a hot mess, my head in my hands as I swore and swore again.
“Silver’s amazing, Chase.” She reached up, trying to calm me down.
“It’s not the silver medal.” I didn’t want to talk about it. But I did have to, with her. After all those years, it was finally time. Plus, she’d see the blog eventually, probably later today. She needed to know the whole story.
“Come on, let’s get out of here.”
A car brought us back to the house. She stayed close to me the whole time, rubbing my shoulder or leaning her head against my chest, letting me know she was there to make me feel better even though she didn’t know what was upsetting me. My teammate Brian was standing in the kitchen, fixing himself a smoothie.
“Have some.” He handed me a glass. I downed it in seconds flat. He didn’t even blink, then did the same thing with the remainder himself. Swimmers and their smoothies.
“Before you say anything.” He stopped me as I was about to start cursing, venting my rage. “It’s a fucking blog. No one pays any attention to that crap. It’s not like it’s the New York Times. Everyone knows they’re just making up shit to pull in readers.”
“Still feels like crap.” I smacked my palm against the refrigerator.
Emma looked pale as a ghost. “What happened?”
“Someone’s been talking smack about your boy,” Brian informed her. “You just need to tell him not to listen to that kind of stupid shit.”
Emma looked really shaken, frightened almost. I reached out my hand. “Here. Let me tell you about it.”
Her hand shook in mine as we walked into my bedroom. Funny, I thought I was the one who needed the comforting. Now that Emma seemed so scared, my need to take care of her kicked in and I drew her against my chest, hugging her close.
“Everything’s OK. But are you ready for a story?” I asked her, not even fully believing myself that I was about to tell her everything. I wasn’t supposed to. I’d signed documents promising not to disclose any details. But 12 years had passed without sharing my story with anyone. I needed to get it off my chest. And I could trust Emma.
She nodded, eyes big and wide, and we sat down together on the bed.
“It happened the summer we were all 14.” I gave her a little background, how Liam and I had been hanging around over the summers for years, how Ian and then Jax were newer arrivals.
“Ian was always pushing the envelope, testing limits. And one afternoon he really went for it.” I explained how Liam and I had been out sitting on a dock fishing, when Jax and Ian had shown up. In a 34 ft. long catamaran.
“I knew it wasn’t Ian’s family’s boat. And I knew it didn’t belong to Jax.” They’d taken it for a joy ride, “borrowed it” as Ian would tell me once we climbed on board.
“I’m not supposed to talk about that, or any of what followed,” I admitted to Emma, looking down at my hands. The owner of the boat had settled out of court, for an undisclosed sum. Ian’s father had paid him off. He didn’t want his boy’s future tarnished by a little thing like a joy ride on a boat. He’d approached the problem with, “So what’s it going to take?” As in, how much money will make this go away?
As part of the agreement, all of us—the boat’s owner, the four of us boys, plus the families involved—had agreed not to discuss it, any of it. But things had a way of making their way to the surface. Rumors, especially, about what had happened. Now I needed to tell Emma everything.
“We decided to take it out for a spin. We all knew our way around a boat.” Liam had grown up on the island year-round, and Ian and I had spent every summer there. “It was nothing we couldn’t handle. At least that’s what we thought.” I shook my head, remembering how thoughtlessly I’d climbed on board. Those steps now seemed so ominous.
“It was later than we realized. The day was already overcast, and it seemed to get darker quickly.” I could still remember the moment when my exhilaration out on the water picked up an edge of fear. “It was a windy day with rough water, but manageable. But then you could feel it, a shift in the air. A storm was coming, working up fast and dangerous.
“The wind and rain came on suddenly. We weren’t even that far from shore, but thank God, Liam knew enough to call the Coast Guard. Ian didn’t want him to, but he didn’t listen.”
I told Emma the rest of what I remembered myself, how we’d started heading back to the yacht club but we couldn’t get there fast enough. What started as a squall turned into a violent thunderstorm in a matter of minutes. And then it hit.
“It was like a white wall coming at us,” I recalled, shuddering at the memory. I’d never seen anything like it before, and I hoped I never would again. “I guess it was wind and water and it hit the boat hard.”
“That’s so terrifying.” Emma cupped her hands over her mouth, frightened at the thought of it. And she was right. It was the scariest thing I’d ever experienced. Later, we’d find out that winds picked up to about 70 miles an hour, just below official hurricane-level. The boat thrashed like a giant had tossed it and the front end of the boat snapped clean off.
“It flipped on i
ts side, and I got thrown into the water. I didn’t even have on a life jacket.” I paused for a moment, taking a breath, keeping it together. That was what I dreamed about, that moment when the waves grasped and pulled at me, so cold and I couldn’t tell in the dark which way was up. I went under, sinking, clawing around me, blind in the blackness, fighting to stay alive even as I gulped down water. And then everything went dark.
“That’s all I remember,” I admitted. “I woke up in the hospital four days later.”
“Oh my God.” Emma’s eyes were wide.
“I found out that Liam jumped in after me. Stupid kid. He could have died.” The heroic rescuer even at age 14, Liam had grabbed a life raft, tied it with a long rope around his waist and thrown himself in after me. “By some miracle, he managed to dive down deep enough to grab me, then found the strength to haul me back up to the surface and swim us over to a life raft. I stayed unconscious the whole time. I’d swallowed too much water. But he managed to strap us both to the raft and keep us alive until the Coast Guard arrived.”
“What about your friends on the boat? Ian and Jax?” She hung on every word, and I realized it did sound like I was telling her the plot to some blockbuster movie. People paid good money to see stuff like that on the big screen, with all the sound effects and props to make it feel real. But take it from me, you didn’t want to experience anything like it, not in real life.
“Ian got hurt bad.” I didn’t know all the details, still this many years later. They kept me in ICU for over a week after the accident. But Ian? He’d spent months in there because of the burns.
“When the boat broke, the fuel pump cracked. You never would have thought it could happen with all that rain, on the water, but a fire started. Ian got trapped, caught on something.” I shook my head, hating the thought of it. He’d been such an active kid, the most athletic of us all.
“I’m so sorry.” She shook her head.
