Page 67 of Coming Home

The glowing pool lights were far above me now, wavering and distorted, and James's body was a dark shape blocking the light. My lungs were burning, screaming. I had only managed a shallow half-breath before he dragged me under, and it wasn't nearly enough. The pressure was building.

I tried to break free. I twisted my torso, pulled back, tried to duck underneath his iron grip the way I'd practiced a thousand times in youth clinics. But he was far heavier than me, and his panic had turned him into a mindless machine with a single function: survival at any cost. And the fuel for that function was my body.

The edges of the pool began to darken, my vision shutting down. The shadows crept in from the periphery, the brilliant blue water fading to a dull gray, and the gray dissolving into black. My limbs grew sluggish, the strength draining from my arms, my kicks turning weak and useless. My lungs screamed; the surface was only eight feet away but might as well have been on the moon.

Then, the hallucinations came. I saw faces in the dark water.

I saw Theo sitting across from me at our childhood kitchen table, sliding the last slice of pepperoni pizza onto my plate because he always let me have the last bite. I saw Ralph, crouched on that rainy porch, his giant hand extended toward mine, pulling me up into his warmth. I saw my mother's face from last Saturday, her soft hands cupping my cheeks as she whispered,

My baby, my sweet baby. I saw my father's strong arms holding me tight for a full minute without saying a single word.

The faces began to blur, melting into the shadows. The water was taking them all away.

My body finally went still. The last thing I saw through the darkening depths, through the sting of the chlorine and my fading consciousness, was a massive silhouette cutting through the surface above us.

It was a body I would have recognized in total darkness. Broad, powerful shoulders. Long, sweeping arms. A magnificent form sculpted by a lifetime in the water, diving straight toward me with everything it had left.

Navy blue eyes, wide open and fiercely focused, found me in the deep.

CHAPTER 22

Ralph

I opened my eyes, and the world was gone.

For months it had been a washed-out, sun-bleached watercolor, edges dissolving but the shapes hanging on if I fought for them. I fought for them now. Nothing surfaced. I turned my head toward where the light should have been, and the black didn't so much as thin. It held flat and even in every direction, the way the deep end looks when you've lost which way is up.

So I listened. A heart monitor beeped somewhere near my head, steady and indifferent, and under it ran the low hum of the ventilation. Out in the corridor, rubber soles squeaked past, someone with somewhere to be. Far down the hall a television murmured, a talk show host laughing about something that didn't matter.

Then the rest of me caught up. The hospital gown lay stiff against my skin, and an IV pulled at the back of my left hand every time I flexed it, a small sharp bite. My skull rested on a pillow worn thin by too many other heads. And then, from somewhere to my left, faint but unmistakable: lilacs. Someone had brought flowers to a man who couldn't see the petals.

The neurologist, Dr. Edwin, delivered the verdict in a voice that was cool and precise. The dive had done it. The sheer impact of hitting the water, combined with the violent trauma of a stray elbow catching me squarely across the eyes during the struggle, had caused acute hemorrhaging around an optic chiasm already choked by months of tumor pressure.

My ophthalmologist, Dr. Thaddeus, had explicitly warned me about this weeks ago. You are playing Russian roulette with your eyesight, Ralph. He had been right. I'd pulled the trigger, and the chamber wasn't empty.

James had been pulled from the bottom of the pool by a maintenance worker who had heard the thrashing. But he had been under too long. The oxygen deprivation had caused severe, irreversible brain damage. He was alive in a different wing of the hospital.

I still couldn't process the last forty-eight hours.

First, the reality. I was blind. Surgery was scheduled within seventy-two hours to cut the tumor out. Without it, the darkness was permanent. With it, there was a chance. Dr. Edwin was disciplined with that word. A chance. Not a guarantee. Just a coin flip I couldn't see.

Second, the fear. It didn't hit like a sudden panic. It was a heavy, cold weight that settled deep in my chest, filling the space where my certainty used to live. I was an athlete. My entire identity was built on spatial awareness, on seeing the wall, on timing the turn down to the millisecond. Now, I didn't even know where the edge of the bed was.

Third, the truth I would never admit to another living soul.

Relief.

Somewhere beneath the terror, a part of me finally exhaled. It was over. The grueling seven-hour training sessions. The crushing pressure. The countdown. The Olympics, the sponsorships, the suffocating expectation of being everyone's golden boy while the wiring inside my skull was actively burning out. The tumor had made the choice for me.

I hated myself for the flash of gratitude I felt alongside the grief, but the truth was simple: I had been drowning long before I ever hit the water.

Light footsteps sounded near the doorway. Tentative, trying to be quiet and failing because the person was too anxious to control the sound.

A hand touched my forearm. And a voice I would have recognized in any hell, because I'd spent my entire adult life memorizing it.

"Ralph."

I turned my head toward her automatically, the way a compass needle finds north. For a cruel, reflexive second, my eyes strained to focus, to resolve her voice into a face, and found nothing but the void.