Chapter Text
Waking up in a fictional world, in the body of the 16 year old protagonist was not what I wanted to accomplish when I glanced for the final time up through the murky water of the lake and into the fading sunlight. The trees had been black against the horizon through the several feet of water, the sun turning the sky behind them brilliant shades of yellow, orange, and pink “Maybe I should have chosen a different color of rope” I thought, the excess of red rope that I had tied to myself floated out of view between me and the surface several feet above.
The boat I had rented a couple of hours before was somewhere behind me, the other end of the rope firmly attached to it. My final note, an apology to whatever unfortunate folks came out to look at the boat and make the grisly discovery was on the seat in a ziplock bag, attached with painter's tape so it would be easy to pull off. No need to inconvenience anyone more than was necessary. I’d packed the remains of my last supper into the cooler I’d brought, the one the ranger had kindly carried to the boat for me. “The park closes at sunset, so you’ll need to return your boat to the dock by then. Enjoy your picnic.” He’d said as he unlocked the boat from the little floating dock, the last words anyone would ever speak to me, I thought. I’d smiled and thanked him, settled onto the bench, and then began slowly rowing the little canoe towards the far side of the lake, where the water was a bit deeper, and to a little cove I knew was out of sight of the playground, but would be just visible to the ranger station and near the big boat launch they’d probably have to use to retrieve my body. See, considerate, even down to my last seconds in my watery grave.
I didn’t want to cause the water rescue and retrieval team any more work or cost than I had to, and at least the water was still cool enough in the early spring that even if it took a whole day to find me, the decomposition wouldn’t be too bad. I knew it was selfish, but drowning seemed like the least painful option to me, and I didn’t want to suffer any more than I had to. After having years of pain ignored by doctors, of being told it was stress, it was weight, it was just female problems, of years of agony, I was done. Years and years and years of dismissal only to get, when someone finally took me seriously, an almost certainly fatal and even more painful final diagnosis, had left me wanting as clean and pain-free a passing as I could take. While I knew it would burn, knew from reading that my lungs would protest and spasm and beg for air, after, it was supposed to be quick, as long as no one tried to resuscitate me, and that supposedly it would feel just like drifting off to sleep at the end. Doing it at the lake, one of the places where I felt most at peace, felt like one of the last gifts I could give myself. A nice dinner from my favorite restaurant, near sunset on the lake, a few bottles of apple ale, my favorite dessert, and then a quick trip to the bottom and eternal peace a few minutes later. No one to miss or mourn me, not sincerely, it was as good and painless for myself and the people who would discover me as I could make it.
Looking up through the water, the red rope drifting into view, I felt my lungs burning for me to take a breath. Cooler packed up, check, note taped up with my ID, including instructions for the disposal of my body, check. I’d prepaid for end-of-life services at the local funeral home “just in case” a few days after my diagnosis, explaining that I wouldn’t want to leave that burden and those decisions to anyone else if I passed. I hadn’t had the money initially, but had taken out a loan against my car, less than its value, and used that. The car would be repossessed and the last of my earthly possessions would be neatly handled. I’d tied the rope firmly to the lock on the side of the boat that was normally used for securing it from thieves and vandals, then tied the other end to the weighted vest I’d picked up at the sporting goods store a few days before. A quick search of scuba diving blogs taught me how to calculate for displacing body weight to sink, and the fifty-pound vest was more than sufficient, though I felt bad for the extra burden it would be for the recovery team, especially considering I wasn’t a small woman, to begin with.
My lungs were burning, and I closed my eyes briefly, bracing, before opening my mouth and taking a deep breath of water. I couldn’t tell if I was crying, could you cry underwater? Cry for all the never beens and never woulds? Cry for a life that, no matter how hard I tried, no matter how good I was or how hard I worked, never seemed to go my way? Spasms started at once, my body rejecting the water I’d taken in, trying in vain to expel it in the search for life-giving air. In the distance, I could hear a boat engine sputtering into action, muffled through the water, and I fought to keep my eyes open as my body finally began to accept the inevitable, my vision dimming as it gave up the fight. I kept my eyes upwards, toward the sky, towards the setting sun just visible over the treeline in the distance. As I accepted my last view of the world, the waning light faded, my vision darkened, and sunset slid into the evening light.
As my body quit functioning I’d expected to fade away, to stop, to cease. Even ascension into the afterlife that my childhood church visits had promised me, maybe, possibly, would have been less of a surprise. Instead, it was like I drifted up, out, away from my body, somehow still in it and yet able to view it completely from outside, taking in a nearly panoramic view with the clearest clarity and definition. I could watch the approaching boat, the small steel fishing boat the rangers used, as it pulled alongside, but somehow, layered on top, in, through, another scene was forming. Another body, floating in a river instead of a lake, lungs full of heavy, biting water instead of clear, smooth air, dark hair floating behind it as hands reached into the water, voices called indistinctly, dragging it to the surface, frantic, yelling, scared. Caring. Caring in a way that I knew no one cared for me. The picture layered, again and again, my own reality, the little rental canoe with the body a vague outline at the bottom of the lake as the ranger pulled along side the most visible, most saturated picture, while the others played over it, simultaneously.
In my own, the ranger read my note, rubbing his face and cursing as he looked down into the water, down at the rope floating along and down to my body at the bottom. I’d chosen a relatively shallow section of the lake, only twelve feet deep. Shallow enough to make recovery easy, but deep enough to do the job at twice my height. My location left no way a single park ranger should be able to haul my body up and onto the boat, let alone manage to resuscitate me. In the other reality, the girl, the body, was being dragged up into a raft, one of those big things tourist groups use to take white water trips, and people were frantically ripping off her life vest and beginning CPR, a man begging and pleading with her to be okay, be okay, “Please, Isabella, Baby, be okay.” As the scene in front of me continued, my own began to fade slightly, the degrees of saturation lessening as the other world became somehow more vibrant, then shifted, split, and now was playing out in separate layers too. In one the girl, Isabella, the man had called her, soon shuddered and began coughing, fountaining water as they turned her to her side and she began to choke and breathe. In another layer, like video being played over each other in projection, the group continued to labor, and the girl lay still and silent. Gone. Was she watching from a distance, tethered too? The man continued to beg and weep at her head, stroking her hair, as the rest of the people in the raft cried around them.
I felt a sudden sharp pulling, a jerk behind my ribs, in my heart. It was the first sensation I’d felt besides a pleasant floating since I’d left my body, as a third scene started to form, nebulous at first but then with deepening color and sharpening reality. I barely noticed as the park ranger in my reality grasped the rope and braced himself against the bench of his little fishing boat, straining and hauling against all likelihood of success, as the world I’d been created in faded, becoming indistinct and this new world flushed with color, full, darkening, alive, took its place. The jerking, tugging sensation became rhythmic in my heart, and it was with growing comprehension I realized that it synchronized to the CPR being performed on the girl from the newest vision. As the first two worlds with the girl from the water, one alive, one dead, evaporated like mist, the new world rushed forward, real, full, overbearing my reality until that popped like a soap bubble and I was only in this new world, the others vanished, floating above the river for a few forced heartbeats as if I’d never moved while they tried to save her. It was with a tremendous tug, lurch, and rushing sensation that I felt my eyes popping open, lungs desperately expelling water as I coughed and coughed to clear them and take in air, watching from inside of a body, through it, instead of from without.
“Isabella!” The man cried, the man who moments before I had watched, sobbing, stroking the girl's hair, was now stroking mine, turning me to the side to expel water before helping the others in the gently bobbing raft turn me back to my back. The sun was no longer on the horizon setting behind the trees, but high in the sky, full noon, and the tall sharp mountainsides in the distance were nothing like the familiar, gentle hills I was used to. It was this more than anything else, the sky all wrong, the sun all wrong, that overwhelmed me, the sharp pain in my head and chest pushing me too far. With the sensation of my eyes rolling back, I passed out, fainting dead away.