Everlong (Everland #1)

To Die

"To die would be an awfully big adventure."

― J.M. Barrie, Peter Pan

The night I died I felt everything. Then I felt nothing at all.

I loved a good survivor story as much as the next girl, but when it became your story of survival, it hit a lot different.

Storms were a drug; a hallucinogenic that had me through withdraws after long bouts without.

I had spent more of my early childhood sailing with my father on his boat than I did in the after-school classes my mother had so desperately begged I attend. Often, when Dad and I would sail out, a storm would peek its ugly head out and drench us from head to toe as the dark, brooding skies wept and the angry waters shook the boat around us. My father, as eccentric as he was, had the most beautiful soul and brightest outlook on life. The first clap of thunder that'd send me cowering in a corner would have him opening his arms and tilting his head back to stare up at the sky, as if he were asking to be rained down on. He convinced me at an early age that storms weren't bad omens-the contrary, he'd said. They were reassurance that even the sky had its moments too.

My father sailed out three years ago on a whale watching yacht with a few Marine Biologists; he came back to us in a navy-blue casket.

The night of I saw a flicker, a glimpse, of the light my father was surely standing in, patiently awaiting my mother and me to join him, was in the middle of July. The monsoon that flooded the streets and swept cars off the asphalt had been predicted to be the worst in years. Mom had had me crash in my room early and had set candles in every room in the case that the power were to go out. It did. I took her sighing and heading for the basement as my opportunity to make my escape. I grabbed the keys to my crappy, 04' silver Mazda from the hook on the right side of the door and stepped out onto the porch, watching from beneath the awning as the rain flooded the streets in sheets, pouring off the shingles of rooftops and down onto driveways.

I smiled and threw my head back the way my father always had; I embraced the storm.

Hurrying down the steps, the water was up to my calves by the time I reached my car and ducked in, my whole body a sticky, soaked mess. Brushing my hair out of my eyes, I started the car, and though I was aware that this weather was not conditions to be driving in, I pulled out of the driveway and headed down the street.

I don't remember a single thing that happened after making a left out of my neighborhood. One second, I was only a couple blocks from my house, the next the front half of my car was totaled and submerged in Lake Belle ten miles away. According to the police on scene, my car had hydroplaned at the stoplight just before the road split that leads one off the highway and toward the lake, and I'd lost full control and drove straight through the forestry and into the cold, murky water.

I had survived by the skin of my teeth is what Doctor Arnold had not-so-reassuringly expressed to my hysteric mother in the hospital room. As wrongly and heartlessly as he'd phrased it, he was right. Because I had died in the ambulance on the way to the hospital. I'd been dead for an entire two minutes before they'd been able to revive me.

Those first few weeks after the accident were a jumbled, disoriented mess of physical therapy, my sobbing mother, and a seething hatred for myself for not being able to remember anything. I spent nights sitting at the end of my bed, staring at my casted broken leg trying to recall the final moments leading up the crash-to what had ultimately led me to my untimely demise. The only thing that I could fully grasp on to was the emotions that'd been rushing through in that moment, the millisecond before my heart had stopped. The devastation of knowing that I'd not only be leaving my mother a widow, but childless as well.