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chapter twenty-two bite the hand that feeds
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Drowning is a silent death.
It isn't like in the movies. There's no thrashing around, desperately clawing at the air to pull yourself out of the water. There's no yelling. It's silent as you sink below the surface of the water, holding your breath while trying not to let any water seep past your sealed lips. It's called voluntary apnea. It's the instinct to not breathe underwater, and it's so strong that it overcomes the agony of running out of air. It's only more painful from there. It's a silent fight as the body blocks its airways, slowly suffocating you until the lack of oxygen leads to unconsciousness and you take an involuntary breath in. That's the breaking point.
Survivors say it burns like lava as you become unconscious and the airways relax, allowing your lungs to fill with water. The water burns so much it feels like lava, and it's not a lovely way to burn, it's lonely and horrifying. And the pain doesn't stop until the last second before you blackout. It keeps going until your body just accepts it and the world fades to black. That's when it's peaceful—at the last second as you're floating through a dark abyss.
Drowning is a silent death, and it only takes eighty-seven seconds to reach the breaking point before death consumes the body. That's all it takes. And Izzy Windsor had done well to remember that. Because truthfully, she had felt like she had been drowning all her life. She took life eighty-seven seconds at a time. She was always in a constant state of dying, and it wasn't peaceful like she'd hoped. It was painful up until the very last second, and then she felt like she could finally breathe . . . until the timer restarted and suddenly, she was drowning again.
But she had noticed she didn't feel like she was sinking into oblivion when she was around the Pogues. They made her feel like she could finally breathe. She realized they were the hands reaching for her body, saving her from the tidal waves which pulled her in. She knew, in a way, she had saved herself . . . but she wouldn't have realized she had a problem if they had never walked into her life. She supposed it was JJ Maybank who had started it all. He was the one person to never let go; the reason the eighty-seven seconds kept restarting. She wouldn't say he saved her, because really, she'd pulled her body from the depths of the ocean by herself, but . . . it was his hand she grabbed when she reached the surface.
