Page 41 of Holding On

Chapter Nine

Travis Russo

The water is freezing. I’ve borrowed one of Finn’s wetsuits, and I’m still cold. I don’t understand how he and Claire go out and swim every morning. Unless the swells are really high, it’s literally every morning, except maybe in February.

Mateus and I are treading water.

“Is this deep enough?” I’m on my lunch break, the clinic’s closed, and I’ve only got an hour. We can’t swim out too far.

“This is good. This’ll work,” he says.

I suck down a lungful of air and then float. I wait until there’s a slight pounding in my ears. I wait again till the back of my throat joins in the beat, then there’s this faint ringing in my right ear. Only then do I allow myself to feel the cramping in my lungs. My head comes back up, and what little air I have left escapes and I nearly choke. Mateus has an arm under mine, and he’s studying me, making sure I don’t swallow too much seawater.

The wind is stiff and we’re at the brink of whitecaps.

“Pretty good, dude. Let’s track your recovery.” He’s looking at his watch, timing me down to the second.

“Two minutes fifty-seven seconds. Hey, don’t try to control the breathing. Just let it come.” I wait for what seems an interminable amount of time before he assesses that I’ve returned to my resting rate.

“That was fantastic,” he says. “You’re doing great. Your recovery is thirty-seven seconds.”

It’s almost as if he’s not treading water. I don’t think the guy’s a former SEAL, I think he is a seal. Even with his left lower leg missing, he still swims with less effort than I do.

“Why did you want to do this again?” He tucks his timer away.

“I’m sure I can beat that.”

“Give it a rest, man. You got it already. What are you even training for?”

I feel foolish. How do I explain how I want to swim with octopuses and jellies and be able to stay under for great lengths of time without having to come up for air? I want to feel like a kid flying over coral reefs down off the coast of Belize.

“I just want to be able to study plants and animals in the ocean, you know, unencumbered,” is all I can come up with.

But there is another legitimate reason that’s fast becoming more important.

I got to know Finn, Bryce, Mateus, Luke, and Jackson better when I helped out with the restorations over spring break. Bryce and Mateus started training me to hold my breath longer. Last winter, they had me practicing breath control exercises, like box breathing, to increase both lung capacity and duration. Right after classes, and before I headed out on the failed Colorado trip, we did a dive out off Rock Island, and I was able to hold my breath for over two minutes.

Actually, it would have been longer, but I think I scared the shit out of both of them.

“You told me to float,” I had said, startled when they both started to drag me up on the rocks.

“Not like you’re dead,” said Mateus, his brown face almost green. “Shit, man. You float like a dead dude.”

That’s why I was so mad at myself at the storm. I couldn’t use any of the training in a real-life situation. It’s like my body forgot.

That’s not going to happen again.

“I didn’t last that long the other day.”

Mateus jerks his head in the direction of the shoreline. “Let’s go.”

We swim parallel to each other with mirrored long strokes. It’s not until we’re in the froth of the surf, walking through thigh-high white water, that he addresses what I’ve just admitted to.

“Dude. That was an emergency situation with storm sequences and surges that can’t be predicted. The adrenaline was racing. There was a possible loss of life and many other contingencies you had basically no control over.”

“I get that. But the reality is, I lasted about two seconds under there. She could’ve drowned.”

“Believe me,” he says, his eyebrows knitting together. “You were under longer than two seconds.”