I kicked and flailed and felt the skin of my ankle rip open, but the rock didn’t budge. The water came quickly, in gulps, filling my throat, burning my nose. My arms pumped up and down, up and down, involuntarily, and I tried to reach the surface, but all I could inhale was more red water. Nothing worked. My head felt a rush of pressure, like it was going to explode. I tried to remember everything I’d ever learned about drowning. I tried to stop swallowing water. My legs and feet began to kick, and kick, and I couldn’t stop them.

I was a marionette jerking on a string.

And then, in a moment, a miraculous moment, I put my weight down on the other foot, and the rock moved. My ankle came free. I shot to the surface.

Air.

I gagged and gasped and vomited lake water in a stream. A coughing fit came over me; my arms were still pumping, and my legs were kicking, and a voice in the back of my mind told me to float on my back. FLOAT, it yelled. FLOAT. I managed to get my pelvis up, and then I was floating, still coughing, but floating. There was air on my skin, in my mouth, in my lungs.

I wasn’t dead.

I didn’t drown.

It took five minutes before I dared to lift my head—upend my balance—to look for the tube.

I made my way toward it, carefully, on my back. Adrenaline burned away the alcohol. Though I was trembling, cold inside, fizzy, destabilized, I had control of myself once more. I held on to the tube and kicked—and kicked—and kicked—for shore.

*  *  *

The first thing I did was throw up, heaving liters of bile-scented lake water into the vintage toilet, sunburned knees pressing tenderly into the peeling linoleum of the floor. Then I took a cold shower, staying under the needles of the spray for half an hour, until my skin stopped cooking itself. Afterward I crawled into bed and clung to the scratchy white sheets, shipwrecked until dawn.

The night was unbearable—rife with fever dreams and nightmares—and every time I heard the sound of the lake on the shoreline, it felt like I was still drowning, like the red water was still pouring from my nose and eyes and mouth.

I crawled out of bed at dawn, tried to put the near-drowning behind me and seize the day. Now that Prudence was done, there was plenty to do: Call Marlin and let her know that I was ready to move studios. Clean up my materials, box them, put them in the truck. Go out into the world to restock my supplies—set up for the next painting, and the next, and the next.