Above me, I heard a sharp gasp, an intake of breath.

I opened my eyes. Closed them. Opened them. Even the dimness made me squint, and I struggled to make sense of what was around me.

At first, all I saw was a halo of light, but inside it, I recognized a face that made everything better. Karly stood over me. Slowly, as if not believing what she was seeing, she put her hands against her cheeks, her fingers trembling. Her lips moved but made no sound. As I stared up at her, her face dissolved into uncontrollable tears. She sobbed, and then she fell to her knees and threw her arms around me and held me tighter than anyone had ever held me in my life.

“Dylan.”

Three weeks, Karly told me.

She waited until my disorientation had mostly gone away, which took several hours. By then, I was aware of being in a hospital room.

Three weeks, she told me.

Three weeks I’d been in a coma.

It was what they called a medically induced coma, in which they kept me sedated in order to give my brain and lungs a chance to heal from my lack of oxygen under the water. Nobody had known whether I would ever wake up.

“You got pneumonia in the early days,” she told me, sitting with me by the bed and not letting go of my hand. “You could hardly breathe. They thought you were going to die. God, I was so scared.”

“My chest hurts,” I said, in a raspy voice.

“Try not to talk. Your lungs still need to heal. Let me talk.”

“Okay.”

“The doctors weren’t sure about—about whether you’d come out of this with your brain functions intact. They said I needed to prepare myself for bad outcomes. But Alicia said the scans showed your brain activity was strong the entire time. In fact, she said the activity was hyperintense, like your mind was going through some kind of frenzied experience. She was sure you’d come out of it okay. She said Roscoe was looking out for you somewhere.”

I smiled without saying anything. Part of it was gratitude, for surviving, for Karly being there for me, for coming through the experience of nearly drowning with my awareness and motor skills intact. Part of it was also the thought of Roscoe watching over me.

I’d seen him again, and that was a gift. Everything I’d been through was a gift.

The nurses called it a miracle. They didn’t throw that word around lightly. I’d been without oxygen for nearly four minutes, which was dangerously close to the point at which brain damage would be irreversible. The day nurse had already been in after I awakened, asking me questions, testing my cognition. What’s your name? What year is it? What city are you in? Apparently, I passed the test.