The water. It hit him like a fist, his nose and eyes and mouth filling with it, with its awful chemical taste, like demon’s breath. She was under and over and all around him as they sank, their arms and legs twisted around each other’s like a net; he tried to free himself but she held fast, dragging him down and down. He couldn’t swim, not a stroke, he could sort of bob along if he had to but even that scared him, and he had no strength to stop her. He craned his head to find the shining surface of the water where it met the air, but it could have been a mile away. She was pulling him down, into a world of silence, as if the pool were an inverted piece of sky, and that was when he figured it: that was where she wanted to go. That’s where she’d been headed, all along, since that day under the freeway when she had stopped her car and said his name. Whatever had kept her in that other world, the one above the water, had finally snapped, like the string of a kite, but the world was upside down, and now the kite was falling. She pulled him into a hug, her chin against his shoulder, and for an instant he glimpsed her eyes through the swirling water and saw they were full of a terrible, final darkness. Oh please, he thought, let me. I’ll die if you want me to, I would die for you if you asked, let me be the one to die instead. All he had to do was breathe. He knew that as clear as he knew his own name, but try as he might he couldn’t make himself do this; he had lived his life too long to give it up by will alone. They hit the bottom with a soft thump, Mrs. Wood still holding him, and he felt her shoulders twitch when she took the first breath. She took another, and then a third, the bubbles of the last air in her lungs rising beside his ear like a whispered secret—God bless you, Mr. Carter—and then she let him go.