TENNYSON
64) RECLAMATION
If he dies, I swear I’ll never forgive him. I’ll never forgive myself.
He’s heavy as granite at the bottom of the pool, his mass so dense he doesn’t float. Bronte and I struggle with every ounce of our strength to raise him to the surface.
My choice to follow him from our house wasn’t out of the purest of motives. I was too much of a wimp to face the emotional wreckage that was sure to come once Brew left and the effect of his presence wore off. I wanted to stay in range—even if only at the edge of it, trailing a block behind him as he searched for my sister. Tonight I was his personal stalker.
When I got to the pool, Bronte was just climbing out. She was dazed, unsure of what had happened. I climbed the fence. I would have moved faster if I’d known. We didn’t see him for at least another ten seconds. Ten seconds can make the difference between living and dying.
Our first attempt to bring him up fails. We come to the surface, gasp a breath of air, and go down again. I get beneath him, pushing him up, while Bronte grabs him in a cross-chest carry, kicking for all she’s worth.
We pull him to the surface at last, somehow getting him over to the side. Standing at the edge, it takes both Bronte and me pulling on his lifeless hands to get him out of the pool.
“You learned CPR in lifesaving, right?” I ask her.
Bronte nods and begins CPR right away, frantically working on him.
“You’re going too fast!”
“I never had to do it for real!”
She slows down. Two rescue breaths, thirty chest compressions.
“I’ll call for help!” But when I pull out my phone, its screen is a jumble of flickering garbage. It traveled with me to the bottom of the pool, and now it’s useless.
Two breaths, thirty compressions, over and over. Bronte’s tears are explosive without Brew to take them away, and I’m terrified that it might mean he’s already gone.
“Get out the heart paddles!” Bronte shouts. “There’s a defibrillation kit somewhere in the storeroom. I saw it once, but I don’t know where.”
I race to the storeroom while Bronte keeps counting out chest compressions. “…nine, ten, eleven—damn it, Brew, breathe!”
I ransack the room—hurling things to the ground, dumping out cabinets until I find the kit—and race back to the pool deck.
“…twenty-five, twenty-six, twenty-seven…”
I kneel beside her and get the thing open. The lid is filled with too many instructions to read. “What do I do?”
“They never showed us!” But then she reaches over and flips the On switch. Simple enough so far. A red light comes on. I can hear it charging up as I grab the heart paddles. Then a green ready light comes on. I press the metallic surface of the paddles to his chest. Bronte leaps back an instant before I press the red buttons on the paddles, and Brew’s back stiffens in a violent arch.
“You’re supposed to yell ‘CLEAR!’” she shouts.
“I forgot!”
I wait for it to recharge, watching for the green light, trying to relive every medical TV show I’ve ever seen to make sure I do this right. Bronte puts two fingers against his neck and shakes her head: no pulse.
Brew has got to fight his way back—but he won’t. He can’t. He’s not a fighter; it’s not in his nature.
But it is in mine! If Brewster won’t fight, then I’ll have to fight for him.
“CLEAR!”
A second jolt. His back arches. Still no pulse.
“It’s not working,” wails Bronte. “It’s no use.”
But today failure is not an option.
As I wait for the machine to recharge, I look into his half open, unseeing eyes, and I realize that CPR and heart paddles are not enough. He needs something more from us.
“We have to take it back!” I tell Bronte. I don’t even know what I mean yet. It’s not a thought; it’s a feeling —something I’m trying to put into words, knowing I don’t have much time to do it.
“Take what back?” Bronte asks
Then the understanding hits me. What Brew needs —what WE need. The only way to save him. It’s simple, and yet it’s impossible. But no more impossible than the things Brew has already done. “We have to take all of it back! Everything we let him take away! We have to steal it back from him.”
I see in her eyes the moment she gets it. “How?”
And suddenly I flash to Uncle Hoyt. “How did his uncle stay angry? Because he wanted to. The things we gave to Brew—we have to want them. We have to OWN them!”
Bronte nods. The light turns green. “One last time,” she says.
I press the paddles to his chest, but my thoughts aren’t on those paddles. Instead they’re on the body bruises I gave away, the head trips I refused to take, the pangs of sorrow I so easily handed over. Against my own self-preservation instinct, I fight to feel those things I refused to feel before.
“CLEAR!”
I pump him full of electricity while trying to steal back a fraction of what I never should have given him in the first place. The battering he stole for me on the field. The heartache he spared me at home. Once I started to give just a little bit of it to him, it was easy to give it all away. But no matter how hard it is, I’m ready to take it all back if it will save him. All of it and more. So I silently pray that I might feel the hurt again somewhere, anywhere, everywhere.
Bronte checks his pulse again. “Nothing.”
But I feel something. There’s a tiny ache on my upper arm. It’s the spot where Bronte had punched me so angrily that day of my lacrosse game. When I raise my arm, I see the faintest bit of a yellow bruise that wasn’t
