What We Lost in the Dark by Jacquelyn Mitchard Read Free Book Online Page B

circulation slows, because of this evolutionary inheritance called the mammalian diving reflex. It’s the reason that small kids can sometimes be revived after long minutes at the bottom of a pool. In cold water, the need to breathe, at least the physicalneed, is actually decreased. I thought for a moment of the little boy in the shallow lake. That had been cold water; nobody was even supposed to be swimming. The fathers were fishing, hoping to catch dinner in water that was crisping at the edges with ice. It would have seemed such a simple matter for the older guy to jump in and pull the little kid out … how could the older boy have died so quickly in such cold water? With the family all there thrashing around? The mammalian body knows how to conserve the oxygen for the tissues that need it most—mostly the brain. Hence the autopsy, I guess … I dragged myself back to the water at hand.
    Wesley was saying that if we were going scuba diving, we’d need dry suits to withstand the epic cold down there because we’d be cruising around, looking at the ribs of dead boats. But for a free dive, we’d only need ordinary wet suits, masks, and these huge blade-like fins to get us the farthest down with the least amount of kicking—which depletes oxygen.
    For now, we just practiced sitting on the bottom of the pool with a weight belt on that wasn’t heavy enough to keep us from kicking to the surface. Which I did. I kicked to the surface after fifty seconds and air never felt so good.
    “Rob must have unusually large lungs for his body size,” Wesley said, as Rob edged past a minute. “What he’s doing is what you have to do, Allie. You have to clear your mind to the edges.”
    As if.
    Another twenty or forty points in the
Do-Not-Want-to-Die
column.
    As I stood there shivering and staring at Rob, sitting contentedly
underwater
, Wesley told me about a Russian diver, Natalia Molchanova, who could hold her breath for eight minutes. In 2009, she finally became the first woman to breakthe record of free diving a hundred meters (that’s more than three hundred feet, folks). She actually dived
one hundred and one
meters, just for insurance. According to Wesley, an American woman, Sara Campbell, had done it first. But Campbell didn’t get to keep her record. The rules say (and who made up these rules?) that you have to remain conscious for sixty seconds on the surface after you make your dive. Sara Campbell got back to the surface, took two breaths, and passed out.
    Fifty more points in the
No-Way-in-Hell
column for that kind of anecdote.
    “As breath holders go, Sara Campbell isn’t really great,” Wesley said. “Five minutes maybe.”
    “What about you?” I asked, teasing, trying to avoid thinking about Rob, who had now gone over two minutes without breathing.
    “Me? Three minutes maybe? I’m about the dive and what you see, not the immersion.”
    Wesley reached into his pocket for his phone and showed me a picture of Sara Campbell at the bottom of the sea, wearing a dive suit that had a single huge fin. She looked exactly like a mermaid, but with a sleek hood and mask instead of the fabled flowing locks. She was looking straight at the camera, calmly. It was like one of those pictures where you try to find the hidden drawing of a shell or a ruler except instead of there being something there that shouldn’t be, there was something missing. People photographed at the bottom of the sea usually have on a breathing apparatus or are in agony or are obviously dead.
    “If you read about Sara Campbell, she passes out pretty often,” he said, shoving his phone back in his pocket “She doesn’t really mind it. She says she kind of likes the feeling.”He paused. “She says that she thinks of being in an Alpine meadow. Puts a whole new perspective on death, doesn’t it?”
    And ten more black marks in the Ixnay ledger.
    “That woman who can do it for eight minutes? What does she think about?” I