Free Black Water by Joyce Carol Oates

all, yet as he kissed her after the first moment she stood
her ground firmly, heels dug into the crusty sand, she leaned to the man taking
the kiss as if it were her due, a natural and inevitable and desired
development of their conversation. And bold too, giddy too, parrying his tongue
with her teeth.
    How nice. How nice, really. You can't
deny—how nice.
     
    As the black water filled her lungs,
and she died.

 

    Except: amid blinding lights suddenly
she was being wheeled on a gurney flat on
her back strapped in place amid lights and strangers' eyes and that harsh hospital
smell they were pumping the black water out of her lungs, the poisonous muck
out of her stomach, her very veins, in a matter of minutes! seconds ! the team of them, an emergency room crew, strangers to
the dying girl yet she was of such enormous concern to them you would have
thought it was one of their own being resuscitated, and how swiftly! how without hesitation! she was trying to explain to them
that she was awake, she was conscious, please don't hurt me, how terrifying the
clamps that held her fast on the table and her head gripped firmly by the
gloved hands of someone who stood behind her and the hose forced down her
throat, the thick fat hideous hose that was so long, so long, you would not
believe how long and how much pain scraping the back of her mouth, her throat,
choking her so she wanted to vomit but could not vomit, she wanted to scream
but could not scream and in the midst of a convulsion her heart lurched and
stopped and she died, she was dying but they were ready, of course they were ready,
elated by this challenge they were ready scarcely missing a beat of her
faltering heart they stimulated it with powerful electric jolts. Ah! yes ! good ! again ! like that! again ! yes ! and the dying girl was revived, the young female corpse
was revived, the heart's pumping restored within five seconds and oxygen
restored to the brain, and by degrees the marmoreal skin took on the flush of
color, of life: the eyes leaked tears: and out of Death there came this life:
hers.
     
    Don't let Lisa die,
dear God don't let her die, don't don't she was waiting in the outer room, she and several others, Oh God please in that calm of mutual hysteria three or four
of them, girls from the residence hall, and the dorm resident who was only a
few years older, Kelly Kelleher was the one who'd seen Lisa Gardiner collapse
in the bathroom, Kelly Kelleher was the one who'd run screaming to the
resident's suite, now keeping vigil in the waiting room beyond the emergency
room of Bronxville General and the shock of it, the trauma of it, seeing one of
their own carried out on a stretcher unconscious and open-eyed open-mouthed her
tongue convulsing drooling as in an epileptic fit and Kelly Kelleher staring,
knuckles pressed to her mouth, had thought, Why it isn't Lisa's
life it's simply—life seeing how it was draining away in her like
water down a sink and perhaps she was already dead and could they restore that
life to her?
    Could,
and did.
     
    Later,
they'd learned, and some of them resented it, that Lisa Gardiner and her twin
sister Laura (whom they had never met—Laura went to school at the Concord
Academy in Massachusetts) had tried to kill themselves by taking sleeping pills
in a suicide pact, three years before when they were living at home, and in
eighth grade in a public junior high school in Snyder, New York.
    Why
did some of the girls resent this fact?—because the near-death of Lisa had
disturbed them so, churned them up so, there was no subject except Lisa and the
emergency team rushing up the stairs and into the bathroom and carrying Lisa
away and the fact that strictly speaking Lisa had died, her heart had stopped,
and how weird! how terrible! how amazing! and you grew simply to resent it, all that fuss over Lisa Gardiner who
always had to be the center of attention, and all that fuss over death, and
dying, how exhausting by the end of the