One Breath

by Adam Skolnick

  Back in Moscow she said, “For me, I have not good results in training. Only in competition. I like to train but I don’t like to swim long-distance Dynamic because many discomfort. So I train with pleasure, very easy, like a dance. There is no gravity, and my body is happy to move with music inside. But in competition, if I feel I have power, and I have potential to go for a record, why not?”

  Though Kyle Gion, the American record holder, was swimming on the far side of the pool, he may as well have been swimming alone. Every spectator hovered over the near side, watching Natalia double kick and glide with power and grace. She was in a zone. Kyle rose at 175 meters. Natalia kept swimming. Now even Kyle was watching.

  When she hit 200 meters, a murmur filtered through the crowd. The women’s Dynamic record was 234 meters. When would she stop? Was she pushing too far? Would she falter? Could the Japanese win after all? At 225 meters she touched and turned, gliding closer to yet another record. She rose up about halfway down. With her elbows on the pool ledge and the Mediterranean spread out before her, she completed the cleanest of protocols. The white card flashed and the crowd went wild, cheering and clapping for minutes on end. The Russian men and women had both won gold, and Natalia had claimed one more world record with a Dynamic swim of 237 meters. She waved, beaming as the photographers surrounded her, calling her name. She was the best woman in the tournament by far, and she’d scored better than any man other than Goran and Alexey.

  Kerry had been watching with her teammate and good friend, Ashleigh Baird. “She’s abnormal,” deadpanned Ashleigh, still clapping.

  “Or she’s just an awesome athlete,” Kerry said.

  The Russians threw a wild party that night in the hotel bar. After weeks of training and teetotaling, the freedivers were cleared to drink, and drink heavily. Even Alexey got lit, and why not? Though it had been Natalia’s tournament, it was Alexey’s year, at least so far. He beat Will in Roatan, took down Goran’s Team Croatia on the world championship stage, and had Vertical Blue in his sights, but for now, he was going to enjoy his party.

  The night did get wild. Athletes binged, some purged, several swapped hotel rooms, others roamed the streets or crashed on lobby sofas. As for Marianna, she was done with Sasha, and so was his girlfriend, at least for a little while. He would look for her most of the night, come up empty, and spend the rest in bed, alone.

  In the wee hours, Mike bellied up to the bar with American alternate Jonathan Lata to discuss Nick Mevoli. Lata, who never knew Nick, was taking a hardline position that he’d caused his own demise—that because he dove for numbers and either ignored or simply refused to heed warnings, it was all Nick’s fault when his body finally gave in. Lata, a talented spearfisherman and big-wave surfer from Maui, was by no means alone in holding that position, but Mike wasn’t having it. He had competed alongside Nick and knew what the herd mentality was in 2013, because he’d shared it.

  “I dive for numbers,” Mike said, “and I think all of us here, we all dive for numbers. And the thing is, Nick didn’t know he could die. He didn’t know that was even possible. None of us did.”

  It was a somber trip home from Sardinia for Kerry and Steve. After three flights they finally landed at Raleigh-Durham International and shared a ride back to Greenville, where they parted ways. She packed a few things, said goodbye to Steve’s precocious thirteen-year-old daughter, whom she’d helped raise from the time she was six, and drove off to the house she’d owned since before they started dating. She’d held on to it as an investment, and her renter had recently moved out, so it was a convenient place to land.

  Steve and Kerry met in medical school and then reconnected in the hospital halls when Kerry was a surgical resident and Steve already a physician’s assistant in the surgery department. He found her attractive, but was married at the time. When he and his wife split, he became a full-time single dad of two girls. Kerry was single too, but when they’d cross paths on a local mountain biking trail or in the OR, he never asked her out. She didn’t know about the divorce and their chance meetings were always too rushed for him to explain himself. He kept hoping for the right moment to arise.

  Being a thirty- or forty-something atheist, single intellectual in Greenville, North Carolina, is not the ideal life predicament. Hell, it’s hard just being single in Greenville. Sure, the Research Triangle is ninety minutes away, but that’s still a long drive, and not an option for a working single parent or a surgical resident. Hard up and looking for love, both registered on Match.com. Steve found Kerry within a few clicks. They chatted online that night, and he told her he was newly single and felt a little lost. They decided to meet for dinner, where they shared their stories and talked for hours, ticking mental boxes: smart, funny, well read, athletic, attractive, and yes, atheist. By the time dinner was over, they both knew.

  Within a few weeks, Kerry had moved into the house that Steve was remodeling himself. He built and installed the custom cabinetry in the kitchen, and the treehouse in the backyard. Kerry never considered that she had a maternal instinct, but now she was part of a family. She clashed with the older daughter, already a teenager, but grew close to his youngest. They shared happy years, and many interests. They rode mountain bikes, blended morning smoothies, and started freediving together. Toward the end they’d even adopted an orphaned baby squirrel. For days, Kerry warmed her in her sports bra and fed her almond butter by hand. As Nutnut grew older she would spend most of her time outside, but she’d still scurry onto their shoulders as they fed her whole nuts at the dinner table.

  There were hard times, too. In 2009, during her last year of residency, Kerry was in San Diego for a medical conference while Steve was visiting his brother in Colorado. It had been a wonderful trip. Her whole life, Kerry had felt like an oddball. Tomboy and bookworm don’t go over well in Greenville, much less in Edenton, North Carolina, where she grew up hunting and fishing, often better than the boys. She was also faster than most of them. She lettered in basketball, tennis, track, and cross-country, and snagged a track scholarship to NC State, where she ran the 1,500. Her personal best time of 4:32 came in the Atlantic Coast Conference finals. But while mingling with women docs from across the country in San Diego, she realized that, just like her, most were fit, tough, fun women who’d achieved big things and were capable of more. Her world opened that week. She felt more comfortable than ever in her own skin, and toward the end of the conference, she went to dinner with a group of her new friends. When their cab arrived at the restaurant, the driver stopped in a no parking zone, close to a corner. Kerry was engaged in conversation, glanced over her shoulder, saw it was clear, and opened the door.

  If the other car had come around the corner right then, it would have taken the door off and only given Kerry the fright of her life. Sadly, there was time enough for her to stand directly in its path. She saw headlights and jumped on her taxi’s trunk to dodge it, but the car hit her legs, spun her in the air, and dropped her in the street. The cabbie rushed to her aid but his car was still in gear, and when he took his foot off the brake, it rolled over both her legs. Unconscious, she was rushed to the hospital with a scalp laceration that would require thirty staples and a compound fracture of the tibia and fibula in her left leg. Incredibly, her right leg was bruised but the bone was intact.

  Steve caught the first flight to San Diego from Denver. The orthopedic surgeon told him they put a rod in Kerry’s leg so the bone could heal properly. No novice, Steve looked at the X-rays after surgery. The rod looked too long and he said so. The surgeon insisted it would be fine. Steve backed off.

  Kerry had already missed weeks by the time she returned to work in her last year of residency. Surgery was always the most competitive department for new docs, and it’s hard to even land one of the coveted surgical resident positions. Kerry hobbled around and tried her best to catch up, but her leg wasn’t healing. For months she dealt with debilitating pain, but never complained. She couldn’t. Her boss, the macho residency director, didn�
�t have much sympathy for her plight. Eventually, she had to have a second surgery (Steve had been right about the rod), and her boss didn’t like that much either. With just weeks to go before her residency was over, he cut her from the program on a technicality. Steve wanted her to go over his head and fight for her job, but she didn’t have the strength. She fell into a shallow depression and wallowed before starting over and landing in a family practice residency program. So close to being a surgeon, she’d have to begin again from year one.

  That’s where their problems began, although her new gig afforded her more free time—time enough to discover freediving. Steve had lost respect for her, and it showed. He became more controlling, and she responded by shutting down instead of fighting back. Though they trained and competed together, the tension built until it broke on the flight to Italy.

  Kerry’s old house felt dark and foreign when she got home. There wasn’t much furniture, just a sofa, a coffee table, and a mattress on the bedroom floor. At first she was excited for the newness of single life 2.0, but as the hours passed, her perspective darkened, and everything about it felt empty. There was no Steve, no precocious thirteen-year-old novelist hiding in her room typing away on Wattpad, and Nutnut would not be coming over for dinner anytime soon. What did squirrels know about heartbreak, anyway?

  For the past three months she’d taken time off and geared her entire life toward training in Kona and competing at the world championship, and now that was in the rearview too. Instead, she had the dog days of the longest residency on record at East Carolina University medical school to look forward to. She was a family practice doc on a convalescent rotation, with the odd nightshift in the ER. There were no exotic locations or urgent competitions on the horizon. Life couldn’t get more ordinary. Forty was just around the corner. She lived in fucking Greenville, alone, with no eligible life partners within a hundred miles, and she’d probably have to drive farther until she found one who would tolerate her compulsion to don a mermaid fin and swim deep enough until her lungs were the size of Nutnut’s acorns. In rural North Carolina, that’s not really a thing.

  As the self-pity swirled, her many gifts were cloaked as flaws. She couldn’t remember feeling so alone, and there wasn’t any wine or whiskey in the house to keep her company, so tears would have to do. They washed over her in waves, rattled her rib cage, and wrenched her gut as she doubled over and wept. Then, suddenly, her iPhone rang, and she was shocked back to reality. She wiped her eyes and looked at the screen. It was Dr. Gilliland, the forensic pathologist Kerry had recruited to help her make sense of what had happened to Nick. Kerry had been waiting a long time for this call. Maybe she finally had some news.

  “Hi, Dr. Gilliland,” she sniffled, “how are you?”

  —

  ON THE DAY Nick died, Kerry was at work in the hospital, sneaking away whenever she had a spare moment to check Facebook for updates on Vertical Blue. That’s how it is for serious competitive freedivers. If there’s a big comp, they keep tabs. If there’s a record, they want to know about it. Kerry was especially keen to know if Nick bagged that Constant No Fins record. What she found instead was an official statement about his tragic death posted by the in-house media team.

  “I didn’t believe it at first. I just kept reading it over and over,” she said. When it finally hit her that Nick was gone, she lost it. She began dry heaving and hyperventilating. Two doctors watched her break down but they let her be. Sobbing, she called Steve, who was working on the house. Pretty soon, he was crying too. “This doesn’t make sense,” she told him. She was having the most trouble correlating a depth of 72 meters to a mortality. Yes, it’s certainly not an easy dive, especially without fins, but the world record was another 30 meters beyond it. She would have had an easier time believing an athlete had died pushing the edge of human limits, trying to set a new world record, but 72 meters? She’d been down that far.

  “We had this construct in our head that you can’t die in competition, that it was this safe endeavor because of the safety training we’ve had,” said Steve.

  Blacking out never scared Kerry and Steve because they understood the physiology and knew it was the brain’s response to low oxygen levels. “That’s why there are safety divers,” Kerry said. “They protect your airway and get you to the surface and you should breathe. If your throat had closed to prevent you from drowning, then the safety divers should give you rescue breaths to break the laryngospasm (an involuntary closing off of the throat), and you should breathe.”

  “And if you don’t, then we keep giving you air, and eventually you should breathe,” added Steve. “We didn’t have any reason to believe that you could damage your lungs so badly that you could hit the surface and not be taken care of.”

  After hanging up with Steve, Kerry called Ashley, who told her that Nick had a massive hemorrhage. “I’m thinking, fuck, did he tear something in his lungs from the pressure? A major blood vessel? If that was the case, there was nothing anybody could do to save him.”

  As word spread throughout the Water Tribe, Kerry’s phone rang nonstop. Francesca from US Freediving called, as did Kirk Krack and John Shedd. AIDA was MIA, and they all agreed that there was no time to waste. Someone had to try and get the family to sign over Nick’s organs for research. Francesca called Paul and Belinda. In the midst of grief and shock, they listened. So little was known about the effects of pressure on an athlete’s organs, Francesca told them—perhaps Nick’s death could advance knowledge and prevent a future tragedy. More accommodating than most, the family agreed, hoping to salvage meaning from loss.

  Dr. Shedd was already in touch with Dr. Caryn Sands, the Nassau pathologist who received Nick’s remains on Monday, November 18. Shedd also reached out to the head of hyperbaric medicine at the University of Miami, while Kerry called Dr. Richard Moon, the chief of hyperbaric medicine at Duke. Neither institution would agree to take the remains on such short notice, so Kerry called forensic pathology at ECU and talked to a tech. She told him that if ECU accepted custody, she would continue to work and find a more permanent home for the organs. With a residency to finish, Kerry had no intention of doing the research herself, but she also had no clue that with custody comes liability, and once ECU received Nick’s remains, the university was legally obligated to research his case. In the mad, last-minute scramble, she’d accidentally suckered her own university into a commitment they had to see through.

  Kerry and Steve were ordered to the morgue to discuss the case with the pathologist in charge. When they got there, they came face to face with Dr. Mary G. Gilliland. Not quite five feet tall, with bobbed gray hair and a strand of pearls draped over her blouse, along with a large gold cross, she sneered with suspicion. Kerry smiled back. They knew each other.

  When Kerry was just an intern, she’d lost a patient in ICU, and thought she’d made a fatal error by inserting a chest tube in someone who’d bled out. Once a week new residents are forced to discuss lost cases in front of their peers and professors as part of a Morbidity and Mortality meeting. Kerry had been nervous heading into that meeting, but Dr. Gilliland turned up and told the room that Kerry hadn’t done anything wrong. If she had done nothing, the patient would have died even sooner. It wasn’t just what she said, but the way she said it that intrigued Kerry. Dr. Gilliland was tiny yet expressive, with wide eyes and an acrobatic brow—the kind that can communicate disbelief, suspicion, anger, and joy without a word.

  In the halls of the morgue, Dr. Gilliland’s face flashed with recognition, but she’d just had a new case dumped on top of a pile of old ones, and wasn’t particularly amused. She marched Kerry and Steve to her office, sat them down, leaned against her desk, exhaled, and said, “Okay, so once there was a diver named Nick, and…”

  They told her all they knew about the sport and Nick’s case, although they were still fuzzy on details. They hadn’t yet seen the video footage, but what they did know was enough to pique Gilliland’s interest. Nick had been a healthy young man wh
o was doing something he loved and was good at, and that was perceived as safe. He was doing it within the guidelines of the sport and still ended up dead. Gilliland longed to have her eye in a microscope and her brain on a puzzle. She found purpose and poetry in the dissection of medical records, witness testimony, police reports, and, of course, corpses. She was a natural-born sleuth, and it was her kind of case.

  Med school in the 1960s was something like the tech industry now. There weren’t many women. Gilliland was one of four in her class of eighty-eight. One was a nun. She’d dealt with her own hard knocks as a young female doctor and was naturally sympathetic to Kerry’s story, which she’d heard through channels. Both whip smart, Kerry knew diving, Gilliland knew forensics, and the case intrigued them both. It was a natural pairing, and they decided to team up and investigate Nick’s death together. Of course, the typical caseload for a forensic pathologist can feel like a blizzard that never ends. Files pile up, and some cases are more urgent than others, so it took awhile for Gilliland’s techs to prepare slides of Nick’s lung tissue.

  In the meantime, Kerry retreated into the literature, trying to find out what the medical community already knew about how depth and pressure can impact an athlete’s lungs. She ran searches on PubMed, an online medical research database, until her eyes hurt, and ended up with forty research papers printed out and piled on her kitchen table.

  Most documented the mammalian dive reflex, blood shift, and bradycardia within divers. One study suggested that perhaps it was the hyperinflated lungs and the squeezing effect of pressure on the chest that compresses the heart and causes it to beat so slowly, though that was just a hypothesis. A Swedish study from Erika Schagatay, a researcher held in high regard within AIDA circles, was the first to document spleen contractions. In terms of the health risk, there were a handful of papers to consider. One suggested that the packing of air could cause embolisms that could stop the heart or cause a stroke. A Canadian study by J. R. Fitz-Clarke at Dalhousie University documented a computer model that determined 235 meters to be the absolute limit for freedivers. After that, the report said, total lung collapse occurs “and the chest simply becomes an incomprehensible mass of solid tissue and blood.”