But that man — someone I had never in my life heard of beyond knowing he existed — 
apparently lost all his and Helen’s money, and soon she found my father, a good man one 
would suppose, who began his work life as a groundskeeper at the Smithsonian Museum in 
Washington, DC, but ended up working as a gardener for rich folk. It paid well enough — 
like I said, we weren’t poor poor.
  My father probably would’ve had more money, but he had a sister who was dying — for 
years — down in Annapolis, Maryland, and he was her only support. So, according to my 
mother, half of his income went to her upcoming. “She has the longest-lived cancer I’ve 
ever heard of,” she’d say, sometimes right in front of him.
  Of course, this wasn’t all there was to it, but if I tell you all the secrets of the 
world at once, you’ll either be dazzled or overwhelmed, and there’s no point in making it 
all explode right now. You’ll want to know why breathing is one of the secrets of life.
  All right, do you know how breathing is voluntary? I’ve heard that people with dementia 
sometimes end up forgetting how to breathe. That’s a terrible way to die, although one 
would suppose that any method of dying would be awful. Well, breathing is the essential 
component of accomplishing anything.
  I observed this early — I was on the school bus, and I noticed a little girl next to me 
who was terrified of an upcoming test we were about to take. She would, in fact, stop 
breathing for seconds at a time. I began to count her breaths, and I saw that for every 
four I took, she took one. I suggested to her that she try just concentrating on her 
breathing. After a bit of persuasion, she did. It didn’t seem to work. I withdrew my 
father’s pocketwatch — the one I’d stolen (yes, I stole things regularly around the 
house. I have reasons, none of which you want to know.) I had learned a bit about 
hypnosis, so I asked her to stare long and hard at the brass of the watch as the sunlight 
reflected on it. She asked me if I’d be putting her under. I told her no. This was, after 
all, just suggestion, nothing more. I would suggest something to her and would hope that 
her mind would accept it. Of course, I was a child. I didn’t say it that way. I said it 
in some little boy way. But eventually, staring at the watch so much that her eyes teared 
up, I began to help modulate her breathing. By the time we reached school, she wasn’t 
half as upset anymore about the test.
  I began asking the other boys — the older ones who were good at softball and running — 
what their secrets were. To get their secrets, I entertained them with my modest 
ventriloquism skills — I could do bird calls and the sounds of crickets and even get a 
brief sentence out without moving my lips.
  Boys like entertainment — so they opened up and told me about athletics and sports.
  They all said screwy things, but what I noticed were two solid answers:
  breathing and imagination.
  They made sure that they breathed through everything. They also imagined that they 
would win.
  This was a huge revelation to me, since I had never felt that I could win anything. I 
realized that these other boys were winners in athletics because they in fact believed 
they were — whether from coaches, friends, family or whomever — and because they did not 
stop breathing. They used their breathing — without even knowing it — to help keep their 
bodies working.
  All right, that sounds simplistic. But I believe that the simplest things can lead to 
the strongest results.
  So, I began working on breathing.
  This was not merely inhaling and exhaling, but swimming at the beach in the icy spring 
and holding my breath under water. After all, if I were going to be lord of my own 
breath, I needed to master everything about it, didn’t I? I wasn’t sure that I’d ever be 
a great breath-holder, because I never seemed able to go much beyond a minute. I was 
holding on too much to my fear of dying.
  This is one of the first lessons about breathing — if you have breath within your 
lungs, you will not die. Death comes once there is no more breath.
  Again, simple. Again, true.
  “Owen,” my mother said, pinning the laundry up outside the cottage that the 
Montgomery’s housed us in. “What in god’s name are you doing?”
  I had come up after logging in a minute-and-a-half beneath the water, right at the 
rocky ledge. I had just leaned over and thrust my face underwater.
  I was eleven at the time. I tried to explain to her the principle behind my experiment, 
but she did not seem to understand. However, within a few short months, I had become best 
friends to the captain of the swim team in seventh grade, and by fall, I was running 
cross country. I would never be the best — this was not my goal after all. I would be a 
winner.
  In fact, I knew I would close in on this with each sport or endeavor I tried — the 
other kids were lazy. Life and their families made them that way. I did not intend to let 
a day go which I could not claim as my own. I was going to own life in a way that neither 
of my parents ever had.
  Academics slipped in my middle school years — but not enough for anyone to notice. I 
read studiously, and never for enjoyment, but to understand systems of thought that the 
world was trying to push at us. I learned quickly that an A+ in school sometimes meant a 
D- in life, and that in fact equal effort had to be made to excel in both spheres. 
Breathing helped.
  When I felt overwhelmed by it all, I practiced my breathing again. Even in December, 
when the island was desolate and the water was cold enough to drown, I would leap into 
the sea and stay beneath the water for as long as I could; I would, if possible, use the 
Montgomery’s indoor swimming pool for my morning workout which began at six a.m.
  8
  That was the wonderful thing about the Montgomery’s place:
  They were usually gone all winter unless Mr. and Mrs. Montgomery were fighting, or Mr. 
Montgomery had gone off with one of his mistresses and Mrs. M was so angry she came to 
the island for a blisteringly cold February. I used to see Mrs. M in those cold 
Februarys, and I ran errands in town for her because she spent too much time staring at 
the walls or sitting along the indoor pool while I did laps. She enjoyed letting me swim 
there, and she sometimes even got in and did laps, too. Once, when I was twelve, Mrs. M 
told me, “You’re turning into quite the handsome boy, Owen Crites.” She was in good shape 
for a woman of forty, and there were times when I was with her that she reminded me so 
much of Jenna it was almost like having Jenna there with me.
  When I watched her back, as she got out of the pool, bathing cap on, her narrow waist, 
the way the water beaded upon her skin — it was like seeing Jenna for a moment. This made 
me happy. Jenna meant a lot to me.
  But the pool — dare I describe it now, how I remember it? It was vast.
  It was Olympic size. I could do real laps there as opposed to laps at the beach which 
ended with a summer lifeguard blowing a whistle for me to come to shore before I’d gone 
out twenty yards. It was off the northern wing of their estate, and was constructed so 
that it was as if you were swimming outside, as if on the bluffs over the Sound, you 
owned the world as you went back and forth, breathing, carefully breathing so as not to 
wear out too fast.
  Because, during those winters when the M’s stayed down in Manhattan, my father and 
mother and I had the run of the house, I could swim naked in the pool, and rise to see