"No, ma'am. You don't." He paused at my door. "For what it's worth, I've been doing this twenty-two years, and I've pulled five people out of the water in that time, and I had a dry suit and a rope for every one of them." He nodded once, as if that settled something between us, and went out, and I locked the door behind him, both locks and the chain, and stood with my back against it until I heard his cruiser pull away.
The Channel 10 segment ran the next week. I didn't watch it, but Winona did, at her desk on her phone, with the sound up, and so I heard it whether I wanted to or not: the piano music, the reporter's warm grave voice, and then a man's voice that I recognized from the embankment, saying, "I didn't think. I just went in." The reporter said something about frigid waters. The man said, "I just kept her head up. That's all I could think about, was keeping her head up." Winona said, "Etta, come look, this guy works here! This is Derek Lockhart from sales, on five!" And I said I had to finish a reconciliation, and didn't get up.
Did he lie, on Channel 10? I've turned it over and over. He never once says, I pulled her out. He says, I went in. He did go in — to his ankles. He says, I kept her head up. He did — in his lap, on the bank, after. The reporter says, "Lockhart waded into the icy retention pond," and he doesn't correct her, and the reporter says, "the man who pulled her from the water," and he doesn't correct her, and at the end the reporter says, "Police say a second motorist also stopped to help but left the scene before she could be identified," and that's all there is of me. A second motorist. Also. I am the also in that sentence. And I asked for it. I asked Sergeant Whitacre not to put me in the news, and he didn't, and the news did exactly what I asked, and what I'd been taught all my life to want, and it was the worst feeling I have ever had.
In March the company put up the plaque. The plaque is brass on walnut, and it says: IN RECOGNITION OF DEREK A. LOCKHART, FOR EXTRAORDINARY COURAGE IN THE RESCUE OF A FELLOW CITIZEN, JANUARY 14. BRECKEN BENEFITS GROUP IS PROUD TO CALL HIM ONE OF OUR OWN. It is still in the display case. I walk past it every morning.
The first time he saw me was in April.
It's a big building and a big company, three hundred and some employees spread over three floors, and sales and accounts payable have almost nothing to do with each other; I had worked there nine years by then and spoken to him exactly never. But one morning in April I got into the elevator in the lobby at eight-fifteen, because I was carrying a box of archived invoices to the records room on five and didn't want to take the stairs with it, and he got in after me and pressed five and stood beside me, scrolling on his phone. And then he glanced over to see what floor I'd pressed, and saw that I hadn't pressed anything because my hands were full, and said, polite and pleasant, "Five?" and reached across to press it, and looked at me properly for the first time, and stopped.
I was wearing my camel coat. I had had it dry-cleaned twice to get the pond out of it, and relined, and it looked like nothing, like any coat, like the coat nobody can describe. And my hands were on the box, palms up, and the stitches were out by then but the scars were new and red, two long angry lines across the right palm and the crosshatch on the left.
He looked at the coat. He looked at my hands on the box. He looked at my face. I watched him know.