The driver's side was toward me. The window was closed. Through it, from the bank, in the gray light, I could see a shape that moved.
I went in.
I have never been able to describe the cold to anyone, and I have stopped trying. The urgent-care doctor told me afterward that the water was probably thirty-four or thirty-five degrees. I know that it did not feel like cold. It felt like being struck all over at once with something flat and heavy. It took my breath completely — not in the way people say, but literally, so that my chest locked and I could not pull air in for what felt like a very long time, and I stood there up to my thighs in it with my mouth open, making a sound like a door hinge. And then I could breathe, in short hard gasps, and I went further. The bottom was soft and sucked at my shoes. By the time I reached the car the water was at my chest, and my coat had soaked through and was dragging at my shoulders like a pair of hands, and my legs had gone somewhere far away from me.
The water inside the car was higher than the water outside, at the front. The car was settling, nose down, and the driver's seat was in the deep part. She was in there with her face tilted up against the roof liner, in a little pocket of air at the top of the window, and the water was at her chin. Her eyes were open. There was blood coming from a cut over her eyebrow, threading down across her face into the water, and her hands were pressed flat against the glass, and when she saw me she began to scream, and I could see her scream but hardly hear it through the window.
I tried the door. Of course it wouldn't open, not against the water.
I took my mother's hammer out of my pocket. My hands did not want to close around it, and I heard my mother — Always have a way out, Etta — and closed the right one by force, as if it belonged to someone else. I put my other palm flat against the glass to show the girl, and she understood, and she pulled her face back toward the far side, and I hit the corner of the window with the steel point of the hammer, the way the package said to, the way my mother had made me practice on a junkyard car in Indiana when I was twelve years old. The window didn't break. I hit it again. On the third time it went, all at once, the way tempered glass does, into ten thousand little cubes, and the water outside rushed in through the opening and the car lurched and dropped six inches, and the girl went under.
I reached in after her. That is where my hands were cut. There's a margin of glass that stays in the frame, jagged, and I put my hands straight through it and grabbed whatever I could find, which was the collar of her coat and a fistful of her hair, and pulled. Her seat belt held her. I could not see anything; the water inside the car was black and full of glass and floating things. I found the buckle by feeling down along the strap with my bleeding fingers, and I could not make my thumb press it. I could not. I pushed with my whole hand, with the heel of my hand, and it didn't give, and I thought, this is it, she is going to die in here with my hand on her and I am going to stand here and feel it happen. And then the buckle let go.
I pulled her out through the window. I don't know how. She was not a big woman, but her coat was full of water and so was mine, and the window frame scraped her all down one side, and when her head came up out of the water she was not breathing. I got her turned onto her back and got my arm under her neck and across her chest, the way I had seen lifeguards do on the television, and I backed toward the shore, dragging her, and I was saying something to her the whole time. I didn't know I was saying it. I found out later what it was.