When my feet hit the shallow part I fell down. I fell down on my back in about a foot of water with her on top of me, and I rolled her off onto the bank, onto the frozen grass, and she still was not breathing, and I turned her on her side the way I'd been taught in a Red Cross class my mother made me take at fifteen — "In case," she said, she never said in case of what — and I hit her on the back between the shoulder blades, hard, with the flat of my ruined hand, and she coughed up a great deal of black water and began to breathe in long, terrible, whooping pulls.
That was when the man came down the embankment.
He came down sliding, the way I had, half on his feet and half on his hip, a big man in a navy parka and dress slacks, with a phone in his hand, and he was shouting into the phone. "— the Polaris ramp, northbound, there's a car in the pond, a car in the water, I need — yes, she's out, somebody got her out, she's on the bank —" He reached the bottom and stood over us. I remember his shoes. Brown leather oxfords, the kind with the little perforations across the toe, already dark with water at the edges. He looked at the girl and he looked at me and his face was white and his mouth was open.
"Oh my God," he said. "Oh my God, are you — is she —"
"She's breathing," I said. My jaw was shaking so hard that I bit my tongue on the word, and tasted blood. "Get her warm. Your coat. Get her warm."
He did. I'll give him that, and I gave it to him then and I give it to him now. He took off his parka without a second's hesitation and knelt down on the frozen grass and wrapped it around her, and he got his arm under her shoulders and lifted her head and chest into his lap, out of the wet, and held her there. He went into the edge of the water to do it. He was in it up to his ankles, maybe a little over. He held her and said, "Hey. Hey. You're okay, you're okay, they're coming, stay with me," and he was still holding the phone pinned between his shoulder and his ear, and the dispatcher was saying something tinny that I couldn't make out, and he was answering her. "Yes. Yes. She's breathing. She's bleeding from her head. I don't — the other lady got her out, I just got here, I — she's soaked, they're both soaked."
The other lady. That's what I was, already.
I tried to stand up and found that I couldn't, so I knelt there instead, on my hands, in my soaked coat, with the blood from my palms running pink into the water and the grass, and I watched the girl's face. Her eyes had come open again. She was looking up past the man's shoulder at the sky, which was going pale now, and then her eyes moved and found me, and I said the thing again, the thing I'd been saying in the water, and this time I heard myself say it.