"Look at me. I've got your head. I've got you, sweetheart, look at me."
She looked at me. Then her eyes closed again, and the man said, "Hey, hey, stay awake," and rubbed her arm through his parka.
I heard sirens. Far off, then not far. The man looked up toward the ramp, and so did I, and I saw the lights coming, red and white and blue, flashing across the ice-covered slope and the guardrail and the black tree branches so that everything glittered like a fairground. And I felt something I can only describe as an animal thing, cold and old and complete: the need to not be there when they came down that hill. To not be asked my name. To not be written down.
I know how that sounds. I've had the better part of two years to know how it sounds. A woman nearly drowns pulling a stranger out of a pond, and the first thing she thinks when help arrives is how to get away. But I had been raised for forty-five years by a woman who believed that the worst thing that could happen to a person was to be described, and I was hypothermic and bleeding and in shock, and my body did what it had been trained to do before I could have any say in it at all.
"They're here," I said, or something like it. "You've got her."
"Wait," he said. "Wait, where are you — you're hurt, you need to —"
But I was already crawling back up the embankment on my hands and knees, through the frozen grass, using the dead stalks of weeds as handholds, leaving pink marks on the ice. Two paramedics came sliding down past me with a backboard between them, and one of them said, "Ma'am, are you okay?" and I said, "Fine, I'm fine, she's down there," and he kept going, because she was the one in the pond, and I was a woman in a beige coat climbing a hill. Nobody remembers beige.
At the top, a state trooper was setting flares across the ramp, his cruiser parked at an angle with its light bar going. I came up over the edge of the embankment beside the end of the guardrail and walked past him to my car on the shoulder, and he looked at me — I know he looked at me, because of what he wrote later — but he was on his radio and setting flares and there was a car in a pond, and I got into the Buick and shut the door.