The boy released a torrent of words, but all in what was, to the best of my knowledge, a Slavic language. We stared at each other in mutual frustrated incomprehension. Then he twisted away from me and pointed back in the direction he’d come.
A drainage ditch ran through this small, light-industrial neighborhood; I could hear its full-throated sound, working overtime after the heavy recent rains. Where it went under the street, a fence of three tubular rails lined the sidewalk, rib cage-high on an adult. Near it, on the sidewalk, were stiff forms of metal that resolved themselves, on a closer look, into bikes heeled over on their side. Two bikes. One kid.
The boy was right behind me as I ran over for a closer look. Just before the drainage ditch went under the street, it dropped a surprisingly good distance into a wider pool bounded by cement walls to prevent overflow onto the street in rains like the kind we’d been having. In drier weather, we’d probably have been looking down into some mud and marshy grass, through which ran a sedate creek. Not now. This early morning, the rains had created a catchpool that roiled irregularly, turbulently.
“Did somebody fall?” To illustrate, I made walking fingers with one hand toward the railing, rising slightly to illustrate climbing, and then I imitated a plunge down.
The kid nodded and said something I didn’t understand.
The newspaper driver had arrived behind us. “Call 911,” I said, swinging a leg over the railing. “Tell them a kid fell in. Take this boy with you and keep him calm.” I didn’t wait for her to acknowledge my request, climbing down to dangle from the lowest railing, with my feet swinging above the surface of the water.
All this, from the kid pointing to the water to my instructions to the newspaper driver to my climb over the fence, took maybe ninety seconds. But it was long enough for me to think of last fall and 14-year-old Ellie Bernhardt. I’d jumped into the Mississippi River after her and briefly made myself famous around the department for it, particularly because I wasn’t a very strong swimmer.
I wish I could say that when I flashed back on Ellie Bernhardt I was thinking something ironic, like, Why does this stuff always happen to me? But I wasn’t. I was simply thinking, God, don’t let me drown. Then I let go.
This water was warmer than I remembered the waters of the Mississippi, but still cool. And turbulent, pulling in varying directions, but not hard. I felt the tugging most strongly low down, toward my calves and feet, in the direction of the underpass, where the water was being drawn under the street.
Diving down, I opened my eyes, to see nothing before me but a brown-gray wall. I felt around in the direction the water was flowing, toward the street. It stood to reason that anything heavy that had fallen into the water would have gotten pulled in that direction. But my fingers brushed nothing, and my lungs began to burn. Air never seems to last as long as it should in these situations. It didn’t help that my heart was probably slamming away at 140 beats a minute. I rose and broke the surface, panting. As I did so, something bumped my foot.
I inhaled fast and made a jackknife dive, feeling ahead of me again. This time, something brushed against my hand, not solid, more like cloth. It was animated by water, so that it rippled against my hand. When I caught it in my hand and pulled, I felt a corresponding resistance. It wasn’t just an old shirt that had ended up in a canal. Someone was in it.
Surfacing was one thing, but it was harder to pull the child up. The thin body had no buoyancy and was weighed down by sodden clothes and waterlogged shoes. Wet black hair broke the surface first, shining and plastered against pale skin. I rolled him over so that his face was raised toward the still-dark sky.
In the rescue textbooks it looks so simple; the diagrams are so clean and neat. The boy and I were illustrating something else: the messiness of real life. I was trying to get a feel for whether he was breathing, if his rib cage was rising and falling under my encircling arm. Theoretically, I should have been able to tell, but I couldn’t. I looked hopefully up toward the railing for the Toyota woman, but she wasn’t there. Just concrete wall on every side, at least five feet of it above the water level. There was no purchase, no handholds that I could see. The boy’s weight kept pushing me under, my legs working hard, treading water, wanting support where there wasn’t any.
Just then, a face appeared at the railing. He was a stranger, but the sight of his face filled me with relief.
He was quite young, perhaps 23 or 24, and Asian, his face sculpted in hard, clean lines, his eyes thoughtful. He’d shaved almost all his head, except for a patch like a trapezoidal Mohawk near the front; it should have looked silly but didn’t. I couldn’t see what he was wearing, a uniform or civilian clothes, but I didn’t need to. Some people show up in difficult times, and it doesn’t matter that you’ve never met them before. You see their faces and immediately know they’ve come to help. He was one of those.
“How you guys doing down there?” he asked.
“Not good.”
He nodded, quite calm. “Okay,” he said, looking at the water thoughtfully as if this were a physics problem in a textbook. “I’m going see if I can’t drop a backboard.”
That’s what he did. When I’d gotten the boy onto the board, I watched his chest and stomach, wrapped in the wet embrace of a sodden red T-shirt. It fell as I watched, rose again. He was breathing. My mind was eased by the sight, like my body felt newly light at being shed of the boy’s weight in the water.
When I was up on the street again, I could see that the rescuer wore the dark-blue jumpsuit of a paramedic. His partner, younger yet and blond, was taking care of the boy. The Asian medic glanced over at them, sized up the situation as under control, and sat on his heels next to me.
“I’m all right,” I said.
“I know,” he told me.
There we were: a tall, courteous kid with a postmodern haircut and a half-drowned county detective.
“Sarah Pribek,” I said, holding out my hand. “Hennepin County Sheriff’s Department.”
He shook my hand. “Nate Shigawa,” he said.
“Pleased to meet you,” I said.
From behind him came a high, thin cry. The newspaper driver had returned, and she wasn’t alone. With her was the boy who’d raised the alarm about his fallen brother and a woman in an inexpensive print dress and long black hair tucked back in a head-scarf. The woman was looking around- not at her son, whom the young EMT was attending to, but everywhere else. Into the back of the ambulance, on the nearby ground, at Shigawa and me. She spoke rapidly in the same Slavic tongue as her son.
When her sharp, urgent inquiries earned her only blank looks, she ran to the bikes. She pointed at one of them, then to the boy who stood by the Toyota, dry and unharmed. Then she picked up the second bike and pointed to the boy on the stretcher. Then she thumped the handlebars of the second bike, as if to indicate a rider there.
Shigawa and I looked at each other, having the same terrible realization: this woman has three children.
We both went to the railing, to look down at the water rolling below, unbroken by anything that resembled a hand or a foot or a scrap of material. It had been too long. Far too long.
“I’ll go,” I said. “I’ve already been in.”
“No, don’t do that,” said Shigawa’s partner, coming to join us. His name tag identified him as Schiller.
“Somebody’s got to,” I said.
“In a couple of hours it’ll be daywatch,” Schiller said. “The county can send some divers out. They’re trained for this.” Schiller was clearly a newly minted EMT, and I’d seen the expression on his face before, a hard fixed look that young rookie cops affect when they don’t want the world to see that the job hasn’t made them jaded and world-weary yet.