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.