I could let go of Ellie and swim for the bank in my serviceable crawl stroke, and live. Or I could stay with her and drown.

I don’t think I really weighed that choice much. Rather, my cold arms wouldn’t let go of Ellie’s frame. We went under, briefly. I swallowed water, came up coughing, and saw in the sky above me that the sun had gone behind another cloud. The cloud was dark gray and wet-looking, but its torn edges were turned a fiery gold from the sun behind it.

God, that’s beautiful.

And then something on the periphery of my vision distracted me. It was a boat. A towboat, actually, but one without a barge before it.

It was all luck for Ellie and me that day: luck that the towboat was stalled in the water where its crew had time to notice us, that its powerful engine wasn’t going, kicking up a current that would have made a rescue impossible.

The crew had seen us. They were yelling at us, but my ears were too full of water to hear anything, turning them into the cast of a silent movie, animated, gesturing. One of them was throwing something.

It was a line, with an empty, sealed two-liter soda bottle tied to it to keep the far end from sinking. I kicked up great splashes on the surface as I headed for it, and with great relief got my free hand on the floating bottle.

Something strange had happened to my flesh in the water. Usually, when the weather is frigid and even warm winter clothes aren’t enough, the fingertips and toes go numb first, followed by the whole of the hands and feet. But when they pulled me out, I could still feel my fingers, but the skin of my upper arms and chest had lost sensation, so that I barely felt the edge of the deck as many hands pulled me ungracefully onto it. It was then I realized I’d shrugged off my jacket; at least, I wasn’t wearing it anymore.

Ellie was already lying on her back next to me, eyes closed. The skin of her face was so white from the cold water that the freckles I had seen as fading now stood out in stark relief. I sat up.