The blue edge of midnight - By Jonathon King Page 0,84

draw air. I was panicking, but looked around and found Scott and he was already to the woman, trying to get a grip on her sweater and turn her on her back. I finally gasped for a breath and it felt like a razor going down my throat but I started swimming.

I know it had to be a dream, but I could hear Scott’s voice saying “I got her, I got her,” though his lips were like two hard lines and not moving. I swam to them and got a fist of the sweater and started pulling and kicking and I could see the snow covered bank but my clothes were heavy and my free hand was starting to feel like a solid mitten. I saw Scott start to lose his grip and slip back and I yelled for him to hang on, goddammit, hang on, but his eyes were starting to glaze. His blue shirt was pasted to his skin and he said he was losing his arms and I told him to keep kicking. The cold had left my own limbs nearly numb and I could feel it creeping toward my heart but I could also hear someone yelling now from the bank. Sergeant Stowe had scrambled down from the bridge and was up to his waist in the water and reaching out. I took a few more slapping strokes and now he was only six feet away. I was still hanging on to my partner and the girl but losing them both when through the numbness of my legs I felt my foot kick the bottom. I had to make a decision. We were too close to give up.

I’m not sure if I was even thinking but I got behind both of them, took as deep a breath as I could, and went under. I planted my legs in the hard mud, tried to concentrate on the feeling I still had in my shoulders and then drove the pile up with as much force as I could.

The effort pushed me deeper and I hung there, my energy spent, a darkness closing in from all sides. From inches below the surface of the water, I could see the sergeant’s face shimmering through the current. Bubbles from my own lips began to rise and the ice seemed to close in, going black around the edges when he bent and got me by the jacket and yanked me up onto a slab of ice. Several men were around us now and one had thrown his coat over Scott, who was on his knees looking down at the woman stretched out on the snow. Her eyes were closed and her face was inhumanly pale. A snowflake landed on her lips and refused to melt.

I crawled over to her and put my hand under her neck and tilted her head back. I fit my mouth over hers and blew air into her lungs and it came back warm. I waited, pinched her nose with my frozen fingers and blew again. The third time she coughed and shuddered and then threw up a handful of river water onto the snow, and then another, and another, and then she curled up into fetal position and continued to gag. Another bystander draped his overcoat on her and then the professional voices of the paramedics were shouting their way through the circle.

When I woke the warm ocean breeze had kicked up but my arms were covered in goose flesh and Billy’s patio felt chilled in the wind. I rubbed my hands over my face and I was out of the dream but could remember every part of that rescue nearly a decade ago.

Sergeant Stowe and Scott and I were wrapped in emergency thermal blankets and watched as the paramedics loaded the woman into a rescue basket and carried her up the embankment to the ambulance. A freelance photographer caught the scene, the three of us, hair plastered and tinged with ice, all soaked and shivering and looking up the hill. The photo ran on the front page of the Daily News the next day with a headline: PHILLY’S FINEST BRAVE FROZEN SCHUYLKILL TO SAVE PENN STUDENT.

A cutline gave our names and a brief description of the time and location of the incident. The woman was described only as an eighteen-year-old freshman at the university. There was no story since it was the newspaper’s policy not to do stories on suicide attempts. Their rationale was that publicity