We were an hour past Augusta when the GPS took us off the highway and onto a county road that looked like it had been drawn by someone who didn't care whether we made it to Savannah at all. It was the Friday before St. Patrick's Day, and the five of us had crammed ourselves into Emily's Subaru Outback with a suitcase full of green t-shirts and enough road-trip snacks to get a small army through a music festival. Emily was driving, because she always drove. I was in the passenger seat, barefoot on the dashboard, trying to get the Bluetooth to cooperate. Maya, Jess, and Kat were in the back, playing some game where you had to name a country for every letter of the alphabet, except no one could ever get past Q, so it was really just a lot of yelling and one person googling under a blanket.
Then Emily said, "Oh my God," and took her foot off the gas.
I looked up from my phone. Through the windshield, maybe two hundred yards ahead, a silver Honda Accord was nose-down in a creek that ran alongside the road. The back wheels were still spinning. Water was already up to the rear windows, and it was rising fast.
There was no sound in the car for a second. Not a word. Just the podcast still playing through the speakers, some comedian laughing at his own joke. Then Emily pulled onto the shoulder so hard the gravel sprayed up against the doors, and all five of us were out of the Outback before the engine was off.
The word that doesn't capture it is "cold." The water in that creek in mid-March wasn't cold. It was a physical blow. It knocked the air out of us the second we hit it. We didn't know how deep the middle was. We didn't know if the Honda would slide further down the bank and go under completely. We didn't stop to think about any of that, actually. That's not me being noble. It's just truth: there wasn't time to think.
Jess was on the phone with 911, screaming our location while she waded in after us, because the signal kept cutting out and she'd have to redial. The rest of us went straight for the car. The woman in the driver's seat had her window down and was trying to pull herself through it, but the current kept shoving the door shut on her arm. Her name was Cora. I didn't learn that until later. At that moment, she was just a woman in a gray hoodie, her hair plastered across her face, saying the same thing over and over: "My babies are in the back."
We got her out first. Maya and I took her under the arms and hauled her to the bank, and she couldn't stand, she kept falling, she kept trying to turn back toward the water. Emily and Kat went in after the boys.
The older one, he was eight, he'd already unbuckled himself and was climbing between the front seats, but his foot was stuck in the center console somehow, and the water was up to his chin by the time Kat pulled him through the driver's window. They got him out. Two of them on each side of him, dragging him through water up to their waists.
That left the little one.
I wasn't the one in the water by then. I was on the bank with the two of them, pulling off the older boy's soaking shirt and trying to wrap him in my cardigan, which was soaked too, which was useless. Kat was next to me, trying to get the mom to sit down, and the mom wouldn't, she just stood at the water's edge making this sound I've never heard a person make before.
I looked back. Emily was at the Honda's rear door, arm-deep in black water. The car had slipped further. Only the top six inches of the rear window were visible. And I watched Emily take a breath and go under.
That's the image that stays with me. Not the rescue itself. The moment before it. Emily Duarte, who I'd known since freshman orientation, who alphabetized her books and couldn't parallel park — she went under that black water without a second of hesitation.
The buckle wouldn't release. That was the thing. Later she told us the four-year-old was still strapped in his booster seat, and the strap had twisted, and the release button was jammed. She came up once, empty-handed, and then went down again. Maya went in after her. The two of them under the water at the same time, and the car still sinking, and the little boy still inside.
It was maybe forty seconds. Felt like the length of a whole semester.
Maya came up first, pulling something. Then Emily. They had the boy between them. He wasn't moving. His lips were blue. Not a figure of speech — his lips were the color of the bruise on Kat's arm where she'd hit the car door.
And this is the moment that made all the rest of it happen, and I'm going to tell it exactly because it still doesn't feel real.
Kat Grace Pemberton, who was a theater major and had walked onstage in front of eight hundred people without blinking, knelt down in the mud and started CPR. She'd been a lifeguard at a YMCA in suburban Columbus for four summers, and she'd never had to use what she knew. Not once. But she put her hands on that boy's chest and started compressions, and she didn't look at any of us, and she didn't look at the mother, and she didn't stop.
One. Two. Three. Four. Five.
We were all frozen. Even the mother, who had gone quiet, just watching Kat's hands on her son's chest.
Sixteen. Seventeen. Eighteen.
The boy's head rolled to the side.
Twenty-one. Twenty-two.
And then he coughed. This tiny, wet, furious cough, like a baby angry at being woken up. And he opened his eyes and he looked up at a sky full of five strange women in torn clothes, and he started to cry, and it was the most beautiful sound I will ever hear in my life.
We all started crying too. Not gracefully. Not one of those movie scenes where a single tear rolls down a cheek. We sobbed. We held onto each other. Maya had mud up to her elbows and she kept wiping her face and leaving streaks. Emily sat down in the mud and put her head between her knees. The mother — Cora — grabbed her son and wouldn't let go, and the older boy just kept saying, "You fixed him. You fixed him."
The ambulance came. We gave our statements. At some point a sheriff's deputy put a blanket around my shoulders, and I remember staring at his badge because it was the same shape as the one my brother had when he worked security at a mall in Athens, and that was the only thing my brain could focus on.
They made us honorary deputies two weeks later. There was a ceremony at the county courthouse, and everyone clapped, and a local news crew came, and Cora was there with her two boys. The little one was running up and down the aisle of the courtroom, and every time he went past us he'd wave, and then he'd run back and wave again, like he'd invented waving and wanted to do it as much as possible. His name is Jackson. I know that now.
After the ceremony, we went back to the same county road. I'm not sure why. We just wanted to see it again in daylight, without the panic. The creek was so much smaller than I remembered. It barely came up to our ankles in some places. It looked like the kind of place you'd stop for a picture.
But there was still a streak of silver paint on a rock near the bank. And Emily reached down and touched it, and then she wiped her hand on her jeans, and we got back in the car and drove to the nearest Waffle House and ordered hash browns scattered, smothered, and covered, and we ate like we hadn't eaten in years.
We didn't make it to Savannah that weekend.
We never asked for the badge or the ceremony or the news story. But every year now, on the Friday before St. Patrick's Day, the five of us get on a group call. We don't talk about what happened. Not directly. We talk about jobs, and boyfriends, and whether anyone's watched the new show everyone's watching. And for four minutes, we just hear each other breathing.
That's the whole thing, really. Four minutes on a group call, five women in five different time zones, and all of us listening to the sound of each other breathing.
