Lives: I Jumped In to Save the Child. But Who Would Rescue Me?

In the distance, a small, black triangle rose from the surface of the pond, then shifted slightly. "Look at the turtle," I said to my son, who was 9 at the time. On that late-summer afternoon, we had ridden our bicycles to one of our favorite spots in Central Park. Just west of Cleopatra's Needle, and across from the statue of a mounted Polish warrior (arms raised, swords crossed), lies a sylvan vista called Turtle Pond — a small body of water, its rocky shore ringed with greenery. It was perpetually alluring to my urban child, even in that season when the water was covered with a thick carpet of bilious algae.

"Where?" a small, unfamiliar voice asked. Two boys, one slightly older than my son and one a bit younger, had come up beside us; a woman, who appeared to be their mother, about 30 and with long dark hair, hovered nearby, smiling. I bent down beside them and pointed out the triangular, dark speck; we watched it turn and disappear into the murk. Then my son and I busied ourselves with gathering some pebbles, while the boys scrambled over the rocks.

Thinking back, I can't remember which I heard first — the cry or the splash. I looked up and saw that the younger boy was in the water. I do recall hearing an anguished moan (his mother's?) as I moved to the pond's edge and reached out to him. And I will never forget the billowing of his shirt as it filled with water while his small brown arms flailed about and his head bobbed up and down. But more down than up. In a flash, I realized the few feet that separated us were for him an unbreachable gap. As if dreaming, I watched my sneakers sink into the murky water as I slipped into the pond to grab him.

The next thing I knew, I couldn't get out. Elsewhere, the shore extends underwater, forming a low shelf, but where I followed the boy in, it dropped away.

I am a competent swimmer, but no lifeguard, and I lacked the upper-body strength to haul us both up and out. In the panic that seized me, I might have let go of him entirely. But I clung blindly to both the rocks and to the boy.

A young woman who had run up was clutching my left arm, which was draped over a small boulder. I was screaming, "Get the child!" She told me that someone was lifting him out. Then she and another woman helped me climb up on shore, where I lay, drenched and panting.

My son crept up and bent over me.

"Get away from the shore!" I shouted, and he scattered.

A white-haired woman several yards from me, whom I glimpsed in peripheral vision, told me to just lie there for a while, and I obeyed her.

When, after a minute, I got up, my son and I went to check on the boy, who was standing beside the woman I took to be his mother, dripping from head to toe. (His brother had run, oddly, to get him a cup of water.)

"Are you O.K.?" I asked. Staring straight ahead, he nodded silently. His mother, eyes still on her child, said nothing. Was she, like me, still reeling from what just happened? Or was she simply unable to bring herself to acknowledge the unthinkable, that the child might have drowned? I will never know.

I felt the deepest possible relief and gratitude that we were all back on dry land. And yet, I was shaken. I had peeked beneath the blanket of anonymity that covers our relations with strangers in this city, discovering, in an instant, the deep ties of responsibility and dependence that bind us to one another. That sudden knowledge haunts me still.

That afternoon at Turtle Pond, as my son and I gathered our bicycles and headed home, we stopped to chat with the young woman who ran up to the water's edge when I went in. She was holding her baby son, whose name was Aidan; a friend sat next to her.

"I'm sorry you were the one who had to get dirty," she said, looking down at my white jeans, which were covered in algae. But we both knew that much more had been at stake.

"You would do the same for my child, right?" I asked. It was a rhetorical question, but I couldn't hide the note of anguish in my voice.

She nodded. "You know," she said, recalling the moment when she gripped my arm, "I never would have let go of you."

Leslie Camhi is at work on a book about Yves Saint Laurent, to be published in 2014 by Random House.

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This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: July 19, 2013

A picture caption with an earlier version of this article misstated the author's name. It is Leslie Camhi, not Laila Lalami.