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Water that I grabbed but that did not contain the shoulder I reached for, the hand, finger even, the bunch of hair. Unthinkable, the idea that he could not resurface, yet that fear tore at my ear, mocking me.
    Then he was there again, and this was my chance to coax him onto his back, like some fumbling magician trying to levitate a body.
    Later Fareed would speak of looking up at water the color of baby moss. It was almost too easy, he told me. Just to rest at the bottom looking up at that moss-green water. His whale-like catapult in the air was his last call for help.
    I grew up trusting water. We spent summers at the Carolina shore, my father teaching me to float, balancing the small of my back on his palm as the waves tossed me.
    Fareed never learned to float. He told me that, growing up in Pakistan, he had learned a few strokes, but never got a chance to know what it felt like to be tired in water, to learn when it’s time to get out.
    These are things we discovered about each other only after that day at Walden. Until then, all the unanswered questions had still danced between us, and we’d only begun to grapple with the more difficult ones. Fareed was seven years younger than I, but most problematic for us, his family was devoutly Muslim. Although he considered himself an atheist, he told me he could never go against his family so profoundly as to marry a Westerner.
    Yet early on, I think we each tried on the possibility of opening, just enough, in the direction of the other. But we always bumped up against the reality of where we were in life: he nearing the end of graduate school and ready to travel the world, while I was established in my career in publishing, thinking about having children.
    Even so, during those months that led to that day at Walden, we became constant companions: hours spent browsing bookstores together, drinking tea in Harvard Square cafes, nights and nights in each other’s arms. I came to know his every expression, to memorize the lines and angles of him.
    That day at the pond, however, none of that seemed to help or matter. His body in my arms became a stranger.
    I knew vaguely what to do; a boyfriend in college had been a lifeguard and once showed me how to save a person from drowning. But for a moment I forgot everything, and Fareed’s long-boned arms kept pulling him down like anchors.
    Then, impossibly, from behind me I heard Samir splashing around, yelling, “Help!” He too was going down. By then I had Fareed on his back and was churning water with my free arm, just a few feet from shore—trying for a place where he could stand—while behind me Samir shouted “Help! Help!” in a breathless staccato.
    I took one more flaccid stroke and then shoved Fareed away from me. We were in shallow water now. He could stand if he just got his feet beneath him. I swam away, looking back until I saw Fareed struggling to shore, legs buckling. I swam hard to Samir, clawing my way to where he was dogpaddling, a panicked look on his face. I tried to grab him but his arms would not stop moving. Just six feet to shore, less even, to reach a point where I could stand. I went under once, beneath a muscular arm; I swallowed water.
    I screamed to Fareed on-shore, still bent at the waist, gulping air. And like some sea creature he lumbered back into the water that had almost swallowed him. He reached out one long arm and Samir grasped hold.
    Afterward, all of us collapsed on-shore, breathing hard. No words. Then, after a while we stood, grabbed our clothes, and quickly moved away from that cove.
    Halfway around the pond, the view to the cove blocked by low-hanging limbs, we all stopped and gazed at the water. It was as if we needed to look at the pond from another angle, where we could reclaim illusion. A good pond, a fine wood. An ordinary day.
    I think that is why they began skipping stones. Something to ground them again. Samir tossed one or two rocks, and soon they both