Lisa Donath was running late. Heading down the sidewalk towards her subway stop, she decided to skip her usual espresso. Donath had a lot to do at work, plus visitors on the way. But as she hustled down the stairs and through the long tunnel, she started to feel uncomfortably warm. By the time she got to the platform, Donath felt faint. Maybe it hadn’t been a good idea to give blood the night before, she thought. She leaned heavily against a post close to the tracks.

Several yards away, Ismael Feneque and his girlfriend, Melina Gonzalez, found a spot close to where the front of the train would stop. Feneque and Gonzalez were deep in dis- cussion about a house they were thinking of buying. But when he heard the scream, fol- lowed by someone yelling, ‘Oh, my God, she fell in!’, Feneque didn’t hesitate. He jumped down to the tracks and ran some 40 feet towards the body sprawled facedown on the rails.

‘No! Not you!’ his girlfriend screamed after him. She was right to be alarmed. By the time Feneque reached Donath, he could ‘feel the vibration on the tracks and see the light coming into the tunnel, ’ he remembers. ‘The train was maybe 20 seconds from the station.’ In that instant, Feneque gave himself a mission, ‘I’m going to get her out, and then I’m going to get myself out, as soon as possible. I’m not going to let myself get killed here.’

Feneque, a former high school wrestler who trains at a gym to stay in shape, grabbed Donath under her armpits. She was deadweight. But he managed to raise her the four feet to the platform so that bystanders could grab her arms and drag her away from the edge. That’s where Donath briefly regained consciousness, felt herself being pulled along the ground, and saw someone else holding her purse. ‘I thought I’d been mugged, ’ she says. She remembers the woman who held her hand and a man who gave his shirt to help stop the blood pouring from her head. The impact of her fall had been absorbed by her face - she’d lost teeth and suffered a broken eye socket, a broken jaw, and cuts all over her head.

But as the train closed in, Feneque wasn’t finished. He still had to grab and hoist up a man and a teenager who’d hopped down to the tracks and then use all the strength he had left to lift himself onto the platform. He did so just seconds before the train bar- relled past him and came to a stop. Police and fire officials soon arrived, and Feneque gave his name to an officer and told him the story. Gonzalez says her unassuming boy- friend was calm on their 40-minute train ride downtown - just as he had been seconds after the rescue, which, she says, made her think about her reaction at the time. ‘I saw the train coming and I was thinking he was going to die, ’ she explains.

Donath’s parents joined her at her hospital bedside by the next morning and stayed in town to see her through the series of surgeries she’d need to reconstruct her face. Donath was determined to find the man who had saved her life - the man the police had listed, incorrectly, as Feneque Ismael. ‘I was never really into going on TV or getting my picture put in the New York Times, ’ says Donath. ‘But I did so to know that I tried everything I could to contact him.’

Feneque, for his part, couldn’t stop wondering what had happened to the woman on the tracks. He went on his own hunt, posting a message on a newspaper website asking if anyone knew whether the woman who had fallen in the subway had survived. No one responded. Several weeks later, while surfing the Internet for any new clues... bingo! A television station had posted an update on its website, detailing Donath’s recovery and her search for her rescuer. Feneque e-mailed the address provided to say that he was that man.

When the two first met, Donath threw her arms around Feneque and wept. It was overwhelming, she says, to try to convey her feelings. When they met again several months later, it felt a lot easier. ‘I finally had the chance to hear his side of the story in detail, ’ she says.

Feneque says there’s no point in wondering why he was on the platform - at a different time from when he usually rides and at a station a considerable distance from his apartment - at the moment Donath needed help. ‘Whether it was pure coincidence or sent from above, who’s to say? All I know is I was there and I’d do it again, ’ he says.

(Adapted from ‘Subway Rescue’ by Mitch Lipka)

Waiting for Dad

Jake was walking home from school. It was a sunny autumn day. He’d usually stamp on the 30___________ of leaves on the footpath to hear them crunch under his shoes. But today he ignored them. He was busy planning his project.

He was used to being home alone. That was because, three years ago, his dad had decided to go back to university, which meant his mum had had to go back to working 31___________. She did a lot of evening shifts because the money was better.

Jake walked up the stairs onto the veranda and stuck his hand in his pocket for the key but it wasn’t there! Frantically, he tried the front door, knowing it would be locked, then turned around and hurried back up the footpath to see if he could find his key. He walked up the road for two blocks, 32___________ the pavement.

It was no 33___________ looking for it; he could have dropped it anywhere. He turned around and went home. He checked his watch. It was four o’clock and his dad would be back by seven. Jake supposed he could read the book he’d borrowed 34___________ the school library for his project. The book was really good with wonderful photos of soldiers.

An hour later he finished the book and felt like having a 35___________ but it didn’t feel right to sleep with nothing over you. So he covered his chest with the foot mat and the book was his pillow. When he woke up, the Miller sisters were standing over him, staring.

‘Why are you lying on the veranda with a foot mat over you?’ said Adele.

‘It’s 36___________ of your business’, Jake thought.