year Adam was born; he had been in the room in 1979, a fact he mentioned
with the care of a man describing where he stood during an eclipse. He lived
in the little house between Adam's and the farm, and since spring he had
taken to teaching Lily the entire curriculum of a 1940s boyhood, one useless
and glorious skill at a time. Today, evidently, it was whistling through a
blade of grass.
Adam set the maul down and wiped his face and watched over the fence,
because some lessons you are allowed to witness if you don't announce
yourself.
"Flat blade," Felix said. "Not a stem, a blade. Wide one. You hold it between
your thumbs — so — stretched like a banjo string, and you blow across the
knuckles. No. You're eating it. The grass is not the sandwich, child, the grass
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is the instrument."
Lily's first attempt produced a sound like a small, offended duck. Her second
produced nothing but effort. She was laughing too hard to be frustrated,
which was, Adam thought, the entire secret curriculum. On the farmhouse
porch, forty feet beyond them, in the rocking chair where she sat most
afternoons with a lap full of mending, Bea Wexford had gone gradually still.
He saw it in her hands first. Her hands stopped. The mending lay across her
skirt like something set down in another room.
"Like this?" Lily said, and blew, and on the third try the blade of grass sang
— one thin, reedy, astonishing note, wavering and true, the sound a field
makes when it thinks nobody mechanical is listening.
Felix threw both arms up like a man whose team had scored. Lily shrieked
with delight and did it again, worse, and again, better, and on the farmhouse
porch Bea Wexford sat with her hands folded over her stopped work and her
face turned toward the sound, listening with everything she had, pretending
— with a discipline Adam recognized, because he used it himself in rooms
where feeling would be a clinical error — pretending she was listening to
nothing at all.
Saturday, October 11, began — though Adam would only assemble this later,
the way you assemble everything that matters, afterward and in pieces — at
2:10 a.m., when Lily coughed in her sleep and the cough did not finish.
He was awake before the second one. Nine years of severe asthma had
rewired his sleep into something shallow and instrumental, a nurse's sleep, a
sentry's; he was in her doorway before she was fully awake herself, and he
had the peak flow meter off her dresser while she was still sitting up, because
in their house the order of things had been drilled into both of them by better
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years and worse ones. First, the breathing.
She blew a number in the red zone. She blew it bravely and badly, her
shoulders climbing toward her ears with the effort, the accessory muscles
standing out in her neck like cords. Adam had seen that neck on strangers'
children and kept his face like a locked door; on his own child it took
everything he had to keep his hands at clinical speed. Nebulizer, albuterol
and ipratropium, the mask sealed, the machine's small storm filling the room.
He timed it the way he'd been taught to time everything: by breaths and by
the clock on her wall, which had a second hand shaped like a rocket ship.
The treatment should have turned her. That was the word they used in the
ER, the chart turning, the kid turning, the corner where the medicine took
hold and the work of breathing came back down out of the neck and
shoulders and settled where it belonged. Lily did not turn. She sat in the blue
wash of the machine's little light and worked, and worked, and her lips — he
was watching her mouth because a nurse watches the mouth — her lips were
going the wrong color at the edges, a duskiness there that he had described to
other parents in the calm voice and never, not once in fourteen years,
described to himself.
He gave the second treatment back to back, the way the plan allowed. He had
the prednisone out of the kitchen cabinet and into her, crushed in applesauce,
while the mask was still on. He counted her respirations with two fingers'
pressure doing nothing but witnessing: thirty-eight, forty. A nine-year-old at
rest should breathe like weather. She was breathing like a race.
"Okay," he said, in the voice. "Okay, Lils. We're going to go see my friends."
He called 911 from her doorway with her leaning against his side, and he
gave the dispatcher the address and the words that would matter, in the order
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that would matter most: nine-year-old, severe asthma, two nebs, no response,
retracting, lips dusky. And then he said the thing he had been rehearsing,
without knowing he had been rehearsing it, since the first morning at the bus
stop: "The lane is chained. Tell them Wexford Lane is chained at the mouth.
The ambulance cannot get through the chain. Send them knowing."
"We'll advise the unit, sir. Stay on the line—"
"I'm taking her to the porch to meet them," Adam said. "Cool air. Tell them
the porch."
He carried her. She was nine and getting tall, all legs and elbows, heavy with
the particular boneless weight of a child who has stopped spending strength
on anything but air, and he carried her down the hall and out onto their porch