The ride to the hospital took nineteen minutes and most of his life.
He rode in the back because there was no question of his riding anywhere
else; Nakamura himself took the wheel, and Tierney worked, calling his
findings forward through the little window in a voice so steady it could have
been reading the weather. Adam sat where the families sit, on the jump seat,
with his daughter's hand in both of his. Magnesium went in, the drip that
pries the airways open from the inside, and the nebulizer rode with them, its
mist filling the box of the ambulance with a medicinal fog, and under his
hands Lily's fingers were cold, and above the mask her eyes were closed
now, which was either rest or surrender and he could not tell and it did not
matter because telling was not his job in this vehicle. His job was the hand.
He held the hand and he counted.
He counted her breaths the way he counted strangers' in the ER, by sixes, the
way he'd been taught in a classroom before Lily was born: watch the chest,
count for fifteen seconds, multiply by four, a number the doctors could use.
He had done it ten thousand times for other people's children, dispassionate
as a metronome. Now the arithmetic turned on him. Twenty-eight.
Twenty-four. Her chest rose against the medicine and the machine air and
fell, and rose, and the numbers came slower and steadier and he tallied them
like a man counting coins in the dark to pay a debt he wasn't sure he could
cover, terrified of the arithmetic and unable to stop doing it, because
counting was the only prayer his hands knew.
Once, somewhere on Route 11 where the road straightened past the quarry,
her fingers tightened around his. Not much. Enough. He wrote it down later
52
in the place he kept such things, which was not paper.
The ER that received her was not his own — county protocol took them to
St. Brigid's, the bigger house over the ridge — and so Adam Reyes stood in a
trauma bay as a father only, in the corner they put the fathers in, and watched
other people's hands do his job, and found, to his own astonishment, that he
could bear it, because the hands were good. He answered questions when
asked, in the shorthand of his trade: nine years old, severe persistent, two
home nebs, prednisone PO forty minutes prior, mag running. He did not offer
advice. He did not touch the equipment. He stood in the corner with his arms
folded so tightly his shoulders ached and he did, as he had taught a hundred
families to do from the other side of the curtain, exactly nothing, at full
strength.
Dawn came up in the corridor windows the color of wet ash, then pearl, then
the ordinary gold of a Sunday in October.
Lily slept in a bed in the step-down unit with the oxygen mask off — off, set
aside on the pillow like a tool laid down after the work — and breathed on
her own in the room's quiet air, pink again, pink as a rumor of health, her
color come back into her face the way the tide comes back into a creek,
without announcement and all at once. The monitor above the bed recorded
its green numbers and was content with them. Adam sat in the chair pulled
close, with his elbows on his knees and his face in his hands, and did not
sleep, because sleep was for after, and after had not been formally declared.
He heard Nakamura before he saw him — the particular squeak of boots that
have been on gravel, on asphalt, on bay concrete, in that order. The captain
stood in the doorway of the unit with his cap in his hand and a paper cup of
coffee he had clearly brought for Adam and forgotten to hand over, and he
looked at the bed, and at the numbers, and at Adam, and nodded once, the
53
nod of a man confirming a delivery.
"She turned," Nakamura said.
"She turned," Adam agreed. His voice came out wrecked and he did not care.
Nakamura came into the room properly then, and set the coffee down, and
put out his hand — and Adam stood, and they shook, there beside the bed,
with the formality of men signing something. "I wanted you to hear it from
me before you read it," Nakamura said. "My incident report goes in this
morning. The delay at the chain — where we stopped, what was said, what it
cost." He held Adam's hand a moment longer than a handshake strictly
needs. "It'll be in writing, Mr. Reyes. All seven minutes."
He went out. The door sighed shut. The monitor ticked its green arithmetic
over the bed.
Adam sat back down in the chair. Through the doorway's glass he could see
the corridor brightening, the day shift arriving with their cups and their soft
voices, the hospital turning its face toward morning. Beside him, under her
blanket, with her hair spread out on the pillow and her mother's mouth gone
soft with sleep, Lily breathed — in, and out, and in again, unhurried,
uncounted-for at last by anyone but her father, who counted anyway, the way
you count the stairs of your own house in the dark: not from fear, but from
love of the number coming out right. Six seconds. In. Six seconds. Out. He
watched his daughter breathe, and did the only arithmetic that mattered, and
it came out even.