CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
SALVATORE
She is up those stairs before I am through the boot room door.
I have been shot at twice and I have never moved the way that woman moves across her own hall in a dead woman's coat at six in the morning.
By the time I get to the top she has the nebuliser going.
He is sitting on the edge of the bed with his feet on the floor and his hands on his knees and his shoulders up around his ears.
That is the wrong shape. I do not know anything about this and I know that is the wrong shape.
"Matteo."
He does not answer me.
He cannot answer me. He has got the mask on and Adelina has got one hand flat between his shoulder blades and she is saying, "In, that's it, and out, don't push it, don't push," in a register she has never once used in front of me, completely level, completely steady, the voice of a woman who has done this thirty times.
His lips are the wrong colour.
"How long," I say.
"Since about five."
"Five."
"He didn't come and get me." Her hand does not stop moving on his back. "He sat in here on his own for an hour and did the breathing because he thought we were asleep."
At six minutes past six the nebuliser is not working.
She knows before I do. I see her know. Her face does not change at all, which is when I understand exactly where she got that from, and she reaches over and turns the machine off and takes the mask off him and says:
"Okay. New plan. Bathroom."
"Adelina."
"Hot shower, all the taps, shut the door, it's the steam." She has him up on his feet. "Call it."
"Call what."
"Nine one one, Salvatore, call it now and then come and help me."
I have never made that call in my life.
I want that written down because of what happens to me in the eleven seconds it takes. I have made every other call there is. I have made the one that starts a war and the one that ends a man and the one at four in the morning to a woman in Mount Vernon whose husband is not coming home.
I have never once called for help.
There is a woman on the other end who wants an address and a callback number and the age of the patient and I give her all of it and my voice comes out completely flat, and she says eleven minutes, and I say thank you, and I put the phone in my pocket.
Eleven minutes.
From the gate at the bottom of my own drive.
The bathroom at the top of the east stairs is nine feet by six.
All four taps and the shower on hot and the door shut and the extractor off, and inside about ninety seconds you cannot see the far wall.
Adelina is on the floor with her back against the bath.
She has him in her lap and she has got his head tipped back against her shoulder and she is still doing it, in, that's it, and out, and he is trying, and it is not going in.
The sound he is making.
I am going to be hearing that sound for the rest of my life and I am not going to try to describe it, because there is no version of the description that is not an insult to a nine year old boy on a bathroom floor.
He is frightened.
That is the part. He is not too far gone to be frightened. His eyes are absolutely wide open and he is looking at his sister and there is a whole person in there, terrified, watching it happen.
And there is nothing to break.
I want that put down plainly because I have never been in it before.
Every single situation of my entire adult life has had a man in it.
There is always a man. There is a man who has the thing, or knows the name, or holds the door, or signs the paper, and I am extremely good at the part where you find the man, and in thirty-five years I have never once been in a room where the answer was not a person.
I am sitting on a wet tile floor in a bathroom full of steam and there is no man.
There is nobody to go and see. There is nothing to put my hand on.
There is a child who cannot get air into his own chest and an ambulance eleven minutes out and a woman on the floor doing the only thing anybody can do, and I am supposed to be the most frightening man in this state, and I am completely useless.
"Salvatore," Adelina says. "Sit down."
"What?"
"Sit down and take him."
"I don't."
"My arms have gone," she says, "and he needs to be up higher, and you are the tallest person in this house. Sit down."
I sit down on a bathroom floor with my back against the door.
She puts him against my chest. She does it in one movement, and gets herself round the other side, and pushes his knees apart and his shoulders back against me and puts my hand flat on his sternum.
"Hold him there."
"Like this."
"Higher. There." Her hair is soaked. "Now talk to him."
"About what."
"Anything. Not about this. Anything at all, just don't stop."
I do not have anything.
That is the truth of it. I sit on a floor with a child on my chest and every single thing in my head is a thing that would frighten him.
So I count.
I do not decide to do it. I have his back against me and my hand flat on his chest and I start counting in Italian, from one, slowly, at about the rate you would want somebody to breathe at.
Uno.
Due.
Tre.
And somewhere around forty his hand comes up off the tile and takes hold of two of my fingers.
Not my hand. Two fingers, in a fist, the way you hold something when you are going down.
Quattro. Cinque.
He starts trying to go with it.
You can feel it. Under my palm, on the fourth or fifth go round, there is a change, and it is not better, it is not anywhere near better, but he is doing it with me instead of on his own.
Undici. Dodici.
I keep counting.
Here is what I have never told anybody.
On the fourteenth of November 2002 I was in a cupboard under a kitchen sink with the waste pipe against my shoulder and my own hand over my own mouth, because my mother put me in there and shut the door.
And on the other side of that door, very quietly, at a speed somewhere around what you would want a person to breathe at, for four minutes and then for longer, my mother counted.
In Italian. From one.
She did it so that I would breathe and not make a sound, and she did it right up until she stopped, and I have not said that out loud to one single human being in twenty-four years, and I am saying it now to a nine year old who is not listening and will never remember it.
Diciotto. Diciannove.
The ambulance comes up the drive at eighteen minutes past six.
I hear the gate. I hear Frankie shouting at somebody to leave it open, and Bruna on the stairs, and boots in the hall, and the whole house coming up underneath us.
And I do not move, and I do not stop counting, and when the first one gets to that bathroom door I have to shift sideways on the floor to let him in because I am not putting the boy down until somebody takes him off me.
His fingers do not let go of mine for another forty seconds.
They have to do it for him.
Bruna is on the landing.
I see her through the door when they carry him out. She is in her dressing gown with her hair down, which I have not seen in twenty-four years, and she is standing against the wall by the linen cupboard with both hands over her mouth.
She is not looking at the boy.
She is looking at me on the floor of that bathroom, and she has clearly been there for some part of it, and there is a thing happening in that woman's face that I have no name for and am not going to guess at.
Then she takes her hands down and goes after them, barefoot, down the east stairs, carrying the inhaler off the nightstand because somebody has to.
That is the other thing nobody mentions.
For the whole of the eleven minutes and the whole of the four after it, inside twelve walled acres, with four men on the gate and a consigliere and a brother and a driver all inside an hour of that door, the only two people who did anything at all were a woman of twenty-three and a woman of seventy-one.
And me, sitting on a floor, counting.
At some point after that I am sitting on a wet floor with my back against a bath and my hands empty and steam coming off my shirt, and there are two paramedics in the doorway and one on the landing on a radio.
And Adelina is standing against the wall by the sink.
She is not looking at her brother.
She has got both hands over her mouth and she is looking at me, and she has been looking at me for a while, and I understand, sitting on a floor in a soaked shirt at twenty past six in the morning, that she heard every single number.