CHAPTER NINE
I did not decide to do anything.
I was on my knees over him before Ivy finished the sentence, and I have no memory of getting there.
“He stopped breathing,” I said into the phone on the floor.
The woman’s voice changed. Everything friendly went out of it and what was left was fast and flat and completely level.
“Is he on his back?”
“Now he is.”
“Put two fingers on the side of his neck, under the jaw. Tell me if you feel anything.”
I put them there.
“Yes.”
“You’re sure?”
“Yes. It’s fast.”
“Okay. He’s got a pulse, he’s not moving air. You’re going to breathe for him. Tilt his head back. Chin up. Pinch his nose shut, make a seal over his mouth, and give him one breath over about a second. Watch his chest. Then another one. Then look at me for the next thing.”
She said look at me like she was in the room. She was in an office somewhere across the city with a headset on and she said look at me, and I said okay.
I put one hand on his forehead and two fingers under his chin and tipped his head back, and his neck went loose in a way that no child’s neck should ever go, and I stopped for a fraction of a second and then kept going, because there was nothing else on the list.
And in that fraction of a second I understood what I was about to do.
My lungs were full of the same thing that had done this to him.
Everything in me was already grayed out and burning. I had been lying in it for forty minutes. Whatever I put into my son was going to come out of me, and it was going to be the exact thing that had shut him down, and there was no other air in that apartment or anywhere near it.
I was going to poison my child on purpose.
It took about a second and a half to work that out and it did not change anything, because the alternative was nothing, and nothing is not a choice, it’s just the absence of one.
I did think about the towel.
For half a beat I thought about breathing through the wet shirt first and then getting my mouth to his, as if you could strain it, as if any of that would survive the trip.
I have asked a doctor about it since, in a hallway, in a voice I tried to keep casual, and he said no.
He said what I did was the right thing and the only thing and that it also did him harm, both, at the same time, and that I should try to hold those two facts in the same hand.
I have not managed it yet.
I pinched his nose and put my mouth over his and gave him what I had.
His chest went up.
I saw it go up in the light off the phone screen and something in me leapt at it like a dog.
Then it went down.
And nothing happened.
“Again,” said the phone.
I did it again. Up, down, nothing.
One, two, three, four. And.
That’s a woman’s voice, but not the dispatcher’s. That is a heavyset woman in a polo shirt in the bay at Station 24, on a Saturday morning in April, four years ago, kneeling next to a plastic torso on a blue mat and clapping her hands on the count.
Mike signed me up for that class.
He signed both of us up, and he told me on the Thursday, not the Wednesday, so I couldn’t get out of it, and I was so annoyed. I had a load in the washer. I had a whole Saturday planned around that load.
Everybody in this house is going to know how to do this. That’s not a thing we’re discussing.
He stood at the back of the bay with his arms folded and watched me do it wrong twice, and he came over and moved my hands with his hands and put them where they went, and he said, no, higher, there, and I said all right, all right, I’ve got it.
He was good that day. I want that written down somewhere.
He was patient with the old man in the front row who couldn’t get down on the mat and had to do it in a chair.
He carried the dummies back to the closet afterward.
He bought me a coffee out of the machine in the bay and it was terrible and we drank it standing up next to the rig and he said, see, that wasn’t so bad, and I said it was extremely bad and he laughed at me.
That is the man I gave fifteen years to. He existed. I was not wrong about him for fifteen years. He was there in that bay with his arms folded, insisting that his wife learn how to keep his children alive.
They gave me a card at the end. A little plastic one with my name on it and an expiration date.
It was in my wallet. My wallet was in my purse. My purse was on the kitchen counter.
Up. Down. Nothing.
“Mom,” Ivy said. “Again.”
She had the phone in both hands, holding the screen up over us like a candle, and she was not looking at her brother’s face. She was looking at his chest, because that is where the information was.
“Again,” she said.
I did it again.
I don’t know how many. Eight. Twelve. The dispatcher was talking the whole time and after a while she was just a sound, like water running in another room.
I do know that at some point I stopped being able to fill my own lungs enough to fill his.
I would get down close and there would not be enough in me, and I’d have to pull in another mouthful of that filth and hold it and try again, and each one of those went through me like drinking out of an ashtray.
My back was soaked. My arms had started shaking somewhere around the seventh one.
Ivy did not move that phone one inch the whole time. She held it up over us with both arms locked out straight, and by the end her elbows were trembling and she was holding it with her chin tucked down against her chest to steady herself, and she never once let the light come off her brother.
At some point she started counting out loud between my breaths, in a small even voice, because that is what she does, and because I had told her he likes it when somebody counts.
One. Two. Three. Four.
I have not been able to hear a person count to four out loud since.
And I remember thinking, with total calm, that I was going to keep doing this until my hands didn’t work anymore, and then I was going to keep doing it after that.
“Mom, his fingers moved.”
“Where?”
“His hand. It moved.”
I did another one.
And my son came back with the worst sound I have ever heard a human being make.
It was wet and it was long and it came up out of him sideways, and he went rigid and rolled halfway onto his shoulder, and then he coughed, and it was not the dry cardboard cough from an hour ago, it was thick and it went on and on and it sounded like it was tearing something, and it was the single most beautiful thing that has ever happened in my life.
“He’s back,” I said to the floor. “He’s back, he’s back.”
“Erin, is he breathing on his own?”
“Yes. Yes.”
“Get him back on his side. Head low. Stay with him.”
I got him onto his side and I got my arm under his head so his cheek wasn’t on the boards, and I put my face down into his hair.
It smelled like smoke and like the top of my son’s head.
“Mom,” he said.
Barely anything. A shape made out of air.
“I’m here.”
“I dreamed something.”
“Yeah?”
“I dreamed you were mad at me.”
I want to be able to tell you what I said to that.
I have gone looking for it a hundred times and it isn’t there. There is a gap. There is my son’s voice saying that, and then there is glass.
Because behind me, up above us in the black, something enormous hit the window.