CHAPTER THIRTY
In the hallway he stopped.
“He asked me if my phone was dead.”
“I heard.”
Mike stood there with his hands at his sides. He had the empty box under one arm because there was nowhere in that room to put it.
“What am I supposed to do with that.”
“You already did it,” I said. “You told him the truth. That’s the whole thing you get to do.”
“That’s it?”
“That’s it.”
He looked down the hallway toward the elevators and then back at me.
“Ren—”
“Saturdays,” I said. “You can come Saturdays.”
Then I went back into 614.
The rest of that day was fine.
That is the part that gets you. It was fine. He watched two more episodes and ate about a third of a grilled cheese and asked me whether people who build tree houses have to have a permit, which is a question he got from me, God help him.
At twenty to eight the fire alarm went off.
Somebody two floors down put something in a toaster oven in a staff break room. That is the entire cause and I found it out from a nurse forty minutes later.
What it sounded like in room 614 was a tone.
Three pulses and a gap, three pulses and a gap, out in the corridor, with a strobe on the wall opposite our door going white white white, and then a recorded voice over the ceiling speakers saying that a situation had been reported and to stand by for instructions.
I was up and moving before it finished the first sentence.
He had already gotten out of the bed.
He was standing on the floor in hospital socks with one hand on the rail and he had the IV line stretched out behind him and his face was doing something I had never seen a face do, and he was going for the door.
“Danny.”
“I have to—”
“Danny. Stop. Stop.”
He got two steps and the line went tight and he made a sound and I got him around the middle from behind and got my hand on the line where it went into the back of his hand so it wouldn’t pull.
He was pulling air in so fast he was not getting any of it out.
That is what it is. That is the mechanism and it is the cruelest joke in medicine. He was breathing four times as much air as anybody in that room and he was drowning in it, and his hands were going numb, and I could feel his fingers curling in on themselves against my forearm.
“I can’t. Mom. I can’t.”
“You can.”
“I can’t get it in—”
“You’re getting it in. You’re getting too much in. Listen to me.”
The tone kept going. Three and a gap. Three and a gap.
I got him around and got him sitting on the edge of the bed and put myself directly in front of him, knees to knees, and took both of his hands, and here is what I found out in about ninety seconds that nobody had taught me.
Holding him did not work. It made it worse. He fought it.
Saying it’s okay did not work. He is seven and not stupid.
What worked was arithmetic.
“The door’s open,” I said. “Look at it. Look at the door.”
He couldn’t.
“Danny. The door is open. It’s open all the way to the wall. Nobody’s touched it.”
His eyes went there. Not all the way, but they went.
“Now. Count with me. In on four.”
“I can’t—”
“One.”
Nothing.
“Two.”
Nothing.
“Three.”
And on the fourth one my son took a breath with me, badly, in pieces, and I said four again and we did it again and by about the ninth one he was doing the numbers with me out loud in a whisper, and he had a death grip on both my thumbs.
Bree came in at some point and stood in the doorway and did not say one word and did not come any closer, and I found out later that she had gone and stopped two other people from coming in.
It took eleven minutes.
The alarm shut off after four of them and it did not make any difference at all, which is something else nobody tells you.
At the end of it he was gray and soaked and he could not hold his own head up, and he lay down on his side facing the door and I pulled the blanket up over his shoulder.
“Mom.”
“Yeah.”
“Can I have your phone.”
I gave it to him.
He got it up in front of his face with both hands and his hands were still shaking and he turned it around and looked at the corner of it, and I watched my son try to read a two digit number off a screen and not be able to do it.
“What does it say,” he said.
“Seventy-seven.”
“Okay,” he said, and gave it back.
He was asleep in about four minutes.
I sat in the fold-out chair in the dark with the overhead light on and my hands flat on my knees, and after a while I got up and went to the window, because I needed to look at something that was not in that room.
It was full dark. The parking structure had its lights on and there was a strip of loading dock below us with a dumpster and a bollard and a light on a bracket.
His truck was in the lot.
Not in the visitor structure. In the strip along the side by the loading dock, where nobody parks, nose out.
He was standing next to it.
I could see him because he was under the light on the bracket. Gray jacket, no hat, hands in his pockets, looking at nothing in particular. And every so often he brought his hand up and there was an orange point in it.
He quit eight years ago. He quit when I was pregnant with Danny and he made a thing of it, he had a countdown on a whiteboard in the kitchen and everything.
I stood at that window and watched my husband smoke in a loading dock at ten past eight at night, four floors under a room he was not allowed to be in.
He did not look up.
Not once. I stood there for a long time and I want to be exact about this because I have gone over it: he never lifted his head.
He looked at the ground and at the far wall and at the middle distance and he smoked three of them, and then he got in the truck and sat there with the engine off for another twenty minutes before he pulled out.
Forty minutes, all told, on the sixth of December, in a loading dock, under a light.
There is a thing I have to say about that and I do not enjoy saying it.
Nobody looks up.
I stood at a window on the fourth floor of a building on Fenwick Street on the twelfth of November and hit the glass with both hands and screamed at a parking lot full of people, and not one of them raised their eyes above the second floor.
And three and a half weeks later I stood at a window on the sixth floor and looked down at a man who was standing in the cold because he could not come inside, and I did not knock, and I did not wave, and I did not go down.
My phone went off in my hand.
Was that a fire alarm? I could hear it from out here. Is he ok
I looked at it.
He had been standing forty feet from a loading dock door hearing an alarm go off in the building his son was in, and he could not come in, because coming in required me.
I typed He’s fine.
I did not tell him that Danny had been on the floor. I did not tell him about the eleven minutes or the numbers or the phone. I made a decision, standing at a window, about what a man was entitled to know about his own child, and I made it in about four seconds, and I have not once revisited it.
I put the phone face down on the windowsill.
Then I picked it up again and turned it over, because it was seventeen minutes to nine, and somebody in that room was going to want to read the number off the corner of it.