Wednesday, 11:38 p.m.
I took the stairs two at a time. The fourth clacked under me and the ninth groaned, and neither of them mattered to anyone.
He had gone onto his back. His chin was down on his chest, and in the light from the hall his face was the color of candle wax. His lips had gone the blue-gray of a slate roof. His chest was heaving against nothing, the ribs flaring, the cords of his neck standing out like ropes under a tarp, and no air moved at his mouth. The oximeter clip was still on his finger, its screen two dashes. I put two fingers under the angle of his jaw where the big vessel runs, and I looked at the clock on my wrist.
Twenty-eight.
Slow, and full, and hard. Each beat came up under my fingers, and then there was a pause where the next one should be, and then it came.
I have felt that pulse before. Not often. A yearling in a Pierce County barn that had been handed the wrong syringe. Ace does the opposite. A heart on ace goes fast and light, chasing a blood pressure that has fallen out of the bottom of the animal, and the skin goes warm and pink and the gums flush. This was cold and pale and slow, with the pressure standing up hard in the vessel, and a heart working like a wet sack being hauled uphill.
It wasn't ace.
"Cal," I said. "Callum."
I got a fist into his breastbone and ground it. Nothing. I took him under the arms and hauled him off the bed. The mattress was a bad surface for anything I might have to do, and a horse is worked on the ground. He came over the edge and landed on the boards beside the bed with a thud that shook the nightstand, and the glass of water walked to the lip and stayed there. I got behind his head on my knees and put my fingers in behind the angles of his jaw and pushed the whole lower half of his face forward and up, until his bottom teeth stood in front of his top ones.
He drew in air with the same noise, the boot coming out of the mud, and again. The gray went out of his lips a shade.
I let go for one second, and the door shut again in his throat.
The sleep clinic had a word for it, and he had quit the mask that answered it. Obstructive. A throat that closes when the muscle lets go, and I had let go every muscle he owned, on top of half a sleeping pill still in him from the tea. His chest heaved and nothing came in, and I had him by the bone again, and it opened, one, two. I put my mouth over his and blew, and felt his chest rise under my hand and go down, and blew, and it came up. His mouth was cold. It tasted of chocolate.
He was going to need something I couldn't do with my hands.
An alpha-2. Detomidine, if I was honest. Two hours ago I'd been handed an empty vial of Dormosedan and told myself a story about the Moens' Belgian, and now it sat in a freezer bag in my partner's truck. It was a guess. It was the only guess that put a heart at twenty-eight and a body cold, and it had an antidote in a steel box in my truck, and the truck was forty yards away. The ambulance out of Marten Falls is twenty-five minutes on a good night, and it doesn't carry Antisedan. I had a phone in my pocket and a partner nine miles off, and I didn't think of either one until it was over.
Forty yards. The stairs. The kitchen. The yard. I ran the numbers as I would on a horse with a leg down: three minutes, out and back. Three minutes without air does what it does. But he had a pulse, and a pulse is a rope you don't argue with. I turned him onto his side with his head tilted back on the rolled edge of the rug and his chin pulled up, and put the door on the latch, and the breath held on it, ragged, one and two and three and four.
It would hold. It had to.
I ran.
* The fourth stair. The kitchen: the mug in the sink, the milk pan on the stove with its skin. In the mudroom the foal box hung by its handle on the shelf where it has hung for nine years, an orange plastic tackle box with a red cross on the lid, and I took it down and got the lid open with my thumb and pulled the mask and the bag out onto my arm and left the box swinging. Out the back door. The yard light turned the gravel to salt.
My truck. The padlock, which I'd closed an hour ago with a click I could still hear, and the key on my ring, and my fingers, which didn't know what they were doing. The lid. The bottles stood in white light now, pink and clear and brown, and I didn't look at any of them but one. Antisedan. Ten milliliters, five milligrams to the mil, the little dog vial I'd carried for years for one dog that never came.
I did a sum in the time it took to seat the needle, and I knew while I did it that it was a horse vet's sum and not a doctor's. If it was what I thought, there could have been fifteen milligrams in the cocoa. How much of it he'd drunk, and how much a man's gut takes up from a mug, I had no way to know. No label I owned had a line for a man. I gave the dog vial what I'd give a big dog with that much on board, a guess built on a guess. I drew two and a half mils and shoved the vial in my jacket pocket, because a man snapped awake out of it can come up fighting, and there was more in the vial.
I ran. In the kitchen the receiver on my belt gave a faint wheeze with nothing behind it, and I ran faster.
The whole trip had been three minutes, maybe less.
He was where I'd left him. On his side, gray again, mouth open, the door shut on him again. I had him onto his back with a hand under his neck, and I took the needle cap in my teeth and put the needle straight through the denim of his jeans and into the great meat of the thigh, and pushed until the barrel was empty. I hadn't time to take his pants down. It's not what you'd want your patient to have.
Then the mask.
A foal mask is a cone of gray silicone meant to fit a muzzle that hasn't yet learned to be one, with a rim you press down and seal with the flat of both hands. It doesn't fit a man. It's the wrong shape. I turned it over, upside down, the wide end at his chin and the narrow at the bridge of his nose, and it sealed for the first time on my third try, on the ridge of his cheekbones, where the bone is. I got both thumbs on the rim and my fingers hooked behind his jaw pulling it up into the cone. The bag hung down off the mask onto the floorboards. I had no hand left.
I got my right knee onto the bag, and put my weight on it.
It went down. His chest came up under the gray cone.
I let the knee up. The bag filled, with a sigh. I counted five, because five is what you do for a foal, one squeeze and five seconds' worth of nothing, so the lungs can empty, and so you can't lose your nerve and go faster.
"One," I said out loud. "Two. Three. Four. Five."
Knee. The chest rose.
I said it again. And again. Once, at the fifth or sixth, something rose in his throat under my thumbs. I tore the cone off and tipped him onto his side and cleared his mouth with two fingers, and got the mask back on and started again from one.
The rest of it I did on the numbers. I had done this on foals in straw at three in the morning, a hundred and something of them, and lost eleven and could name every one, and I had never once done it to a face I loved. I said them into a room with a glass of water walking on the edge of a nightstand, and the mask fogged and cleared, fogged and cleared.
My phone lay on the floor beside his head where I'd dropped it. It lit as I looked, no message, just the time, as it does. 11:52.
A day, to the minute, since the voice.
I squeezed. The chest rose.
Four. Five. Under my left hand, laid flat on his neck, the pulse came out of its long pause and stumbled. Thirty-two. Then thirty-six. It's the small things that let you breathe: a fingernail bed, a gum, an ear. I lifted the mask a half inch, and the rim of the ear beside my hand had been the color of tallow and was pink at the edge. The lips took it next. They took color from the inside out, like a stain going the other way.
Forty-four.
At 11:57 he pulled a breath of his own. I felt it before I heard it, a small shudder under the cone that wasn't mine, and I stopped with my knee lifted. Another. Ragged. Shallow. His.
I took the mask off his face. There was a red ring on his skin where the silicone had been, the shape of a small upside-down house. I put my ear down over his mouth, not touching, and held my own breath to hear his, and shut my eyes, because it's what I do, the last few inches to the answer.
His breath came in, and it caught at the top, and it went out against my ear, warm.
"You're doing it again," he said.
He hadn't opened his eyes. His voice was a scrape, hardly a voice. Then he coughed and turned his head and was sick, all at once, over the boards, over the rug and my knees and the mask, and I got him onto his side with my hand spread on his back, holding him there.
I don't know how long I stayed like that. He was breathing and I had my hand on the proof of it, and I didn't lift it.
The phone was in my hand before I knew I'd picked it up, my thumb on the nine. Twenty-five minutes from Marten Falls, and a crew to carry him down my stairs. He was breathing, steady and pink and wet. Then the screen lit under my thumb, and it wasn't the time. I will know. Two words, no name. I turned it face down on the boards. He was breathing. I told myself that was the whole of the argument.
* He came up a little more with every minute. I got him half sitting against the bed with his head on my shoulder. He said something that was mostly vowels, and something about the cold, and went slack again. I took the sheet off the mattress and the pad under it and the second pillow with the spoiled case and pitched them into the hall, until the bare ticking lay there striped and blue. I pulled the quilt onto the floor in a heap. It took two heaves and a "Cal, help me, up, come on" to get him onto the bed, with his knees folded like a foal's and his arm across my neck. He did some of it. I got him onto his side on the ticking with a towel under his cheek, and I stood over him with my hands on my knees and my ears ringing.
The phone buzzed on the floor. 12:04.
I picked it up, and it was a message from Port Ashby, and I had guessed what it was before I read it, and I read it anyway.
That's Cal.
And, under it, a second, on top of the first as if she'd typed it with a wet thumb:
Don't tell him I asked.
Another rule. I'd had enough of those. I read it standing over him. It was my husband. It was Callum James Reeve, forty-four years old, born in Kettle Lake, who steps out of his boots without bending, and I'd put a syringe into his cocoa and stopped his breath in his own bed. His sister, who hadn't seen him in twenty-four years, had looked at a tired man under a lamp and named him in two words. Then the mouth on the films was somebody else's, some other boy's, and I had no idea whose.
I typed He's OK. I'll call you. I sent it.
Then I did what I do at the end of any bad night. I went and washed.
The bathroom light over the sink is a sixty-watt bulb in a frosted dish, which is the only white light in the house that has never once been kind to anyone. I ran the tap and put my mouth under it. I scrubbed my knees. I took off the barn jacket, and it hung heavy on the hook, and its pocket knocked on the porcelain: the bottle, with my own tape on it, ACE, that I had put there at 10:50 and hadn't thought about for an hour and a half.
I had put fifteen milligrams of something in a mug and watched him drink it with his eyes on my face. I took the bottle out and held it up to the bulb.
Clear. Clear as the water running in the basin. There was no tea in it, no yellow, no weak color of anything, and I turned it and held it against the white dish and looked for what I knew should be there. Ace is the color of thin tea. It has always been the color of thin tea.
And there was less in it than I'd written down. I know what six and a half milliliters looks like in that bottle. This was three and a half.