Thursday, 12:05 p.m.
I put two fingers under his jaw and found nothing I could trust.
In a man that cold, with that much in his blood, a pulse can go so slow and so shallow it hides under your own. I gave it the ten seconds I'd give a horse. I couldn't tell. A pulse you can't tell is a pulse you don't have, and I laid him flat on the gravel and tipped his head back and put my mouth over his.
He was cold to the mouth. His lips tasted of the lake. I pinched his nose and blew, and his chest came up under my hand, and I let it fall, and blew, and let it fall. Five times. Nothing came back at me. His eyes stayed half open on the cloud.
Then the heel of my hand on his breastbone, where I had once ground my knuckles to wake him from a drug I'd never heard of, and the other hand over it, and my arms locked.
"One," I said. "Two. Three."
I said them out loud. It was for him, so he'd have a thing to follow, a rope to come up by. Since Tuesday night I had counted him from across rooms, off a plastic speaker, off the rise and fall of a T-shirt in the dark. It was a different thing to count with my hands.
"Eleven. Twelve."
His ribs gave under me and sprang back. You press until you feel the give, and then a little farther, and something in there answers, a small dull crack, and you don't stop.
"Twenty-nine. Thirty."
Two breaths. Chin up, pinch, seal. His mouth was slack and wet under mine, and I blew into my husband, and I blew again, and I put my hands back on him where they'd been.
"One."
Somewhere behind me a horse blew out through her nose, long and low, and a man said something to her that I didn't hear. I did not look round. I had nothing to look round with. There was a place at the center of my chest and a place at the center of his, and a number, and the number was the only thing in the whole gray day that was still mine.
"Twenty-two. Twenty-three."
Sweat ran into my eyes, or the lake did. My lip had opened, and it dripped on his shirt in small bright drops and I let it. Thirty. Two. I got the third set done, and the fourth, and somewhere in the fifth the numbers began to slur, my arms shaking now to the elbows, my shoulders on fire. I counted through it. I got to nineteen and heard my own voice come out in pieces.
"Twenty."
"Move."
She came down the lane like something thrown. I hadn't heard her on the gravel. She'd come the whole of it on foot, a mile and a half of washed-out clay downhill, running where she could, in a smoker's lungs, and she hit her knees beside me with her face the color of raw liver and her breath tearing in and out of her in long ripped sheets.
"Move, Hanne. Give me the hands."
"Thirty," I said. "Then two. You count."
"I know how to count."
She put her hands where mine had been, and I slid out from under them, and she set her weight and drove. "One," Dagny said, in a voice like a cracked bell. "Two. Three." Her arms were thick and brown from the tug's lines, and she did not tire.
"I told you to wait at the road."
"I gave you your seven minutes." Twelve. Thirteen. "Then I started down with the phone. I held them till noon like you said, and then I told them to come."
"Stop at thirty. I'm getting the box."
The truck stood ten yards off with its door open. The foal box lay on the seat under its wool blanket, where I'd put it that morning, and I took it in one hand and the oximeter clip I'd scooped off his pillow and shoved in the console in the other and was back on my knees before Dagny reached twenty-eight. "Twenty-nine. Thirty." I had the lid up with my thumb and the mask out of it, a gray silicone cone with the bag hanging off it like a lung, and I turned it upside down, the wide end at his chin, as I had on our bedroom floor. It was built for a foal's muzzle, not a man's face, and nothing about using it this way was in any book. It sealed on the first try. I got both thumbs on the rim and my fingers behind his jaw and my knee on the bag.
Knee. His chest came up under the cone.
I let the knee up, and the bag filled with a sigh, and I gave him the second, and Dagny's hands came down on him again. "One," she said, and I said it with her.
The fourth round, or the fifth. I lifted my knee, and the chest under Dagny's hands did something it hadn't done. It hitched. It heaved against her, one hard spasm from the belly up, and his whole body arched under the cone, and I tore the mask off and the lake came out of him.
I had him on his side before it finished. I had my hand spread on his back, exactly where it had been on Wednesday in the dark, holding him as the lake came up out of his stomach, brown and thin, onto the gravel, more than I'd have believed a man could swallow. What was in his lungs wouldn't come up like that. That would be the hospital's to find. He retched. He dragged a breath in through it, and it rattled, and he took another, and it didn't rattle. Dagny sat back on her heels with both hands over her mouth.
He breathed. It was ragged. It went in and caught and went out. I could not have said how long I knelt there with my hand on him, listening to it come.
His face went from blue to the gray of wet cement and from that toward something with blood in it, and I put my cheek down beside his to feel the air move against it, warm and damp on my skin. I thumbed up an eyelid. The pupil was middling and round, and it shrank a hair against the gray light, and something at the back of my neck came unlocked. His eyes opened.
They didn't find me. They were wide and dark and full of somewhere else.
"Did she get out?" he said.
His voice was a rag. It was the voice from the bed on Wednesday, Wren, is it cold. He was on a lake at midnight, twenty-five years down.
"She got out," I said.
I said it into his wet hair. It was a lie. I would have said it again. His eyes stayed on me for a second more. Then they closed, and his breath went on.
Behind me a man's voice said, "I wanted to see someone come up."
I did not turn round.
* He had sat down on the gravel beside the mare. That's all. He sat with his back against the trailer's wheel and one leg drawn up and his hand on Pilot's foreleg above the fetlock, and she stood over him with her big head lowered, the rope still in its loop across her chest, and blew slowly into his hair. He did not look at me or at Callum. He looked at the lake, where there was nothing now but a slick of silver and some bubbles still coming up and going out.
Nobody touched him.
Dagny came back from the trailer with two wool blankets from its tack room, and we peeled my husband out of his wet clothes on the ramp and wrapped him to the chin. She stayed on her knees beside him. When she looked up the ramp she looked at the old man for the length of one cigarette she did not light. She had been twenty-three on the ice.
She didn't say anything. She turned her back on him, all of it, like a door, and took Callum's cold hand in both of hers.
I slid the clip on his finger. The little screen woke up. 84. 86. It had been the only honest voice in the house on Wednesday afternoon, and it climbed to 91 and hung there.
"What are we waiting for?" Dagny said.
"The county." I looked at my watch, which had stopped at 12:03 in the lake. "You called them down. They're coming."
"Then we wait."
"Yes."
We waited. Dagny's lighter clicked and she put it away without lighting it. Pilot shifted at the top of the ramp and the trailer answered, and the old man on the gravel did not move at all, and my hand on Callum's chest went up and down with him, and I kept it there and did not let myself take it for an answer. A small wind got up off the water and moved in the dead white pines on the far shore. From the north, through the trees, came the thin, whining rise of something with four wheels and no muffler, and behind it, over the point, a low engine, a boat, coming steadily nearer.
* The ATV came down out of the trees behind the trailer at 12:14, by my phone, which had survived a lake it was not rated for. It carried two medics, a woman with a braid and a boy with a backboard strapped to a little cart, and it stopped in a spray of gravel, and they were on the ramp with their bags open before its engine died. I gave the woman the history in order, fast, in the voice I use at the head of an animal on the ground. She wrote nothing down and asked me nothing.
"Four minutes in the water, cold, sedated with midazolam by the man sitting at that wheel. CPR about seven minutes, by me and then by her. Sat 91 on room air. Detomidine by mouth last night, and two doses of Antisedan after. Triazolam, two tablets Tuesday night that he took, and half a tablet Wednesday afternoon that I gave him. He swallowed a lot of lake, and he'll have breathed some. Watch his chest."
She looked at me. "You gave what?"
"I'm a veterinarian. The drug was mine."
The boat came round the point while she was still looking. It was flat, aluminum, green and white, with a state shield on the bow and a man at the tiller in a life vest and a duty belt. He put the bow onto the gravel and stepped over the gunwale in one motion, up to his knees in the lake.
"Conservation Warden Aaberg," he said. He looked at the ramp, the blankets, me on my knees with a cut lip, a horse and a trailer at the top and an old man in a wet white shirt against a wheel. "Which one of you called it in?"
"She did," I said. "My sister-in-law."
Dagny's head came up an inch when I said it.
At the wheel of the trailer, Aubrey was getting to his feet. It took him some time. He put his hand on the mare's leg to do it, and then on her shoulder, and then he stood straight in his cardigan and his wet shirt, thin as a stick, with the yellow in his face, and he held out both his wrists before anyone asked, palms up, the way a child holds out his hands to be looked at before supper.
Warden Aaberg's hand went to his belt and stopped there.
"Sir?"
The old man said nothing.
I got the bottle from the trailer fender. It was dry. It had sat on the fender all that while in the gray light, my own label, my own lot number, a little over three milliliters of clear liquid. I carried it across the gravel and put it in the warden's hand.
"That says acepromazine," I said. "It's detomidine, or I'm a fool. It came out of my truck, and I think that man put it there, and you'll want to find out. Test it. And test his blood." I looked back at the ramp, at the wool bundle with a gray face at its top. "I gave it to him last night."
The warden turned the bottle over and slid it into a clear bag and wrote on the bag with a grease pencil, in a hand that was nothing like the block capitals I had been reading all morning. Behind me, on the gravel, someone drew in a breath that wasn't Callum's.
"There's a syringe of pentobarbital in the gravel at the top of the ramp," I said. "It's mine. It's a Schedule II. I'll want it counted."
"You'll give a statement," Aaberg said.
"Yes. All of it. In order. I'm going with my husband first."
He looked at the medics, at the boy strapping Callum to a board, at Dagny standing up out of the gravel with her arms at her sides and her eyes fixed on me. He looked at the old man with his wrists out.
"A deputy will meet you at Marten Falls," Warden Aaberg said. "Doctor. Go."
* They put him on the cart and ran the ATV up the lane at the pace of a man walking, and I walked at the side with one hand on the board. The pines came down over us. The warden and the medic's boy had walked the mare back into her trailer for me while Aubrey sat with his wrists still out, and behind us Dagny drove my truck in low gear with the mare's hooves shifting in the trailer. I didn't look back at the lake.
At the county road an ambulance stood on the shoulder with its back doors open and its lights going round and round in the trees, red, white, red. A man in a vest held a stretcher. They slid him in. The woman with the braid got up after him and took the oximeter off his finger, my clinic's clip with its cracked case, and put a hospital's on him and looked at its screen.
"Family?" she asked.
"Wife."
"Sit there. Tell me his name."
Somebody put a blanket on me. It smelled of ambulance and of someone else's cigarettes, and I found I was holding the edge of it in my fist like a lead rope. I sat. I put my back against the wall of the ambulance and my hand on the blanket over his shin. The doors shut, and the siren wound up, and the whole box leaned into the first curve.
"Callum James Reeve," I said. "Fourteenth of October, 1981. Kettle Lake, Wisconsin."
The medic wrote it down. She looked at my mouth, and then at my hand on the blanket, where two fingers were still keeping time on his shin, thirty and two, thirty and two, and would not stop.