Friday, 5:35 p.m.
The lobby had eight plastic chairs bolted to a rail, and Toby wouldn’t sit in any of them.
He stood at the front desk in Rob’s boots with one hand flat on the counter to hold himself up, and he argued with Ann Treadwell through the gap in the bulletproof glass the way a kid argues with a teacher about a grade, standing too close, not raising his voice, saying the same thing again.
“He’s my grandson.”
“Sir—”
“He’s twenty-nine. He’s got a baby. It came after he left. He’s never seen it.”
“You’re sixty-three,” Treadwell said.
“Yes.”
“You told my deputy yesterday you were sixty-three.”
“Yes.” He waited to see if she’d get there by herself. She didn’t. “He’s my daughter’s son. He’s Pell’s. He’s twenty-nine. I’m sixty-three. That’s how it goes.”
Treadwell considered him through the glass. She had the face she’d had on Jo’s lawn on Thursday, which gave away nothing, and her readers hanging on their cord, and a stack of forms under her hand she hadn’t looked at. Behind her the dispatcher had stopped typing.
“Your family keeps producing old men, Rob,” Treadwell said, not to Toby. She’d seen Rob by the door. “Now it’s producing young ones.”
Rob didn’t answer that. There wasn’t an answer.
He was standing by the glass doors with his back to them, because out on the steps were the vans and the ring light and Brynn Kessler’s voice going on and on, and he’d found that if he stood with his back to the doors the people on the steps saw his back. Across the lobby Jo sat in the last plastic chair with Pip asleep across her lap, still in the young man’s coat. Jo hadn’t spoken since the park. She was looking at Toby’s hand on the counter.
The knuckles had gone white where he was pressing. The nails had a blue to them at the beds, like a man who’d been working in the cold without gloves.
“Toby,” Rob said. “Sit down.”
“In a minute, Dad.”
“Sit down and argue.”
Toby looked around at him. Then he let go of the counter, carefully, one finger at a time, and came across and sat in the chair nearest the desk. He sat with his hands on his knees and his head back against the cinder block and his mouth open, breathing.
Rob went to the glass himself.
“The leaf,” he said to Treadwell. “His medicine. In the pouch. Your deputy bagged it yesterday.”
“It went to the state lab with everything else.”
“He needs it.”
“Then he can see a doctor, Rob. There’s a hospital in Bend with a lot of them in it.” She squared the forms. “I’m not handing a man a bag of unidentified plant matter out of evidence because he says it’s for his heart.”
“He calls it heart-leaf. He’s been taking it for years.”
Across the lobby Jo’s head came up. Rob didn’t look at her.
“He’s said a lot of things,” Treadwell said. She took her readers off and let them fall. “Come back to my office a minute. I’ve got something I want from you.”
◆
Her office had a dying plant on the file cabinet and a picture of her on a snowfield in a red jacket. She shut the door. She didn’t sit.
“I’ve got a lab result that says the man out there is Jo’s parent,” she said. “Parent or child. You know which one I think.”
“Her dad.”
“Gary Pruett. I’ve got people looking. Nobody’s found him yet, which is interesting all by itself.” She opened her desk drawer and took out a sealed kit in a paper sleeve and laid it on the blotter. “Now I’ve got a second one, twenty-nine, no ID, no English, knows Jo’s address. I want to know how far this goes. I want to know if it goes to you.”
“To me.”
“I want a swab. For exclusion. A Y-chromosome test. It runs down the father’s line, father to son to son. If he’s Gary, he’s nothing to you, and you’re out of it, and I stop wondering.” She tapped the sleeve. “State lab’s backed up past Labor Day. There’s a private lab in Portland that’ll do it on a rush. County’s paying. Courier’s coming at six.”
Rob looked at the kit on the blotter.
Father to son to son. He stood there and turned it over like a board with a split in it, looking for the side it would hold on. If the man out in the lobby was Gary Pruett, Rob was nothing to him. And if he was what he said he was—
“Open it,” Rob said. Treadwell didn’t move. “Go on. Open it.”
She put on gloves. She did it herself, not a deputy, the long swab in its paper, and he opened his mouth and she rolled it along the inside of one cheek and then the other, ten seconds a side, not scrubbing. He’d never had anything done so gently by a cop. She sealed it and wrote on it and signed across the seal, and he watched her write VOSS, R. and the date and the time. 6:04.
“Most people ask me what it’s for,” she said. “Before.”
“You told me what it’s for.”
“You look like a man who thinks it’s going to help him.”
He didn’t answer. The courier knocked at 6:06, a kid in a windbreaker with a hard case, and she handed it over and signed a form, and the kid went out the back.
Tuesday, Denise had said. After the holiday. And the old man on the bench in the park had said Tuesday too. Late morning. Maybe the afternoon.
Two Tuesdays. Rob stood in the sheriff’s office and thought about that, and couldn’t make it add up to anything, and couldn’t stop adding.
◆
Gil Ahern came on at six. Rob caught him in the hall by the booking desk, taking off his jacket.
“Two minutes,” Rob said. “The young one.”
Gil looked at the clock over the booking desk.
“That kid doesn’t have ten words,” Gil said. “What are you going to say to him?”
“I don’t know.”
Gil hung up his jacket. He went down the hall with his keys and Rob followed him. The young one wasn’t in the cell with the bars, the one Toby had been in. He was in the other one, the one with a steel door and a window in it the size of a sheet of paper, wired glass, and a slot at the bottom for trays.
Gil stood back from the door and folded his arms and looked at the ceiling.
Rob looked through the glass.
The kid was sitting on the bench against the back wall with his knees drawn up and his arms around them. No coat. His shirt was linen, like Toby’s, and his trousers were wool, and he’d taken his boots off and set them side by side under the bench, toes out. When he saw a face in the window he got up and came to the door, fast, and then saw it wasn’t the face he wanted, and stopped.
He was thin. Rob had never seen a grown man that thin who wasn’t sick. Thin in the neck and the wrists and across the chest, the collarbones standing out under the shirt like a coat hanger. He’d been starving himself. Rob didn’t know how he knew it, and he knew it.
The kid put his hand flat on the glass.
“Toby,” he said. The vowels went somewhere Rob couldn’t follow. “Toby?”
“He’s okay,” Rob said. “He’s out front. He’s okay.”
The kid knew that one. “Okay,” he said, and nodded hard. “Okay.”
Rob didn’t have anything to give him. He felt in his shirt pocket and found the pad from Calder Ranch & Lumber, the little one with the tear-off sheets and their logo across the top, a steer’s head, and he took the pencil from behind his ear. A carpenter’s pencil, flat, sharpened with a utility knife down to a chisel point. He crouched and pushed them both through the tray slot.
The kid picked them up. He turned the pencil over, the flat of it, and then he found how to hold it without being shown, on the wide side, the way you’d hold it to mark a stud, and he put the pad against the door on his side and drew.
The lines came fast and straight, no sketching, no going back. Somebody had taught this kid to draw a line he meant.
A door. An arch of rock around it. A man, a stick man, but with a braid. An arrow from the man through the door. On the other side of the door, a house with a pointed roof and a window, and in the window a round thing with lines out all around it.
The kid turned the pad around and held it flat to the glass so Rob could see. He tapped the man with the braid. He tapped the arrow. He tapped the house, the window, the lamp. Then he looked at Rob with his whole face, waiting, and Rob understood that he was being asked a question, and that it was a simple one, and that it was the only one.
“Yeah,” Rob said. “I know. I know he has to.”
He didn’t know if the kid understood a word. The kid held his eyes a while longer. Then he took the pad back against his chest and held it there, and the pencil, and went back and sat down on the bench with them.
“Rob,” Gil said.
◆
At 7:10 Toby stood up to go to the bathroom.
Rob saw him do it from across the lobby. He’d been standing by the doors again, watching the ring light on the steps go off and on as the girl did her segments. Toby put his hands on his knees and pushed, and came up out of the chair in stages, a hand on the rail, a hand on the wall, and stood. He took two steps toward the hall. He said, “Mom,” in an ordinary voice, as if he was going to tell her something.
Then he went down.
He didn’t fold. He went over like a post that’s been cut through at the base, stiff, all at once, and his head hit the tile, and he lay there on his side with one arm under him.
Jo screamed. Pip came awake on her lap and screamed because Jo had.
Rob was already there. He was on his knees on the tile and he had Toby over on his back, and Toby’s eyes were open and not looking at anything, and his mouth was open, and his chest wasn’t going up.
Rob put two fingers in the groove of his neck as the course had shown them. Nothing. He held them there. He counted, and got to five, and there was still nothing, and he took his fingers away.
“Call it,” he said, to anybody. “Call an ambulance.”
Treadwell was already on the radio behind the glass, her voice gone flat and fast. Ten fifty-two, Sheriff’s Office lobby, male sixties, unresponsive.
Rob tore the linen shirt open. The buttons were horn and they went across the tile like teeth. Under it his son’s chest was white and hairless and so thin he could see every rib, and the heart going nowhere under them.
Two winters ago OSHA had made him take a first-aid course, when he’d had Cody and two others on the crew. Four hours in the back room at Calder Ranch & Lumber with a retired paramedic and a plastic torso the paramedic called Annie. Heel of the hand on the breastbone, between the nipples. Other hand on top. Lock your elbows. Shoulders over your hands. Push hard, push fast, two inches, let it come all the way back up. A hundred a minute. You know “Stayin’ Alive”? Like that. Don’t be shy. You’re going to break ribs. That’s how you know you’re doing it right.
Rob put the heel of his hand on his son’s breastbone.
He pushed.
“One,” he said out loud. “Two. Three.”
It went down under him farther than Annie had. There was nothing on Toby to stop it. On the fourth push something gave under the heel of his hand with a soft wet crack, like a green board splitting along the grain, and Rob felt it go all the way up through his arms into his teeth, and he didn’t stop. That’s how you know.
“Seven. Eight. Nine.”
He counted out loud. He counted the way he counted boards off a lift, steady, not fast, not slow, and he kept his elbows locked and his shoulders over his hands and he pushed his son’s heart down into the floor of the Tamarack County Sheriff’s Office, and let it come back up, and pushed it down.
“Fourteen. Fifteen.”
Jo was on the floor at Toby’s head. She had his face between her hands. She was saying his name. She was saying Toby, Toby, Toby, bud, Toby in a voice Rob had heard once, in the hall bathroom at three in the morning with the shower going.
Pip was standing by the chairs in the big coat with her hands over her ears. Nobody was holding her. Rob saw that and couldn’t do anything about it and kept counting.
“Twenty-two. Twenty-three.”
His arms were burning. Sweat ran in his eyes. Toby’s head rocked in Jo’s hands with every push, and his mouth was open, and the gap in his teeth was there, the empty place on the upper left.
“Twenty-nine. Thirty.”
Treadwell came through the door from the back with a red case and dropped to her knees across Toby from him. The AED. She had it open and was peeling the backing off the pads, and she slapped one high on the right of Toby’s chest and one low on the left, under his arm, and a machine voice said Analyzing heart rhythm. Do not touch the patient.
Rob took his hands off.
He knelt there with his hands held up off his son’s chest and his arms shaking and did nothing, because a machine had told him to.
Shock advised. Stand clear. Press the flashing button.
“Clear,” Treadwell said. “Jo. Jo, let go of him.”
Jo let go.
Treadwell pressed the button. Toby’s body jumped on the tile, all of it at once, his arms coming up off the floor and falling back.
Shock delivered. Begin CPR.
Rob put his hands back.
“One. Two. Three.”
He got to eleven. On eleven, under the heel of his hand, something pushed back.
He stopped. He put his fingers in the groove of Toby’s neck.
It was there. It was ragged and it was fast and it came in a spill and then nothing and then a spill again, but it was there. And Toby’s chest went up, once, a long ugly pull of air through his open mouth that sounded like a saw binding in a wet cut, and came down, and went up again.
“He’s got a pulse,” Rob said. “He’s breathing. Ann. He’s breathing.”
He sat back on his heels. He looked at his hands. They didn’t look like his.
Outside the glass doors the ring light was on, and the girl’s phone on its stick, and a man’s phone beside it, and another, pointed through the glass at the floor of the lobby, at him.
◆
He rode in the back of the ambulance with his knees against the gurney and his hands between his knees.
The medic was a woman about Jo’s age with a braid of her own down her back, and she worked the whole way without talking much, watching the monitor, the green line jumping and stalling and jumping. She’d put a line in Toby’s arm and a mask over his face. She’d asked Rob what he was taking and Rob had said a leaf, some kind of leaf, for his heart, and she’d looked at him hard over the gurney and written something down.
“What’s his name?”
“Toby,” Rob said. “Voss.”
She wrote it. She didn’t ask anything else. Maybe she knew. Maybe everybody in three counties knew.
The highway to Bend went by in the back windows, the lights of the cars behind them. Jo was back there somewhere in the Subaru, out of the sheriff’s lot, with Pip buckled in the pink booster in that coat. Rob had seen her running across the lot with Pip on her hip before the ambulance doors closed. The kid in the steel cell was back there too, farther back, on a bench, with a pad of paper and a pencil, and nobody had told him anything.
Somewhere past Redmond, Toby’s hand moved on the sheet. The fingers opened and closed. Then the hand came across the gurney, slowly, as if it had a long way to go, and found Rob’s hand on his knee and took hold of it.
Toby’s eyes were open over the mask. They were Rob’s eyes. They found him.
The medic said, “Hey. Hey, there he is. Don’t try to talk, okay, sir, you’ve had a—”
Toby pulled the mask down with his other hand. His voice came out of him in pieces, hoarse, with no air behind it.
“You were awake,” he said.
Rob held on to his hand.
He meant to say something. He had it ready. And then there was nothing in him to say it with, and he put his forehead down on the gurney rail by his son’s hand and shook, and the medic reached across and put the mask back over Toby’s face and didn’t say anything about it, and Toby didn’t let go.
◆
At 9:45 they’d been in the ER at St. Anne’s for an hour and twenty minutes. Toby was in a bay with a curtain and three machines, asleep or something like it, with a bandage on the side of his head where it had hit the tile and wires going to his taped-up chest. The ER doctor had come and gone twice. She’d said cardiology in the morning and severe and we’ll know more, and she’d asked Rob what the old man had been taking, and Jo had said foxglove from the other chair without lifting her head, and the doctor had said, “That would explain a few things,” and asked where it was, and Jo hadn’t answered, and Rob had said in a lab, and she’d looked at him the way the medic had.
“He’s not going anywhere for a while,” she’d said. “I wouldn’t let him climb a flight of stairs with that heart.”
Jo was in the chair on the other side of the bed with Pip asleep on her, still in the oilcloth coat. She had her hand through the bed rail on Toby’s arm. She hadn’t looked at Rob since the lobby and she didn’t now.
Rob sat in the other chair. His hands were on his knees. He could still feel it in the heels of them, the give, the green board going.
On the third day of the search they’d let him go into the Whistler with the SAR crew, as far as the round room they called the Bell Room, because he wouldn’t stop asking and because they’d wanted him to see. He’d crouched at the slot at the back where the tube pinched down to nothing. He’d put his Stanley on it. He put it on everything. He’d held the blade up in his flashlight to read it.
He spread his right hand now on his knee, thumb to little finger, as wide as it went. Nine and a half inches.
The slot had been ten, and a hair.
On the bed his son breathed in, and caught at the top, and breathed out. Rob sat with his hand spread on his knee and didn’t close it.