“I’ll call,” Earlene overrides.
I turn back to Thomas. He’s no longer the slim man he was when I married him, and there’s no room to kneel between his body and the bookcase on one side, or the desk on the other. I pick my way forward and sit astride his belly.
My skirt rides up over my thighs, and I wait for his reprimand. “Elizabeth Lightsey, the world can see China.”
But he says nothing.
His face is a color skin was never meant to be.
I hear Earlene’s voice behind me, talking to somebody on the phone. “I don’t know. Just a minute. Elizabeth, is he breathing?”
“No.” There is no movement of his chest, no sound of air moving in and out of his lungs. I press my fingers to the skin of his throat, where the pulse is supposed to be, but it’s pointless. I can feel the way he isn’t here, the absence of him.
“Does he have any medical conditions?” Earlene shouts. Too loud, as if I’m in the backyard instead of just a few feet away from her.
I position my hands over his breastbone. Press down. His chest doesn’t even give. I push harder, put all of my weight behind it. This doesn’t feel at all like the resuscitation dummy I practiced on.
“Tanya wants to talk to you,” Earlene shouts.
I look up, confused, compressing Thomas’s chest again. Surely even Earlene knows I’m not free to chat right now.
But she holds the phone out toward me, then says, “Wait. What am I thinking?” and pushes a button.
A voice comes through on speakerphone.
“Mrs. Lightsey? Elizabeth?”
“It’s not a good—”
“This is Tanya. From church. What’s happened to Pastor?”
I stop compressions, staring at the circle of pale, stricken faces gaping back at me. They all expect me to answer, and that finally jars loose the important detail. Tanya works for dispatch. Colville is a small enough town that I know half the people in it. Tanya is my 911 contact.
I take a breath. “He’s—lying on the floor. I found him this way.”
“Is he conscious?”
“No, he’s just lying here.”
“Did he fall? Hit his head?”
“He’s not breathing, Tanya. His heart isn’t beating. I don’t know—”
“An ambulance is on the way. Now, I need you to start CPR. Okay? Can you do that?”
“I think so.”
“Good, that’s good. Oh, dear God help us. Okay. I’ll count with you. Are you ready? One-one-thousand, two-one-thousand . . .”
Somebody is weeping, and from the strange place my brain has wandered off to, it feels irrational. If I had any breath left over, maybe I’d say, “What are you crying about? He’s not your husband.”
My arms feel like jelly. My breath burns in my lungs, my heart is laboring.
Guilt sets in. This is all my fault. Just this very morning I asked God for a space of my own, and He’s punishing me for my selfishness.
“Time to give him a breath,” Tanya says. “Tilt his head back, seal his nose with your thumb and forefinger . . .”
I try, but Thomas does not cooperate. His skin is clammy and his neck is stiff and I’m doing this wrong, all wrong. I pinch his nostrils and get set to deliver a breath. His lips are cold and taste sour, and my stomach lurches.
Nausea is a luxury I don’t have a right to.
I take a new breath and try to blow it into him. It feels like blowing up an overly stiff balloon. My own lungs burn with the pressure, and I don’t think any of the oxygen is transferring from me to him.
Which means his head isn’t tilted back properly, but any time I take to try to fix his airway will be time that his heart isn’t beating.
“All right, back to compressions,” Tanya’s voice says, and I abandon the botched breathing thing and resume my inadequate chest compressions.
If Abigail were here, she’d know how to do CPR, would probably already have her father up and talking and requesting a fresh cup of tea.
One-one-thousand, two-one-thousand, three-one-thousand, four . . .
Thomas is an annoying breather. At night he snores, sighs, makes puffing noises. In the daytime he tends to snuffle and snort even when he’s reading or watching the news on TV. It irritates me some days until I want to scream at him to stop.
And now he has, and I’d give anything for him to start again.
My own breath is coming hard and fast. My heart is pounding. The ambulance has begun to feel like a myth.
“Are they coming?” I gasp.
“Just a few more minutes. Keep going. One-one-thousand, two-one-thousand . . .”
My arms and shoulders are beyond aching. I can’t do this anymore, but I also can’t stop.
“They’re here,” Annie’s voice says. I hear footsteps in the hallway and look up to see a woman in uniform, a man behind her.
“We’ll take it from here,” the woman says.
“There’s no room to work,” the man responds. “We’ll have to move him.” His hand rests on my shoulder. “Ma’am, you can stop now. We’ve got this.”
I keep going, like a mechanical toy, but he hauls me up to my feet and passes me off to Earlene’s none-too-steady hands out in the hallway. We squeeze into the space between a wheeled stretcher and the wall. I notice a trail of muddy snow on the hardwood floor. Thomas will have a fit about that when he wakes up. Maybe I should wipe it up, now, while we’re waiting.
The EMTs shove the visitor chairs against the wall and drag Thomas out from behind the desk. The man resumes CPR, brisk, professional. The woman puts a mask over Thomas’s nose and mouth and starts breathing for him with a bag, then stops to slap sticky pads on his chest and hook him up to an EKG machine.
A heady rush of relief flows through me. These people are so competent. Everything will be fine after all. Later this evening, Thomas will be gently chastising me for my failure and suggesting CPR refresher classes, and this time the resuscitation doll will get my full and undivided attention.
But my rush of hope disintegrates rapidly. The EMTs are intense, focused. They speak to each other in short, abrupt words that sound like code.
Not one of them speaks to me. Not one of them says, “It’s okay, Mrs. Lightsey. We’ve got this. Your husband will be just fine.”
“No rhythm,” the woman says. “Let’s shock him.”
I hear footsteps running in the hallway. A pair of warm arms circles my waist, gently tugging me back away from the door.
“You don’t need to watch this,” a familiar voice says. “Come away.”
“Val. He’s . . .”
“I see. Come on now.”
Val’s voice is reassuring, calm. She works in a nursing home; this isn’t her first encounter with a medical emergency. I let her lead me down the hall, into the living room. When she puts her arms around me, I lean into her, bury my face in her shoulder, and she rubs slow circles on my back, making small shushing noises as if I’m a child. Her hair smells like bacon and tobacco, oddly comforting.
Val is my neighbor to the left, not a member of the fold. Thomas has tolerated our fraternizing because I’ve told him I’m witnessing, trying to save her soul. He knows nothing of the clandestine friendship that has sprung up between us. Coffee in the backyard on summer afternoons, or in one of our kitchens in the winter. Shared excursions to the grocery store. An occasional movie night when he’s out late at a meeting.