Her dad’s face was drenched with sweat, tiny droplets clung to his brows and threatened to drip into his eyes. His skin the color of chalk. She stifled a sob as she gently wiped his forehead with her t-shirt. Her mother’s body had always felt like an extension of her own—familiar, recognizable. When her mom died, even though she’d been a ghost of herself for years, Cassie felt like some essential organ had been scooped out of her. She’d slunk away in agony and left her dad to suffer alone.
She listened again for his breath. Fainter now.Oh God.She was losing him. She’d give anything to have that time back, to be the daughter she should have been.She’d given the dispatcher the right address, she knew she had. And Andrew was waiting at the street to direct them.
“Hang on,” she whispered. “Please hang on.” But his hand was chilled and limp and now she could see no rise and fall of breath. In a panic, she set her ear to his mouth.
Nothing.
She knelt beside him and felt for a pulse, her heart roaring in her ears. She’d taken CPR years ago. Five compressions to one breath? Did they even give breaths anymore? She didn’t think so; things had changed. She couldn’t remember. She choked out a prayer as she began compressions, the heel of one hand booting into the other.
Please God.Let him live.
She kept at it. Ten, twenty, thirty compressions. Sweat dripped into her own eyes, but she didn’t dare stop. Finally, mercifully, the distant wail of a siren. Rising and falling. Rising again. Then all at once close enough to shatter the quiet. From across the street, she heard Andrew’s shout and doorsslamming. The thunderous arrival of help. With a sob she kept going, trying to keep her count. “Up here,” she screamed. “Up here!”
A minute later Andrew dashed up the hill with two medics behind him, a bulky man and a small wiry woman, both of them moving sharply with duffel bags and a stretcher.
“He’s not breathing,” Cassie cried, jumping up to make way for them. The man, who looked like nothing could faze him, checked for a pulse then immediately began CPR, straight-armed and competent, while his partner fitted an oxygen mask over her dad’s face.
“How long has he been unresponsive?” The woman lifted her eyes to Cassie’s, but the question overwhelmed her.
“I don’t know, a few minutes, maybe.” How longhadit been? Five or six minutes since she’d run back from the house to find him collapsed. Her heart shriveled as they threaded an IV into her father’s arm, then slid him into a contraption that delivered chest compressions with some sort of plunger. The device started up with an indifferent mechanical whirring.
Cassie gripped Andrew’s hand, which was as sweaty as her own.
The machine kept on but her father didn’t respond, and the relief she’d felt when the medics arrived puddled into terror as they exposed his frail chest and shocked his heart to keep it going. She wept like a child as his body jerked with the jolt of the defibrillator. Andrew, clutching her hand, sobbed too.
From somewhere a dog barked, which startled her. How could the rest of the world carry on like nothing was happening?
Her father still wasn’t responding, and the medics started up the CPR machine again. Cassie had lost track of time. Had they been here five minutes, ten? An hour? How long could this go on?
“Clear!” the EMT barked and they shocked him again. Cassie’s hope dimmed. They’d shocked his heart twice. And nothing. She held Andrew in her arms and wept as the female medic knelt with two fingers to her father’s neck.
The woman looked up. “I feel a pulse. Very faint.”
Cassie’s heart leapt with joy. He was still alive.
Two more responders huffed up the hill with even more gear, the soft ground trampled under so many feet. They carefully transferred her father onto a board and strapped him down, the relentless CPR machine still pumping. The female medic held the oxygen tank as the men hoisted the stretcher. Then with her father’s shirt gaping, they hustled him down the hill and out to the street as Cassie and Andrew hurried after.
The ambulance was waiting, its lights pulsing red and blue like a beating heart. The medics quickly loaded her father and Cassie made to climb in, but the woman shook her head. “Not in back, you can ride up front if you want.”
She started for the passenger side, then caught a glimpse of Andrew’s stricken face. Her son, melting down on the side of the road.
“We’ll follow,” she said. “Where are you taking him?”
“Stamford’s the closest,” the woman said as the doors swung shut.
The siren swooned to life, the sound gutting her as the ambulance sped down the quiet street. She agonized at the thought of her dad, terrified and alone. Or maybe he was in some twilight where no one could reach him, the life seeping out of him.
She gathered herself. They had to go forward.
“Come on,” she said to Andrew. “Let’s get to the hospital.”
...
Stamford Hospital had undergone a renovation, and the fluorescent waiting room with plastic chairs that Cassie remembered from her own childhood mishaps had been replaced by muted lighting and tasteful furniture in tan and seafoam green.
But the décor belied the commotion within. A teenager with a bloody bandage on his arm sat slumped in a chair, a woman clearly his mother, hovering. Across the room, two young children boiled on a couch as the father tried to rein them in. She could only guess at the traumas that brought people here. Car accidents. Heart attacks. Burns. The routine emergencies of life, unremarkable until they were your own.
At the desk they had no information. “Stuart Linden,” she repeated, as if saying her father’s name would make him appear magically unscathed, strolling under his own steam out the double doors that swung ominously into the bowels of the hospital.
