Twenty Three Minutes
The scream, when it came, did not sound like Allison to the man kneeling beside her.
It came up out of her whole body, raw and unending, the sound a person makes when the world tears along a seam she did not know it had. Neighbors would say later that they heard it inside their houses with the doors shut. Two streets over, a man stopped mowing and stood in his yard listening, knowing without being told that something on Oakridge Drive had gone past fixing by ordinary means.
But before the scream there had been the stillness, and Nick Grace would remember the stillness longer.
He remembered watching Logan's chest the way he had watched it a hundred times in the night, one hand hovering, counting. There it was. There it was again. A rise so small it could have been wished into being, and then another.
"He is breathing. Allison. He is breathing. Hold him still. Do not move his head."
His phone was in his pocket. He fumbled it out and dropped it once on the porch boards and caught it on the second bounce, and his fingers, which could thread wire in a panel box by feel, were clumsy with a fear so large it made them stupid.
The operator's voice was calm in the way of people who are paid to be the calmest person in the worst minute of a stranger's life.
"Nine one one, what is your emergency?"
"My son," Nick said. "A man threw a brick through our window and it hit my son. He is three weeks old. He is bleeding from the head. He is breathing but he is not crying. Why is he not crying?"
He gave the address twice. He spelled Grace. He said the truck was gone, black, no plates, and he heard how useless it sounded, how thin, and the operator told him help was coming and to keep the baby warm and still and to stay on the line, and Nick said yes and set the phone down on the boards with the line open because he needed both of his hands.
The ambulance took twenty three minutes.
He counted Logan's breaths and lost the number and started over. He watched the bend in the street where the truck had vanished, and willed a different vehicle around it, and the street stayed empty, and the sun stayed high and ordinary and insulting. He spoke to his son in a low, even stream, nonsense and promise mixed together. Allison rocked. She had stopped screaming and gone into a quiet that was worse, her lips moving again over the old prayers, for strength this time and not for peace, and her eyes fixed on Logan's face as if her looking were a kind of holding, as if the baby might stay if she refused to blink.
Porch doors opened up and down the street. People came out slowly, the way people approach a wreck, holding phones they did not use. A woman from the walking group stood on the lawn with both hands pressed to her mouth. Nobody crossed to the porch. The glass on the hardwood glittered, and the brick lay where it had fallen like a thing that had a right to be there.
Twenty three minutes is not a long time to wait for a bus. It is not a long time to wait for bread to rise. Measured in the breaths of a three week old boy with blood in his hair, it is a country, and Nick and Allison crossed it on their knees.
"Where are they?" Allison said once, very quietly, not to Nick, not to anyone.
"Coming," Nick said. "They are coming. You hold him. I will watch the street. That is my job. I watch the street."
He was still watching it when the sound arrived, thin and far and growing, the first beautiful sound of that whole ruined afternoon. The ambulance came around the bend fast, light washing the street in red and white, and the paramedics were out of it before it had properly stopped, a woman and a man with a board and a bag, moving with the clean speed of people who carry other people's worst minutes for a living.
"How long ago?" the woman asked, already kneeling, already taking Logan into the authority of her hands.
"Twenty three minutes," Nick said. "The ambulance, I mean. The brick was. He has been breathing the whole time. He never stopped breathing."
"Then he is fighting," she said, "and so are we."
They went in a wash of doors and engines. Allison rode in the back, folded around the small board where her son lay, one hand where the medic allowed it, resting on the blanket. Nick followed in his truck with his hazard lights on, driving with the terrible care of a man carrying nitroglycerin, and the brick on the floor of his house sat behind him, already waiting.