Twenty-Three Minutes
Nick could not remember dialing 911.
His thumb must have found the numbers on its own. He only knew that at some point the phone was against his ear and a calm voice was asking him a question he could not hear properly.
"Sir. Sir, I need you to tell me exactly what happened."
"My son," he said. "My baby. He was hit. Somebody threw a brick."
"Is he breathing?"
"Yes. Barely. Yes."
"Is he conscious?"
"No."
"Is there bleeding?"
Nick looked down.
"Yes."
"Stay on the line, sir. Help is on the way. I need you to keep him as still as you can. Do not move his head. Can you do that for me?"
Nick knelt beside Allison.
Her hands were slick and trembling. Her face had gone the color of paper. She did not look at him. She looked only at Logan, as though looking away for even a heartbeat might let something slip.
The operator talked him through it, one calm instruction after another. Keep the head steady. Keep the airway clear. Keep talking to the baby. Nick did what she said. He did not understand how his voice could sound so level when everything inside him was breaking apart.
He remembered the operator's voice.
He remembered Allison rocking Logan, so gently, so slowly, as though she could rock the injury out of him.
He remembered the blood on the porch boards.
And he remembered the street, still silent, and the neighbors standing on their lawns with their hands over their mouths.
An older woman from across the road, Mrs. Delacroix, hurried over with a clean dish towel and pressed it into Nick's hands without saying anything. Her eyes were full of tears. Another neighbor knelt on the other side of Allison and laid a hand on her back. A young man jogged out to the end of the driveway and stood there, scanning the road for the ambulance.
Minutes passed.
Nick looked at his watch. Then at the empty street. Then at his watch again.
Where were they?
He asked the operator. She told him the ambulance was coming. She told him that crews were stretched thin, that the closest unit had been dispatched to another call across the county, that another had been redirected. She told him that every available vehicle was on its way.
None of it mattered.
All that mattered was that his son's breathing was shallow, and that every second the sirens did not come was a second that could not be taken back.
"Stay with me, Logan," Allison whispered. "Stay with Mommy."
She began to hum.
It was the same melody. The old one. The lullaby that was half a prayer. Her voice shook so badly that the notes broke apart, but she kept going, and Nick realized that she was holding their son to this world with nothing but a song.
At last, from far away, he heard the sirens.
Faint at first.
Then louder.
Then red and white lights flashed against the cream-colored walls, and the ambulance came down Oakridge Drive and stopped hard in front of the house.
Twenty-three minutes.
To Nick, it felt like twenty-three years.
Two paramedics leapt out. They moved fast, but not frantically, with the careful efficiency of people who knew exactly what they were doing. One of them knelt and took Logan from Allison's arms, and she let go only because Nick put his hand on her shoulder and whispered, "Let them help him."
They checked his pulse.
His pupils.
His breathing.
"Pediatric head trauma," one of them said into the radio. "Infant, approximately five weeks. Unresponsive. We're moving now."
Logan was alive.
Barely.
They strapped him onto a small stretcher and lifted him into the ambulance. Allison climbed in behind them without being asked, without hesitating, her bloodied hands gripping the rail. Nick started to follow, but the paramedic held up a palm.
"Only one parent. Follow us in your vehicle."
Nick nodded.
The doors closed.
The ambulance pulled away with its sirens screaming, and the lights faded down Oakridge Drive until they disappeared past the magnolia trees.
Nick stood alone in the road for a heartbeat.
The street was quiet again.
Then he ran to his truck, his boots pounding on the asphalt.
He drove the way he had never driven before. Red lights became suggestions. Stop signs became shadows. His hands gripped the wheel so tightly that his knuckles ached, and he did not feel it. He kept the ambulance in sight, a distant flicker of red against the late afternoon, and he spoke to it as though it could hear him.
"Hold on," he said aloud. "Hold on, buddy. Daddy's coming."
The Georgia sun, which had hung so gently over the neighborhood an hour earlier, was sinking now into a sky the color of a bruise.
Nick did not look at it.
He kept his eyes on the ambulance, and he kept driving, and he did not let himself think about the truck, or the men, or the brick.
Not yet.
First, his son.
Everything else could wait.