She was paying for the evening paper when a shrill bell intruded, the kind that used to wake them and send Tom out on dark roads. Mrs. H brought up the receiver, an object she regarded like an animal she had never fully trained.
—Sledmere oh-four!
Her expression shifted to insult, then disbelief.
—It’s for you.
She extended the receiver like smelly parcel. Elsa put it to her ear as if it might spark. Could wishes without hope come true in a breath, the call from the other side, come through a common wire?
—Yes?
It took her some moments to realize it wasn’t Tom, longer to recognize her son and to grasp what he was saying, but even as her equilibrium faltered, her voice held, the firm command of a ward nurse:
—Is he breathing?
Mrs. H offered a stool.
—Does he have a pulse?
Water.
—Does the bottle have a label?
The boy was rattled and confused; her jaw strained with helplessness.
—Is there a doctor? she asked Mrs. H.
—Oh, aye, the postmistress said.
—We need him at once.
—Aye, but you won’t have him. Birth up Stockingdale.
She thought the hospital had inured her to crisis, but her hands were starting to shake. It wasn’t panic, but something else she knew, the sudden, acute dread that had engulfed them when Tom’s numbered days were set before them, beads on a chain short enough to choke.
—Gray, stop talking. You must wake him.
Telephones were the worst inventions. They gave the illusion of nearness without the body of truth.
—Throw cold water on him, slap his face, do whatever is necessary.
In the absence of a doctor, nurses stood in the breech.
—Yes, you can. I’m coming.
Even at the fearsome speed of forty miles an hour, the distance was too far. She had to drive across the playing field to the door the boy described. As he opened the French windows, she took in the scene: the blue-lipped man, the red stains, broken glass. The boy had doused him in water, which he said had provoked momentary sound, but the man had lapsed back into—she pushed the boy aside and felt for a pulse. Her fingers fumbled the buttons then tore the shirt to a chest white and boney, breastbone, knuckles, no pause for pity on that naked spot.
Heart cleaved, weeds about his head, sea—
—Come on!
Hook faster than pain, harder than love—
—Wake—
Up, wake up, night is flying, what bridegroom, what sword—
—Yes!
Air, ribs, breaking, broke—
His mother swore. Never in his life—and her face like a washerwoman murdering her laundry, exhorting it with curses to breathe.
She sent the boy for towels. He was laboring to breathe, which meant he could labor, but they could slip away as you watched if the things they swallowed overcame the brain. There was brandy on the floor and a vial without label. Perhaps too late but that should never bar trying. She turned him on his side, took hold of his head, put a finger to the back of his throat.
When he returned with the towels, the man was propped against the side of the desk. Gray helped her to lift him and haul him into the back seat of the motorcar.
—He’s asleep again!
—Be quiet!
Face tight, mouth fierce, she switched on the headlamps and reversed across the playing fields. Back at the cottage, she roused the man enough so they could get him up the stairs to her bed. She sent the boy again for towels and hot water, but she didn’t let him back in the room, not that night, and not in the days and nights that followed.