PART 2: Twenty-Two Minutes
I don’t remember getting to the truck. I remember the freezer door banging shut behind me, my supervisor shouting my name across the dock, and then the engine roaring in the parking lot.
I called Piper back. Voicemail. I called again. Voicemail. On the third try, someone picked up, but nobody spoke. I heard only a wet, echoing slap, like water against tile.
“Piper! Piper, talk to me!”
Nothing. I yanked the company phone off the dash and dialed 911 with my thumb, leaving my own phone on the passenger seat with the line still open. I gave the dispatcher our address twice, because my voice kept breaking. “My son is two. We have a pool. My daughter is eight, and she’s home with my mother-in-law, and she isn’t waking up. I’m twenty-two minutes away.”
“Sir, I’m sending paramedics right now. Stay on the line with me.” Her calm made me want to scream.
I drove ninety miles an hour on a road marked fifty-five. I ran two red lights. I prayed the way you pray when you haven’t in a while, with no real words, just my children’s names over and over.
Then the speaker on the seat crackled. Coughing. Splashing. A small voice, choking and fierce.
“Daddy! I got him! I got him!”
My eight-year-old had dropped the phone on the patio, jumped into the deep end in her clothes, and grabbed her little brother by the back of his shirt.
She’d had swimming lessons the summer before Dana died. Ten Saturday mornings at the community center. Dana had stood on the pool deck with a towel, cheering like Piper was at the Olympics, while I grumbled about the cost. I would have paid ten times that price right then.
“Pull him to the steps, bug! The shallow end steps! Can you kick?”
“I’m kicking! He’s heavy, Daddy!”
I heard splashing. Gasping. Then Theo, coughing and wailing, a loud, angry, beautiful cry.
“He’s crying, Daddy! He’s spitting up water!”
“Good. Crying means he’s breathing. Turn him on his side and keep his face out of the water. Don’t let go of him.”
“I won’t. I won’t ever let go.”
Our neighbor, Mr. Walt Delaney, a seventy-one-year-old retired bus driver and a widower, heard Piper screaming over the fence. He climbed it. A man with two bad knees went over a six-foot fence like he was twenty. He pulled them both up the steps and wrapped them in beach towels.
His voice came through the speaker, rough and winded. “Marcus, it’s Walt. I’ve got them. I’ve got them both. The boy’s breathing.” I cried so hard I could barely see the road.
The paramedics reached the house in six minutes. I reached it in twenty-two.
Theo sat on a stretcher in the driveway in a tiny oxygen mask, soaking wet and absolutely furious, his blue bucket hat clenched in one fist. Piper sat beside him, wrapped in a blanket, shaking so hard her teeth clicked, holding his foot as if he might float away.
I dropped to my knees on the hot asphalt and pulled them both against my chest.
“You saved him,” I said into Piper’s wet hair. “Piper, you saved your brother.”
“I’m sorry,” she sobbed. “I was supposed to be watching him, but Grandma wouldn’t wake up and I got so scared, and I ran to find the phone, and he went out the door. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”
“No, baby,” I said. “You were never supposed to be watching him. That was a grown-up’s job.”
Over her shoulder, through the open front door, I saw two more paramedics kneeling in my living room. Lorraine lay on the couch, her face the color of ash, one arm hanging off the cushion.
“Narcan’s in,” one of them said. “Give her the second dose. Come on, Lorraine. Come on.”
I knew that word only from the news. I stood up without feeling my legs.
A long, terrible second passed. Then a ragged, whooping gasp came from the couch, and her chest heaved. She was alive.
One of the paramedics walked out holding a clear plastic bag with an orange pill bottle inside. Empty. “Sir,” he said gently, “this was in her cardigan pocket. The label has your wife’s name on it. Do you know why your mother-in-law would have it?”
I had cleaned out Dana’s medicine cabinet myself. I was sure I had. I opened my mouth, and nothing came out.
Something tugged at my sleeve. Piper was standing beside me with the blanket around her shoulders. From underneath it, she pulled out a soggy purple notebook with a glittery cover and handed it to me with both hands.
“Daddy,” she whispered, “it isn’t just today. I wrote it all down.”
I opened it to the first page. The date at the top was March third. Almost four months ago.
