"Arvo," she said. "It's Lauren. Arvo, it's Lauren from the cafe."
"I was counting," he said, very reasonably. His lips barely moved. "I lost the count. I sat down to remember it."
She could not lift him. She was five foot four and he had been a miner for thirty years and was built like a stove. She got her arms under his and pulled, and he came up a little and his legs folded, and they both went down on the step, and she sat there in the snow with his head against her shoulder and his breath going in and out against her neck, slow, too slow, and she thought, very clearly, this is how it happens, this is how people die, a block from the courthouse, a woman sitting right beside them.
Headlights came around the corner of Main, slow in the fog. A truck. It stopped beside hers in the street, with its engine running and its lights making two white tunnels in the air, and the door opened and a man got out, and it was Gordie.
He didn't say anything. He came up the steps two at a time and got down and put Arvo's arm across his shoulders and lifted, and Arvo came up off the step like a sack of feed, and Gordie got him down the steps and into the cab of the Ostojiches' Scout and turned the heater up to the top and slammed the door.
"Mrs. Ostojich has got Mandy," he said. "I stood at that sink fifteen minutes. Then I couldn't stand it." He looked at her, at the soot on her face. "What happened to you?"
"The glass was empty," Lauren said. "I put it out. Gordie, I had to put it out. There's no heat in there now. There's Tomo."
He was already turning toward the truck.
They got them out. That was what Lauren would remember of the next hour, if she remembered anything clearly: getting them out. The front door of the Carrigan was padlocked from outside on a chain, so everything had to go out the back, down the steep wooden stairs to the boiler room and then up the concrete steps to the alley. Gordie carried Tomo Bilich. He picked him up in the armchair quilt, Johanna's coat and all, like a man carrying a child out of a house fire, and Tomo's breath sucked and whistled against his chest the whole way, and at the bottom of the stairs, in the dark boiler room, it stopped for a long moment, and Gordie stood absolutely still, and then it came again, a short tight pull, and Gordie went on. Lauren went ahead with the flashlight. Mossy came down the stairs behind them on his seat, refusing all help, cursing them both in a long continuous murmur that had Leitrim in it and the Leonard mine and the Blessed Mother. They took the composition book and the coffee can of grape jelly, because Mossy would not leave without them. And the kerosene lamps, which Lauren blew out.