She was on her knees on the linoleum. Toomer had not seen her move. She was kneeling on the other side of the child in her navy skirt, with her wristwatch turned toward her face, and her voice was perfectly calm.
"Fifty seconds," she said again. "Don't hold her arms, dear, you're doing it right, let her move. Just keep her head on the towel. Look at the dog. He knows. One minute. Mrs. Gadsden. Mrs. Gadsden, come here, she'll want you when she wakes up. One minute ten."
Viola Gadsden came. She came across the lobby as though she were walking across water and got down on the floor by her daughter's head and put her hand on the braids, and Toomer understood, watching her face, that she had never seen it. Not this. In three years, in all those nights, she had come home at seven in the morning to the towel on the floor and the bag open. She had never once seen the dog go for the bag.
"One minute thirty," said Adelaide Prioleau. "She's slowing. There. There, now. One minute forty. There."
The shaking stopped. The child lay limp on her side against the dog, breathing in long heavy snores, her mouth open. There was a wet patch spreading under her on the pink sweater and the floor, and Dessa took the clean clothes out of the bag without a word and laid them by her, and Adelaide Prioleau, still on her knees, reached up without looking and took Pinckney's suit coat off his arm and put it over the child's legs, so nobody could see.
It was four minutes before Tilly opened her eyes. Nobody in the lobby said anything at all in those four minutes. The box fan ticked. Somewhere in the building a dog barked, and stopped. Bosun did not move. When the child's eyes opened they were blank and far off, the way a newborn's eyes are, and she did not seem to know where she was. Then she moved her hand, slowly, and found the fur of his neck, and closed her fingers in it.
"He's here," she said, thickly, to nobody. "It happened. He's here."
"He's here, baby," said her mother. "He's right here."