"She was what?"
Emi shrugged, a small miserable motion. "She said she was going to tell you thank you someday. When she was ready. She said she wasn't ready yet. I asked her why not and she said grown-up stuff is complicated."
Lazaro did not say anything for a while. He looked at the covered bridge on the wall. Red, with a little white trim.
Grown-up stuff is complicated. Well. That was one way to put it.
It had been March, six years and seven months ago, a night when the slush in the alley had frozen into ruts and the drop light by Mrs. Vuong's back door made everything look like the inside of a refrigerator. In those days there was no coffee can. In those days Lazaro had been out of the Chemung County Correctional Facility for a little under two years and was still on parole, still reporting to an officer on Lake Street every other Monday, still peeing in a cup on demand, still waking at four in the morning with his heart going like a rabbit's because he had dreamed that he'd used. He had not used. He was renting a room over the Polish bakery on Hoffman Street and working nights cleaning the floors at the Big Lots, and in the afternoons he came to the alley because Mrs. Vuong's late husband, Mr. Vuong, who was alive then, had said he could keep the dead Shovelhead in the shed behind the laundromat, and the bike was the only thing he had left from before.
He had come out of the shed that night at about nine-thirty and found a young woman lying in the slush by the dumpster.
She had been alone. She had been wearing a thin denim jacket and one glove, and her lips had been blue, and there had been a syringe in the slush beside her and a scorched spoon and a bit of cotton. He'd had no naloxone then. Parolees with drug convictions do not walk around carrying kits for reversing opioid overdoses; he had thought about it and been afraid of what his parole officer would make of it. What he had was his hands and his breath and nineteen years of knowing how to use them. He had knelt in the slush and breathed for her, and with one hand he'd dialed 911 on the flip phone, and he had breathed for her for eleven minutes, by the clock on the bank sign over on Water Street, until the ambulance came with the naloxone. He had been there when she came up gasping. He had held her head so she wouldn't hit it on the dumpster.
And when the first patrol car pulled into the mouth of the alley with its spotlight on, and the officer got out with one hand on his belt and saw the scene in the white beam, a tattooed man on his knees in the slush over a half-conscious young woman and a needle on the ground between them, the young woman had looked up into that light, terrified, and then she had looked at Lazaro, and then she had lifted a shaking hand and pointed at him and said, "He gave it to me. He sold it to me. It's his."
He did not blame the officer for what happened next. He'd thought about it for six years and had never managed to blame the officer. He had a record, and the record said what it said. He was put on the ground in the slush with his hands behind his back while she was loaded into the ambulance. He was held for two days. There was no evidence; there were no drugs on him, his room over the bakery was clean, the syringe had nobody's prints on it that came back to anything, and the young woman, when an investigator went to the hospital the next day to take her statement, had already signed herself out against medical advice and could not be found. The charge was dropped. But a parole violation hearing doesn't need what a criminal trial needs, and for six weeks Lazaro had lived with the real possibility of going back inside for the rest of his term, and his parole officer had told him plainly that associating with known drug users in an alley at night was not a great look for a man in his position. In the end a hearing officer had looked at the 911 call log, which showed his phone calling for an ambulance at 9:34 p.m. and staying on the line, and decided that a man who sells a woman heroin does not usually then call 911 on himself and do CPR for eleven minutes, and the violation was dismissed.
But the Star-Gazette police blotter had already run it, the week of the arrest. Four lines. A forty-eight-year-old Elmira man with a prior conviction for possession and theft of controlled substances had been arrested on Lake Street on suspicion of criminal sale after a woman overdosed. They had printed his name. They had not printed, later, that the charge was dropped. Nobody prints that.
That was when people on Lake Street had started crossing the street.