He had not run in years, not really. His body remembered how anyway. It remembered the particular lurch of going fast with a bag in one hand, remembered how to keep the eyes up and on the target instead of on the feet, remembered the cold clean place the mind goes when there is no time for anything but the next thing. They came out of the far end of the alley and cut across the lot behind the dead tire shop, weeds through the cracks, a stack of bald tires sagging in the rain, and there was a wooden staircase bolted to the side of the cinderblock building, and the boy was already halfway up it, and at the top a door stood open on a yellow light.
Lazaro took the stairs one at a time, hauling himself on the rail. At the top he stopped for exactly one breath in the doorway and looked.
A small kitchen. Clean. Very clean, in the way of people who have decided that if they can't control much, they can control this. A table with two chairs. A school worksheet on the table, half-finished, a pencil lying across it. A calendar on the refrigerator with every Thursday circled in green. Down a short hallway, the bathroom door open, the light on, and on the bathroom floor, a woman.
Emi was standing in the hallway with both hands over his mouth.
Lazaro went past him and got down on his knees on the tile. The woman was on her side, half curled between the tub and the toilet, in hospital-blue scrubs with a laminated badge clipped to the pocket. Mid-thirties. Dark hair pulled back. Her lips had gone the gray-violet color of a bruise three days old, and the sound coming out of her was the sound the boy had described, a long, wet, dragging rasp, a few seconds apart. Too far apart. On the edge of the sink was a brown prescription bottle with its cap off and a glass of water, and on the floor by her hand a single small blue pill, round, stamped with a letter and a number.
He did not need the pill to tell him. He had known from the doorway. He knew it the way you know a song from the first two notes.
"Ma'am," he said loudly, and dug his knuckles hard into the center of her breastbone and ground them. Nothing. Her eyes were partly open, and when he thumbed one lid back the pupil was a pinpoint, a speck of black in a brown iris. He rolled her onto her back, tilted her head, listened with his cheek over her mouth. One breath, ragged. Then nothing for a long count. Then another.
"Emi," he said, without looking up. "I need you to do something for me. I need you to call 911."
He tore open the first white box with his teeth.
"No." The boy's voice from the hallway was suddenly very small and very firm. "No, I can't. She said never. She said if I ever call 911 they'll come and take me away. She said that's what happens. She made me promise."
Lazaro fitted the nozzle into the woman's nostril, pressed the plunger, felt the little cold puff go in. He tossed the empty aside. "Emi."