"I promised. You can't make me. That's why I came to get you, so I didn't have to, so you could fix it." The boy was crying again. "She said you'd come and you wouldn't ask anything, she said you'd just help. She said."
Lazaro tilted the woman's head back again, pinched her nose, sealed his mouth over hers, and gave her a breath, watching her chest rise. Then another. He counted under his own breath. Five seconds. Breath. Five seconds. Breath. The naloxone took two to three minutes on a good day. Sometimes it took longer. Sometimes one dose wasn't enough, not with what was in the pills these days, and sometimes nothing was enough, and he had knelt on bathroom floors and kitchen floors and the floors of gas station restrooms and given everything he had and watched it not be enough.
He thought, with that cold clean part of his mind, about the boy's promise. He thought about the woman's badge, which said ARNOT HILLS REHABILITATION AND NURSING CENTER and below that CELESTINA S., CNA. He thought about what happened in this county when the ambulance came to a call like this one, the police car that came with it, the report that got written, the phone call to the Department of Social Services that somebody would be obliged to make because there was a nine-year-old child in the home. He thought about all of that, and it took him the length of one rescue breath, and then he took his own phone out of his vest, a cheap flip phone with a cracked hinge, and dialed with his thumb.
"Elmira 911, what's the address of your emergency?"
"Second floor, the apartment over the old Fulton Tire, corner of Fulton and Lake. Outside stairs on the east side. Female, mid-thirties, opioid overdose, unresponsive, respirations about six a minute, pinpoint pupils, cyanotic. I've given one dose of intranasal naloxone, four milligrams, at—" he looked at the cheap watch on his wrist "—sixteen forty-four. I'm giving rescue breaths. There's a nine-year-old child on scene."
There was the smallest pause on the line, the pause of a dispatcher recognizing someone who had once been on the same side of the radio. "Copy, sir. Units are rolling. Stay on the line with me."
"I'm going to set you down. I need both hands." He put the phone on speaker and laid it on the bathmat.
Behind him the boy had gone silent. Lazaro turned his head long enough to look at him. Emi was standing in the hallway with his fists balled at his sides and his face twisted up into something that was beyond crying, and when he spoke his voice was a whisper with a scream folded up inside it.
"You promised," he said.
"I didn't, son," Lazaro said. "I'm sorry. I didn't promise. Your mom promised you some things, and she's going to have to talk to you about them, and I hope she gets the chance. Come here. Come sit here by her head where she can hear you. Talk to her. Tell her to wake up."
The boy did not move. Lazaro turned back and gave another breath. Two minutes. The woman's chest rose and fell under his hand and nothing else changed. Her color didn't change. Two and a half minutes. He tore open the second box.