Then the boy was beside him on the tile, knees in the puddle where the water glass had tipped over, and he had both hands on his mother's arm and he was shaking it, and he was saying "Mamá, Mamá, despiértate, por favor, wake up, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, wake up," over and over, and he was hitting Lazaro, too, at the same time, small hard punches into his shoulder with one fist while the other hand kept hold of his mother, and Lazaro let him. He put the second dose into the other nostril and gave her another breath.
At three minutes and forty seconds, by the cheap watch, Celestina Saldivar dragged in a breath on her own, a deep ugly one that rattled all the way down, and then another, and then her eyes came open and her whole body jerked like someone falling in a dream, and she rolled toward the tub and threw up on the floor, and Lazaro had her turned on her side with her airway clear before she finished.
"There you go," he said. "There you go. You're all right. Breathe. Just breathe."
She was gasping and shaking and her eyes were swimming around the room, not landing on anything. They landed on her son. Something went across her face that Lazaro did not have a word for. Then they landed on Lazaro, on his face and his neck and the column of letters there, on the knuckles of the hand that was holding her shoulder, HOLD, and she went absolutely still.
He watched her recognize him. He had recognized her from the doorway, a little behind the overdose, the way you recognize a face in a crowd a beat after you've passed it. Six years older. Thinner in the face, and her hair was longer, and the scrubs were new. But it was the same woman. He had knelt over her once before.
"You," she said. It was barely a sound.
"Me," Lazaro said. "Don't talk. They're coming."
Somewhere out on Lake Street, a siren started up and came toward them.
The ambulance crew came up the outside stairs two at a time, a heavy young man with a shaved head and a woman with a gray braid carrying the monitor, and behind them a patrol officer in a dark jacket who stopped in the kitchen and stayed there, which Lazaro noted and filed away as a decent thing to do. The bathroom was not big enough for four adults and a child. He got up off his knees to make room, and the knee nearly put him back down, and he caught himself on the doorframe.
The young medic with the shaved head looked up at him from the floor, and stopped with a blood pressure cuff halfway around Celestina's arm.
"Laz?" he said.