"Okay," he said. His voice came out rough. He cleared his throat. "Okay, Ruthie. I believe you."
"You believe her," the girl corrected him. "You didn't have to believe me."
"I believe both of you."
He lifted the flashlight again, because it seemed to him that a person ought to say something back to someone who had answered a question like that, standing at a window, sick, holding a baby on a ventilator, for a stranger. He looked at the card. He found O and K. He sent them, slowly. Dash dash dash. Dash dot dash.
"You can say thank you," Ruthie said. "It's long. But you can."
He was looking for T on the card when the light in the window came back.
It came fast this time, not steady at all. Dash dash dash. Then a long pause, and then something that started like a J — dot dash — and stopped. And then the light went out, and the window went dark, and not just the flashlight. The lamp. The whole window went black, as if somebody had knocked it over, and the curtain swung once and hung still.
Ruthie made a sound. It was very small.
"What's that?" Denny said. "What was that, what was she sending?"
"OJ," the girl said. She was staring at the window. "She was sending OJ. It means fine. She didn't finish it." And then, in a different voice, the voice of a much younger child: "She didn't finish it."
Denny turned to the pharmacist. He did not have to say anything. Neha Kulkarni was already through the door, the bell ringing wildly behind her, and by the time Denny got inside, with the girl's hand somehow in his — he did not remember taking it, or her taking his — the pharmacist had the white bag on the counter and was stuffing it into the whale cooler on top of the blue ice pack, and was saying, fast, in the voice of a woman who had worked a lot of different stores and had stopped being afraid of any of them: "Lantus SoloStar, five pens. Eighteen units once a day, the directions say. Tonight. Then she calls the doctor in the morning. Prime two units first, every time. Needles are in there. Don't worry about paying. I'll run it tomorrow. Go. Go."