"Thank you," Ruthie said, grabbing the cooler.
"Go," said the pharmacist.
They went. Denny would remember later that he had not stopped for his own bag, or for the glucose meter in Tyrell's hand, and that Joyce, when she heard, would laugh so hard she had to sit down. He would remember the rain, cold on the back of his neck. He would remember that the girl did not look both ways, and that he did, for both of them, one hand flat out toward the empty street like a crossing guard. He would remember that she was right about the steps, more or less. He did not count them. But it was not many. It was not many at all.
The door at the top of the outside stairs was unlocked. Ruthie went through it first, and Denny heard the alarm before he was all the way inside: a high-low-high electronic chime, steady and insistent, coming from somewhere to the left. The apartment was dim. The only light came from the kitchen, and from the small blue and green glow of numbers on a monitor beside a white crib in the living room. A floor lamp lay on its side on the carpet under the window, its shade crushed, its bulb still miraculously lit and throwing a long slanted fan of light across the ceiling. There was a smell in the air, faint and sweetish, like nail polish remover, that Denny's mind filed and did not yet name.
Ruthie did not go to her mother. She dropped the whale cooler on the couch and went straight to the crib.
Denny would think about that later, too — about how he had almost grabbed her by the shoulder to stop her, to say where's your mom, and how glad he was that he had not. Because by the time he had taken two steps into the room the girl was already bending over the crib rail, and her hands were already moving, and he understood in the space of a breath that he was watching somebody who knew exactly what she was doing and had done it many times.
The baby was on his back in the crib, in footed pajamas printed with yellow ducks. He was small for fourteen months — smaller than Denny's granddaughter had been at nine — with a round bald head and enormous dark eyes, and he was awake, and his mouth was open in a cry that made no sound at all. At the base of his throat, held in place by a soft white collar with Velcro ties, was a small plastic tube, and the corrugated gray hose that should have been attached to it lay beside his head on the sheet, disconnected, hissing faintly.
"Low pressure," Ruthie said, to nobody, or to herself. "He's off the circuit. She must have put him down too fast." She picked up the hose, fitted its elbow onto the end of the trach tube with one small twist, pressed it gently into place, and held it there with two fingers while she looked up at the monitor. The alarm stopped mid-chime. The silence was enormous. On the monitor a number in green had been blinking — eighty-seven, eighty-eight — and now, as Denny watched, it climbed. Ninety. Ninety-two. Ninety-five. The baby's chest rose under the ducks, and fell, and rose, in a slow mechanical rhythm, and his silent cry closed, and he looked up at his sister with his enormous eyes.
"Hi, Teddy-bear," Ruthie said. "Hi. I know. I know. You're okay."
From the back of the apartment, behind a half-open door, came the sound of somebody being sick.
"Bathroom," Ruthie said, without turning around. "Go. I've got him."