"You'll tell him," said Joyce, from the kitchen, not a question.
"When the new pump's on. When it's over. I'll tell him all of it." She looked down at her daughter, who had fallen asleep against her with her mouth open, still in her rubber boots. "I'll tell him about the light."
Joyce went home at midnight, after the second ketone strip came up one shade lighter, and Denny stayed. He sat in the recliner beside the crib that was Vonda Pyle's chair, with Vonda's knitting basket on the floor beside it and Vonda's enormous water bottle on the windowsill, and Lauren, from the couch, taught him the numbers. The top green number was oxygen, and it should be over ninety-two; the one under it was heart rate, and anything from about a hundred to a hundred and sixty was fine for Teddy, asleep; the yellow numbers were the ventilator's, and he did not have to understand them, he only had to know that if the chime went high-low-high he should look at the hose first, because nine times out of ten that was all it was. The tenth time, Lauren said, he should wake her, and if he could not wake her, he should call 911 and then wake Ruthie, in that order.
"In that order," Denny repeated.
"She'll know what to do before they get here," Lauren said. "But she's ten. Call them first."
At two the sugar was two-sixty and the ketones were small. At two-thirty she kept down half a cup of broth. At three Teddy's chime went off, high-low-high, and Denny was out of the recliner before he was awake, and looked at the hose, and the hose was fine, and the green number was ninety, eighty-nine, and he turned around and Lauren was already there with the suction machine humming in her hand. She threaded a thin catheter into the trach and drew it back, a wet rattle, and the green number climbed, and she sat down on the floor by the crib with the catheter in its paper sleeve in her lap and leaned her head back against the wall.
"Every night," she said. "Two or three times. Vonda sleeps through that like it's rain. I never could."
Denny sat back down in the recliner. The apartment was very quiet. The rain had stopped sometime after one, and the window was a black square with the dark shape of Stimson Drug on the other side of it and the sodium-orange glow of the single streetlight on the wet pavement in between.
He told her about Dustin Kincaid then. He had not known he was going to. He told it plainly, the way he would have written it in a report, the Rexall in Millersport and the hydrocodone and the buzz cut and the Browns sweatshirt, and the door, and the hand on the boy's head, and good man, helping your grandma, and the trailer off County Road 39, and the bathroom floor. He did not tell her what Dustin had said to him on the bathroom floor. That part he kept.
When he finished, Lauren did not say anything for a while.
"Where is he now?"