Denny was putting on his jacket. He had a list in his head already, the way he did on any shift that started badly. Phil Hartnett's daughter-in-law was a respiratory therapist at Union Hospital in Dover. The fire department had two paramedics on the volunteer roster who might know someone. There was the Methodist church, whose casserole committee Joyce could probably restart with a single phone call and a tone of voice. There was Dr. Pruszynski, who knew every home-health agency between here and Canton. None of it was a night nurse. None of it was tonight. He did not know if any of it would come to anything. He knew he was going to make the calls.
"I'll be back around four," he said. "With some names, maybe. Maybe not. I can't promise."
Lauren looked at him over the coffee. "You don't have to do that."
"I know I don't."
Ruthie went to school. Her mother insisted. The new pump would come by ten-thirty, her mother said, and Dr. Ahn's office had already called, and Mrs. Esposito's daughter was driving her back from Columbus by noon, and there was no reason for a fifth grader to miss a fractions quiz just because she had stayed up a little late. Ruthie argued, and lost, and put on her rubber boots and her yellow raincoat, which had dried overnight over the back of a kitchen chair, and her purple backpack. Before she went, she stood at the door and looked at Denny, and then took the laminated card out of his shirt pocket, where it had been all night, and looked at it, and put it back.
"You can keep it," she said. "I made Mom one too. I can make another one."
"Thank you, Ruthie."
"You have to practice, though," she said seriously. "Your question mark was really bad."
He walked down the outside stairs behind her. The stairs were still dark with wet, and he held the rail. At the bottom she looked both ways this time, carefully, and crossed Front Street in forty seconds, more or less, and stood under the green awning of Stimson Drug, by the bench where the bus would stop, and took her father's flashlight out of the front pocket of her backpack. Denny stayed on the near side of the street, by his truck. It had a parking ticket under the wiper from one of his own officers, which he decided he would frame.
Ruthie pointed the flashlight up at the window above the laundromat. Dash dash dash. Dot dash dash dash.
The window flashed back at once. Dot dash dot dot. Dash dash dash. Dot dot dot dash. Dot.