"Milo," he whispered.
The cat pressed his face into Kevin's neck.
"Yeah," Janet said. Her voice cracked right down the middle. "Yeah. Milo's here."
* * *
It took the ambulance eleven minutes. Janet would remember that later; she'd remember looking at Del's watch on his wrist as he knelt beside her and counting the minutes like a code, every one of them a year. They wrapped Kevin in every blanket in the house, and Del sat on the cold concrete and pulled the boy's head and shoulders into his lap and held him there, and Janet kept her fingers on his pulse and talked to him the whole time, nonsense, anything, his name, the Reds, Pete Rose. Did you see Pete Rose this year, Kevin? Did you see him break the record? Kevin's eyes came and went. His pulse came down, a little, as the cold clean air did its work. He threw up once more, weakly, and she turned his head and wiped his mouth with a corner of the electric blanket.
Milo didn't leave him. Not for a second. He lay pressed along the length of the boy's body, outside the blankets, his gray fur ruffling in the wind, and when Kevin's hand came loose from the covers, Milo put his head under it.
Lights went on up and down Linden Street. Somebody's porch light. Then another. Then the long strange whooping wail of the siren coming up Dayton-Yellow Springs Road, and the red lights bouncing off the frost on the Kowalskis' Buick, and the paramedics running up the driveway with their big orange box. And behind them, coming at a shuffle down the frozen sidewalk in a long dark coat thrown on over pajamas, his earflaps untied and flapping, Arliss Haskell, with no dog at all.
* * *
They put Kevin on high-flow oxygen in the back of the ambulance before the doors even closed, a clear mask over his small gray face, and Janet rode with him because she was a nurse and because, when the paramedic tried to take her hand off his, Kevin wouldn't let go. Del followed in the Citation, still in his pajama pants, with his softball jacket over his undershirt and his bare feet jammed into his work boots, unlaced.
They had to leave Milo. Janet looked back through the ambulance's rear window as they pulled away and saw him sitting in the open mouth of the garage under the bare bulb, very upright, watching them go, with Arliss Haskell crouched beside him and one thin hand resting on his back.
At Greene Memorial the emergency room doctor was a tired young man named Patel whom Janet knew a little from the cafeteria. He said, "Pruitt? From 4 West? Tell me," and she told him: the heater, the closed attic, the blanket over the vent, the hours. The vomiting. The confusion. The headache. He listened without interrupting and nodded and drew blood from Kevin's arm for a carboxyhemoglobin level and wrapped him in a warming blanket that blew hot air, and he kept him on the oxygen, and around five-thirty in the morning, as the windows in the waiting room went from black to iron gray, he came out and found them sitting side by side on the orange plastic chairs.
"His level was twenty-six percent when he came in," Dr. Patel said. "That's high. That's a lot higher than you'd want." He let that sit for a second. "It's coming down nicely on the oxygen. He's talking. He's oriented. He asked for something to eat, which I take as a good sign. He's dehydrated and underweight, but I think he's going to be fine. We'll keep him a couple of days to be sure."
Janet put her hand over her mouth.
"If you'd found him in the morning," Patel said, gently, "I don't think we'd be having this conversation. He'd stopped feeling the cold, he told me. He said he just felt like going to sleep." He looked at Del. "You went up there and got him?"
Del nodded. He didn't seem able to say anything.
"The cat did," Janet said. "The cat found him. We just followed the cat."