Chuy came out the front door dragging the mother.
She was a small woman in a man's flannel shirt and jeans, with her hair tied up in a red bandanna, and he had her under the arms and was walking backward with her heels dragging across the porch. Her face was red like the girl's. Her arms flopped. He got her down the steps and onto the snow beside her daughter and the captain went to her and did the same things, the ear on the chest, the fingers on the neck, and this time his face didn't change. He said, "She's breathing. She's breathing. Not much. Hank, the bag," and Hank brought the black rubber bag with a mask on it and fit it over her face, and the captain hooked it to the oxygen and started squeezing it, slow and steady, one, two, three, four, squeeze, one, two, three, four, squeeze.
"Oven was wide open," Chuy said, crouching down next to them. He was breathing hard and his eyes were red and running. "All four burners on top too. They had towels stuffed under the back door and under the hall doors, keeping it in. Pilot on the furnace is out. Cold as a stone. I don't think the furnace has been on in days, Cap, there's a shutoff notice on the fridge. I opened the back door and broke out the kitchen window. I shut the gas off at the stove."
"Good," said the captain. "Good man." Squeeze. One, two, three, four. Squeeze. "Ma'am? Ma'am, can you hear me? Your little girl's okay. She's right here. You hear her yelling? Your little girl's okay."
The woman didn't move. The girl kept screaming. I stood at the foot of the steps with my hands in my coat pockets because I didn't know what else to do with them. People had started coming out of their houses up and down Evans now, the way they do, standing on their porches in their slippers with their arms crossed against the cold. Mrs. Quintana from the corner came down off her porch in a housecoat and an old Broncos stocking cap and stood next to me without saying anything and put her hand on my shoulder, and I let her.
I heard the ambulance before I saw it, coming up Northern with its siren going, and when it turned onto Evans, Ingot lifted her head from the snow and opened her mouth and howled along with it, that long low falling howl that started a half second after the siren and would stop a half second after it stopped. She howled the whole time it took the ambulance to come down the block. Nobody told her to quit that either.
The ambulance men put the little girl on the stretcher first, with her mother's oxygen mask still too big over her face, and she had stopped screaming by then and was only crying, and she still had the transmitter. She would not let go of it. One of the ambulance men tried to take it from her and she held on and started screaming again, so he let her keep it, and she went into the back of the ambulance hugging a cream-colored plastic box with a cord dragging off it. Then they put the mother on the other stretcher, with the captain walking beside it still squeezing the bag, one, two, three, four, squeeze, and the captain climbed into the back of the ambulance with her and didn't look back, and the doors shut, and they went.