Oh no you don’t. He turned onto his back and stroked hard toward shore, floating her near his chest, so lost in the rhythm of pull and breath and kick that he didn’t realize he was there until he reached back and hit coarse grit instead of cold water. He rolled to his knees and half dragged, half carried the old lady onto the grass. He pinched her nose, tilted her head back, and began mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. Blow. Breath. Blow. Breath.
He heard the scrape of the rowboat’s keel and then Shaun was there, falling to his knees on the other side of the old lady’s head. He pushed against Russ’s shoulder. “Let me take a turn, man,” he said. “You need to get a breath for yourself.” Russ nodded. He watched as Shaun picked up his rhythm, and then Russ let himself collapse into the grass.
He heard a gargling cough and shoved himself out of the way as Shaun rolled the old lady to her side. She gasped, choked, and then vomited up a startling quantity of water. She started to cry weakly. He met Shaun’s eyes over her shoulder. Shaun spread his hands and shrugged. Now what?
Russ staggered back onto his feet. Curled up on her side, weeping, the woman didn’t look scary anymore, just old and lost. “I think we ought to get her to the hospital,” Russ said. “Run up the trail and see if she parked a car beside the road.”
Swinging wide around the tiny cemetery, Shaun loped to the overgrown path and disappeared from view. Russ returned to the rowboat and dragged it up onto the grass as far as he could. He retrieved his jeans-stinking of beer-and his sneakers, and had just finished getting dressed when Shaun ran back down the trail.
“ ’Sup there,” he panted, pointing toward the road. “Keys in the ignition and all.”
“Good.” Russ knelt by the old woman and carefully pulled her into a sitting position. “Ma’am? Can you walk? What’s your name?”
The old lady leaned against his shoulder. She wasn’t exactly crying anymore, but making deep, shaky sounds like a little kid. She didn’t seem to hear him. He wondered if she was senile, and if so, what she was doing driving around by herself. He looked back at Shaun. “I think we need to carry her.”
“What about our stuff?” Shaun pointed to the boat. “It’s not just the fishing tackle, man. I still have”-he dropped his voice, as if a narc might be hiding behind one of the headstones-“almost an ounce of grass in there.”
The woman gave a rattling sigh and lapsed into a still silence that made Russ uneasy. “Bring it,” he said. “Or hide it. This lady needs help. We gotta get her to a doctor.”
“Oh, shit,” Shaun said. “Okay.” He strode to the rowboat and grabbed the backpack he used to carry his paraphernalia. “But if anything happens to the boat, you’re gonna be the one who explains it to my dad.”
Russ laughed, a short, sharp sound. “Fine. I’m not gonna be around long enough for him to kick my ass.”
They laced their hands together and eased the woman into a seat carry. With Shaun on the other side, she didn’t weigh as much as some of the sacks Russ toted for customers at Greuling’s Grocery. The trail up to the county road was less than a half mile, and within ten minutes they burst out of the shade of the pines and into open air and brilliant sunshine. Shaun jerked his head toward a ’59 Rambler wagon. Two-toned: baby-shit brown and tired tan. Russ pulled open the back door and shut his eyes for a moment against the wave of thick, moist heat that rolled out of the car.
“Where should we put her?” Shaun asked.
“Lay her down in the backseat.” Russ looked in the rear for a blanket or a coat to lay under her, but there was nothing except more gardening equipment.
They stretched the woman out on the sticky plastic seat. She looked clammy and paler than before. Russ had a sudden image of himself and Shaun driving into town in an overheated granny car with a corpse in the back. He shuddered.
“You okay?”
“Yeah, sure. You want to drive?”
Shaun held up his hands. “No way, man. If we get stopped, I don’t want the cops getting too close to me.” He sniffed his shirt. “Can you smell it on me?”
Russ rolled his eyes. “You know it’s good stuff if it’s making you ’noid.” He slid into the driver’s seat and adjusted it back to fit his long frame. “Hop in.”
The ride into Millers Kill passed in silence. Russ was concentrating on driving as fast as he could. Shaun was tense, hissing between his teeth whenever Russ took a corner too tightly, gripping his seat if another car went past them. And in the back was-nothing. Russ couldn’t even hear the old lady breathe. As they passed from the forest down into the rolling farmland, the back of his neck began to creep. He couldn’t shake the idea that if he turned around, he would see her lying there, wet, unbreathing, looking at him with her black eyes. He was grateful when they came to the town and he had to focus on navigating through the stop-and-go traffic.
He pulled into emergency parking at the Washington County Hospital and killed the engine. Shaun looked at him. “Well?” he said. “Let’s get her in there.”
Russ forced himself to twist in his seat and check behind him. And, of course, he saw nothing except an unconscious old lady. His shoulders twitched at the sudden release of tension. “Yeah,” he said to Shaun.
If he had been less weirded out and more on top of things, he would have gone into the emergency room, fetched out a couple of nurses, and had them wheel the old lady into the place themselves. He thought of it, later, but at the time, sliding her out of the Rambler seemed like the most logical thing to do. He took her feet and Shaun took her shoulders. He was so intent on avoiding a collision while walking backward that he didn’t see the commotion their entrance caused. Shaun did, though, and nearly dropped the woman on her head.
“For Chrissake, Shaun, don’t just-”
“What are you boys doing?” The nurse bearing down on them had a bosom like the prow of a battleship, and the face to match. In one swift move, she caught the old woman’s wrist lightly in one hand while digging her other fingers bone-deep into Russ’s shoulder.
“Ow!” he said. “We’re not doing anything!”
“Is this your grandmother?”
“I don’t know who it is! We just found her. At Stewart’s Pond. She walked into the water. She tried to drown herself.”
She sized him up with a single flick of her eyelashes, and even though she barely came up to his chest, she somehow managed to speak over his head. “Skelly, McClaren, get that gurney over here.” She glared at Shaun, who was looking longingly at the exit doors. “Don’t even think about moving, young man.”
Two nurses scarcely older than Shaun and Russ rolled a pallet over. One of them glanced sympathetically at Russ. The battleship let go of his shoulder in order to ease the old woman onto the gurney.
“Into the examination room,” she said to the other nurses, who obeyed her with such speed that Russ figured she must terrorize everybody she came into contact with. She hooked her hands around his and Shaun’s arms and followed the gurney, towing them past the admissions desk and through the swinging double doors into the examination room. She bulldozed through a square of limp blue curtains shielding the old woman from public view. “Get Dr. Hansvoort,” she said firmly. One of the young nurses disappeared. “Well, don’t just stand there,” she told the remaining nurse. “Get her vitals. Ah, Dr. Hansvoort. Thank you for coming so promptly.”
The young resident who had parted the curtains looked as if he wouldn’t have dared take his time. “Nurse Vigue?”
She rattled Russ’s and Shaun’s arms. “All right, you two. Tell Dr. Hansvoort here what happened.” She narrowed her eyes. “Truthfully.”
Russ and Shaun fell all over themselves trying to get their story out. While they described the woman’s strange actions, Russ’s dive to rescue her, and the mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, Dr. Hansvoort clicked on a penlight and looked into his patient’s eyes, nose, and throat.