I could just make out the ambulance's lights, far away across the fields but coming fast, flickering red and white off the horizon, when Jacob reached out and grabbed my ankle. His grip was tight, violent. I had to yank my leg twice to get it free.
A gurgling sound came out of his chest, very faint. As soon as I heard it, I realized that it had been going on for some time.
I stooped down beside him, just out of reach. His jacket was torn and soaked through with blood. I could see the lights coming closer. There were three sets of them -- silent, no sirens, converging on Lou's house, two approaching from the east, still far away, and one from the south, which was closer.
Jacob tried to lift his head but couldn't. His eyes took a moment to find me; then they focused a little, faded, and focused again. His glasses were lying beside him on the walk.
I could hear the ambulance's engine now, racing.
'Help me,' Jacob gasped.
He said it twice.
Then he lost consciousness.
7
THE NEXT morning, just after eight, I was sitting in an empty room on the second floor of the Delphia Municipal Hospital, watching myself on TV. First an announcer talked from the studio, reading something off a sheet of paper. The television was broken, so I couldn't hear what he was saying, but I knew that it was about what had happened the previous night because from the studio they cut to a shot of me, just a short one, perhaps five seconds, as I walked from a police car into the hospital. I was hunched over, hurrying, head down. I didn't look like myself, and this reassured me. I looked shaken, shocked, like I belonged there, on the news.
Next there was a reporter, a woman, talking into a microphone in front of Lou's house. She had on a heavy down jacket and thick yellow ski gloves. As she spoke, her long brown hair lifted itself an inch or so from her shoulders, trembling in the wind. Several police cars were parked behind her in the driveway. The yard was crisscrossed with tire tracks. Lou's front door was wide open, and I could see two men crouched inside the entranceway, taking pictures.
The woman talked for a bit, her face serious, grief-stricken. The announcer reappeared when she finished, and he seemed to say something consoling to her. Then the newsbreak was over.
There was a commercial next, and after that a cartoon. Elmer Fudd chasing Daffy Duck. I turned away from the screen. I was sitting with Sarah and Amanda in what was once a two-bed, semiprivate room. For some reason it had been emptied of furniture. The beds were gone, the night tables, everything. Except for the two folding chairs Sarah and I sat in, the room was barren. The floor was light blue. I could see where the beds had stood; the tiles were a little darker there, two perfect rectangles against the wall, like shadows. There was a single small window, a slit in the side of the building, the same size and shape as the ones they used to have in castles, to shoot arrows through. It looked out onto the hospital's parking lot.
The television set hung on a bracket hooked into the ceiling. Though it gave me a sick feeling to look at it, I found it hard not to watch. It was the only thing in the room besides Sarah, and I didn't want to look at her. If I looked at her, I knew I'd start talking, and I didn't feel safe talking there.
We'd been put in the room as a courtesy, for our privacy. There were reporters down in the regular waiting room. I'd been up all night, had not eaten since the previous day. I was unshaven, dirty, shaky.
The FBI hadn't been called in. It was just the Fulton County Sheriff's Department. I'd spent two hours talking with them, and it had been fine. They were normal people, like Carl Jenkins, and they saw things exactly as Sarah and I had anticipated they would: Lou coming home drunk, finding Sonny and Nancy in bed together, getting his gun and shooting them; Jacob and I hearing the shots as we pulled away, Jacob running up to the house with his rifle, Lou opening the door, pointing his shotgun, two explosions ripping through the night.
The sheriff's deputies had treated me with great care and courtesy, like a victim rather than a suspect, mistaking my unconcealable distress over the possibility of Jacob's regaining consciousness for a brother's heartfelt grief.
Jacob was in his third hour of surgery.
Sarah and I sat in the room and waited.
Neither of us seemed to want to talk. Sarah tended Amanda. She nursed her, whispered to her, played little games with her. When the baby slept, Sarah closed her eyes, too, slouching forward in her folding chair. I watched the silent TV -- cartoons, a game show, a rerun of 'The Odd Couple.' During commercials I went over to the window and stared down at the parking lot. It was a big lot, like a field of asphalt. The cars clustered around the building, leaving the far edge empty and forlorn looking. Beyond the parking lot was a real field, buried in snow. When the wind came up, it carried grains of this snow across the asphalt in little semitransparent waves and threw them up against the hospital.
Sarah and I waited and waited. Doctors and nurses and policemen walked by outside the door, the clicking of their shoes echoing up and down the tiled hallway, drawing our eyes to their passing, but no one stopped to tell us anything.
Whenever the baby started to cry, Sarah hummed a little song to her, and she quieted down. After a while, I recognized the tune. It was 'Frere Jacques.' Listening to Sarah, I got it in my head, and then I couldn't get it out, even when she stopped.
Just after eleven, a sheriff's deputy came into the room. I was sitting in my chair, and I stood up to shake his hand. Sarah smiled and nodded, her arms wrapped around the baby.
'I don't want to impose at a time like this,' the deputy began. Then he paused, as if he'd forgotten what he'd come to say. He stared up at the television, a Toyota commercial, and frowned. He wasn't one of the men I'd spoken to earlier. He looked too young to be a policeman, looked like a kid dressing up. His uniform was a little too big, his black shoes a little too shiny, the crease in his trooper's hat a little too perfect. When he frowned up at the TV, his whole face frowned, even his eyes. It was a perfectly round face, lightly freckled, a farm boy's face, flat and pale and moonlike.
'I'm real sorry about your brother,' he started again. He glanced shyly at Sarah, taking in the baby in one swift glance, then turned back to the TV.
I waited, guarded.
'We have his dog,' he said. 'We found it at the crime site.' He cleared his throat, pulled his eyes away from the TV, and gave me a hesitant look. 'We were wondering if you wanted to look after it yourself.'
He shifted his weight from one foot to the other. His shiny black shoes made a creaking noise.
'If you didn't,' he said quickly, 'if it's too much to think of right now, we can put it in the pound for a while.' He glanced at Sarah. 'Until things settle down.'
I looked toward Sarah, too. She nodded at me.
'No,' I said. 'We'll take care of him.'
The deputy smiled. He seemed relieved. 'I'll drop him off at your house then,' he said.
He shook my hand again before he left.
FORTY minutes later a doctor came in to tell us that Jacob was out of surgery. He'd been moved to the intensive care unit and was listed in critical condition. The doctor told us that the blast from the shotgun had damaged both of Jacob's lungs, his heart, his aorta, three of his thoracic vertebrae, his diaphragm, his esophagus, his liver, and his stomach. He had a foldout chart to show Sarah and me where all these parts were in the body. As he listed off their names, he circled them with a red pen.
'We've done all we can for now,' he said.
He gave Jacob a one-in-ten chance of surviving.
