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Beside him, Lucy Locke keeps counting, announcing each compression through teeth clenched against her loss.
Fin Locke didn’t live long enough to learn life’s toughest lessons. Perhaps that’s a blessing. Because nice things, Abraham knows,don’thappen to people because they deserve it. Sometimes – in fact, quite often – bad things happen, terrible things. Things just like this.
Silent, he puts his hands over Lucy’s.
A few days ago, when he sought to comfort her, she flinched from his touch. She doesn’t flinch now. Instead, her head bows. She sobs, once, a broken sound.
Abraham lifts Lucy’s hands from her son’s chest.
Closing his eyes, he recalls the anecdote a doctor once told him, about a cold and lifeless sailor pulled from the sea:You’re not dead until you’re warm and dead.That sailor went thirty minutes without a pulse before the medical team shocked him back to life. The cold water had chilled his blood, protecting his brain from fatal damage.
Putting his hands on Fin’s chest, he begins to pump.
He knows he’ll have to be brutal. Lucy’s compressions, when he arrived, were far too delicate to do any good. Possibly because she’d run out of strength. Possibly because, unlike him, she’s not one of God’s blunt-edged tools.
Abraham shoves down on the boy’s breastbone, compressing the chest a full five centimetres, cringing when he hears the crack of bone but not slowing.
He meets Lucy’s saucer eyes. ‘We’ll do it together. You and me, side by side. When I finish the count, you breathe.’
She nods. He nods.
‘Twenty-eight, twenty-nine,thirty.’
Lucy leans over, blows twice into Fin’s lungs. The boy’s chest inflates and sinks down.
Abraham continues to pump.
That anecdote about the sailor wasn’t the only one the doctor shared. There was also the Spanish woman half frozen in a snowstorm, revived after six hours with a stopped heart. But that situation was completely different to this one. Abraham doesn’t know how long Fin was in the water. Or how cold his blood.
‘She asked me,’ Lucy says. ‘Before she died, Billie asked me what came next. I told her nothing did. She was looking for comfort and I didn’t give it.’
‘Twenty-eight, twenty-nine,thirty.’
Lucy bends to Fin’s mouth, gives him two more breaths. When there’s no response, Abraham carries on pumping.
‘What kind of mother does that?’ she asks. ‘Daniel says she talked about me before the end. What if she remembered what I said?’
‘Twenty-eight, twenty-nine,thirty.’
Abraham watches Lucy fill her son’s lungs with air. He wants to offer her comfort but he can think of no words. And then he doesn’t have to, because Fin Locke’s hand twitches.
2
Lucy groans as if a plug has been pulled. She leans over her boy, her ear close to his lips. Abraham’s eyes are on those fingers. It could have been a random muscle movement, could have been the yacht shifting beneath them.
With shocking suddenness, Fin’s chest inflates. Life, rushing back. He gags, starts choking. ‘Turn him over,’ Abraham says. ‘Get him on his side.’
The boy convulses, draws up his knees, half vomits and half coughs seawater. He takes another wheezing breath, blinks and screws up his face.
Abraham rolls his shoulders. He stands, staggers back, gives mother and son a little space. Lucy Locke’s world, right now, extends to a radius of two feet – he belongs far outside it.
He tries to imagine what she’s feeling, but he has no frame of reference. He won’t complain. He’s God’s blunt-edged tool, formed at speed from the roughest clay to hand. Inelegant, uncivilized. Crudely and occasionally effective.
He’s wrong about Lucy Locke, though. Her world extends a little further than he thought. Because she turns, just for a moment, and meets Abraham’s gaze. Then she goes back to tending her son. It’s enough. It’s more than enough. He smiles at her, even though she can’t see.
Epilogue
Penleith Beach. Summer.