Chapter 5 - BETWEEN GLASS AND BREATH
The iron box was sixteen inches square, made of rolled Swedish steel that had been painted with black stove enamel fifty years ago.
The brass key went into the lower escutcheon with a resistance that made the metal groan, but when I turned it—three quarter-turns to the left, then one hard click to the right—the internal tumblers dropped with the heavy, hydraulic *clonk* of a bank safe.
Inside there was no gold. There were no bearer bonds.
There was a black leather ledger, eight inches by twelve, tied with a length of faded yellow twine, and four micro-cassettes labeled in my father’s small, cramped architectural hand: *E.W. — DEDHAM EXPENSES, 1984.*
I didn't open the book. I didn't have time. I shoved the ledger inside my shirt, next to my skin where the cold paper absorbed the remaining warmth of my ribs, and dropped the tapes into my trousers pocket.
"Mateo," I said, looking toward the man in the yellow slicker who was still sobbing in the floor joists, holding his shattered fingers to his chest. "Tie them up. Use the log chain from the door. If either of them makes a sound before four o'clock, break their other hands."
"Grant," Mateo said, stepping out of the shadows with his gun still drawn. "The pier. If Eleanor is at Pier Forty-two, she has the private security force from the terminal. That’s twenty men with automatic rifles. We can't hit that dock with two revolvers and a Buick."
"We aren't hitting the dock," I said, turning toward the broken side door where the rain was still roaring like a cataract. "We’re going back to St. Catherine’s."
"The ambulance—"
"Victor was lying about the ambulance," I said, looking down at the old man on the marble floor who was now staring at me with a hatred so pure it seemed to burn through the blood on his mouth. "Eleanor wouldn't move those boys to a pier in a storm like this. She’s a monster, Mateo, but she isn't stupid. She knows if those infants die before the probate hearing, the trust remains with me. She needs them alive. She needs them as wards of the court."
We hit the street at twelve-forty.
The drive back through Back Bay was a nightmare of silver water, blue police beacons, and the smell of hot transmission fluid from the Buick’s overworked engine. Twice we had to jump the curb on Commonwealth Avenue to avoid utility crews clearing fallen elm branches that had been brought down by the sleet.
When we pulled into the alley behind St. Catherine’s, the two state cruisers were still there, but their engines were off, their windshields covered in a thick crust of gray slush.
The basement door was still unlatched.
I took the stairs three at a time, my boots slipping on the wet concrete, the heavy .45 bumping against my hip.
The old recovery ward beneath the chapel was as quiet as a tomb.
The sixty-watt bulbs were still burning, their filaments vibrating with the thrum of the church boiler next door. On the iron bed, Mara was still lying on her side, but the plastic ambu-mask was gone. She was breathing through a green nasal cannula, her chest rising and falling with a slow, fragile regularity that looked like life, though her skin was still the color of wet limestone.
Dr. Chen was sitting on an upturned wooden box beside her, his fingers resting lightly against her radial pulse, his eyes closed.
"She’s holding," Chen said without looking up as my boots hit the brick floor. "The pressure is ninety over sixty. We gave her the third unit of whole blood. But the boys, Grant... the boys aren't down here."
My heart jumped into my throat. "Where are they?"
"June took them," Chen said, opening his eyes then—they were red-rimmed with exhaustion and the bitter smoke from his sister’s herbal cigarettes. "Ten minutes ago. A team from the state health department arrived with an administrative warrant to clear the nursery. They said there was a salmonella outbreak in the ventilation ducts."
"Where did she take them?"
Chen pointed up, toward the brick vaulting of the ceiling.
"To the choir loft," he said. "The old organ room behind the pipes. It’s the only place in this building that isn't connected to the hospital air handlers. But the smaller one... Leo... he’s failing, Grant. June doesn't have an incubator up there. She has two hot-water bottles and a wool army blanket."
I didn't look at Mara. I knew if I looked at her, I wouldn't leave the room, and if I didn't leave the room, my son would be dead before the church clock struck one.
The stairs to the choir loft were located behind the chapel altar, hidden behind a set of red velvet drapes that smelled of seventy years of incense and candle tallow. They were narrow, spiral steps made of cast iron that rang like bells under my boots as I climbed through the darkness.
At the top, the air was hot and dry, smelling of old leather, sheepskin bellows, and cedar.
June was sitting on a wooden bench beneath the great wooden pipes of the 1904 Hutchings organ. She was wearing her winter coat over her nursing whites, her gray hair loose around her shoulders, falling across her face in wet strings.
Between her knees she held an antique wicker Moses basket that had probably been used for church pageants fifty years ago.
Inside the basket, wrapped together in a single olive-drab blanket with three rubber hot-water bottles packed around their flanks, were the boys.
They weren't moving.
The smaller one—Leo—was the color of skimmed milk, his tiny mouth open, his tongue dry and white against his gums. Every few seconds, his little chest would hitch—a sharp, mechanical gasp that didn't seem to draw any air into his lungs at all.
"He stopped crying twenty minutes ago," June said, her voice completely flat, devoid of anger, devoid of hope, stripped down to the gray marrow of defeat. "His temperature is ninety-four. The lungs... they're full of fluid, Grant. Without the suction machine from the NICU, I can't clear the trachea."
I fell to my knees beside the basket.
The iron floor of the loft was cold through my wet trousers, but I didn't feel it. I reached out with one finger—a finger that had signed warrants, that had pulled triggers, that had held three million dollars worth of bank paper—and touched the side of Leo’s face.
His skin was like wet parchment. Cold. Elastic.
"Leo," I said.
The child didn't move. The hitch in his ribs came again—longer this time, followed by five seconds of complete, terrifying stillness.
"Do it, June," I rasped.
"Do what?" she asked, her tears finally breaking, falling into her gray lap. "I don't have the drugs, Grant. I don't have the epi. I don't have the tubes. There’s nothing left to do except hold him until he stops fighting."
"No," I said.
I leaned over the wicker basket until my face was three inches from his. I could smell the sweet, sour milk of him, the clean, raw smell of a creature that had only been in the world for sixteen hours and had found nothing in it except cold rain and the sound of angry people in rooms with concrete floors.
I placed my mouth over his tiny nose and lips—his whole face was smaller than my chin—and I drew a breath.
Not hard. A breath like the one you use to keep a dry leaf from falling off a table.
I blew into him.
The resistance in his chest was immense—it felt like trying to blow air into an oak knot. But I didn't stop. I held the pressure, my lungs feeding his, my blood warming the thin, cold skin of his cheeks, while my fingers found his ribs and pressed—once, twice, three times—gentle, like testing the ripeness of a peach through its skin.
"Come on," I whispered against his wet lips. "Come on, Leo. Your brother is waiting. Your mother is in the cellar. Come on."
For three seconds, nothing happened.
Then, beneath my cheek, I felt a tiny, violent shudder.
The boy’s ribs contracted with a wet, bubbling sound that ended in a cough so sharp, so thin, it sounded like a dry twig snapping in a forest. A string of clear mucus bubbled from his left nostril, followed by another gasp—this one deeper, hitting the bottom of his lungs with a rattle that turned into a thin, reedy wail.
It wasn't the sound of an infant in a nursery catalog. It was the sound of an animal that had decided, against every law of probability and medicine, that it was not going to die in a dark room behind thirty ranks of wooden pipes.
Beside him, the larger boy—Julian—stirred beneath the army blanket. His arm, no thicker than my thumb, came out of the wool and hit his brother’s cheek, his fingers curling into the small fold of skin near Leo’s ear.
June let out a ragged, choking sob, her hands coming down over mine on the edge of the basket.
"He's pinking up," she whispered, her fingers checking the nail beds on Leo’s feet. "The capillary refill... it’s under two seconds. Grant... look at him."
I looked.
The milk-white cast was gone, replaced by a dark, angry red that spread from his ears down across his throat. His eyes—which June had said hadn't opened since eight o'clock—cracked open half a millimeter, catching the dim yellow light of the organ bench.
They were gray. Not violet like Mara’s. Not dark like mine.
They were the pale, stony gray of the water off the light at Graves End before the sun comes up over the harbor.
"He's a Waverly," June murmured, her head bowed over the basket.
May you like
"No," I said, my voice shaking so hard the words were barely recognizable even to myself as I reached into my shirt and pulled out the black leather book with its yellow twine. "He’s a Bennett. Both of them. And tonight is the last night anyone in this city will ever use that other name to scare a child in the dark."
***
