Page 72 of Till The Cows Come Home
“911, what’s your emergency?”
“My dad collapsed and I can’t find a pulse. I need help. Please, help.”
“What’s your location?”
“1398 Valley View Lane. Baker Farm.”
“What’s your name, sweetheart?”
“Sage. Sage Baker.”
“Okay, Sage. I need you to put me on speakerphone, can you do that?”
My hands shook, fumbling to push the buttons.
“You’re on speaker.”
“Okay, Sage. The ambulance is coming, but since your father doesn’t have a pulse, I’m going to need you to start CPR. Do you know how to administer compressions?”
“Yeah, yeah I do.”
“You can do this, Sage. I know it’s scary, but your dad needs you, okay?”
My father’s lifeless body laid in front of me, yet hearing that he needed me jarred me all the same. Stu Baker, the man who never asked for anything, neededme?
“Okay,” I whispered.
Everyone at the library was CPR certified, something that Jane had pushed for. We were around kids constantly, and with the occasional wandering parent, it just made sense. But Ialways hoped it’d be a skill I’d keep in my back pocket, not something I’d have to do to my family.
“Don’t bother stopping to give breaths okay, Sage? Just keep on going with the compressions. The ambulance will be there soon.”
She was right, I could hear the sirens, but their dullness did nothing but cause worry as I pounded and pounded on my father’s chest with no sign of life. My arms burned like hell but I didn’t stop.
I wouldn’t stop.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Miles
I’d been downtown grabbing supplies at the hardware store when Sage called me from the back of an ambulance. In between sobs I made out that she was on the way to the hospital with her father, and from how it sounded, he was in pretty bad shape. Without a thought, I dropped my basket in the middle of the aisle, jogging to my truck to meet her at the hospital.
The front desk directed me to the room they’d been given, and when I walked to the door Stu was unrecognizable. He was hooked up to more things than I could count, with a tube down his throat, and the only thing familiar was Sage, clutching his hand in the chair next to him.
“Miles!” she cried, and for a moment she moved to stand, but stopped, unable to let go.
“Don’t move, hun.”
I cleared the room in a few steps, and as she settled in her seat again, I wrapped my arms around her from behind. Her shoulders began to heave, and so I held on, waiting for the angst to pass before pressing herfor answers.
“They haven’t told me anything, just that they’re treating it as a heart attack,” she whimpered.
“Where’s your mom?”
“She’s on the way. She was shopping in Easton and one of her girlfriends is driving her back.”
“Okay, well as soon as she gets here I’ll find someone and see if I can get us some more answers. Could you try and tell me what happened?”
“Nothing, Miles. It was so strange. We were doing the same as we always did. Dad was holding the framing and I was nailing it down. But after one of our last sheets he just wasn’t hanging on anymore, and now he’s barely hanging on at all. He was just laying there, not breathing. I did CPR until the ambulance got there and they shocked him until they got a pulse. Then in a blink we were here, with all this happening.”
