“I did call,” I said, sobbing now, trying to keep my count steady the way the infant CPR nurse had taught us in the class Ben insisted we take. “I called you too.”
“Natalie,” my mother said sharply, “stop crying and do what they tell you. We cannot leave in the middle of this.”
Then she hung up.
Just like that.
I dropped the phone onto the carpet, put it on speaker with numb fingers, and kept pressing—two fingers, center of the chest, one and two and three and four and five—while the 911 operator’s voice came through the room in calm, professional bursts.
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