Voracious - Alice Henderson [6]
Immediately she felt for a pulse and was relieved to find one, though it was very weak. But the girl was not breathing.
Madeline’s father was a wildlands firefighter and emergency medical technician and had taught her CPR when she was just a kid.
Madeline went to work.
She remembered she had to check three things: airway, breathing, and circulation. Rolling the girl onto her side, Madeline reached into her mouth and checked for obstructions. Her index finger hooked around a small twig and a plug of mud, and she fished them out. Squeezing the girl, she forced water from her lungs. A stream of fluid escaped between the blue lips, followed, to Madeline’s great relief, by a small gasp. Quickly she worked to stabilize her, administering a ten-count of mouth-to-mouth. Kate coughed and sputtered, drawing in a ragged breath, her eyes fluttering, blinking, and tearing up. Madeline checked her pulse. It was stronger.
The girl coughed again, flecks of water raining from her mouth.
Madeline had to get help. Knowing it was too dangerous to move her, she spoke softly to her. “Can you hear me?” After a moment, Kate’s eyes turned and attempted to focus on Madeline. “I have to get help. You have to lie here very still while I’m gone, do you understand? You could have other injuries, and moving around might make them worse.” The girl didn’t speak, just continued to breathe raggedly, her eyes dazed and wide. “I’ll be back as fast as I can.” Madeline didn’t like how blue the girl’s skin was. Hypothermia. She had to move quickly.
Trying to determine how far they’d drifted downstream, she stood, shivering in her own soaked clothing. “I’ll be back,” she said, looking back down at the girl reassuringly.
The girl’s mouth moved, a whisper escaping her lips.
“What?” Madeline bent down to listen.
“Winthrop,” the girl whispered.
Madeline raised her eyebrows. “Winthrop?”
“My … my dino.”
Madeline thought of the smiling brontosaurus she’d found in the field. “He’s fine,” she told Kate. “I found him myself. He’s waiting for you.”
The girl shuddered and coughed again.
“Try to stay awake,” Madeline told her, and then dashed off along the riverbank in her sock feet. Avoiding sharp rocks and pointed branches, she soon reached the dam and the worn path. Grabbing her shoes, she slid them on, not bothering to lace them. Stooping again, she grabbed Winthrop and the robot and took off for town.
Madeline reached the Stevensons’ house in under ten minutes, a painful stitch in her side and her lungs on fire. Kate’s parents summoned the paramedics. The minutes stretched endlessly as they waited. Madeline knew her father would likely be one of the respondents, and she dreaded seeing him, not knowing what to say. The ambulance roared up, and he jumped out of the back, saving her the awkwardness of talking to him by completely ignoring her. Even as she led them back to Kate, he didn’t so much as meet her eyes. On the riverbank, the EMTs immobilized Kate on a gurney and transported her back to the ambulance. Madeline placed Winthrop next to Kate’s thin arm as they loaded her inside.
Her chest expanded with relief as her father drove away. Another moment of uneasiness over, another moment of their inevitable encounters survived. It hit her powerfully then that when she moved, she wouldn’t have to see either parent ever again.
Now she sat in a worn-out cushioned chair in the emergency room, having been checked for hypothermia herself. Luckily she was all right and had changed into dry clothes. Her long, wavy brown hair hung in wet tangles around her shoulders. Across from her, Kate’s father wept noisily, holding the girl’s robot, and her mother looked exhausted, anxiously glancing up every time a doctor entered the room to talk to a nurse or another family.
As Kate’s father cried, Madeline couldn’t help but notice the stench of alcohol radiating from him. He smelled saturated with