A barrage of first-aid posters and Red Cross handouts flooded his thoughts as he leaned Shaun forward and slapped his back with a solid whack. Air flew from Shaun’s lungs, and to Evan’s relief, he gasped some back in. His airway wasn’t totally plugged.
Picking him up from the chair, Evan clutched Shaun to his chest, his arms threaded beneath his son’s, hands locked over the boy’s sternum. Trying to maintain a semblance of control, Evan pulled one, two, three times in rapid succession. With each movement, a thin stream of air jolted from Shaun’s lips and he gasped a little back in. A small amount of vomit dribbled out of his mouth when Evan pulled again, and he stopped, sweat coating his entire body.
Would this be how it ended? With a bite of egg and his lack of memory of the Heimlich maneuver? Would this be the day he feared above all others, the day when Shaun would slip away from his frantic grasp, somehow slighting all his measures to keep him safe?
“No,” Evan grunted, his eyes tearing up with moisture born of panic and premature grief. “NO!”
He spun Shaun over and laid him on his back, kneeling beside him. Shaun heaved in a little air and then gagged, coughing out streams of spittle and mucus.
“Open your mouth, honey, open your mouth,” Evan said, forcing his fingers past his son’s spasming teeth.
He swiped an index finger to the back of his throat, searching for an obstruction but feeling nothing. Another pass came up empty.
Evan fell back on his ass, pulling Shaun into his lap.
“Open your mouth, Shaun, open it!”
Trying to ignore the wavering alarm of his voice, he pried Shaun’s mouth open and looked inside, ready to reach in and grab any soggy chunk of egg that might be there.
Several white strands poked up at the back of his throat, their bright color catching the light.
Evan’s face contorted as he reached with two fingers and managed to grab the hairs. With a revulsion so pure it bordered on horror, he pulled the white hairs out of Shaun’s mouth, watching their length extend far, much too far, into his son’s throat.
“Uhhhhh,” Evan moaned, and instantly remembered Becky’s incoherent mumblings down by the beach.
He pulled and the hairs kept coming, impossibly long, stretching, catching the natural light of the room until they seemed to shine with a glow of their own.
Just when he thought his arm would not be long enough and he would have to re-grip the hairs, they slid free of Shaun’s mouth and hung suspended from the tips of his fingers, limp, like pale parasites. With a cry of revulsion, Evan flicked them away, knowing, somewhere in the deep cellar of his mind where all morbid thoughts were birthed, that the hairs wouldn’t fly free of his fingers. They would wrap around his hand, entwine themselves to him, and begin to slither toward his own face, seeking the wet darkness of his mouth.
But they did detach from his fingers. After an almost graceful flight, they landed in a coil on the kitchen floor and flattened there, unmoving. He looked down at Shaun, who breathed fully and deep, tears running from his eyes in streams that tracked sideways toward his temples.
“You’re okay, honey, you’re okay,” he said, clutching his son close in a hug.
The sound of Shaun’s heavy but easy breathing was like music to Evan’s ears, and he relished it the only way a person who knew the loss of something precious could.
“Da,” Shaun sobbed, and Evan held him tighter.
“I’m right here, buddy, you’re okay, you’re fine.”
He rocked him as if he were an infant, for what seemed like hours, his eyes straying to the white hairs from time to time, which shone like threads of snow in the morning sun.
~
“Are you okay?”
Selena’s soft voice brought him out of his fugue, and he blinked, sitting up straighter in the pontoon’s seat. The sunlight glared off the water, and he felt it tightening the skin on his face. He’d have to be careful not to get burned.
Burned. Burn it. Destroy it.
“I’m great,” Evan said, and tried to smile. “Thinking.”
“You were miles away.”
“Yeah, busy morning.”
Of pulling white hairs that couldn’t have been there out of your son’s throat—out of his stomach.
He shook his head, silencing the voice.
“Do you want to talk?” Selena asked, setting her rod against the pontoon’s railing.
“You keep trying to do your thing, don’t you?”
“Can’t shut it off.”
“No, I’m fine.”
“Is it the article? Is that what’s bothering you?”
Shaun kicked his legs out and squealed with delight as the pontoon drifted over a wave. Evan watched him for a moment before he answered, telling himself he wasn’t waiting for him to begin choking again.
“Yeah. I got an email from my friend saying the editor wasn’t interested in the story.”
Selena frowned. “I’m sorry. Is there any other magazine that might buy it from you?”
He shrugged. “Maybe. I’m giving it one last go with him, see if I can convince him it’s worth printing.”
“So the mystery woman you went to see yesterday wasn’t a dead end?”
“No, no, she wasn’t.”
Evan related the events at Cecil’s house to her, as the boat drifted in a lazy line parallel to the nearby shore. When he’d finished, Selena sat quiet, not looking at him for a while.
“And you think she was telling the truth?”
“Definitely. Even if everything she said was made-up, she still believed it. Plus all the pieces seemed to connect.”
Selena picked up her rod and twitched it up and down, and Evan once again admired her skill, which outdid his own.
“Is there another interest you have in all this?” she asked, not looking at him.
Yes.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, you seem somewhat fixated on the story. I’m wondering if it has any significance to you other than the article.”
“No.”
Liar.
“I think it’s an incredible mystery that no one’s heard before.”
You think it can do something impossible, you think it can turn—
“And one that could secure a future for Shaun and I if someone would pick it up,” he said, fighting the voice into silence.