PART 2
I went down that ridge faster than I’ve ever moved in my life.
Sliding on wet leaves. Grabbing tree trunks. Shouting his name. “Carter! Blow it again, baby! Mommy’s coming!”
No whistle.
I found him at the edge of the creek, exactly where I’d told him to go when he was five. Downhill. By the water.
He was sitting against a rock with his knees pulled up. His lips were gray-blue. His shoulders were heaving up and down. Every breath made a high, thin whistling sound in his chest.
He looked at me with huge, scared eyes. He couldn’t talk.
I dropped to my knees and pulled the spare inhaler and spacer out of my coat pocket.
“Slow, baby. Breathe with me. In. Hold it. Out.”
One puff. Count. Another.
I counted out loud. My hands were shaking so hard I almost dropped it.
After the fourth puff, the whistling in his chest started to loosen. After the sixth, he could finally whisper.
“I did the rule, Mommy. Downhill. Water. Three whistles.”
“You did it perfectly,” I said, and held him against me.
The search and rescue team reached us twenty minutes later. A deputy came down the ridge behind them with a paramedic.
At the hospital, the doctor said Carter’s oxygen level was dangerously low when they first checked him. The cold air and the panic had triggered a severe asthma attack.
“Without that inhaler in your pocket,” she told me quietly, “he would have been in serious trouble before anyone reached him.”
Carter told the deputy everything. Grandpa taking his inhaler. Grandpa telling him to “quit wheezing like a girl.” Grandpa climbing down the ladder and leaving him alone.
When he couldn’t breathe, he got scared. He climbed down and walked downhill, like Mommy said.
My nephew told the deputy the same story. So did my sister-in-law, who’d heard my father bragging about it at breakfast.
My father was charged with child endangerment. The Arkansas Game and Fish Commission suspended his hunting license for leaving a child unsupervised in a stand on opening day.
Rusty called me a week later.
“You really went to the cops on Dad?”
“Dad took my son’s medicine and left him alone in the woods,” I said. “I went to the cops on that.”
He didn’t call again.
My father pleaded guilty in the spring. He paid a fine and took a court-ordered class. He hasn’t seen Carter since. He’s never apologized.
My mother visits us on her own now. She brings Carter a new whistle every birthday.
Last month, Carter and I went hiking on a trail near our house.
At the top of a hill, he stopped, pulled out his inhaler, took a puff, and put it back in his pocket.
Then he looked at me and grinned.
“That’s not a crutch,” he said. “That’s my superpower.”
THE END.
