“My daddy’s just sleeping.” Panic lifted his young voice to a high pitch. “He’s just sleeping.”
His face tightly controlled, Daniel ignored the boy and glanced at a frozen-to-the-spot waiter. “Call 911, and request an ambulance. Now.”
His eyes giving the lifeless man one last look, the waiter rushed toward the front of the restaurant, presumably where he’d make the call.
In between giving breaths, her gaze met Daniel’s.
He nodded at her unspoken question.
Without missing a compression, she relieved him and began counting in her head as she used pent-up frustration to give her the strength to press hard against the man’s huge chest over and over in a synchronized rhythm.
“Does anyone have any nitroglycerin?”
The little boy’s eyes went round. “You’re not blowing up my daddy!”
Daniel’s gaze touched on the boy for a split second, but he didn’t comment, just took a tiny brown medicine bottle from a fifty-ish man who stood watching and who looked quite pale.
In between blowing air into the man’s lungs, Daniel turned to the heart attack patient’s wife. “Is he on any medications? Or does he have any known health problems?”
“His cholesterol, but that’s it. He’s as healthy as a horse.”
“No Viagra, Levitra, or Cialis?”
The woman looked appalled, and gave her son a blushing glance. “Of course not.”
Kimberly continued to compress, and Daniel placed a small white tablet under the man’s tongue. The medication would dissolve on i
ts own and cause the blood vessels to dilate, allowing more easy passage of blood to vital parts.
The moment he’d done so he motioned for her to change spots and she readily did so, taking over giving the man air in sync with Daniel’s compressions.
CPR was hard work. Anyone who hadn’t performed it had no idea of the stamina required to keep at it, of the strain it took on a person.
After what seemed like hours, but couldn’t have been more than a few minutes at most, Kimberly offered to trade, to give Daniel a break, but he shook his head.
That’s when she saw it.
The way he kept glancing at the little boy, who was sobbing in his mother’s arms.
She knew what he was thinking, what he was remembering.
Not about Ryan, but the day his father had died.
How his own mother had held him while he’d cried.
He’d already been kicked in the gut by her revelation about Ryan. Being subjected to this, to the memories it would bring back, might down him.
Never had she wanted to hold him more, to take him in her arms and love away his worries. Or at least do her best to try.
Daniel’s pain was her pain and she’d caused so much of the hurt he’d experienced tonight. Although nothing could atone for what she’d done, she’d spend the rest of her life attempting to make up for what she’d robbed him of.
Never had Kimberly been so relieved as when she heard the wail of the ambulance’s sirens.
The paramedics quickly took over, injecting the man with atropine and shocking him with a mobile defibrillator. And again.
“We have a heartbeat!” one of the paramedics exclaimed, and a cheer went up from the crowd.
Not that the man was out of danger, but the fact he now had a heartbeat gave better odds of survival.