Deep Water Patricia Highsmith (elon musk reading list .txt) 📖

was in his way, feeling for Charley's heart, frenziedly feeling for a pulse in the wrist.

       "I can't find his pulse!" Melinda said hysterically. "Call Dr. Franklin!"

       "I'll call him!" Evelyn ran toward the house.

       "That may not mean anything," Phil said quickly. "Go ahead." He was feeling Charley's left wrist.

       Vic was on his knees facing Charley, lifting the bony, thin-skinned rib cage, letting it go, lifting from under the armpits. "Does this look right, Horace?"

       "It looks right," Horace said tensely. He knelt beside Vic, watching Charley's face. "You're supposed to keep the mouth open," he said, reaching unhesitantly as a doctor into Charley's mouth, pulling the tongue forward.

       "Do you think we should hold him up and drain the water out of him?" Phil asked.

       "No, you don't do that," Horace said. "You don't waste time with that."

       Vic lifted the ribs higher. He had never tried to give artificial respiration before, but he had read about it very recently in the 'World Almanac', one evening when Charley had been at the house, Vic happened to remember. But he remembered, too, that the book advised artificial respiration if the breathing had stopped and the heart was still beating, but Charley's heart was not beating. "Do you think," Vic said between strokes, "we should turn him over and try to massage his heart?" and though he thought he was calm, he felt it was a stupid, excited question, and just the kind of question he might have been expected to ask.

       "No," Horace said.

       "You're not doing it 'right'!" Melinda shrieked on her knees beside Vic.

       "Why? What's the matter?" Phil asked.

       "Do you think I should get a blanket?" Mary's high-pitched voice asked.

       "You're not doing it 'right'!" Melinda began to cry, to moan between the jagged sobs.

       "Let me take over when you get tired, Vic," Phil said. He kept feeling for a pulse in the left wrist, but from his frightened face Vic knew that he had not felt a flutter.

       Evelyn came running back. "Dr. Franklin's coming right away. He's calling the hospital and they're sending an ambulance."

       "Don't you think we should get a blanket for him?" Mary said again.

       "All right, I'll get one," Evelyn said and went off to the house again.

       "What do you think happened?" Phil asked. "Cramp?" Nobody answered.

       Melinda moaned, rocking from side to side, her eyes shut.

       "I wonder if he hit his head? Was he diving, Vic?" Phil asked. "No. He was paddling around—" Vic released the unelastic ribs—"in the shallow part."

       "He seemed all right?" Mary asked.

       "Yes," Vic said.

       Then Phil pushed Vic away. "Let me take over."

       A siren wailed in a slow, mournful rise and fall, came closer, and wailed still lower and stopped. Phil went on intently with the lifting and dropping of the ribs and shoulders. A couple of white-clad interns ran across the lawn toward them, carrying an oxygen tank.

       The light on the scene was ghastly—the dismal, blanching light of dawn. Nobody could come back to life in a light like this, Vic thought. It was a light for dying. Watching the interns bustling about, asking questions, recommencing the artificial respiration, Vic realized his own fatigue. He seemed to awaken from a trance. He realized for the first time that, if De Lisle were revived, he was doomed. That hadn't even crossed his mind while he had been giving him artificial respiration. He had simply done the best he could with the artificial respiration, he was sure of that, made the same movements he would have made if it had been Horace under his hands. He had gone through the proper motions, but he hadn't 'wanted' De Lisle to come back to life. Then, for a moment, it seemed unreal that he had drowned De Lisle, seemed like something he had imagined rather than done. Vic began to watch De Lisle's face intently, as all the others did—all the others except Melinda, who still wailed and whimpered, still stared into space in front of her as if she were out of her mind.

       An intern shook his head in discouragement.

       Vic heard a door slam. Then Dr. Franklin, a spry, serious little man with gray hair—the doctor who had seen Trixie into the world and who had set broken arms, treated acute indigestion, lanced boils, prescribed diets for, and tested the blood pressures of all of them—hurried across the lawn with his little black bag.

       "You've been giving the artificial respiration since you called me?" he asked, feeling De Lisle's wrist, lifting one of his lids.

       "Since before," Evelyn said. "Since a few minutes before."

       Dr. Franklin, too, gave a displeased jerk of his head.

       "You don't think there's any hope?" Evelyn asked.

       Melinda moaned louder.

       "Doesn't look like it," Dr. Franklin replied in a cheerless voice. He was preparing an injection.

       "Oooooooh-hooo-oo-hooooo!" Melinda covered her face.

       Dr. Franklin, apparently used to emergency night calls and to what he found on them, paid absolutely no attention to her, though he would have, Vic thought, if it had been he who had drowned. Dr. Franklin would have had time for a word to a wife. He stuck the needle into De Lisle's arm.

       "We should know in a few minutes," Dr. Franklin said. "Otherwise—" He was holding De Lisle's left wrist.

       Phil stood up, moved a few feet away, then Evelyn came over to him. Horace and Mary joined them, as if they were compelled to relieve their tension by putting a little distance between themselves and the dead man. Vic bent and took Melinda gently by the arm, but she shook him off. Vic joined the others.

       Phil looked ashen, as if he were about to faint. "I suppose we could all use some coffee," he said, but nobody moved.

       Everybody was glancing back at the cluster of interns and doctor, at the body half covered by the steamer rug.

       "I'm afraid there's nothing we can do,"