Free The New Moon's Arms by Nalo Hopkinson

pardon?”
    “Never mind. They reach yet?”
    “Not quite…” The crackle of the radio call interrupted her. I wished I could understand what they were saying.
    “They have located the patient, ma’am. They want me to tell you that from the racket he’s making, his lungs are probably fine.”
    I managed to laugh a little. Now that I knew the child was getting help, reaction was setting in. My whole body shook. My sunburned face and leg were screaming at me.
    “There’s a Coast Guard speedboat waiting at the dock to take him to hospital.”
    “Already?”
    “Two minutes three seconds from Cayaba to Dolorosse,” she said proudly. “You could go back now.”
    “Thank you. Thank you.” I hung up the phone and began the walk back. The drums inside my head had changed to a chorus of gongs. Two minutes, three seconds. Took almost half hour by waterbus. I stopped to wait for a bout of the spins to pass, then kept walking.
    When I reached back to the little boy, the two paramedics were kneeling beside him in the sand. They had put some kind of contraption under him; like a slotted spoon with no handle. He had a hard plastic collar around his neck. The man who had helped us—Hector?—was holding the boy’s head in his two hands, keeping it still. Everybody was wearing blue rubber gloves. The boy looked so frightened! “It’s all right, small one,” said Mr. Goonan. “Everything going to be all right.” He had long black hair pulled back into a ponytail. Why a perfectly good-looking man would go and do that kind of stupidness?
    Jerry looked up and saw me. “Hey, Miz L.”
    “He hurt bad?” I asked. “His neck?”
    “The collar, you mean? Just a precaution. Pam, hand me the stethoscope there, nuh?”
    The child, sobbing, said something. I didn’t recognise the language.
    Pamela got the stethoscope out of the black doctor bag sitting on the sand and handed it to Jerry. She looked off . Stone-faced, like jumbie walking on her grave. Pam was a strapping red woman with light brown skin. Not this morning, though. Her face was yellow, bloodless.
    Jerry listened to the boy’s chest, handed the stethoscope back to Pamela. “You check his pulse yet?” he asked her.
    “Sorry.” With two fingers, she touched the boy’s wrist like she was touching a whip snake. “You want me to check his pupils, too?”
    “No. Nothing wrong with them. Small and reactive. Miz L., you the one who found him, right?”
    I told him what had happened. As I talked to him, he put his hands around the child’s hips, pressed his thumbs towards each other. He started working his way down the child’s good leg. “Hector, you okay there?” he asked.
    “Doing fine.”
    Pamela said, “Pulse is regular and full at 115, BP 94/80, resps 24, SpO2 100 percent. You want the monitor on?”
    “Nah. We can do that later. Either of you know this boy? You ever see him around the island?”
    I said no. Hector told them he wasn’t from Dolorosse. Pamela asked, “Either of you recognise what language he speaking?”
    Jerry sighed, gave her a hard look. “I recognise it. I don’t understand it, but I hear it before. He don’t have aphasia.”
    Pamela pressed her lips together. She didn’t reply. Jerry was feeling the thigh of the boy’s damaged leg now. “You say he was unconscious when you found him?” he asked me. “When he woke up, he vomited?”
    “No, but I di… I don’t think so. I can’t remember. I’m sorry.”
    Jerry was close to the boy’s knee. The child got agitated. He was complaining, saying the same words over and over. Jerry said, “Hector, most likely I’ll hurt him when I touch his lower leg. Make sure you don’t let his head move.”
    “All right.”
    “I going to work as fast as I can. Miz L., I need you to hold his torso for me.”
    “You sure you don’t want Pamela to do it?”
    “No. You the one who found him. He might remember that. And the two of you keep talking to him, all right? Look in his eyes and