Chapter One
Tony peered into the living room to look in Samantha and Jonathan. "How's that homework coming?"
"I'm already done," said Jonathan, his face buried in a thick book titled simply Earth Science. "I'm just reading ahead in the textbook so I'll be ready for the next unit." He turned a page. "Did you know that glacial ice is considered a metamorphic rock, Tony?"
"No kidding? In that case, here comes a blast of lava!" He'd been rinsing vegetables for dinner, and shook his wet hands in Jonathan's face. The boy shrieked, cowering behind his book. "How 'bout you, Sam? Need any help?"
Sam wheezed a very phony-sounding sneeze. "Dad, I think I'm allergic to geometry. Can you write me a note?"
I should put these two kids in a blender, Tony thought. The final product would be incredibly well-rounded. "No, but I'll help you with whatever you're stuck on."
"How about a trade?" Sam bargained. "I'll cook dinner, and you finish the assignment."
Jonathan made a face. "If she makes dinner, I'm eating at Steve's."
Sam glowered at him. "Good, and while you're at it, why don't you sleep there? It'll give us a chance to clear the stink out of the house for a few hours."
"Hey, I smell fine!" Jonathan's indignation quickly gave way to anxiety. "Don't I?" he asked, lifting an arm and sniffing tentatively underneath it.
"You smell…like an eleven-year-old boy," said Tony diplomatically. "Now be nice, the both of yous!" Tony commanded, taking custody of Sam's textbook as she lifted it to throw at Jonathan. He flipped back to the page she had marked. "Sam, which problem are you on?"
"Number one," she grumbled with a hint of embarrassment.
"Wow, that's farther along than I would have guessed," said Jonathan, applauding sarcastically.
"If you don't shut your trap, I'm gonna shut it for you!" Samantha warned, brandishing a fist.
"Ooh, beating up a kid three years younger than you. Real impressive," Jonathan snorted derisively.
Tony didn't bother taking a side. They were both being insufferable, as was their usual pattern at this time of day. After hours at school, followed by homework, they were tired and stressed, and it being so close to dinnertime, they were also getting hungry. Once the books were out of sight and hot food was on the table, they'd be their terrific selves again. "I said put a lid on it, you two!" He skimmed the page. "Number one, let's see… What is equation of the line whose slope is 3 and crosses the y-axis at 4?" Tony drummed his fingers, struggling to remember his own long-ago battle with introductory geometry. "Let's see, if the slope is three—"
"Y equals 3x plus 4," Jonathan rattled off smugly.
"I knew that," said Tony and Samantha in unison.
Jonathan just giggled. "Okay."
"He's right, though," Tony observed. "Let's see, what's next? Use the Pythagorean Theorem to find the missing side of right triangle where a equals three and b equals 4."
"Oh, I know this one!" said Sam, cheering up a bit. "I saw it on one of those God-awful School House Rock videos! The answer is—"
"Five!" Jonathan cut in.
"Jonathan, you ain't gotta show off," said Tony. "We all know your brain is tops—why don't you go outside and work on your body for a while? Shoot some hoops, or take a bike ride."
"I guess a bike ride sounds okay," said Jonathan, as Tony had predicted he would. The kid had gotten a top-of-the-line twelve-speed road bike for his birthday, just last week, and hadn't had a chance to get bored with it yet. Jonathan headed for the door.
"Oh no you don't!" Tony barked at him, stopping him in his tracks. "Remember what came with the bike?"
"Aw, come on, Tony!" the boy groaned. "It makes me look like a dork."
"Pfft. You only wish you could blame that on the helmet," sneered Sam.
"Shut up!"
"Oh, it does not," Tony insisted. "Joe Montana wears a helmet, and nobody gives him shade about it."
Jonathan's face scrunched up in confusion. "Who's Joe Montana?"
Marone a mi, I've failed this child as a mentor, Tony realized with dismay. "Darth Vader wore one, too."
"Easy for him, he was bald and didn't have to worry about helmet hair," scoffed Jonathan.
"I wore a helmet. A batting helmet. When I played in the big leagues," Tony tried.
"A batting helmet makes you look like a cool jock. A bike helmet makes you look like a seizure patient," Jonathan argued.
"Good. If a bully picks on you, you can pretend to go into a seizure. That'll scare him off." Tony went to the hall closet, took the unused helmet off the shelf, placed it on the boy's and buckled securely under his chin.
Jonathan stopped to look in the mirror beside the front door, making a face. "It doesn't help that Mom bought me one with the Ninja Turtles all over it. What am I, five?"
Sam rolled her eyes. "Jonathan, you love Ninja Turtles."
"Well, I don't need to flaunt it! Life in the fifth grade is hard enough!" the boy snapped, storming out and slamming the door behind him.
Sam gave her father an innocent smile. "Dad, I think I can finish up from here. Why don't you go out front and keep an eye on him? We both know he's going to take that off the moment he gets to the curb."
"Samantha, your lack of respect for my intelligence hurts me deeply. Could you at least have the decency to wait till I'm gone before setting aside your books and picking up the remote?" Tony plucked the remote from her grasp, sat it carefully out of reach, then placed her math book back in her lap. "Now, what do we got next?"
"Polyhedrons," said Sam without enthusiasm.
"Hey, don't knock polyhedrons. You ever take up shooting craps, this knowledge is gonna come in handy." He perched on the arm of the sofa, looking over her shoulder. "Let's see, if a polyhedron has twenty-seven edges, how many sides would that be?"
"Sixty-one?" Sam offered.
Tony did the math mentally, then shook his head. "Think lower."
"Three?"
"Not that much lower."
"Twenty-four?"
She wasn't even trying, and that infuriated him more than anything else possibly could have. "Where are you getting these random numbers?" He looked up from the textbook, and saw her skimming a list of channels in the TV Guide. "Put that down!"
Whatever protest she was about to make died on her tongue as a bloodcurdling scream pierced the air. "Uh-oh. Sounds like Jonathan's pulling on Jenny Wittener's hair again," Tony sighed, standing up and heading for the door.
"Ah, young love." Samantha rolled her eyes.
"Jonathan, how many times do I gotta tell you? Just kiss her and get it over w—" As he yanked open the door, Tony's heart fell into his shoes. "Samantha, call 9-1-1."
Samantha happily set her books aside. "Did she knock another of his teeth out? Was it an adult tooth this time? I warned him not to-"
"Just do it, now!" With a speed Tony had not known he still had the capacity for, he leapt from the porch, skipping over the stairs completely, and ran out into the street.
Jonathan lay sprawled on his back in front of a crookedly-parked pickup truck with a badly-dented hood, trailed by heavy skid marks. The helmet Tony had forced on him was badly cracked, with a large rift of bare Styrofoam running between Leonardo and Donatello. The kid was out cold. The scream must have come from the car's driver, an emaciated blond man with glazed eyes, who was standing beside his vehicle, hyperventilating.
The terror gripping Tony's heart won out over the rage bubbling up in his stomach, and he shoved past the guy instead of beating him senseless. He knelt at Jonathan's side. Thinking back on the CPR and first aid class he'd been forced to take, far too long ago, when he'd started coaching Little League, he gave the boy's supine body a quick once-over. His torso was bent sideways, somewhere between a forty-five- and a ninety-degree angle. He fought the urge to pick up the little boy he'd come to think of as his own and carry him to safety. There was no telling what damage moving him might do.
He picked up Jonathan's hand, putting two fingers to his wrist to check for a pulse. Nothing. Maybe it was his mistake, and he was feeling in the wrong spot? Please, God, let it be my mistake! He pressed his fingers to Jonathan's carotid artery, but there was nothing there, either. The kid's chest was as motionless as a corpse—no, no, no, think of a different metaphor Micelli! Tony immediately commanded himself. There wasn't any sign of breath in Jonathan's body. Tony put a hand in front of Jonathan's face, but there wasn't even the slightest breeze coming from his mouth or nose. "Jonathan, buddy?" There was no response, no movement, not even a blink of the eyes. Though Tony hadn't really suspected there would be.
He tilted Jonathan's head back, popped his jaw open like the nurse teaching the class had made him practice on that creepy-looking plastic dummy, and pinched his nose. Then he closed his mouth over Jonathan's and gave him two long puffs of air. A vile mixture of bile and half-digested tuna sandwiches flooded first Jonathan's mouth, then his own. Tony was too keyed up to bother being disgusted at the moment, spitting the secondhand vomit over his shoulder and then poking two fingers into the lifeless child's mouth to clear his airway.
"Hey, you!" he barked at the driver, who was still motionless with…what? Horror? Guilt? Fear? Good, Tony thought spitefully. "Ay-oh, snap out of it!" Tony picked up a rock lying in the gutter nearby and threw it at the driver, hitting him right in the upper arm.
The blow seemed to knock some tiny amount of sense into the guy, who blinked as if waking from a nightmare. "What?! What?!"
"Get over here and help me, already!" He impatiently tapped the asphalt beside Jonathan's head.
The unkempt creature, who reeked of cheap weed and sour sweat, dropped to his knees and crawled over where Tony had commanded him, as if he didn't fully trust his ability to walk upright. "What do I do?"
"Hold his head where it is and keep his airway clear." The stranger obeyed, clutching Jonathan's head with dirty, spindly fingers. Tony checked again for a pulse, just to make sure this was absolutely necessary, before proceeding. Doing chest compressions on someone with an obviously-busted spine didn't sit well with him, but at this point, the kid was already dead, and couldn't get much deader. "Pal-o-mine, if you can hear me, this is gonna hurt like crazy. I'm sorry, and if it'll make you feel better, you can punch me in the face when you come to." I'll look forward to it, if you get the chance. Placing the heel of his hand along the boy's sternum, he bore down, feeling the sickening crunch of breaking bones as Jonathan's chest fell, then rose again. Stomach rolling, he counted to fifteen, then gave the kid two more breaths. Then fifteen more compressions, then two more breaths.
The reedy stranger responsible for the whole mess caught him by the shoulder. "You're gonna wear yourself out, dude," the stranger slurred. "Let me handle the rescue breaths, you keep working on his heart."
"You know CPR?" Tony asked warily.
"Naw, but I saw what you've been doing. Pinch his nose, cover his mouth up tight with yours, then breath in until his chest goes up a little." The guy demonstrated.
The stranger's mouth didn't look any too clean, but they couldn't afford to turn away any help right now. He could clean Jonathan's mouth out with some Listerine later. "Go to it. And don't forget to keep his airway clear."
They worked in tandem for what could have been minutes or hours, until the flashing of lights and the screeching of sirens announced that Sam had followed through on calling 9-1-1. A pair of paramedics; one female and toting a large bag of supplies, one male and gripping a walkie-talkie. "What happened?" the lady asked as she knelt on the pavement beside them.
"What the hell does it look like happened, you dumbass?! I ran over a kid!" the stranger shrieked hysterically. "Get off your asses and save him! I don't wanna be a murderer, damn it!"
"What he said," Tony grunted, still pounding on Jonathan's chest. He hated to agree with the man, but a good idea was a good idea.
"Step aside, both of you," the lady paramedic firmly but gently commanded.
"Are you blind, lady? I can't, his heart ain't beating!" Tony Micelli didn't hit girls, but under the circumstances, and given the amount of adrenaline coursing through his veins at the moment, he wasn't above pitching her into the Thompsons' rosebushes if she tried to pry him off Jonathan.
She tugged the driver's grubby hands off Jonathan's face and touched his neck. "Actually, it is. It's weak, thready and irregular, but it's there."
"What?" Luckily for her, she had found the one sentence in the English language that could have gotten through to him. Tony finally stopped the compressions and reached for Jonathan's little wrist again. She was right. It wasn't much of a pulse, but it was there. "It's beating again. He's alive."
"Oh, thank God!" the driver sighed.
"He's alive!" Tony was no longer sure what direction Sam was in, so he screamed the words as loudly as he could in the hopes that they would reach her, not caring that he sounded for all the world like a mad scientist.
"Yes sir, and we want him to stay that way," the woman reminded him, gently nudging him out of the way. "Your son needs defibrillation and intubation on the double. You've done everything you could for him. Now it's time to let the professionals take over." Without further ado, she whipped out a pair of scissors, chopping right through the fancy cashmere sweater Angela had just bought for an obscene amount of money at Christmas, two short months ago. Then she gave the same treatment to the New York Knicks t-shirt underneath, which Tony had been so very proud to see Jonathan wearing for the first time this morning. Jonathan, I've spent far too long teaching you how to shoot hoops. Don't you dare die on me before you've had the chance to make a basket.
A blunt object struck Tony painfully in the back, and for a moment, he wondered if he was having sympathy pains. Then a pair of pudgy-faced, badly-winded cops converged on him. "Young lady, this is a restricted area."
For a short, bizarre moment, Tony wondered why he was being addressed as "young lady." Then a pair of small, familiar hands clutched him around the waist, and he realized who they were actually talking to, and what the heavy weight at his back was. "It's okay, officers. This is my daughter. She's the one who called you, and she won't do no harm." He dragged her around to stand by his side, putting an arm around her. He noticed that she was shivering, and then noticed that he was, too. Neither of them had bothered to put on a coat before running out into the icy February air. He rubbed her bare arms, trying to warm them up, grateful to have something to do.
"I called 9-1-1," said Sam, pointing out the obvious.
"I noticed. Thanks, sweetheart. You did good." He kissed the top of her head.
She took one glance at Jonathan and then quickly looked away, her face pale, as the paramedics shoved a long, plastic tube down his throat. "Is he going to be okay?"
"Yes," said Tony, praying it wasn't a lie.
A/N: Oh my. Look at that. I wrote something serious, and dare I say, depressing? Well, don't worry, folks. I'm sure it won't last long!