He looked around one final time, asking himself if he really wanted to do this. The answer was yes, and so he kicked the footstool away, expecting to hear the crack of his neck breaking deep in his head before the tunnel of light opened before him—the tunnel with his family standing at the far end, beckoning him to a second and better life where harmless boys were not raped and murdered.

There was no crack. He had missed or ignored the part in the Wikipedia entry about how a certain drop was necessary to break the neck of a man weighing two hundred and five pounds. Instead of dying, he began to strangle. As his windpipe closed and his eyes bulged in their sockets, his previously drowsing survival instinct awakened in a clangor of alarm bells and a glare of interior security lights. In a space of three seconds his body overrode his brain and the desire to die became the brute will to live.

Fred raised his hands, groped, and found the rope. He pulled with all his strength. The rope slackened, and he was able to draw a breath—necessarily shallow, because the noose was still tight, the knot digging into the side of his throat like a swollen gland. Holding on with one hand, he groped for the branch to which he had tied the rope. His fingers brushed its underside, and loosed a few flakes of bark that fluttered down onto his hair, but that was all.

He was not a fit man in his middle age, most of his exercise consisting of trips to the fridge for another beer during one of his beloved Dallas Cowboys football games, but even as a high school kid in phys ed, five pull-ups had been the best he could do. He could feel his one-handed grip slipping, and grabbed the rope with his other hand again, holding it slack long enough to pull in another half-breath, but unable to yank himself any higher. His feet swung back and forth eight inches above the lawn. One of his slippers came off, then the other. He tried to call for help, but all he could manage was a rusty wheeze . . . and who would possibly be awake to hear him at this hour of the morning? Nosy old Mrs. Gibson next door? She would be asleep in her bed with her rosary in her hand, dreaming of Father Brixton.

His hands slipped. The branch creaked. His breath stopped. He could feel the blood trapped in his head pulsing, getting ready to burst his brains. He heard a rasping sound and thought, It wasn’t supposed to be like this.

He flailed for the rope, a drowning man reaching for the surface of the lake into which he has fallen. Large black spores appeared in front of his eyes. They burst into extravagant black toadstools. But before they overwhelmed his sight, he saw a man standing on the patio in the moonlight, one hand resting possessively on the barbecue where Fred would never grill another steak. Or maybe it wasn’t a man at all. The features were crude, as if punched into being by a blind sculptor. And the eyes were straws.

6

June Gibson happened to be the woman who had made the lasagna Arlene Peterson dumped over her head before suffering her heart attack, and she wasn’t asleep. Nor was she thinking about Father Brixton. She was suffering herself, and plenty. It had been three years since her last attack of sciatica, and she had dared to hope it was gone for good, but here it was again, a nasty uninvited visitor who just barged in and took up residence. Only a telltale stiffness behind her left knee after the post-funeral gathering at the Petersons’ next door, but she knew the signs and begged Dr. Richland for an oxycodone prescription, which he had reluctantly written. The pills only helped a little. The pain ran down her left side from the small of her back to her ankle, where it cinched her with a thorny manacle. One of the cruelest attributes of sciatica—hers, anyway—was that lying down intensified the pain instead of easing it. So she sat here in her living room, dressed in her robe and pajamas, alternately watching an infomercial for sexy abs on TV and playing solitaire on the iPhone her son had given her for Mother’s Day.

Her back was bad and her eyes were failing, but she had muted the sound on the infomercial and there was nothing wrong with her ears. She heard a gunshot next door clearly, and leaped to her feet with no thought for the bolt of pain that pistoned down the entire left side of her body.

Dear God, Fred Peterson has just shot himself.

She grabbed her cane and hobbled, bent over and crone-like, to her back door. On the porch, and by the light of that heartless silver moon, she saw Peterson crumpled on his lawn. Not a gunshot after all. There was a rope around his neck, and it snaked a short distance to the broken branch around which it had been tied.

Dropping her cane—it would only slow her down—Mrs. Gibson sidesaddled down her back porch steps and negotiated the ninety feet between the two backyards at a lurching jog, unaware of her own cries of pain as her sciatic nerve went nuclear, ripping her from her skinny buttocks to the ball of her left foot.

She knelt beside Mr. Peterson, observing his swollen and empurpled face, the protruding tongue, and the rope half-buried in the ample flesh of his neck. She wriggled her fingers under the rope and pulled with all her strength, unleashing another blast of agony. The cry this occasioned she was aware of: a high, long, ululating scream. Lights went on across the street, but Mrs. Gibson didn’t see them. The rope was finally loosening, thank God and Jesus and Mary and all the saints. She waited for Mr. Peterson to gasp in air.

He did not.

During the first phase of her working life, Mrs. Gibson had been a teller at Flint City First National. When she retired from that position at the mandatory age of sixty-two, she had taken the classes necessary to become a qualified Home Helper, a job she had done to supplement her retirement checks until the age of seventy-four. One of those classes had necessarily dealt with resuscitation. She now knelt beside Mr. Peterson’s considerable bulk, tilted his head up, pinched his nostrils shut, yanked his mouth open, and pressed her lips to his.

She was on her tenth breath, and feeling decidedly woozy, when Mr. Jagger from across the street joined her and tapped her on one bony shoulder. “Is he dead?”

“Not if I can help it,” said Mrs. Gibson. She clutched the pocket of her housecoat and felt the rectangle of her cell phone. She took it out and tossed it blindly behind her. “Call 911. And if I pass out, you’ll have to take over.”

But she didn’t pass out. On her fifteenth breath—and just as she really was about to—Fred Peterson took a big, slobbery breath on his own. Then another. Mrs. Gibson waited for his eyes to open, and when they did not, she rolled up one lid. Beneath was nothing but the sclera, not white but red with burst blood vessels.

Fred Peterson took a third breath, then stopped again. Mrs. Gibson began the best chest compressions she could manage, not sure they would help but feeling they could not hurt. She was aware that the pain in her back and down her leg had lessened. Was it possible that sciatica could be shocked out of one’s body? Of course not. The idea was ridiculous. It was adrenalin, and once the supply was exhausted, she would feel worse than ever.

A siren floated over the early morning darkness, approaching.

Mrs. Gibson returned to forcing her breath down Fred Peterson’s throat (her most intimate contact with a man since her husband had died in 2004), stopping each time she felt on the verge of toppling into a gray faint. Mr. Jagger did not offer to take over, and she didn’t ask him to. Until the ambulance came, this was between her and Peterson.

Sometimes when she stopped, Mr. Peterson would take one of those great slobbering breaths. Sometimes he would not. She was barely cognizant of the pulsing red ambulance lights when they began to zap the two adjacent yards, strobing across the jagged stub of branch on the hackberry tree where Mr. Peterson had tried to hang himself. One of the EMTs eased her to her feet, and she was able to stand on them almost without pain. It was amazing. No matter how temporary the miracle was, she’d accept it with thanks.