his pulse, looked at Kenny and said, “He’s tachycardic. Blood pressure’s high.”
But Max just smacked him on the head. “Of course it is, Josh. I’ve been dancing all night.”
It turned out, Max had taught both of the paramedics who showed up that night, and even though they were overly thorough, everything else seemed to check out on Max. They wanted to take him to the ER right then, but Max managed to talk them out of it. “Nobody’s ever thrown me a sixtieth birthday party before,” he told them, “and I really don’t want to miss it.”
Somehow, after they helped him up, he charmed them into having some snacks, and they agreed to give him a few minutes to drink some water and then reevaluate.
They took a few cookies, but even as they were eating, they were watching him. Babette and I were watching him, too.
But he seemed totally back to his old self. Laughing. Joking around. When the band finally started up again, it was one of Max’s favorites: ABBA’s “Dancing Queen.”
As soon as he heard it, Max was looking around for Babette. When he caught her eye about ten feet away, he pointed at her, then at himself, then at the dance floor.
“No,” Babette called. “You need to rest and hydrate!”
“Wife,” Max growled. “They are literally playing our song.”
Babette walked over to scold him—and maybe flirt with him a little, too. “Behave yourself,” she said.
“I’m fine,” he said.
“You just—”
But before she could finish, he pulled her into his arms and pressed his hand against the small of her back.
I saw her give in. I felt it.
I gave in, too. This wasn’t a mosh pit, after all. They were just swaying, for Pete’s sake. He’d had at least six glasses of water by now. He looked fine. Let the man have his birthday dance. It wasn’t like they were doing the worm.
Max spun Babette out, but gently.
He dipped her next, but carefully.
He was fine. He was fine. He was absolutely fine.
But then he started coughing.
Coughing a lot.
Coughing so hard, he let Babette go, and he stepped back and bent over.
Next, he looked up to meet Babette’s eyes, and that’s when we saw he was coughing up blood—bright red, and lots of it—all over his hand and down his chin, drenching his bow tie and his shirt.
He coughed again, and then he hit the floor.
The paramedics were back over to him in less than a second, ripping his shirt open, cutting off the bow tie, intubating him and squeezing air in with a bag, performing CPR compressions. I don’t really know what else was going on in the room then. Later, I heard that Alice rounded up all the kids and herded them right outside to the garden. I heard the school nurse dropped to her knees and started praying. Mrs. Kline, Max’s secretary for thirty years, tried helplessly to wipe up a splatter of blood with cocktail napkins.
For my part, all I could do was stare.
Babette was standing next to me, and at some point, our hands found each other’s, and we wound up squeezing so tight that I’d have a bruise for a week.
The paramedics worked on Max for what seemed like a million years—but was maybe only five minutes: intensely, bent over him, performing the same insistent, forceful movements over his chest. When they couldn’t get him back, I heard one of them say, “We need to transport him. This isn’t working.”
Transport him to the hospital, I guessed.
They stopped to check for a rhythm, but as they pulled back a little, my breath caught in my throat, and Babette made a noise that was half-gasp, half-scream.
Max, lying there on the floor, was blue.
“Oh, shit,” Kenny said. “It’s a PE.”
I glanced at Babette. What was a PE?
“Oh, God,” Josh said, “look at that demarcation line.”
Sure enough, there was a straight line across Max’s rib cage, where the color of his skin changed from healthy and pink to blue. “Get the gurney,” Kenny barked, but as he did his voice cracked.
That’s when I saw there were tears on Kenny’s face.
Then I looked over at Josh: his, too.
And then I just knew exactly what they knew. They would wipe their faces on their sleeves, and keep doing compressions on Max, and keep working him, and transport him to the hospital, but it wouldn’t do any good. Even though he was Max—our principal, our hero, our living legend.
All the love in the world wouldn’t be enough to keep him with us.
And