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him in the hall, shepherding my grandmother with his hands on his hips.
    “Get out of the way,” he said to me.
    She was carrying my nephew in her arms. But not like she normally did. She had him lying on her left arm, his head in her hand and his feet at her elbow, facing downward. With her right hand, she was slapping him on the back. It was him who was choking.
    “Is he breathing?” my mother asked. She and my brother were behind Dad. They disappeared into the living room. I took the chance to search my grandmother’s bed. I wanted to get the chick. Take it to its drawer. Let it grow in peace in its T-shirt nest, beside the cactus. But when I lifted the pillow I saw the eggshell. Broken. Beside it, a yellowish mark. I touched it. It was moist.
    “What’s that smell?” my sister asked.
    She was sitting on her bed, staring at the wall. Her voice came from behind the mask, toneless. “I don’t know,” I replied. I felt the sticky moisture, took one of the shell pieces and dropped the pillow.
    “Is the baby all right?” asked my sister, reeling off the question as if it were a single word.
    “I’ll go see.” Before leaving the room, I stopped under the doorframe. I asked if she was coming.
    “Not right now,” she answered.
    I went into the living room and perched on the brown sofa. Grandma was on a chair by the second window, the one at the top of one of the walls. She had the baby in the same position as before. He was making little gurgling sounds that became less and less frequent. At first they were constant, almost at normal breathing speed, but the intervals got longer and longer as my mother’s erratic pacing around the chair accelerated. She was biting her thumbnail.
    My brother covered his mouth to hide his laughter.
    Dad approached the baby while fiddling nervously with the key hung from his neck. He let go and smacked the little boy so hard that Grandma had to raise her arm to keep him from falling off. “Not like that,” she protested.
    Still, after the heavy blow the gurgling ended. The baby’s nose bubbled when air entered his body again. My mother interrupted her frantic pacing. My brother began to march up and down the room, lifting his knees with each step, swinging his arms. He whistled his song all the way to the table.
    “Not now!” Mom shouted at him. The melody broke off. The ground stopped trembling. My brother made a scraping sound in his throat like he always did before one of his crying fits.
    “Cry all you like,” she said.
    My brother ran out into the hall. When he slammed the door the living room lightbulb swung. The shadow from my head stretched until it melded with the chair’s. There, my grandmother turned the baby around. His face was dark red now. She hunched her back to listen more closely.
    The muffled gurgling continued.
    “He’s not breathing,” said my grandmother. She shot to her feet. The chair balanced on two legs, the back resting on the wall. Grandma bit her lips, her lopsided eyebrows creased above eyes that struggled not to cry. She paced through the room’s half-light, rocking the little boy, and sang to him like she did on any other day when it was time for his nap. Then Grandma forced open the baby’s mouth and stuck two fingers inside. They disappeared up to the knuckles. When she took them out they shone with dribble.
    “I don’t know what else to do,” she whispered. Then she shouted it. “I don’t know what else to do!”
    She turned the little boy around. Then tipped him over. She slapped his back again and again. She shook him.
    The baby was almost blue.
    “I don’t know what else to do!” The light from the bulb reflected in the moisture around her eyes.
    “We have to get him out of here,” my mother said. “He’s going to—”
    “We won’t get there in time,” Dad cut in.
    I looked toward the door that was on the other side of the room, near the table. The one that had always been unlocked. The one I’d approached for the