Half smiling—because of the kiss and the craziness. At the other side of the house loud music had started, with shouts and laughter; and here in this shadowy room, the little crowd of silent anxious faces, the boy on the floor, his chalk-white face and blue lips, the woman hovering and inserting the syringe into his right nostril, depressing the plunger, the boy’s head moving as though in protest, and then the left nostril, penetrating a bubble of snot and shooting the Narcan up his nose.

The music was still thumping the walls and the floor as the boy opened his mouth. No sound came out, his mouth was simply gaping, but he wagged his head in a sort of sluggish resistance and he gasped, choked a little, and, attempting to raise his head, he drooled on his chin.

“He’s moving,” Franco said, a flutter of panicky relief in his voice. “Is he all right?”

“No—this is going to take a while.” The woman was peering with a small flashlight into the boy's eyes, then wiping his chin, brushing his hair out of his eyes, tidying his shirt. “And if he’s been on fentanyl he’s going into withdrawal.”

Just then, over the sound of the music and her voice, and the shouts from the other room, and the laughter, the wail of a siren, growing louder, nearer.

“Tell them to take him to Kahuku. I’ll go with him. He needs to detox.”

Still slack-jawed and doglike in his stupor, Sharkey now filled the window, watching the frantic figures, admiring the efficiency of the small woman in the flimsy pareu—pretty wahine, he was thinking—and she seemed the only person in the house with a working brain, someone with a gift, in the sudden visitation from next door, a ministering angel taking charge.

What he first noticed from her physique was that she was not a surfer, and that confounded him, because this slight, small-boned woman had obvious power. She had flown into the room and hovered over the boy in his distress—muscular, blue-lipped, frozen in a convulsion, pale twitching toes—and she had kissed him with force, as insistent as a lover, pressing her mouth against his, and breathed life into him. Lifting her face from his, she had worked magic on his nose with a syringe while caressing him, all this time Sharkey gaping at the window. Even in his half-buzzed state, dead-eyed, his mouth open, his flesh like clay, Sharkey was aroused, as though a voyeur at a scene of unembarrassed passion.

“You’re blocking the light,” the woman called out to Sharkey.

“Sorry,” he said, and heard his voice as goofy.

But the woman had gotten to her feet and was shaping her hands in the air as though trying to grasp something.

“What’s all this fuss about?”

She meant the music, the shouts, the laughter from the other room.