He had felt this nervous excitement before football games, but those were games for entertainment. This was life and death. If they lost, there wasn’t another chance the following Saturday. All the months of work now came down to the health of one small child. He walked with fear in his heart—the fear of failure compounded by the fear of retribution. Park asked the neighborhood constable to accompany them and stand outside the tenement house. As they knocked on the tenement door in the strangely quiet hallway, Park looked at Jonathan and took a deep breath. “No one has assailed us yet,” Jonathan said encouragingly. Park nodded and knocked again. When it opened, Angelo’s mother Lucia immediately began crying and Jonathan’s heart sank. Then she startled both of them by grabbing Doctor Park’s hand and kissing it. Park looked at Jonathan, his eyebrows raised, as the woman pulled him into the room by his arm to see Angelo. The boy was lying on a thin mattress on the floor, breathing normally, and when he looked up at them, he smiled.
