"Tell me," she said in a panting whisper.
"Your boy is going to be okay." I put my arm around her. "Everything's under control. The doctors say he's going to live and pull through and...."
I stopped. I wondered what words I was going to use when no words that I had ever heard in my life would be the right ones.
"Tell me." She pulled from my grasp and tilted her head so that she could look up into my eyes and read them like a printed page. "Tell me!"
"He cut out the boy's—he said he couldn't stand whistling. It was a phobia, he claimed. Eight bullets cured his phobia, if any."
"He cut out what?"
"Your son's tongue."
I put my arm around her again, but it wasn't necessary. She didn't cry out, she didn't slump. Her head did go down and her eyes did blink once or twice, but that was all.
"He was the only little boy on Mars who could whistle," she said.
All of the emotion within her was somehow squeezed into those few words.