Burning Down the House (15 page)

If you're doing chest compressions in CPR, you focus on pushing just hard enough, on the number of compressions you're supposed to do before you stop to let your partner push a breath in with the ventilator bag. You imagine there is a heart in there somewhere, that you're doing the equivalent of taking it up gently in your hands and squeezing, purposefully pumping blood through an almost endless tangle of pipes. You don't think of the victim as a person, and you don't think that your hands are in a place so personal that it's the regular preserve of lovers or children—or, at its impersonal best, a doctor's cold stethoscope. Hell, do it well enough and you can almost forget it's a person at all. You can think it's just numbers— sets of five, to be precise, with that single breath in between every five compressions.

If I'm the one breathing for her, I try not to think about the tongue I've pushed aside to insert an airway, or about her lips or her voice or the way she might smile. It's much easier just to focus on the steps, to do the things I was trained to do, to ignore the thought of how her too-small hands, her curled fingers, must have felt when they were warm and alive. Don't ever imagine that finger strung through a ringlet of a granddaughter's hair or the whole thing will fly apart.

But all of that is right there, hanging in the wings, waiting to swoop down on you at just the wrong moment, when something suddenly becomes so familiar that you're taken away by it, putting other people—people you know and love—in that house and on that floor instead of her.

The home care nurse was standing next to us as well, her cream-coloured knitting and a pair of knitting needles left in the rocking chair where she must have been sitting. She was just an arm's length away from where her patient had died, without ever noticing the older woman gradually slipping away.

The old woman had had dental surgery earlier that day, and she spent the evening in the recliner watching television and slowly bleeding to death. It turned out that she had started bleeding at the back of her mouth and had simply bled out without so much as a whimper of distress, travelling from miserable to unconscious to moribund. Just like that: she changed channels, going from alive to dead, with hardly a sign that anything was wrong.

Hindsight's a devil: someone might point out that the nurse should have tried to wake her. But if you're sleeping every night in a recliner, you'd hardly want someone to wake you every half-hour to see if you're still all right.

When we loaded the White Woman onto the gurney and took her out to the ambulance, I looked at the two firefighters, the younger of them with his hair cut brutally short and soft, his face still not fully formed—much the way I must have looked during my first year with the Wolfville department—and I saw the clots of dark blood on his gloves and on the knees of his bunker pants, others caught dangling on the trailing edges of his sleeves.

It's not supposed to work that way—you're supposed to get eased into things. You're not meant to get slammed with a three-dimensional graphic medical case just a few months in. As an officer, if you do that to your firefighters, you lose them quick. Sometimes, though, I think it doesn't matter; I'm sure that most firefighters hit a wall somewhere, and eventually find themselves on a scene that marks them up for good. I wonder, too, if it wouldn't be better for everyone involved to recognize early on that some people just aren't suited for the whole thing. Maybe this should happen when they can still get out without looking at other firefighters— people who've become friends, people they've shared a tremendous amount with—and thinking they're letting them down by leaving.

Those two freshmen, still probationary firefighters, got their trial by fire—or at least by gore—and I remember talking to one of them, Mike Reid, barely shaving then and with a scraggle of a goatee, about whether he was okay. I received only a soft, embarrassed half smile in return, along with a mumbled “I'm all right” that was a clear push away.

Parts of Newfoundland still celebrate Guy Fawkes Night, so November 5 is often spent driving around the fire district, checking on bonfires that might be anything from backyard brush piles to stacks of burning, threadbare car tires. In St. John's, the fires are illegal, and the fire department there plays cat and mouse with youngsters who have collected scraps of construction waste and playground fences—and sometimes even old propane cylinders and spray-paint cans. In our town, we merely kept track of where the fires were, dropping in to watch for anything that might be getting out of control.

Once, following a huge column of reeking heavy smoke to an abandoned basement on the end of a narrow road, we found a group of three men unloading rolls of used carpet and underlay into a massive blaze inside the four concrete walls of the basement. When they weren't piling on more carpet, they were drinking beer. When our truck pulled up, huge and red with the emergency flashers going, one of the men staggered over to the yellow-jacketed, helmeted firefighters climbing down from the front seats. There were sooty streaks down his face from the smoke, and he looked confused.

“Are you the police, then?” he said.

THIRTEEN

The trainers might have had the decency to teach me the averages in the very beginning—then I wouldn't have had to learn them for myself, sliding sideways with every step, thinking I was making some sort of critical mistake and people were dying as a result. They might have taught me up front, as I understand they do now, that only one out of every ten people you treat with cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) will survive—and by “survive” I just mean they will make it to the hospital with something close to a beating heart and a working brain.

Talk to a doctor about it and she will just shake her head: even in a hospital, with all the equipment there and at the ready, defibrillators and drugs and all, it's still only one in ten. You'd think it would be common sense to let potential rescuers know what the odds really are, so they won't go around beating themselves up.

But that's not how it was taught when I started training on the big Rescue Randy doll with the sweet spot in the centre of his chest where I always did the cleanest compressions. Rescue Randy, in his red and blue track suit, always expired the moment I stopped working on him, the tape feeding out from his monitor flatlining as soon as the trainer said to stop.

It turned out that was pretty much the way it worked in real life too.

I'd like to say I derived more satisfaction from it, that there was some point at which I clearly saved a life, that I had some kind of proof that I'd even been doing the right things. But it's fuzzy, that line between intention and effort, between trying and actually doing. More to the point, it's hard to cross the line between trying to save a life and actually having someone live.

On the night of the March social for the Portugal Cove fire department, I was home and sound asleep when the pager went off, the radio chattering that the paramedics needed help on Bradbury's Road. That's all the dispatcher said. The whole house sound asleep, then the pulse of the pager followed by a handful of words.

That night it was icy roads, and no one on the radio. There wasn't enough snow to stop my pickup truck, but it had been the kind of night you'd prefer to pull the curtains, turn off the outside lights and pretend the entire world was framed in by the outside walls of your house. It was the kind of night when it's nice to have a fire banked down and glowing red in the wood stove, a blanket on the floor and the whole house barricaded, braced, against the winter wind outside.

There was snow drifting up against the back door as I went out. Each step was accompanied by a ripping crunch as my foot broke through the thin layer of ice on top of the softer snow. The kind of night where you're driving right along the edge of the freezing line, so that sometimes there's a wave of fine, almost dusty snow, and the next there's rain, freezing into smears on a windshield that's not warm enough yet for the wipers to sweep clear.

Once out and on the road, there was no sign that anyone else was responding, no trucks keying up their microphones to say that they'd even left the station. I could feel the swing of the back end of my pickup through the slush and snowdrifts, could feel the motion of it in my ears like I was on the edge of losing my balance, so I found myself always fighting against the rear wheels, cutting the front wheels too far over, trying to stay out of the ditch. The night was both empty and lonely, and after a half mile on the road and only thirty feet or so higher up the hill, the rain vanished completely. Snow was running sideways across the road in that proprietary way that suggests no one else has been there in hours. They were long, gilled, breathing snowdrifts, cut only by my own wheel marks in the rear-view mirror.

Turning off Bradbury's Road and into the driveway, I saw the rescue truck abandoned, its lights spinning, doors yawning open in the blowing snow with no one in sight. They'd come up the same road that I had turned down, but they'd come up from the bottom, approaching the house from the other direction.

Everyone was there in the living room—husband, wife, two firefighters. The house would go on the market a couple of weeks later, a blue and white realtor's sign swinging in the wind in the front yard, the curtains taken down so that you could look through the front windows as you drove by and see all the way through the house and out the back through the kitchen windows.

The husband was on the floor, and immediacy makes things simple: the room was muddy, and everything else seemed to be drawn from the same family of earth tones. He was sprawled flat on his back near the stairs, the couch pushed back out of the way. The brightest light on in the kitchen, casting a long yellow triangle across the carpet. The staircase behind, angled up. I can draw it all in my head with fat crayons, umber and brown and black, and the whole picture could be summed up with a minute's work, a pattern of simple shapes in muted shades—but I'd probably be the only one who could make sense out of that drawing.

There was an airway down his throat, obscene, so that his mouth was a small and unyielding white plastic O, and the two firefighters were alone there, no one to drive, no one else to help. What kind of trust is that? They were out beyond the reach of the radios, both working, both trusting that someone else would eventually show up. You don't know how physical CPR is unless you've done it; they were working him, sweating already. His skin was too, too white, fish-belly white, and it was shivering away from their hands in ripples. They pushed, and his stomach shimmied reflexively away in fleshy little waves.

They wanted the backboard and the gurney. One of the firefighters was ripping apart the trauma kit looking for the ambu-bag, the ribbed plastic cylinder that you squeeze to force air into the patient. They wanted someone to help them lift him onto the board, someone to help with the straps and to wrangle the gurney back out through the door, and no one in the world would ever want to be in that room. They needed help, in the kind of place most people would just want to walk away from.

When the big pumper came, it drove spinning right across the lawn, the heavy truck sliding sideways over the grass, tearing great trenches down through the snow to the soil. There was still green left in the grass—I remember seeing that—and even though it was March, the ground wasn't frozen under the snow, so that the tracks left by the pumper were raw and wet and oozing, the ground successfully insulated from the harsh cold of the earlier part of the winter.

I wound up driving the man's wife into the city after the rescue left. They knew better than to let her ride with them in the back, knew better than to let her watch the sheer brutality it takes to try to bring someone back to life after his heart has stopped. So she sat beside me in the front seat of the pickup while the red light whirred, spinning on its almost noiseless axis just inside the windshield, and we drove headlong into the battering snow, the wind darting at us sideways through every single gap in the trees.

I remember asking that Faustian question: Do you want me to put the siren on? Of course you want me to put the siren on. If you could press a button and make the truck sprout wings to get there even faster, you would. But no one will ever say yes. No one ever asks for the siren, embarrassed that its wail might be unnecessary, embarrassed because of the attention it will inevitably draw.

Embarrassed because someone has put that choice into their hands.

I took a different route to the hospital than the rescue did, yet at Thorburn Road we came together again. The rescue screamed by us at the T of an intersection, the driver stone-faced in my headlights and looking straight ahead. Even before we pulled into the intersection, the rescue and its lights had slipped away into the distance, and there was only the black night, the white snow and the looming spruce trees reaching in at the edges of the road, just like any other winter night.

Beside me, the man's wife was grabbing the dashboard with both hands. Glancing over at her, looking out of the corner of my eye, I could see how stricken she was. I can gather up that expression in my head, but if I saw her again I doubt I'd recognize her. Just a small woman, grey hair, her hands most often in front of her mouth or bracing themselves against the dashboard as the truck slithered sideways around corners.

Coming into Emergency with her—a woman who had sat next to me in my truck, so close that I could hear her stifled sobs, but whose name I would never know—I watched the emergency room nurse spot me in my firefighting gear, put the pieces together and give her head that final, warning half shake.

The shake that means don't tell her yet, but he's dead.

It's bad enough that you know you shouldn't make promises, that you are so careful you don't even begin to suggest the possibility that things might be all right. This was worse. The nurse's gesture was saying don't even think about being reassuring, don't even say “The doctors are doing their best.” Wash your hands of this woman in the waiting room and walk away, as clean as you can, as clean as you can ever be when you're lying by not telling what is obviously now the truth. That's what the look is supposed to do; it's supposed to give you the cue to disengage, to get away while you can. It's a throwaway, a professional kindness, a warning, and when you get it, your heart falls.