In Case of Emergency (12 page)

Picture an orange on a table. Picture a shoreline drawing back, revealing miles of ocean floor.

“I’ll tell you all about it sometime. But not tonight, if that’s okay.”

“Okay.” I trace her arm again, trying to soften her brooding body, but she seems held in place, almost lifted off the mattress.

“What about your mom, Piper?”

I find myself hesitating. Here it is, the moment when I have to decide which version of the story to tell. I start with Mom’s river rafting trip, how
she went to Colorado with some college friends and ended up falling in love with the guide. How she decided to leave us, barely taking anything with her when she did. How the phone calls tapered off, things slowly filled in around her absence, and how Ryan and I eventually got used to it, probably because kids can get used to anything. I rush through the whole sordid story with a hint of apology in my voice, and then wait for Ayla to tell me how sorry she is, how horrible. For a while she doesn’t say anything.

“What do you remember about her?”

“Not a lot.”

“Hard to trust people.”

“Yes.”

“Did your dad ever remarry?”

“He tried dating here and there. He never got over her.” I burrow in closer. “Do I get to hear about the banshee?”

“What, you a fan of ghost stories?”

“Maybe. Will you hold me if I get scared?”

“Maybe.” Her weight relaxes and she squeezes my arm. “Let me think. You know, I’ve never tried to tell this story.”

“There’s no backing out now.”

Her cheek moves against my scalp: she’s smiling. “She haunted an Irish family by the name of MacNeal for hundreds of years. The MacNeals had stories and songs about her, passed down generation after generation; the children were warned to watch out for her and grown men would wake from their sleep thinking they had heard her.” If you hear the banshee’s wail of mourning, she tells me, it means that exactly three days later, you or a member of your family will die.

Her voice becomes uncharacteristically wistful. “A hundred years go by. All that’s left of the MacNeals is a ruined castle.”

One night, she continues, a young American tourist traveling the countryside in search of his heritage sees a speck of white floating in the hills.
As he gets closer, he sees a woman, pale, with long black hair, wearing a tattered white dress. Then he sees her feet don’t touch the ground. But it’s too late. She rushes toward him, shrieking, her face full of despair, and he falls backward down the hillside, getting hurt so badly he can’t move his arms or legs. He calls for help; he can still hear her floating above him, moaning softly.

“When he dies three days later, the last of the MacNeal line is lost. The banshee’s never seen or heard again.”

We’re both quiet. Ayla’s fingers dig into my hair and massage my scalp, then come loose and wrap around my shoulders. As my hair settles back down, the smallest of the strands give the sensory impression they’re standing erect.

“What does she sound like?”

Ayla leans into me until her nose presses against my cheekbone. Her voice low in my ear, at once musical and gravelly, she moans an oddly terrifying “
aiee
.”

16

Centuries after he died, you can hold the skull of Phineas Gage in your hand and admire the large triangular hole, like a misshapen third eye, just above the crest of what must have been his hairline. You can contemplate how, in the 1800s, Phineas Gage lived to the bright age of thirty-six despite the fact that when he was twenty-five, an almost-four-foot-long solid steel tamping iron blasted through his left cheekbone and out the top of his head. You can turn the skull toward the light and see evidence of his rudimentary surgery. The physician at the time, a Doctor Harlow, managed the wound as if it were a jigsaw puzzle, placing large bits of skull fragments where they seemed to fit, discarding smaller fragments as useless, and even
inserting the full length of his index finger into the tunnels of Phineas’s enormous entrance and exit wounds in order to check for any remaining pieces of bone.

Your brain weighs three pounds and is most recognizable for its fissures and folds, the coiled tissue sitting atop the brain stem like a bouquet of miniature sausage links. Its resilience and adaptability have long been recognized but remain mostly inexplicable. You can talk about neuroplasticity and cortical remapping; you can point out the different case studies, the miraculous recoveries, or how startling it is that when a blind person learns to read Braille, it isn’t just the tactile part of the brain that gets activated but the visual cortex, dormant for so long. Your brain knows how to rewire itself in order to recover function.

Or, rather than ponder the fate of Phineas Gage, these days you can consider Li Fu, a Chinese man from Yunnan Province, who for four years complained of migraines and a bad taste in his mouth, until X-rays revealed a ten-centimeter knife blade lodged in the middle of his brain. You can consider Kate Dendrinos, who, in 2002, endured a motorcycle crash without a helmet. Because of massive amounts of swelling, doctors were forced to remove the left frontal and temporal lobes of her brain completely. She wasn’t expected ever to recover cognitive function.

But what do we have except hope? And what is hope except the persistent belief in the unlikely, if not the impossible? As in: you won’t get hurt, you won’t fall, you’ll survive, you’ll recover, you can beat this, you are loved, you’re going to live, you’re not alone.

These incidents weren’t without consequence. Phineas Gage became unrecognizable to his loved ones after the accident, prone to violence and bouts of rage. When he was refused his old position as a crew foreman, he appeared in live shows, always holding the tamping iron that hadn’t bested him. Kate Dendrinos experienced profound relapses over the years, but made a full recovery. She now teaches the disabled how to ride horses. And
Li Fu, the mild-mannered family man who once had a slowly rusting knife blade lodged in his brain? Li Fu’s headaches are gone.

17

“Man, I hate slow days.”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah.”

Silence. They listen. The phone does not ring.

“You know we’re not sleeping. We’re going to be up all night.”

Carl, the most forlorn I’ve seen him, looks at his watch. “I’ll make a pot of coffee later. Maybe at 2100. Get us through the night.”

The five of us have been sitting around the table at station for about three hours. It is something of an honor to be sitting with the two regular crews like this, and I’m guessing this means Ruth feels more confident about my skills. We haven’t had a single call. We ran a couple of station drills, using the infant-size mannequin and the unfortunate “Jenna” doll, whose gender is debatable and whose fake-blood-splattered rubber skin sorely needs a washing. After lunch I vacuumed the carpet in sleeping quarters, while the boys played video games and Ruth graded my mapping exercises. The lack of calls makes everyone nervous, especially Pep. Everyone expects some kind of retaliation later for all the free time they’ve had so far.

“I should take a nap now,” Pep says.

J-Rock spits tobacco into a red plastic cup. “Man, all you ever do is sleep. You need your beauty rest? I’d do you. Put a wig on that dome and you’d look like a girl.”

“I can’t help it that I’m prettier than your girlfriend, Rock.”

“You’re not nearly as pretty as your mom. She says hello, by the way.”

Carl told me on my second day that if I wanted to impress other EMTs,
and Ruth in particular, I shouldn’t laugh, join in, or speak until spoken to—not until I earn my badge. Today this is not a problem. Today I have a goofy smile stretched across my face and I float above the conversation, thinking of Ayla’s hands on me, Ayla’s voice in my ear, Ayla’s kisses and moans and warm, soft skin.

The boys continue.

“Fuck you.”

“Go suck a horse.”

“Don’t want sloppy seconds where your mouth has been.”

Ruth places her hands flat on the table’s surface and pushes her chair back a couple of inches. She does this so efficiently, not a single copper hair in her perfect ponytail stirs. The effect is a loud scraping sound of wood against linoleum, and the conversation ends. J-Rock and Pep look like children expecting a reprimand, and Carl looks upward appreciatively as if he’s thanking God for the hilarity.

But soon they’re arguing about zombies. Conversations at Station 710 often circle back to this, to the upcoming, and inevitable, Zombie Apocalypse. How to train for, defend, and survive an invasion of the living dead. J-Rock appears to be particularly obsessed with this topic. J-Rock is a bit more of a geek than Carl or Pep, with his backward hat and hunched posture, his lack of affect. He has the enviable skill of looking completely serious even when he’s saying something hysterical.

Although Ruth hasn’t said a word on the subject, I think my Zombie Apocalypse Plan would be to hide behind her. J-Rock’s newest plan is to gather weapons, food, and animals, and head to Catalina Island.

“That’s the dumbest thing I ever heard,” Pep says.

“It’s the perfect defense,” J-Rock replies. “You’ve got a 360-degree lookout. Plus, zombies can’t swim.”

“Yeah, but there’s nothing to do there,” Carl says. “Better to load up a cruise ship and travel around the world than be stuck on a boring island.”

“The Centers for Disease Control actually cover this,” I say. “Their website has a page on zombies; it talks about virus transmission and government containment and there’s a recommended list of supplies…” I trail off, remembering I’m not supposed to speak unless spoken to. By the looks on their faces, everyone at the table, with the exception of Ruth, just fell in love with me.

To distract myself, I slink down in my chair and try to count how many times today the boys have broken the rather long-winded sexual harassment policy of A & O Ambulance. So far: twenty-seven times. They continue their stream of chatter about their regular patients, nurses at CRH, someone who got fired last week for forgetting the height clearance at a Carl’s Jr. drive-through. The mechanics at A & O’s headquarters in Gardena are still doing repairs on the roof of the rig.

“Lucy finally got let go, too,” J-Rock says with a satisfied nod.

“The queen of the badge bunnies!” Carl laughs. “Didn’t she have sex with someone at CRH?”

J-Rock wraps his hands around his reversed hat and leans back. “You’re getting her mixed up with our favorite neighborhood transient, Sadie.” He looks at me with that stoic expression of his. “Sadie has the highest frequent flyer points out of everybody.”

He tells me that video cameras in the Crossroads Hospital waiting room caught the full action of a very intoxicated Sadie copulating with another transient in front of patients and their families. She has since been banned from admittance to the hospital, and rumor has it she temporarily relocated to the streets of Hollywood.

Pep begins the discussion of whether it was the illegal Code 3 or the blow job given to a firefighter in Station 3980’s parking lot that got Lucy fired. Ruth’s voice is startling when she interrupts. “I have a train
ee
! For fuck’s sake.”

Silence again. The three boys straighten and stare down at their laps. They seem to be earnestly considering what topics won’t become
inappropriate. Finally they settle on their bucket lists.

“Amputation. Oh, definitely.”

“Cardiac tamponade. But what are the chances?”

“Yeah, good luck, they usually get stabbed in the gut. Speaking of which, I’m going with an evisceration. Piper, what about you?”

“Um, well, I guess I’m curious about a sucking chest wound.”

The four of them stare at me. “A sucking chest wound?” Pep says. “That’s like saying you want to run a call on a drunk. People get shot so much around here, you’re bound to get one of those.”

“Or two or three.” J-Rock spits dark liquid into his cup. “Pick another one.”

They give me a moment to think about it.

“I want to deliver a baby.”

The boys shudder. “I can think of a
lot
of things I’d rather do,” Carl says.

“Don’t listen to them,” Ruth says. “It’s fun.”

When we finally get a call, Ruth, Carl, and I arrive closely behind the fire department paramedics, and soon all of us have infiltrated a crowded birthday party, where we begin our search for a sixteen-year-old seizure in a sea of ten-year-olds. The small one-story house has been squeezed to capacity. The front room looks like a dining room as well as a children’s bedroom, judging by the four tiny mattresses pushed up against the walls. The decorations are standard fare: a giant white cake, a couple of drifting balloons, and some cardboard cutouts held to the walls with Scotch tape. Through the postage stamp of a kitchen window I see there is a backyard, too, with presents piled on a small plastic table. There isn’t a game in sight, but I can make out the unicorn piñata dangling from a tree.

It’s unusual to be at any birthday party and see the adults crying. Eager and nervous as always, practically hugging the green oxygen tank
I unhitched from the gurney, I look around, trying to locate our patient. We get ushered into a corner room with much dramatics. One woman has dark mascara trails outlining her nose, tears waterfalling off her face. Lying on the couch is a teenager with a fragile build and long, thick hair. Her body looks held in place; she doesn’t seem relaxed enough to be sleeping. She’s pale and her eyelids flutter. This must be our seizure patient. I start to rush in but get stopped by the paramedic. He’s surly-looking, his face riddled with gray stubble. His arm bars me as I try to enter the room.