In Case of Emergency (34 page)

“She wasn’t—I mean, it was somebody else.”

“No shit. Doubt you’d be back here if it
had
been your girl, am I right?”

I laugh, resting the side of my face against my palm so I can wipe at my eyes without looking obvious. “True.”

Staring at the screen, elbows resting on his knees, he says, “We all get it, you know. I definitely get it. If I ran a call on my mom or my grandma, I would bug out.”

“So you don’t think I’m crazy?”

“We’re all a little crazy.” He spits brown liquid into his cup. “I don’t even like my grandma.”

58

Carl has been so easy to work with, while I have been one of the zombies J-Rock is always talking about. I stopped trying to compensate for my monotone hollowness twelve hours ago, when I realized I still had forty hours left on this unending shift. It hasn’t helped that we’ve been on con home duty all day, taking elders to dialysis from their houses, or to the ER from a rest home, wrapping up shunts, removing bed pans, rolling blankly staring bodies on to the gurney like logs. We call the worst ones “Triple D,” for dim, disoriented, and drooling. But it’s somehow worse when we take a spry, intelligent eighty-year-old man to the hospital for a broken hip, because he looks around at the bodies piled on the gurneys, at the bottleneck shape of the traffic flowing into the emergency department, and says sadly, “We were never meant to live this long. I think I’m ready to go now.”

Carl and I skip dinner. We opt for ice cream instead, and swivel on the stools like children. “I bet you’re going to be the cat lady type,” Carl says, and I can’t really argue. He swears up and down that when he turns sixty he’s going to get the words
DO NOT RESUSCITATE
tattooed on his sternum, or maybe even on his forehead. We discuss the logistics of overdosing on heroin, or opium, as a way to die pleasantly and with some dignity.

At 0217 we get woken to do yet another transfer, this time a middle-aged patient who’s a pickup from the Huntington Park Surgical Center. But when we try to drive the woman home, she can’t remember her zip code or any cross streets, the hospital face sheet has only a numeric address, and there are so many varieties of “Central Avenue” in the Thomas Guide,
Central Avenues running east, west, north, south, and diagonally. What side of the city does she live on? I have the bright idea to call someone who knows her. I pull over on the big, empty street, a half mile from the hospital, and set the hazards blinking. Once in a while a car zooms by and the rig slowly rocks from side to side. Carl in the back, digging through our patient’s purse, exhaustion affecting him now, too, finds the tattered piece of paper with a phone number on it. I dial it on my phone, forgetting it’s the middle of the night, not recognizing the New York area code, and wake the woman up. Her voice, brittle and paper thin over the bad connection, grows with warmth and volume as the conversation progresses. She didn’t know her sister had been in the hospital. After helping me out with the address, she says with a choke in her voice, “Tell her to call me when she gets home? Please?”

I assure her, hang up, put the paper slip back. I drive again, my hands at a perfect ten and two on the wheel. I know where I’m headed, easy does it, this is a simple transfer, I’m just tired, only twenty-eight more hours to go, no problem. “Ridiculous,” I whisper. But then I give myself over to it, to the rolling grief that pummels me from all sides. Something about that concerned voice on the phone, and the empty, dark streets, and the sad, lonely character in the back, the one who doesn’t remember where she lives, who didn’t tell her sister about her medical problems, who is now a double amputee.

When we get to the house and struggle to fit her through the narrow hallways in her new wheelchair, she tells us to lock the door on our way out. There are seven dead bolts and nothing inside worth stealing. I remind her, with a sense of responsibility: “Call your sister, okay?” She looks at me, nods reluctantly, and, just before we squeeze ourselves out and into the night, gasping for fresh air, I see her pick up the old rotary receiver and stare at it.

59

Jumbled bones, aching teeth, my eyes feel puffy, and where is my other boot? I shuffle around, pants pulled loosely over gym shorts, the belt buckle swinging wildly. Found it. Practically behind the television. Of course. I should take a shower, or at least put on new socks, because these are glued to the bottom of—but I put the boot on just the same. People are watching, eyes on me: straighten up, look normal, everything’s fine, nothing to see, and there’s Buddy, standing nervous and tall, you remember him.

“Hi, Buddy,” I croak. My hands are like the flapping wings of a pigeon, trying to locate the carabiner on my belt loop, forgetting that my belt is lower than my waist because my pants aren’t on. “Here you go.” I hand him the rig keys. “You’re driving today, can’t. Dangerous.”

He looks at his palm like he’s never seen keys before.

She has too many missing teeth to count. She grabs a fourteen-gauge needle out of the medbox and raises it over her head, as if to plunge it into the nearest heart. “You aren’t going to put one of these in me, no, sir.” I look at her, unable to move or think. Adrenaline like a dull old friend. A firefighter politely asks for the needle back; everyone exhales when his request works. At the hospital she asks me, “What’s it like to be beautiful?” Her cackling mouth reveals her few remaining teeth, crooked and stained, and yet I can’t figure out why she’s asking me that.

Attempt naps. Buddy wakes you for calls. Punch him in the arm and call him by your brother’s name. Remember where you are and apologize. Coffee stopped working a long time ago. Drink it anyway.

You no longer eat solid food.

You’re close to having a widespread organ mutiny.

The man’s throat was squeezed by a cop’s hands almost to the point of asphyxiation. His face is a smear of purples and his lips are ghostly. His eyes—the last thing to regain normalcy—are bulbous and blank, but they start to move through emotions as if ticking off a checklist: comprehension, fear, anger, relief, desperation, reproach…

The emaciated curmudgeon says in a clear voice that he has been choking on his iron pill for two days. He demands that you give him CPR.

The kid with the snapped clavicle and sprained wrist, who jumped her bicycle from the roof to the pool on a dare, points at all the objects in the rig compartments with her good hand. “What is that? And that? What does it do? Why?”

At Buddy’s urging, I agree to eat something. I struggle to open my last dented can of clam chowder with Station 710’s rusted can opener, feeling suddenly that I might start crying. By the time I get the soup into a bowl, I decide to eat it cold.

“Piper? Can I ask you something?” Buddy leans against the counter a few feet away, twisting a pen in his hands. “Did you tell anyone… about the cat?”

I rummage through recollections of endless calls, trying to find the one he’s talking about. “Oh! The
cat
.” I smile at him. “The one you wanted to—no, I didn’t tell anyone.”

Buddy’s long arms around me, armpits clamping down over my
shoulders, “
Thank you
, Piper, thank you,” and the bowl of soup suspends itself between us, pressing against my chest in an increasing diagonal, the plastic rim digging into my sternum. Finally it capsizes, sending chunks of soup down my shirt, and Buddy is flinging paper towels at me and at the floor, promising to lend me his clean extra shirt and buy me dinner. Buddy, who thought he would have to quit his job, maybe move out of the county.

The man who tried to hang himself used wire, several feet of it, around a ceiling fan. The thin cable snapped, dumping him onto the ground, leaving a slit in his neck. He looks at me with his newly spliced Adam’s apple, a strange texture in his eyes, and says, “I’m so glad it didn’t work.”

Halfway through my shift with Buddy, as if surfacing from a long movie, I remember with a jolt that Carl and I had a GSW last night. How we arrived at a parking lot around 0400 to find two firefighter paramedics, one getting a line ready, the other sitting on the ground holding our patient in his lap. The lead medic was new, probably on his first big trauma call, and wore a stunned expression. It would almost have been sort of funny, the way the whole thing brought to mind a badly done TV melodrama—the boy in his lap looked like Jesus after the crucifixion, lolling and ghastly, and the lead medic kept asking, “Can I get some help?” as if he’d forgotten who we were, as if he hadn’t already run four calls with us that day—if it weren’t for the fact that the boy was so clearly a goner, shot not once but five times. The image of the two of them on the ground like that lasted only a second because soon the four of us were working hard to keep him alive; we dropped him off alive and who knows if he stayed that way. Every serious trauma call I run is somehow that first boy all over again, dying from a bullet to the brain, and even the stunned
paramedic appeared similarly, fusing with the boy in his lap and the boy in my memory, bewildered palms turned out, offering and accepting benediction, forgive me, forgive me.

I massage the hinge of my jaw with my index fingers, feeling two persistent nubs kick back against the pads of my fingertips. Eight more hours to go, but I can’t remember what happens after that.

Of course I miss her.

60

The morning air has a chill to it; the sun is out but hasn’t warmed yet. I drag my stuff to my car, freshly washed hair dripping on the clean sweatshirt and jeans I had the good sense to pack four days ago, and shiver a little. This morning, at 0725, a member of the oncoming B shift crew came into sleeping quarters to wake me up. I was reluctant to hand over the set of station keys and walkie-talkie that for three days had been attached to my belt. These objects: my new appendages. The crew member had to tug a little before I let go, and although I wanted to ask him how it worked, the real world—what kinds of things were supposed to happen, how I was supposed to behave—I didn’t know what questions would get me the answers I needed.

Into the open mouth of my trunk I throw a sorry-shaped mountain of uniforms, towels, bedding, boots, and paper bags. Then I stand there, wiggling my toes against the thin rubber of flip-flops.

“What do you think?” I look up to see Carl leaning out of the back window of a Toyota 4Runner, a bright red hoodie pulled over his head. Pep is driving, and J-Rock waves at me from the passenger seat.

“She looks like a walrus on Oxycontin,” Pep says. “Not ready to be returned to the wild.”

“Piper!” J-Rock yells from the passenger seat. “Can you tell me your name?”

Carl laughs. “Hope you don’t do your assessments like that.” He waves his hand at me like he’s a magician about to do a trick. “Where are you right now? What day is it?”

“Station 710. B shift.”

Pep moans and slaps the side of the driver door. “
Mayday
,” he says. “We got to take this one in.”

“Come on, guys, seriously—”

“Oh, we are serious,” Carl says. And J-Rock nods emphatically.

“Get in,” Pep says. “You’re in no shape to drive.”

Breakfast at McDonald’s. Carl has to buy it for me, because I left my wallet at station. They’ve been drinking since the night before, so I have to catch up. Thoughts of Ayla push against me no matter what I say, what I do, how loudly I laugh. As if to declare: you can’t run forever. But I can and I will. I have to even if I can’t remember why.

Drinking out of paper bags on the Santa Monica boardwalk. Belligerence beset by more belligerence. Carl heckling a bronzed woman in a pink bikini who Rollerblades by us, me running at every clump of seagulls I see so I can watch them fly away, J-Rock repeatedly trying to wrestle with Pep, who keeps fixing his hair. The four of us storming the Mexican restaurant on Ocean Avenue as soon as it opens for brunch, ordering pitchers of margaritas to go with our food. By now I can no longer remember how much money I owe Carl, but I’m promising him the world as if it were mine to give.

“The world,” I tell him, dragging out the sound. “The woorrrl.”

After that things go dark. We get separated somehow. I’m in Pep’s car, my eyelids so thick and heavy it hurts to open them, and everything is swimming. Pep is trying to drive to his house in Baldwin Hills; I have the vague feeling his house is not where I want to go.

Hearing my own voice in a slurred singsong, asking him where J-Rock and Carl are.

“I told you,” he says. “They went to pick up ladies on the beach.”

Close my eyes. “That’s right.”

Pep sees a cop and pulls over, not wanting to get a DUI. “Take me home,” I tell him. But he doesn’t want to drive to Echo Park right now, we can just take a nap at his place and go back later to pick up the boys from Santa Monica.

Everything will be okay, he tells me.

When I wake up the sun has dropped low and slanted, my temples are pounding, and the buzz of alcohol has vanished. It takes a moment to disengage my cheek from the passenger seat of Pep’s truck and my tongue from the roof of my mouth. For the first time in a long time, I feel as though I
slept
. I must have slept for hours and hours.

I stir in my seat and look around. We’re parked on a small rundown residential street, with tiny box houses spaced evenly from each other. A cherry blossom tree hangs above us, its bare branches casting spindly shadows on the hood of Pep’s 4Runner.

Pep’s in the driver’s seat next to me, one hand tucked into the waist of his pants, his tongue loose in his open mouth, his face collapsed at a severe angle—if he weren’t so motionless, he would look like he was trying to lick his right shoulder.