Holding Still for as Long as Possible (4 page)

“What was your first dead body?” I asked him.

“A twelve-year-old in Rosedale. Hung himself with a phone cord. The note said he hated his parents for ignoring him. They didn't find him for two weeks, because they'd gone away and left him alone. I'll never forget that.” Carl paused and then glanced over at the pretty triage nurse. She nodded at him, politely, a red flush in her cheeks.

Shortly after that I fell asleep into my curled-up hand, and managed a twenty-minute nap.

The next afternoon, after a long sleep, I woke up with the smell of nursing home in my nose and what felt like a hangover. I held on to Amy. The smell of her skin calmed me. I nibbled between her shoulder blades. I told her Carl's joke. She turned over and looked at me. “I never heard about that case. Huh.” She got up to make coffee, came back about ten minutes later holding out two mugs, eyes rolling
.
“You're an asshole. Cereal killer. Duh.” She got back in bed and kicked playfully at my legs under the blanket. “That's such a
Dad
joke.”

A few weeks after that, maybe a month,
SARS
happened. I was the new guy so I got all the shit jobs. I was a little nervous, sure. Okay, I was shitting my pants. The uniform was hot already and when I took all the proper precautions against
SARS
, I just sat there sweating. It was almost biblical, the amount of sweat. I lost about ten pounds. The heat made everyone even more nervous. It was definitely a test of my dedication.

Amy would make me take off all my clothes in the alcove where the coat rack was, and she'd stick a thermometer in my mouth and make me stand still not touching anything while she brought my clothes downstairs right away to wash, wearing latex gloves. Then I had to shower. It was pretty ridiculous, but I wanted to make her comfortable. No one wanted to hang out with me or come to our house, and I ended up getting a lot closer to my co-workers because they were the only ones who really understood.

I don't know how, but I got through that time — the protocols started to become normal. But a lot of the procedures that were put into place for
SARS
are no longer happening, now that the scare has come and gone. It's amazing how quickly we forgot. There should be staff scanning visitors before they enter the
ER
. The government promised thermal imaging scanners. But it all cost too much money. So you have a room full of people coughing and sneezing and bleeding; if anybody does have an infection and they come in, shit will spread like wildfire. I'm surprised
SARS
didn't get a lot bigger.

I still wash my hands like crazy, wear gloves whenever I touch anything, especially in the trucks because they're so filthy. I try not to think about
SARS
, and mostly it never comes up. You can't spend your life worrying about shit you can't control. It's a waste of time.

Tonight, the triage nurse, Nina, looked about as happy to be at work as I felt.

“Twenty-five-year-old male, possible overdose of
GHB
. Found unconscious by his son approximately forty-five minutes ago. Rousable by painful stimulus. Immediately after gaining consciousness, patient was aggressive and violent and required restraining by police.” I handed over his health card. In the photo he was smiling like it was Grade Two class-picture day. “Unknown medical history, unknown meds, unknown allergies. Blood sugar 5.8, heart rate tachy at 132, sats were 97% on room air,
GCS
of 12, not tolerating oxygen . . .”

I felt my phone vibrate in my shirt pocket. Nina was distracted for a moment so I checked my texts. Amy
.
Baby, Wish u didn't have 2 work 2night. Wish u were here right now. I miss yr gorgeous face. I'm loaded with Noreen. She wants me 2 drive her 2 Ngra Falls.

I texted back,
Sorry, I Love You;
the tiny screen wasn't big enough to explain things like seniority and triple time to a girl who, until the age of twenty-three, had only ever held one job, as a summer camp counsellor. Every relationship has an obstacle, and money was ours. I came from a family that had struggled to get by; Amy didn't. It wasn't as if Amy didn't understand why I felt compelled to work so hard, but family, not work, was paramount to her. It was one of the reasons I loved her so much. She made me understand family in a way I'd never experienced. I clicked the phone shut.

Lately, though, for the last six months or so, it had felt like she and I were just going through the motions. Like someone had turned our lives greyscale. I didn't think it was just me that was feeling this way, but Amy seemed to be in denial whenever we actually tried to say it out loud. “Every relationship has ups and downs,” she'd say. “We don't have to make everything a catastrophe, right?”

Back at the station, Diane and I moved around quietly because an
ALS
crew was asleep on the couches. Al Collins, the self-proclaimed laziest paramedic in the southwest quadrant, and one of those people who was always referred to by first and last name, slept on the navy blue sofa with the corner
TV
blaring
Weekend at Bernie's
. I pressed “mute.”

Station 34 was originally a jail and it used to make me uneasy. It still looked like a jail. The bathroom doors had prison symbols on them. This seemed particularly meaningful on really long shifts.

On the second floor, an elevated block in the centre of the open-concept station, I checked my e-mail. Back downstairs, I grabbed one of the salmon-coloured less-than-comforting sheets from where they were generously strewn about the living room area.

Tracey and Rob came in, faces drawn from being on a two-to-two shift, with a story about an arterial bleed. “It looked like a murder scene. I've never seen that much blood when the patient wasn't
VSA
!” Rob said to me, eyes alight, as he rinsed out his travel coffee cup in the sink. “This security guard was running after a thief outside the Beer Store, and he tackled him and a bottle broke between them. I can't believe he made it.” Rob took a swig from his water bottle and shook his head back and forth.

After he booked off, he tapped me on the shoulder to say goodbye. I nodded back. I liked Rob. I respected him. I hoped someday to be as good at my job as he was.

As I sank into the couch, the automatic slide show began involuntarily — a red Superman cape running down the hall. Tiny eyes with enlarged pupils.

Diane and I didn't talk about the call. When I was a student paramedic, one of the best pieces of advice I got was to cultivate an “I give a shit” on/off switch. For some reason, it didn't turn off tonight. My mind was spinning like that little aggravating icon that appears when your computer decides to not respond and just spins until you have to shut it down.

The sky was a pinky blue when I drove home at 7:30 a.m., and because I wanted to see Amy so badly, I hardly even noticed the delirium that accompanies not having slept for twenty-six hours. I found her asleep on the couch in the living room in bright green flannel pyjamas. The sun was starting to stream into the room at the front of the house. There was a half-full bottle of Maker's Mark she'd been pouring into cups of coffee, waiting for my return. I wanted to take a photo of her like that and carry it around in my wallet. She was so still. She looked like she had when we first met, before things started to get hard.

As I moved closer, I saw that a folded-up paperback copy of
The Places That Scare You
lay on the floor in front of her. She was always reading self-help and Buddhist books, trying to become a better person. I thought it was hilarious because to me Amy seemed like the most together person in the world. She could write one of these books, I was certain.

“How was work, baby?”
she asked after stretching out and opening her eyes slowly. She turned to watch me in the doorway as I unbuttoned my shirt.

“Fine. Pretty busy.”

She followed me up the stairs to our bedroom, helping me take off my clothes. Stopped and leaned against my back on the landing. We stood that way for a few moments before walking into the bedroom.

Amy fell asleep in minutes, and I stared at the ceiling.
Little eyes. Superman cape. Just call my mom
. My stomach felt like a pile of old sweaters. I pulled from the bottle of water on the night table. Two big swallows burned their way down.

I didn't understand this feeling. I'd scoured the side of the 401 to extract severed arms from roadside weeds to store on ice on the way to the hospital. I'd dealt with bodies after they fell twenty-eight stories, eighty-five-year-olds with broken surgery scars, or the result of what happens when a human hand meets an industrial saw. All of these things were fascinating. I'd lunged forward to watch and discover, curious, my heart pulsing. These didn't keep me up at night. It was amazing what I could deal with and immediately forget. You got used to peoples' sad lives. Mostly, I could see a dead guy, or transport a particularly pathetic case to the
ER
, and in an hour I'd have completely forgotten about it. It got to be routine. Sometimes I would text Amy in the morning about a
VSA
call, and when I got home at night she'd be concerned, saying, “Are you okay? How are you feeling?” and I wouldn't even remember what she was talking about. And you knew that it was someone's family member who'd just died, and it was a big deal, but really, when it happened all the time, you just stopped caring. You had to. I think that's why medics generally have a really sick sense of humour, that thin line between tragedy and comedy.

But today I couldn't sleep. I saw a child's enlarged pupils, hands around a dirty white phone, and the air became molasses and the day stretched infinite and there was nothing funny about it. Perhaps it was just my trigger — irresponsible, self-obsessed parents.

My gut swelling, wet yarn in my throat, I moved as close to Amy as I could, inhaling the smell of her hair, lavender and mint. She was like a little furnace. When I closed my eyes, even though my body was beyond exhausted, my brain felt like a buzz saw. I buried my nose in her hair and inhaled again.

After Judy and Nick had split for good, my mom and sister and I left British Columbia to live on my grandparents' farm outside of Guelph. Farms are a great place to be a kid. There's no one to watch you all the time making sure you're cool. You can stay a kid longer, just another part of the garden, because things grow when they grow. And it matters less if you're a girl or a boy. Everyone wears jeans and T-shirts and gets dirty and stays dirty, the adults and the kids. Spending hours in the hayloft, lying on my back against an empty feedbag, I listened to the wind whistle through the holes in the thin wood walls of the barn. All around me was packed earth and the smell of hay. No other smell had ever come close to conjuring in me such inner calm, until I caught the scent of Amy's shampoo.

I contemplated waking her up, explaining what had happened tonight. But she hadn't chosen my career. I didn't want to bring it all home to her and have her lying awake, thinking of abandoned kids or bloated corpses curled over two-week-old
TV
Dinner trays. Part of me didn't want her to know what I dealt with all the time. I used to tell her, when I first started out. But then I stopped. I'm not sure why. I guess I didn't want her to feel sorry, or to take on any of the stress. I took this job on. It was mine. I liked that the world hadn't let Amy down. I didn't want to be the first.

Besides
, I thought,
when I wake up later today, I'll have forgotten about it anyway.
I had a pretty solid ability to appreciate the moments we have here on earth, 'cause God knows, it can all change in one second.

[ 2 ]

Billy

Have you ever been on fire? That's how I'd felt for the last year or so, like sparks were running around inside me. I looked at my skin and I couldn't believe it wasn't ablaze. Have you ever, like, really thought about your skin? We're pretty useless without it, right? But it's so insubstantial. Thin thin thin!
Breathe, Hilary, breathe. Good Will. Good Will. Good Will. It's just stressful. This is just a panic attack.

I had my first panic attack on stage eight years ago. I didn't know what was happening. I passed out and woke up on a stretcher. This was not just the stage at a karaoke bar. It was the kind of stage that spurred headlines such as “Is She On Drugs?” And “Another Teen Anorexic?” Headlines on
E! News
and
MuchMusic
, sandwiched between the repeated playing of “Bitter Sweet Symphony.” I can't hear that song without feeling nauseated.

The attacks happened a few times after that, and then I was fine for several years. As if I'd had an allergy that had abated. Until about a year ago. I was in my Major British Writers class and my hands lit themselves on fire. My head turned inside out. I was afraid of everything, as suddenly as a sneeze. The only place I felt safe was at home.

Entertainment Tonight
called panic disorder the new “It” disease of the stars. And I was a motherfucking star. Well, not any more. Yeah. I had felt fine that morning. I had hope for 2004. Four is a lucky number, easily divisible. Four is the only number in the English language with the number of letters in its name equal to itself.
Good! Will!