In Case of Emergency (27 page)

As the waiter walks away, Dad says to Ayla, “When Piper’s mother was pregnant with her, no junk food was allowed in the house. Very healthy, had to have vegetable shakes every morning. She never wanted to be around cigarette smoke, and this was back when everyone smoked. Those shakes—they smelled like I don’t know what. To this day, I have no idea how she drank them.”

“I heard about your ex-wife. I’m very sorry.”

Dad leans across the table, one bulky forearm flattening the white cloth napkin that’s arranged in the shape of a triangle. “Actually, she’s not my ex-wife. We never divorced—neither of us ever filed.”

I stiffen at this new piece of information. Ayla’s foot finds and traps my right ankle under the table, as if to keep me from running away. She returns his smile.

“What was her name?”

“Cecelia. Cecelia Morgan. When I met her she had hair down to her butt and—”

“She always had hair down to her butt, Dad.” More than fifteen years they were separated. Why didn’t they get a divorce?

“No, they took almost two feet off for a wig once when you were about four. Paid handsomely for it.”

Dad asks Ayla what she does for a living and she skirts it a little. She mentions her time in the Army, her plans to go back to school. When she asks him what he does, he tells her he’s a software engineer. As he explains that a friend of his helped build a video game for post-traumatic stress, her eyes flicker in that way they do when she wants to change the subject.

“He said the work was very particular. Had to be extremely realistic, with options the doctors could add in, like certain kinds of buildings or roads.”

“Right,” Ayla says. “They even add a vibrating cushion so it feels like you’re sitting in a Humvee.”

“Wait, what is this?” I ask.

“They say reliving a bad experience helps it go away,” Ayla tells me, “if it’s in a controlled setting. Of course, with vets, the hard part is getting them to the doctor in the first place.”

I try to think back to the last time I asked my father how his work was going, and how he answered that question.

“He told me simulating combat was the hardest part. There’s some center in Texas where they test explosives on animals—”

“Oh, that’s horrible.” I make a face.

Ayla shrugs. She says her father grew up on a dairy farm, and when he was a kid a cow combusted. She talks about the theory behind spontaneous bovine combustion, and she’s wearing her storytelling face now, carefully blank so as not to give away the ending. My dad’s eyes light up in response.

“See, it’s not just all the methane in their intestines—or the flatulence—it can’t be, because if that were the case, there’d be eruptions in every cow field. Not a pretty sight.”

“Or a pretty smell.” Dad’s barrel chest starts shaking with barely contained laughter; I can’t remember the last time I saw him look so pleased.

She says if a spark lights off the fat just under the skin, the cow turns into a candle on four legs. The spark can come from an electrical field, or maybe a heat-packed haystack. “Add all
that
to a bunch of methane—”

“And you’ve got yourself a bovine bonfire,” Dad finishes. They’re both laughing now.

There’s something unsettling about watching the two of them together, how easily they get along. Ayla soaks a piece of bread in the saucer of olive oil, then dabs it on the sides. Her free hand finds mine under the table, squeezes it. Dad looks relaxed and happy, his arms crossed over his chest, his tie loosened around his thick neck. What’s unfolding is what I’ve always wanted, only now that it’s happening it’s still not enough. I reach for the word and find it. Family. And I can sense how much Dad enjoys it, too.

After Mom left, Ryan used to get horribly depressed on his birthdays.
Dad never knew what to do. Sometimes you could hear Ryan crying in his room even though he was trying to be quiet. Dad would ignore it for a while, then tell me to run up and see if Ryan wanted to watch a movie or something, get his mind off things. He’d hand me a slice of store-bought cake to take upstairs but never went himself, never acknowledged Ryan’s grief directly. It’s obvious to me now that Dad was helpless against what happened, that he had no idea how to move on and still hasn’t. A memory is not a life, a shrine is not a home… but I’m no better. It’s been so hard to forgive Dad for what he couldn’t give us.

A song comes on in the restaurant, Johnny Cash, I think, forlorn and gruff and true, and it’s too much, suddenly. I feel a little sick, a little embarrassed at my own sentimentality. Dad and Ayla are talking about UFO sightings and cattle mutilations, Ayla moving in that restless way of hers, picking at her napkin, rotating her water glass. Dad’s blond hair is graying at his temples and the weathered lines in his face stop at his jawline—his large ears look soft and young. A single white hair grows wildly out of one of Dad’s eyebrows. The stuff you can’t see in pictures.

Our food arrives. We peer at each other’s plates and at each other; we nod, hesitating before picking up our forks. It feels like we should say something, recognize the moment somehow.

“Just a minute.” Dad fishes around in his jacket pocket. “I can’t forget to—” He locates his plastic pill holder case, which has the days of the week labeled on each divided well. “It’s my ticker,” he explains to Ayla. “Not as young anymore.”

“Oh, I get you.” She knocks knuckles against the side of her head. “My noggin has bad days sometimes. I got knocked out pretty good overseas.”

Dad fishes four pills out from a well and chases them with what’s left in his water glass. He oozes vitality. You wouldn’t know my father’s in poor health from looking at him, but he has an ulcer, some prostate polyps, high blood pressure, high cholesterol… My father is one of my patients,
I realize. If I ran a call on him, I would suspect chronic heart failure and immediately look for the pedal edema swelling of his ankles.

I read a story once about a guy who had been a big Wall Street somebody and then he left everything and everyone and went to live off the grid, in the woods somewhere in a little cabin, eating fish and game he’d caught, buying supplies at the nearest town once a month. When a journalist tracked him down and asked how he could leave everything behind like that, his wife and friends and family, not to mention a small fortune, the man responded, “I just don’t think about it.”

Now Ayla is laughing and Dad is beaming. “There’s only one saying I know,” Ayla says, “I think it’s Irish, anyway—something about arriving in heaven before hell knows you’ve died?”

“That’s a good one,” Dad says. He raises his drink. “May your glass be ever full, may the roof over your head be strong.” Ayla and I raise our glasses as well, my voice unconsciously joining his, Ayla’s lips moving slightly, as if she’s trying to memorize the words. “And may you be in heaven half an hour before the devil knows you’re dead.”

PART THREE

39

By now you know this neighborhood better than your own. You’ve run calls at every type of establishment and household, every disreputable office and narrow stairwell, every freeway and restaurant, con home and club, all the high schools—sports injuries, fake seizures, assaults—and all but two of the elementary schools.

At the liquor store closest to station, you buy soda and energy drinks, power bars and beef jerky, to squirrel away in the rig console for the especially busy days. There is no Take a Penny, Leave a Penny. The man who owns it is Jerry; he knows everyone’s name in this neighborhood but yours. To you and to all the other EMTs, he makes the same joke every time you enter the store: “Don’t arrest me, Officer!” And then he laughs, and you think for the thousandth time that your uniform looks nothing like a cop’s. You went in there after a shift once wearing street clothes, and an unrecognizing Jerry just stared at you and couldn’t think of what to say.

Your blind spot is less pronounced. By now you’re so used to the job’s daily decisions, you can take the time to take it all in. There’s the mansion
on Slauson Avenue, your new favorite, not because of the sweet and elderly owner who sometimes drinks too many gin martinis and calls 911, but because the foyer displays a life-size cardboard cutout of Barack Obama.

You’ve run calls at the county jail and the courthouse, on men and women smart enough to know that claiming chest pain would get them out of their cells for a little while. You’ve run calls on drug overdoses and assaults where the police officer leans over and shouts, “Do you want to go to jail or to the hospital?” and even in their fucked-up state (you can almost see the cartoon birds circling), they choose the hospital.

You know which streets are dead ends, which alleys too narrow to fit the ambulance, which avenues and boulevards the easiest to oppose traffic, and when to swerve to avoid the large pothole two blocks from Crossroads. You know the patterns of the homeless, where they sleep and who they fight with, what medications they should be on. Sadie, known in three districts for her consumption of Wild Turkey bourbon, calls every day. One minute she’ll be drinking alone and the next she’ll be surrounded by seven emergency responders. Her joy at the sight of all those people towering over her is evident. But then she’ll remember she’s not supposed to look happy, so she’ll scrunch up her face and moan. “It hurts,” she says, in a voice withered from smoke and drink. “It hurts.” And someone will make a joke, and Sadie will forget herself, and she will start cackling all over again.

You’ve learned which chief complaint is the worst chief complaint. When someone has abdominal pain, it doesn’t matter if it’s mild indigestion or a life-threatening aortic aneurysm, the treatment is the same.
Drive to the hospital
. That’s it. They could have an ulcer, blood in their GI tract, kidney stones, a bladder infection, appendicitis; they could have internal bleeding from a bruised solid organ or the swollen infection of a hollow one. They could be throwing up bright red blood or vomiting “coffee grounds”—digested blood. This could have been going on for weeks or hours.

The most you can do on your way to the hospital is get signs, symptoms, and severity. The triage nurse takes it from there, but god forbid you finish your paperwork on the rig and still have even one minute to go on your ride to the ER. That’s one minute more of sitting there, listening to someone scream their head off, ask for pain medicine, and tell you they’re going to throw up. You can sympathize with their pain, hand them a basin, tell them no medicine is allowed until some tests are performed at the hospital, but what it really feels like you’re saying is, I’m useless. I can’t help you. Just sit tight in this overrated taxi and we’ll get you there.

And by now you’ve learned the secret: in your job, it’s better when there are things to do. The worst kind of patient is the one you can’t help.

40

Hail Jesus God our Father please save him, save my baby let him live please
…

I glance in the rearview mirror. I only have a blocked view, but I hear banging, pleading, retching, and terrified shouts, not to mention the patient’s wife is sitting in the passenger seat praying her head off. I’m still pouring sweat from struggling with the 280-pound man. The one who went from dead to combative as we loaded him onto a backboard and attempted to carry him down a steep flight of stairs to the ambulance waiting below. We’d found him pulseless, his last dying breath leaving his lungs as his eyes went limp.

We did the usual to bring him back. Bagged him with oxygen, jumped on compressions, pushed drugs through an IV, stopped to shock him twice, and all the while his wife yelled at him in an unbelievably commanding voice: “Breathe, big man!
Breathe,
baby!” I thought at the time that we should bring her to every full arrest. Who wouldn’t do what she says?

Because he was big, we had to four-point the backboard, and unfortunately the way out was so tight we had to lift his feet up over the banister
and carry him down the stairs headfirst, all of us squeezed together, shuffling our steps. Halfway down the stairs, all that blood in his brain, his eyes opened and he started yelling and flailing. He probably had no clue what had happened to him. There he was, a born-again newborn, and his first view of the world after dying was a strange angle of the night sky, our sweaty faces, and the beeping EKG monitor we’d balanced on his chest.

Now his huge arms thrash around and William says, “Calm down, sir, try to relax!”

“So what happened?” I ask the wife.

She starts her story but I interrupt her right away. “What’s his history of drug use?”

Her eyes go wide and she uses her booming voice. “He does crack cocaine!”

I nod, fighting the inappropriate urge to laugh. So the patient in the back is a crack overdose who just got loaded up with voltage and pure adrenaline. No wonder he’s frothing at the mouth.

Please God let him go to rehab, he’s been clean for two years God don’t let him die for this mistake, please God praise Jesus let him live let him live…

It sounds like a brawl back there. At this point I’m more concerned that he’s going to hurt one of my coworkers than I am about him dying again. I oppose traffic almost the entire trip. Stupid cars keep stopping in the middle of the road—does no one ever pull to the right? My habit of cursing under my breath while I drive Code 3 is in full force. I hope she doesn’t notice I’m countering her prayers with a string of cuss words.

We arrive at Crossroads and I fly out of the ambulance to open the back doors. That’s when I see that the walls, ceiling, floor, and doors are all splattered with a clear fluid that smells faintly of alcohol. The two paramedics pile out; William hops down. As I stand there, stunned, looking at the mess, he tells me that our patient threw up four times en route to the hospital. Also, he managed to free himself from the backboard. The
slamming I heard was that of the board swinging into the rig walls.