Rescue (16 page)

“You almost killed Rowan.”

“I’m so sorry.”

“I don’t care about that.”

“I’ll go to rehab,” she promised.

“You’ll go to jail.” He paused. “I’m supposed to take you to the police station now.”

She looked up. “But you’re not.”

“No.”

Voltage crossed the distance between Sheila and Webster. A
current composed of anger and remorse and something else—the last flicker of attraction.

Webster pulled the cruiser around to the front of the hospital. Mary wheeled Sheila down. Nye, Burrows, and Mary making it
happen. Webster would owe Nye forever.

In the cruiser, Webster asked Sheila what she had been doing on 222.

“I don’t remember,” she said.

His hands clenched and unclenched on the wheel. He couldn’t keep his jaw from jutting forward. He was furious with her for
what she’d done, for making him do what he had to do now.

He stopped a mile short of his parents’ house. He faced Sheila, but she didn’t look up.

“I’m leaving the keys in the car,” he said. “There’s fifteen hundred dollars in the glove compartment. Keep driving until
you’re past New York. Then ditch the cruiser at a twenty-four-hour convenience stop. Find a bus and get on it and go as far
as you can. Don’t come back. You come back, you’ll be arrested.”

Sheila began to cry.

“And you’ll go to jail.”

He waited. He thought she might ask to see her daughter. He was prepared to refuse her. She never asked.

Webster stepped out of the cruiser onto the road. He shut the door, aware that he was shutting the door on a life. He walked
forward, his shoulders hunched, as if waiting for a bullet.

He was a thousand feet away when he heard the cruiser start up. He listened as the engine moved toward him.

A wild hope flared, a skinny flame. He imagined Sheila stop
ping. He would tell her that he loved her. Something miraculous would happen, and the three of them could be a family again.

Sheila drew abreast of him, hesitated, and then drove on.

He watched the back bumper of the cruiser until he could no longer see it.

Webster collapsed onto the dead grass at the side of the road. He wept, and he didn’t care who saw him.

A
fter Rowan leaves for school and Webster washes the birthday breakfast dishes, he climbs the narrow staircase, the house his
own now since the death of his parents. Both had been under hospice care in the front room, Webster with his fully loaded
belt, helpless in the face of the cancers that ravaged each of them. Prostate for his father; lung for his mother. She’d never
smoked a day in her life. Even at the end, or especially at the end, watching his father take his last breaths, each followed
by seconds of nothing, Webster, with his training, felt panic. It was all about the morphine and the hospice nurses and sitting
in the dim light then, his father in the hospital bed in the front room, his hand light and cool in Webster’s. It was not
Webster’s first experience with death by any means, but it rocked him nevertheless. Traveled inside and screwed around with
his innards and his brain so that by the time he brought ten-year-old Rowan in to say good-bye to her grandfather, Webster
felt the fear and responsibility of fatherhood stopping up his chest. He was it. Nothing between him and the morphine drip
at the end. Sheila already gone eight years.

Rowan is seventeen now.

Webster lies down on his daughter’s bed.

Overhead, Rowan has painted a mural of all the New England
ski areas she’s visited. The mountains are rendered with intricate trails, a dry blue sky behind them, the distances among
the mountains shortened by curving roads dotted with Jeep Cherokees and Subarus and Rowan’s Toyota, all of them with ski racks
on top. Sunday River, Stowe, Okemo, Loon, Killington, Stratton, Bromley, Bretton Woods, and even Wachusett Mountain to the
southeast.

After his parents died, Webster renovated his old bedroom for Rowan, building a closet and bookshelves and a desk with drawers.
Rowan still sleeps on the old oak bed Webster once had, but gone is the Bruins blanket, replaced now with a patchwork quilt
Rowan’s grandmother made, the quilt and half the top sheet now on the floor. Webster, an inexpert bed maker himself, has never
been able to teach Rowan the proper way to do hers. Webster sometimes finds the blanket drawn up to the pillows with what
looks like one strong swipe.

In the corner of the room are Rowan’s guitar and clarinet. Webster hasn’t heard her play either in months. Webster knows that
if he opens Rowan’s desk drawers, he will find various tubes of lip gloss, several dozen Bic pens with the tops chewed, a
photo of Sheila and Rowan shortly after the baby’s birth (the photo viewed so often that it no longer holds any power over
Webster or Rowan—or does it?), costume jewelry Rowan received as presents years ago and can’t bear to throw away, and various
coins. Periodically Webster has Rowan collect all the loose change in the house, put it into wrappers, and take it to the
bank, Rowan getting half the score. One recent Christmas, Webster gave Rowan a machine that sorted and wrapped the coins.
Before Christmas dinner, Rowan presented her father with $260 in neat tubes.

But Webster will no longer look through Rowan’s drawers, the
result of an agreement on Webster’s part not to pry. In the fall, right after Rowan’s seventeenth birthday, Webster found
a card of birth control pills in the desk and called her on it. It was a mistake that led to the worst fight father and daughter
had ever had. Webster winces just to think of it, his own anger (at what, really? His daughter’s sexuality? Her preparedness?
Her common sense?) just as immediate and sharp as Rowan’s, with all sorts of pent-up frustrations leaking out on both sides:
a mysterious dent on the front bumper of the Toyota neither would claim; a C– on a Spanish test that Rowan defended by proving
that she knew the material—she brandished the corrected paper annotated with sympathetic comments from her teacher—but couldn’t
finish the test on time; and a curfew that Rowan thought punishing and laughable. The invasion of privacy, Rowan insisted,
was unforgivable. In the end, Rowan took care of the dent in the car, though Webster paid. Webster relented on the curfew.
Both agreed that a Spanish tutor might be a good idea. Webster promised never again to pry.

He rolls, and his radio digs into his waist. He takes it off.

Before he died, his father sold the store for a modest sum that after taxes and debts went to Webster. He was thirty-two then
with a ten-year-old daughter and no wife. The bulk of the money went to day and night child care over the years, and he set
aside most of the rest for Rowan’s education.

Now Webster makes $57,000 a year. He’s reached the top. He’ll never make more than that, apart from yearly incremental raises.
Not even yearly lately. The next four years will be rough, but not impossible.

Or maybe they will be impossible now. He thinks of the present Rowan gave him at breakfast. That forecast might as well
have been a picture of his daughter in the space of any given day: a sun, a sun with cloud, rain, and another sun.

His radio sounds the tones. “Webster,” he says.

“I need you to come in early. Actually right now,” Koenig says.

“Be right there.”

“No. You’re closer.”

Koenig gives Webster the address.

“What is it?”

“Forty-eight-year-old male. Difficulty breathing.”

The patient, confused and sweating, is sitting on a Persian rug and leaning against a wall. Webster has enough time to register
the cathedral ceiling, the oversized flat-screen television, and the wall of glass with the view of the Green Mountains beyond.
Koenig finds the man’s radial pulse and applies the blood pressure cuff. The redheaded wife stands, puts her hands to her
head, and spins with anxiety. Two girls with similar hair, about five and eight, have been banished to the kitchen, but Webster
can see small toes hugging the doorsill.

“Where does it hurt?” Webster asks the man.

The patient puts his hand on his chest and runs it down his left arm.

“BP seventy-eight over thirty-six,” Koenig reports. “Can’t get a pulse. Respirations thirty-two and shallow.”

Webster applies the electrodes from the monitor. Right arm, left arm. Right leg, left leg. “Get a line in,” he says to Koenig.
“He needs a fluid challenge to get that pressure up.”

“We were just having coffee,” the wife says in a high-pitched voice, as if she can’t believe it. She’s jumping up and down,
and
Webster wants to tell her to knock it off, she’s scaring the children. In the kitchen, the kids are crying.

“On a scale of one to ten,” Webster asks the man, “how bad is the pain?”

The man loses consciousness and lists to one side. Webster and Koenig line up the backboard and the two lift him onto it while
checking his carotid pulse.

“What’s his name?” Webster yells.

The wife hesitates long enough that Webster has to turn his head.

“Mr. Dennis!” the kids shout from the doorsill.

Mr. Dennis?

“Dennis!” Webster shouts.

No response.

“Dennis, stay with us!” He checks the monitor. “V-fib,” he says to Koenig. “Any pulse?”

“Can’t find one,” Koenig reports.

“Remove the oxygen.”

Webster checks to see that the pads are in the proper position. He yells, “Is everybody clear?” He scans to make sure no one
is touching the patient. He shocks the man.

The wife begins to keen—an eerie sound that rises to the ceiling.

Webster completes a round of CPR, then sets the machine at 100 joules again. He administers another shock. He gives the patient
epinephrine and then raises the level to 150 joules. It takes four tries before Koenig reports a pulse. Koenig secures the
airway by intubating the patient.

“Let’s load him,” Webster says.

“Where are you taking him?” the wife asks as they head toward the door.

“Mercy,” Webster answers. “We’re doing everything we can for your husband.” He glances at the children, who are white-faced
now.

“He’s not my husband,” the woman says in a small voice.

Webster nods. Of course. The way the children yelled
Mr. Dennis
while the woman hesitated. The way she hasn’t touched or talked to the patient in all the time they’ve been at the house.

Never make assumptions.

“Ma’am, I want you to wait for someone to get here for the kids and then drive yourself to Mercy. Then get someone to drive
my car to Rescue. Leave the keys under the seat. You need to calm down a little. We’re doing everything we can for him.”

But boyfriend Dennis is not OK. Again, he falls into V-fib, and this time, in the ambulance, Webster can’t shock him out of
it. They wail down the ridge, sparsely populated with expensive vacation homes, the owners thrilled at the prospect of six
times more square footage than they have back in Manhattan.

Webster and Koenig approach the ER with lights and sirens turned off. Jogging alongside the stretcher, Webster gives his report,
being precise about the order of the procedures, the amount of medication, and the number of shocks. “No pulse since nine
forty-seven,” he says.

As good as dead.

He wonders if the girlfriend will come to the hospital and if the man was married. If the woman’s spinning meant more than
just distress, meant,
This can’t happen here.

After leaving Mercy, just outside the town limits, Koenig and Webster head to Rescue, passing a sign that announces that Hart
stone is tobacco-free. Webster and Koenig are silent because no matter how hard they’ve worked, a death is a failure. As they
drive south with the Taconic range to the west and the Green Mountains to the east, Webster thinks about the girlfriend. Koenig
put her address in the report, and maybe that will be fine with her, but Webster doubts it. Had the woman been unconcerned
about anyone finding the boyfriend at her house, she’d have been more forthcoming with information. She’d have gone to her
children and would have spoken to Dennis. Webster wonders who the next of kin really is. The true wife might be back in Manhattan
or she might have her own six thousand on an adjacent ridge. Webster is a cynic. Too many of his calls unearth infidelities.
Other calls are often marital disputes gone spectacularly wrong. He thinks he’s seen pretty much everything one spouse can
do to another.

Koenig parks the rig in its spot: facing out, ready to go again. Webster heads for the building while Koenig finishes cleaning
out the rig. No blood, Webster notes in passing, which is a blessing.

“What happened to Pinto?” Webster asks when Koening enters the squad room. Koenig walks to the coffee machine and presses
the lever six times to get half a cup. Webster checks his watch again. Three hours since his daughter made him breakfast.

“He called in sick,” Koenig says, setting his cup on the Formica counter that runs the length of the room.

“Again?”

“Burnout,” Koenig says. Koenig isn’t a probie, but he has less seniority than Webster.

“After only two years?” Webster asks.

“He’s always been a stressed-out dude.”

Burnout. Webster knows all about it. Emotional anxiety coupled with physical damage to backs and knees from having to lift
patients causes many rookies and veterans to leave the field before their time. Some go back to school to study to be nurses.
A few of the younger ones try for the police academy. Others merely drift away or, in the case of his first partner, Burrows,
die in their living rooms. Burrows in his last year a burnout and, at the end, a cardiac. Webster, out of service, heard about
Burrows’s death an hour later, which sent him into a frenzy. If only he had been on duty. He was certain he could have saved
his old partner, whom he’d come to love like a cranky uncle.

Only once has Webster had to deal with personal burnout. After Sheila left, Webster was unable to answer a single call. He
lay on the couch as he watched his mother take care of his two-year-old daughter. It wasn’t entirely burnout that was causing
his paralysis, but it was the job that took the brunt of his anger: the bloody messes, the fat bodies, the houses that smelled
of urine and cat food, and the sudden deaths of teenagers, suicides the worst. He’d seen guys lose it at the scene, screaming
at the rookie and terrifying the patient. He’d watched them sob in public or throw equipment back at Rescue. Worse, he’d known
them to start down the short path to alcoholism. Unwilling to resign, the burnouts always found a way to force themselves
off the job.