Rescue (17 page)

After Webster spent a week on the couch, his mother stood over him and told him he had no choice but to be the man he used
to be. Webster was his daughter’s sole provider. Even now, he can see the way his mother looked at him: a sheet of parental
anger over eyes filled with sympathy. Her fists were knots on her hips. She and Webster’s father would help when they could,
she said, but Rowan was Webster’s responsibility.

After that day, Webster has never let himself get close to burnout. He can’t afford to.

“The weather’s going to be good tonight for the rehearsal dinner,” Webster says to Koenig to change the subject. His tall
partner, who both runs and smokes, looks younger than his forty-seven years, with his close-cropped blond hair and his light
brown eyes. Once a math teacher at a private school, Koenig had his own personal burnout. He decided he needed a job that
wouldn’t bore him to death. Webster was surprised to learn that being an EMT paid better than being a math teacher. So much
for four years of college. Koenig, relieved never to have to enter a classroom again, loves his job, and it shows. Webster
has never had a better partner and doubts he ever will. Often the two switch roles to keep up Koenig’s skills. Webster doesn’t
want to lose his partner, but he hopes for Koenig’s sake that he gets the lead position on the number two ambulance when it
comes in.

“You like the guy?” Webster asks. The wedding isn’t exactly shotgun, but it came on fast because Jim (Joe, Jack?) has to ship
out next week for Afghanistan.

“I’m worried for the guy, but I’m worried more about Annabelle.” Annabelle, who at twenty-one shares Koenig’s height and love
of running. “I might get to like him more when he gets back,” he adds. “He’s rabid right wing, which is normal for a guy committed
to the military. I never go near politics with him. But Annabelle worked for Obama. I don’t know what the hell they talk about.”

“How’d they meet?”

“Blind date.”

“Sometimes, they end up the best,” Webster says.

Unlike meeting your wife at the scene of an accident she caused because she was drunk, which ought to have told Webster all
he needed to know if only he’d been paying attention.

“I just hope he doesn’t come home with a head or spine,” Koenig says. “I know Annabelle. She’ll stick with him forever. But,
Jesus, one week of a marriage, and then you’re taking care of a guy you hardly know, wiping his ass and trying to teach him
to talk again. No kids? Main breadwinner? What kind of a life is that?”

“Hey,” Webster says, “you’re getting ahead of yourself. Let the girl get married. Enjoy the wedding, Koenig. It’s your only
job tomorrow.”

“That and writing the checks.”

“Right. Oh, jeez, I almost forgot.” Webster fetches an envelope from his back pocket and opens it on the table. “I have to
renew my license.”

“You have a birthday coming up?”

“Today.”

“Hey, happy birthday. What? Forty?”

“Yup.”

“Just a baby,” Koenig says.

“Watch it.”

Webster reads the letter. “I have to get a new pic this time. Do they really think the color of my eyes is going to change?”

“No, but your weight might. You might go gray.”

“My parents went gray in their forties,” Webster says.

“I’ll be bald at fifty.”

“Your mother’s father?”

“I loved the guy. He had an ugly head, though.”

Webster checks the computer that is always open on the center table. “Weather’s going to be great tomorrow,” he tells his
partner. “Sixty-eight and sunny.”

“May the gods smile on Annabelle.”

“Hope the gods smile on the soldier, too.”

“Jackson.”

“I knew that.” Webster puts down the letter and sips his lukewarm coffee.

“You OK?” Koenig asks.

“Yeah, why?”

“You look preoccupied.”

“No, you know, the usual. Worried about Rowan.”

“Until six months ago,” Koenig points out, “you hardly ever worried about Rowan.”

Webster says nothing.

“What’s different?” Koenig asks.

“Seventeen?”

“Maybe she’s got a romance going.”

“She does have a romance,” Webster says. “Guy named Tommy. Good kid, as far as I can tell.”

Koenig is silent. He crushes his empty cup and lobs it toward the trash bin. “Rowan’s a straight-up kid,” he says as he unlaces
his boots. “These new Timberlands hurt like hell.”

“How long have you had them?”

“Three weeks.”

“Wearing them the whole time?”

Koenig nods.

“Get rid of them, then. You have to be sharp on your pins.”

“Shame.”

“Find someone on the squad who has your foot size,” Webster says as the tones sound a call. He takes it.

“Seizure,” he reports to Koenig. “Twenty-two-year-old female. Known epileptic.”

“Super,” Koenig says, lacing his boots as fast as he can.

W
ebster cleans the kitchen, moving the silver cube from the center of the table to the sill. There’s a different fortune in
the box:
Go slowly and be careful.
He thinks that Rowan, the previous night, must have given the box another shake, and he wonders what advice she was looking
for. After he finishes with the kitchen, he gives the bathroom a punishing scrubbing. The windows are winter-filthy, but he
knows that Rowan will tackle them, still tickled by the novelty of the Windex sprayer that sheets them clean. The day is fine,
as promised, and Webster from time to time thinks about Koenig and Annabelle and the soldier. Mostly, however, he thinks about
Rowan.

It wasn’t so long ago that Rowan used to give him a hug and a kiss when she walked in the door. Then she’d ask him how his
day went while she sliced apples for them to eat with a sugar and cinnamon mix. He’d want to know about her day, and she’d
tell him—when she planned on hiking with Gina; how she was glad she no longer had to take history; and could he loan her fifty
dollars until she got paid so that she and Gina could go shopping in Manchester for good deals on winter jackets? When had
that been? October? November? Had the change in Rowan happened gradually or all at once? He can’t remember. It seems to him
that one day she gave him a hug and a kiss, and the next day she didn’t.
That all of a sudden he no longer knew where she was or who she was with. That by Christmas a petulant tone had crept into
her voice, there one minute, gone the next. And that by March, she was questioning his authority and letting him know when
he irritated her with his questions and his always
wanting to know
. He supposed the change had to happen, that it would help when Rowan had to leave in the fall. All that made theoretical
sense. What didn’t make sense was the day-to-day reality of not knowing his daughter anymore.

Webster hears the specific whine of Rowan’s Corolla before it hits the driveway. He’s still vacuuming when Rowan comes in,
so it isn’t until he turns off the machine that he hears voices in the back hallway, those of Rowan and Gina, a blond genius
who might also one day be a beauty once she rids herself of the small landmasses of pimples that cross her facial continent.
Webster strolls into the kitchen, hands in pockets. “Gina,” he says, “how are you doing?”

“Hey, Mr. Webster.”

“Hey, Dad,” Rowan says, opening the fridge, the first move she makes whenever she enters the house. “Want some OJ?” she asks
her friend.

“Sure.”

“How was work?” Webster asks. “You two have the same shift today?”

Gina’s sweatshirt is dotted with what looks to be meat blood.

“It was OK, not great,” Gina says, as Rowan fills two tall glasses with orange juice. “I was mostly at the back door, opening
cartons. Least I got some sun.”

“I had this lady at the register went nuts on me,” Rowan announces, sitting at the table, glass in hand. “All of a sudden
she
starts screaming that I’m trying to cheat her. I haven’t even totaled her order yet, much less taken her money. And she’s
screaming—I mean
screaming—
that I’m ripping her off.” Rowan downs the juice in one go, looks for a napkin. Webster tears off a piece of paper towel
and hands it to her. “The assistant manager comes over, takes the tape out, and compares it to every item in her bags. Then
the lady says she’s entitled to two boxes of strawberries for the price of one, and that I charged her for both—she’s pointing
her finger at me now—and Mr. T explains that was last week’s offer. And before he gets a chance to tell her he’ll extend the
offer, she throws her purse at him, and all this crap falls out. Coins, keys, dollar bills, used tissues, breath mints… a
jar of makeup breaks and gets all over my sneakers and Mr. T’s shoes, and then the lady starts sobbing. Mr. T tries to put
everything back into her purse except for the used tissues and the makeup. He gives her pocketbook back, bags her groceries,
and wheels them out to her car for her, and of course she hasn’t paid for anything.”

Gina laughs. “I love the makeup.”

“You wouldn’t if it was all over
your
sneakers,” Rowan points out. “I had to clean that up and pick up the tissues and the millions of pieces of glass.”

“So,” Webster asks, “what are you two up to tonight?”

“Gina’s over because her computer broke again,” Rowan says, “and she needs to get some notes and a take-home quiz off mine.”

They both know this to be a white lie. Gina’s mother doesn’t have the money for a computer, and Gina is expected to use the
one in the library, which always has a long line. At least two or three times a week, the girl comes to the house to use Rowan’s
laptop. Gina had to complete all her applications on it, and some of those applications had four essays. Despite the hardship,
Gina has excellent grades, which proves something, though Webster isn’t sure exactly what. He likes it that Rowan spends time
with her.

“There’s homemade pea soup in the freezer,” he says.

Sometimes Webster worries about what Gina is getting to eat at home. The girl lives with her mother, Eileen, and a housebound
grandmother. Eileen works part-time as a receptionist at Blake Ford because she can’t leave the grandmother alone all day.
Eileen is probably pulling in twenty-five, thirty at best, Webster guesses. Gina will be able to go to Columbia only because
she has a full ride.

On Saturdays, Webster doesn’t make dinner. Gina and Rowan are eating the first of two meals they’ll have that afternoon and
evening, the other away from home and not a real meal—more like cows grazing. On Saturday nights, Webster consumes leftovers
and watches TV until he can’t keep his eyes open. Rowan used to wake him up when she came in, but she’s stopped doing that.

“Well, I’ll let you be,” Webster says, eyeing Rowan, who returns his gaze and shrugs.

“You’ll do the windows today,” Webster announces on Sunday morning. “It’s going to rain tomorrow, so it has to be today.”

Rowan, sleep hanging off her face like a net, nods.

“Nana used to love the days when Gramps would wash the windows in the spring. ‘I’ve got new eyes,’ she’d say.”

Rowan, in her flannel pants and T-shirt, says she has to go to Liz Foster’s at four. “We’re finishing up a physics project.”

“Fine. Don’t be too late. I’m guessing you have a lot of homework.”

“A ton of reading.”

“What book?”

“
Gravity’s Rainbow
.”

“What’s that?” Webster asks.

“A really stupid seven-hundred-sixty-page book.”

Webster turns from the stove with a pan of fried eggs and bacon. “They’re asking you at the end of your senior year to read
a seven-hundred-sixty-page book? Mrs. Washington assigned it?”

“She says it’s the best novel in the English language.”

“Your class make fun of her this year?” Webster asks as he slips the eggs and bacon onto Rowan’s plate.

“No. Maybe. A little.”

“You reap what you sow.”

Rowan shrugs.

“Bad luck for you,” Webster says. He puts a plate of toast between them.

“No kidding.”

“You and Gina have fun last night?” he asks.

“Pretty much.” There’s a trim of tiny pimples at her widow’s peak, a rose growing near a nostril. Rowan’s morning smell—the
sweet scent of her hair, the particular fragrance of her skin—is so familiar to Webster that he thinks he’d know the girl
anywhere: in the woods, in a crowded department store. He remembers a trip to Boston he and Rowan made during spring vacation
when she was nine. After touring the Freedom Trail, he took her to the Aquarium and promptly lost her when he became engrossed
in an exhibit on penguins and she wandered away. Panicked, he
snagged a security guard, which alerted other security guards. Rowan was startled to find herself the center of attention
at an exhibit of dolphins. “I knew where
he
was,” she said, bewildered.

“Rowan, eat. You need your strength.”

Rowan rolls her eyes. Webster wonders how many times he’s said that to her. Sometimes he gets into a groove, and he can’t
get out. “It’s just that Friday, at breakfast, you went from zero to sixty in nothing flat. Everything OK?”

“Everything’s
fine,
Dad.”

“Well, good,” he says, though he knows now that it isn’t.

Rowan scratches her left arm, a sign that she’s anxious.

“You OK?”
Rowan mimics as she points to her father’s untouched breakfast.

Webster stabs a cold egg. “You don’t have to take that tone with me.”

Rowan sops up her eggs with a slice of toast.

Webster puts his fork down and glances at the dirty windows. He can’t eat the eggs. Wrong breakfast. He’d have done better
with something sweet. “Rowan, I’m getting tired of your moodiness.”

“Dad, just fuck off, OK?”

The word, like a scratch of fingernails against a blackboard, creates a physical reaction along his spine. Webster can see
that Rowan is waiting for him to reprimand her, punish her. When he doesn’t, she pushes her chair back. “Where’s the hose?”
she asks.

From the garage, Webster watches as Rowan washes the outside windows. She stands on a stepladder and starts with the back
attic window of her bedroom. She points the hose with the
attached Windex and sets the switch to “soap,” letting the foamy water shimmy down the panes. Rowan waits a few seconds, turns
the sprayer to “water,” and washes the soap away, leaving a clean window with droplets that will shortly dry. Just the way
he’s taught her. He’s had to assure her that the fluid won’t damage the bushes and the grass, and though he wonders how that
can possibly be true, neither the bushes nor the grass has been hurt. He wishes Windex would invent a product to wash the
insides of the windows as easily as the exterior ones. Old houses are great, but a bitch to keep clean.