The child is a girl. She's scared and strapped in tight and she has a cut on her forehead and she is very, very angry about her situation.
"What's your name?" Gemma asks, crouching at the broken window.
"Maisie." Small voice. Deeply skeptical.
"I'm Gemma. I'm a paramedic, which means my entire job is to help. Can I come in there with you?"
A pause during which Maisie apparently weighs the offer with significant gravity. "Are you scared of broken glass?"
"A little bit. Are you?"
"A little bit."
"Then we're both being very brave," Gemma says. "Deal?"
A beat. "...Deal."
I'm working the driver's side of the SUV with my crew — stabilizing, fuel check, coordinating the second rig coming inbehind us. My hands are doing their job. My eyes keep finding her.
She talks to Maisie the whole time. Not the voice she uses on adults — something warmer and more direct, completely present. She asks Maisie about her giraffe. She learns the giraffe's name is Gerald. She tells Maisie that Gerald seems like a very sensible giraffe. Maisie relaxes and Gemma uses the window to get a neck brace on her before she notices.
I have to keep my eyes on my work before someone on my crew catches me watching and starts treating it like a development worth narrating.
She does not stop moving until every patient is loaded, every wound is dressed, every set of vitals has been called in.
She doesn't stop until it's done.
The scene clears the slow way — by degrees, with paperwork. Police tape goes up. The second rig pulls out. My crew begins winding hose.
I find her on the ambulance bumper.
She's sitting with her elbows on her knees, gloves stripped off and bundled in her lap, kit closed at her feet. The shaking in her hands is mostly gone. Mostly. She's looking at the ditch where the SUV was — the crushed grass and the ruts in the soft shoulder, the last evidence of where something almost went very wrong.
I sit down beside her. The bumper is cold and low and not designed for two people.
We make it work.
Neither of us speaks for a while. Down the road, Tommy is giving a statement to a deputy. The afternoon light is going sharp and gold across the ridgeline.
"You didn't try to fix me," she says.
"No."
A beat. The hose winds. The deputy's radio crackles.
"You didn't fix it for me."
Her hand is in her lap. Still trembling, just slightly, the small aftershock of adrenaline that has nowhere left to go. I reach over and take it.
Not carefully. Not like it's a question.
She turns her palm over and holds on.
"That's what lovers do," I say.
She doesn't answer. She leans her shoulder against mine — just slightly, just enough — and we sit on the ambulance bumper while the scene finishes clearing around us.
She climbs back into the rig.
