“Okay!” says Paul from somewhere behind us, not quite embarrassed but maybe on the edge of it, and I realize I’ve got one leg hitched around Aiden’s hip. I can’t blame the harness for it—I’m just pressing close to him, getting to where I know him best, where we say everything best. “That was a wonderful job, Zoe,” Paul says, “just wonderful! How do you feel?”
“I feel awesome,” I say, my too-big smile back. Sheree and Tom congratulate me as Aiden and Paul help me out of the harness, and I can’t stop looking up at the pole, at the height I scaled, the dive I made. I can’t stop thinking about the press of Aiden’s lips against mine, the way it felt to have his arms around me after coming down.
If I had a gratitude jar, I’d put this day in there.
I’d fill it with slips, all for thisday’s memories.
Chapter 14
Aiden
I remember all the people I’ve haddie on the job.
My first was in my second year running: a pulmonary embolism, dead before we even got him on the rig. My second, a car crash, two victims. My third, an MI, husband in the rig with us, watching his wife breathe her last. Twenty-three in all, over my ten years running, first as an EMT and later as a medic. It seems morbid, maybe, to keep a count, but I guess I think it’d be more morbidnotto, to have it become commonplace, to not remember.
But I’d give anything, anything at all, to forgetthe last hour.
The call had come in at 5:06 a.m. Female, twenty-five, possible overdose.Lights and sirens,the dispatcher had said, which meant we needed to hustle. I’d done overdoses since Aaron; they were too commonplace to avoid. But they still made me sweat a little harder, made my hands a little unsteadier.
You want to tell yourself, I guess, that you’ll be going somewhere seedy, somewhere where there’s cooking spoons on the dresser, hollow-eyed spectators who scatter under the lights of the rig like cockroaches. You want to tell yourself that there’s a type, because that helps you make sense of things. But there isn’t, so I wasn’t surprised to be headed to a nice neighborhood. I wasn’t surprised to pull up to the large, perfectly maintained Tudor, professional landscaping, fancy lights lining the walk. I wasn’t surprised by any of the details I learned over those next frantic twenty minutes: Sidney, her name was. Living with her parents, sleeping in her childhood bedroom. A bad back injury while playing on her college soccer team. Addiction to prescription opioid painkillers. Just home from rehab yesterday.
Unconscious.
Unresponsive.
In the rig, her parents following us to the hospital, Ahmed and I had done everything. Intubation. Twelve lead to monitor heart function. IV line to pump her full of Narcan, sodium bicarbonate. Ahmed doing CPR when she’d lost her pulse, me putting pads on for the AED. Epinephrine, trying to get a shockable rhythm. Over and over again, until it started to feel awful, like we were just rag-dolling her around, Charlie in the front, calling ahead to the hospital.One more time,I’d thought, more epinephrine in her line, and I’d opened my mouth to say her name, to shock her back—Sidney!—but instead I’d said his name, quick, automatic, and utterly humiliating.
Aaron.
Across from me, Ahmed had stiffened, and I’d corrected. “I’m fine,” I’d said quickly. “I’m fine.”
No change by the time we’d gotten to the hospital, and Ahmed and Charlie had taken over, covering the transfer and paperwork. It takes longer than you’d think, the hanging around, the paperwork. Long enough to find out the doctors couldn’t do any better than we had done. Long enough to find out Sidney was gone.
I’m quiet on the ride back to the station; we all are. But while Charlie and Ahmed manage at least a few duty-related exchanges—meds we’ll have to replenish, paperwork we’ll have to file—I say nothing, a black, twisting pain in my throat that’s nearly choking me. When we pull up, it’s two minutes until our shift is over, and the next crew is in the bay, sipping coffee, laughing and talking. It’s normal—it’s so fuckingnormal, and I feel frozen in this seat. I feel like if I move, it’ll just be to destroy this truck with my bare hands. It suddenly seems so wrong to ever use this vehicle again. It should be buried, set on fire, put out tosea,something.
When Charlie and Ahmed get out, I see Charlie shake her head, a slight turn, but the expression on her face must convey something, because the new crew adjusts, turns solemn, one of them looking my way in sympathy. That’s all I need to extract myself, to get moving. Med stops me, a big hand on my shoulder. “Take off, man. Charlie and I will close out.”
“I’m all right.”
“I know,” he answers, giving my shoulder a firm slap of recognition. “No shame in needing sometime, though.”
“Yeah,” I manage. “Thanks.”
I don’t look at him, or at Charlie, or at anyone else as I grab my things from my locker and head out. But in my car, I feel as lost as I did in the rig, unsure where I should go next. It’s seven in the morning, and before the call we’d all gotten a few good hours of interrupted sleep, and I doubt I could get any shut-eye even if we hadn’t. Even now, when I blink, I see her open eyes, the green cast to her skin. I can so easily rearrange her features. Make them into Aaron’s. She was slight, like he was. Fine bones underneath thin skin.
I drive without seeing, the kind of autopilot where you get home and think,How did I get here?, where you remember none of the traffic lights you stopped at, none of the intersections you passed through. Except I haven’t gone home. I’ve gone to Zoe’s. I’m parked right outside her building, the place where I’ve waited for her, or where she’s waited for me, every time we’ve left forStanton Valley.
There is not one person who I should want to be around less after I’ve watched a woman die from the same thing that killed my brother. Butshouldmeans nothing to me right now. It’s only been two and a half days since I dropped her off here, after our weekend, and it feels like a lifetime. If I’m honest it felt like a lifetime even before this morning. When I’d dropped her off on Sunday, I’d lingered at this same spot, not wanting to be apart from her after a weekend that had been damned near perfect, after the days before where we’d spent stolen time at my place. There’s something new between us now, though neither of us had been able to say it, and she’d slid from my car like she does every Sunday. I don’t think I’d stopped thinking of her since, not until these last frantic couple of hours, where my head had been full with trying to put color back in Sidney’s sunken, wasting skin.
So right now, all I want is to see Zoe’s smooth, bright skin, her hair in the sun when it gleams and changes color. I want her smile, her sharp, clear voice. I am too wrung out tocare about why.
I’m greeted in the lobby by a black-suited doorman who sits behind a high, granite-topped desk, a headset in his ear. He greets me with a grating, cheerful, “May I help you?” I didn’t even know this place had a doorman, didn’t think much past getting in the door. Now I wonder what will happen if I have this guy call up, if Zoe will not, in fact—despite how things are between us now—want to see me at seven o’clock on a random Wednesday morning, no phone call first. But I don’t think about turning back. My seeing her feels as necessary asmy next breath.
“I’m here to see a resident. Zoe Ferris.”
He nods, asks my name, and types something onto his laptop, and in a few seconds he’s speaking quietly into his headset while I try to make myself look calm and disinterested, like I don’t feel as if I could tear this place to pieces just to get what I need. I catch sight of myself in a mirror across the lobby, wincing at the state of my uniform, the dark circlesunder my eyes.
“You can go on up, sir,” the doorman says. I hear a buzzy click that must open the glass doors behind him, leading into a bay of elevators. I head toward them, then pause and turn back, embarrassed. “I don’t know her apartment number.”
