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She’s breathing! And she has a heartbeat! Not strong, but I feel it!
Ali knew better than to move her, especially given the blood seeping from her head. He debated calling his dad but instead sent a text telling him to come straight home, that Nana Mama had fallen and that he was calling 911.
Which he did. The dispatcher, a woman with a gravelly voice, said, “This is 911, what is your emergency?”
“My name is Ali Cross. My great-grandmother has fallen down the stairs in our backyard and she is unconscious and bleeding from her head, but she has a heartbeat, and she is breathing,” Ali said, fighting off the urge to cry as the reality of it started sinking in. “I need an ambulance.”
“Give me your address, son,” the dispatcher said. “We have a lot of emergencies right now, but let me see how fast I can get someone there to help you. Don’t hang up.”
He gave her the address. She asked him to hold on.
Ali’s phone buzzed. His father was calling.
“Dad!” he said when he clicked over. “I found Nana Mama on the bricks at the bottom of the back stairs. She’s unconscious but breathing. Her right arm looks bad, and she’s got blood around her head. The dispatch lady is sending an ambulance here.”
“I’m eight minutes away,” his father replied. “Tell the paramedics Nana should go to St. Anthony’s. It’s closest and all her records are there.”
Before Ali could reply, his dad hung up. In the far distance, he heard the faint wail of a siren. He looked down at Nana Mama and all at once felt a terrible fear of the unknown.
11
JOHN SAMPSON SLAPPED A bubble on the roof of his pickup and lit up the siren the second I hung up with Ali. We’d only just gotten back to the truck after spending the better part of our frustrating day under the ghost ramp.
“Lucky we’re close to your place,” Sampson said through gritted teeth, weaving in and out of traffic, speeding toward a usable on-ramp to the Beltway. From there, it was one mile to my exit and then six blocks home. “And she’s tough, Alex.”
“Tougher than tough,” I said, flashing on a childhood memory of my nine-year-old self coming to live at Nana Mama’s house, climbing up the steps along with my older brothers, Charlie, Blake, and Aaron.
We hadn’t needed to knock. She’d flung the front door open and greeted us, crying with grief and joy and open arms.
“My good boys,” Nana Mama had said, hugging us fiercely to her. “Welcome home. I’m so deeply sorry for what’s happened, but welcome home. I love you all and I hope together we can get over everything we’ve lost.”
Sampson had to swerve hard to avoid hitting a motorcyclist as we came onto the Beltway, which shook me from that early memory and returned me to the present difficult moment. I called Ali back.
“We’re about three minutes out now,” I said. “How long for the ambulance?”
“Like, twenty minutes.”
“Twenty minutes!”
“The dispatch lady said they got fifteen emergency calls in the five minutes before I called.”
“Is Nana still unconscious?”
“She opened her eyes and kind of groaned, but her eyes are shut again.”
“Hang on,” I said. “We’ll be there in less than two minutes.”
I hung up, looked at Sampson. “We’re taking her to St. Anthony’s Hospital.”
He kept his eyes on the road. “I don’t know, Alex. She fell and hit her head. We don’t know what’s happened to her head or her spine. She needs to come out of there on a backboard.”
“I thought of that,” I said. “You still have those orange plastic traction boards you use to get out of mud and sand in the back, right?”
John liked to drive his truck off-road on weekends, and he had the rig set up for it, including a winch and self-rescue gear like the boards.
“Strapped to the left wall in the bed,” he said. “They’ll keep her stable.”
A minute later, we skidded to a stop in front of the same house I’d walked into back when I was nine years old. Sampson killed the siren and left the bubble on.
