“No, not at all.”
“You’re shaking,” Burrows said, suddenly examining his partner.
“I’m fine.”
“Look, it didn’t happen to you,” Burrows said. “Rowan is fine. She will be fine. She’s long past when you have to worry about that.”
“I know,” Webster said.
“You go outside and wait for the cops. I’ll sit here with the mother.”
“You sure?”
“Go,” Burrows said. “That’s an order.”
Webster walked outside. He felt tears popping into his eyes and stared up at the sky so that they could leak back into his head. He’d never live it down if Nye showed up and he was bawling. He thanked God out loud, wherever he was. With Rowan, there had been no SIDS, no respiratory distress, no abnormalities, no twisted cord, nothing. He could hear the cop car bumping along the dirt road. He had no excuse for why he was outside. He turned and walked back into the house. Things would happen fast now.
Webster shed his equipment as he walked, calling out, surprised not to see Sheila with Rowan in the living room. He called again and heard an answer from the bedroom. There, in the dark of a late October afternoon, Sheila sat on the bed nursing their fourteen-month-old daughter. Sheila had on a pair of jeans and a white button-down shirt that allowed Rowan easy access to Sheila’s breast. Webster pounced on the bed, joining them. He laid a finger against Rowan’s cheek.
“Don’t get her going,” Sheila said. “I’m trying to put her down. She hasn’t slept all day.”
Webster registered the snappish tone. Sheila’s hair was stringy, and there were dark shadows below her eyes. If Rowan hadn’t slept all day, neither had Sheila.
“As soon as she’s done,” Webster said, “put her down and then you can sleep. Or if she won’t go down, I’ll take her.”
“You’ve been working two shifts.”
“I’m in better shape than you are.”
Sheila nodded.
Webster stood and undressed. He didn’t want any part of his job to touch the baby. Taking off the uniform was a way of putting aside one life and taking up another.
He slipped on a pair of jeans and a black sweater, then went into the bathroom to wash his face and hands. Back in the bedroom, standing in front of the mirror at the dresser so that he could finger-comb his hair into place, he caught a cameo of Sheila and Rowan on the bed. On impulse, he turned and swooped in to give Sheila and the baby a kiss. His foot kicked a glass, and Sheila turned her head away.
He picked up the glass from the floor. It still had a residue of amber liquid in it. He smelled it. The whiskey shook him.
“Where is it?” he asked.
Sheila didn’t answer. He could tell by the set of her jaw that she was angry. Hell, he was angry.
“I’ll find it,” he said, “so you might as well tell me.”
“Be my guest,” she said.
“What the fuck, Sheila? You’re nursing. It’s like giving Rowan a shot of Jack Daniel’s straight.”
“Don’t exaggerate,” she said.
Webster took Rowan from his wife. Sheila’s arms hung empty. After a few seconds, she stood and slipped behind him. She slid her feet into her boots.
Rowan, ripped from the breast, started crying. She began to flail, revving up for a good one.
“Now look what you’ve done,” Sheila said.
“What I’ve done?” Webster asked. “What I’ve done? How long has this been going on? Sheila, I need to know.”
“I don’t have to explain myself to you.”
“Yeah, you do. It’s my baby who’s been sucking on whiskey.”
“Your baby.”
“Our baby.”
“Oh good, I thought maybe I was the wet nurse.”
“Sheila, stop this.”
She walked out into the living room, and Webster followed. He watched as Sheila picked up her purse.
“Oh, Christ,” he said. “Where are you going?”
“I don’t know.”
“Don’t go.”
“If I don’t get out of here, I’ll go nuts.”
Webster placed himself between the door and Sheila, Rowan wailing.
“What the hell happened?” he asked. “Everything seemed fine when I left yesterday.”
She faced him, her stare hard. “It’s fucking eight degrees out, and it’s not even November. I can’t take the baby anywhere. She’s been crying all day. This whole thing is a mess. Just a fucking mess. I feel like a trapped lunatic.”
“Everybody feels like that when winter starts. Baby or no baby.”
“But at least you’re out. You’re someplace.”
“Maybe it’s time to think about going back to work,” Webster said.
“I don’t want to go back to work. I just want to…”
Webster felt his blood go cold. “What, Sheila? What is it that you want to do?”
“Get in a car.”
For a time, he couldn’t speak.
“You were my best shot,” Sheila said.
“Best shot at what?”
“Safety. You exude safety, Webster.”
His head spun. Webster shifted the baby in his arms and patted her back to calm her.
“It happened once, OK? I had a drink. You happy now, Mr. EMT? It happened once, and it won’t happen again. And you should take another look at your precious medical books. A mother has a small drink, you know how little gets to the baby? Practically nothing.”
“Where’s the bottle?”
“Rowan needs a change. And she needs to take a nap. And you’re standing in my way.”
She put her hands on him and pushed him to one side. Though he could have stopped her at any time, he stepped away from the door. He thought of telling her not to come back unless she was prepared to stay sober, but he knew the threat to be an empty one.
* * *
After Sheila left, Webster sat on the couch with Rowan. Had Sheila really picked him out as her best chance in life? The thought sickened him. Didn’t she love him as he did her? Hadn’t they fallen into their life together?
Or were Sheila’s words merely tossed out in the heat of the moment? Would she come home and take them back?
When Rowan began to squirm and cry again, Webster fetched the pink diaper bag from the bedroom and selected what he needed. He laid his daughter on the pad on the coffee table to change her. She smiled as if he were tickling her. Though Rowan might have sensed the tension in the air, she’d never know what her mother and father had said to each other. Sheila’s words were pebbles at the bottom of his stomach.
After he changed his daughter, he put her into her yellow pajamas. He sat for a moment in a kitchen chair, holding her, making faces and clucking.
Had Sheila deliberately gotten pregnant because he was her best shot? Who would do that? But then Webster thought about the confusion over the contraception the first time they’d been together. He shut his eyes. The night under the .9 moon had been a precious memory for him.
Sheila wanted to break the rules. OK, fine. But Webster could change the rules.
He struggled to get Rowan into her light blue snowsuit. Sheila had left the car seat at the foot of the stairs. Webster held Rowan’s face close to his chest to protect her tender skin. He put the car seat in the cruiser. After he strapped her in, he walked around to the front seat, sat down, and put the key in.
He turned to look at his daughter, but all he could see was a pair of blueberry eyes in a snowsuit. Something fragile bounced around his chest. The edgy, restless Sheila had returned. The Sheila who drank.
Webster backed out onto 42 and drove to the Giant Mart. With Rowan strapped against his chest, he searched the aisles for baby formula. He could figure out how to make up bottles. In the morning, he would tell Sheila to stop nursing. He thought she might agree if only for the freedom it would give her.
When he returned to the apartment, he put Rowan to sleep and searched for liquor bottles. He found nothing. Either s
he’d taken it with her or she was more cagey than he’d thought. The word squirrel popped into his head, and he made an ugly sound.
Sheila returned during the night. Webster didn’t ask her where she’d been.
In the morning, he made up four bottles of formula before he left for work.
The tones sounded, and the deadpan voice from Dispatch requested help. “Suspected cardiac, male, severe chest pain radiating through the jaw.” Webster asked for the address. Burrows said, Fuck. He continued swearing the entire way as the Bullet took a beating over the frozen ruts. Burrows was unusually attached to his rig.
“Where is this place, anyway?” Webster asked.
“Hell if I know,” Burrows said.
They reached a fishing cabin at the edge of a small frozen lake. Five trucks were parked outside. The enormous late-model vehicles looked ridiculous next to the tiny shack.
“Ice fishing,” Webster said.
“You ever see the movie Deliverance?” Burrows asked.
“No.”
“Never mind.”
Webster noticed that Burrows knocked on the front door instead of barging in as he usually did. Maybe he thought there might be a shotgun on the other side. A man yelled, “Come in,” and it didn’t sound like an ambush. Not that any medic Webster knew had ever run into an ambush, but he’d read about them happening in the cities.
Inside, there were four men standing, one lying on the floor. Five men, five trucks. Nobody offered anyone a ride?
The floor was made of gray indoor-outdoor carpet tiles, badly stained. With what, Webster didn’t want to know. The man down was crying and pressing his chest.
Webster and Burrows pushed their way through pizza boxes and beer cans.
When Webster knelt beside the patient, he was confused. The patient’s skin looked too pink to be cardiac-related, but the man was panting hard. Webster went through the basic assessment. The patient wasn’t sweating or short of breath, and he wasn’t nauseated. His blood pressure was high.
“What’s his name?” Webster asked.
“Sully,” a man over by the sink said.
“Sully,” Webster said. “Have you ever had this pain before?”
“Once,” the fisherman cried out. “At my niece’s wedding!” He spoke as if he were in agony. “They almost called the medics then.”
“Sully, on a scale of one to ten, how high is your pain?”
“Eight,” the man said. “Maybe nine! It’s terrible!”
“Can you show me where it hurts?” Burrows asked.
The man put his fingers just under his ears and ran them to the middle of his chest.
“Chest pain radiating to jaw,” Webster said.
“Call my wife!” the man yelled.
Webster stood and spoke to Burrows. “We got to take him in,” Webster said.
“Nice ride.”
“Long ride.”
Webster sat Sully up and asked if he could walk to the ambulance. Sully tried, and after several attempts was able to stand on his own. Webster heard the belch before they’d reached the front door. Sully said, as Webster had expected, “The pain is easing off a little. I’m feeling a little better. Let’s wait a second.”
“Let me check your vitals,” Webster said, as protocol demanded, though both he and Burrows knew exactly what they were dealing with. “Sit down right here.”
Webster cuffed the patient, then reached for a radial pulse. Before Webster could report, Sully stood again as if he’d had a tentative recovery from a near-death experience. After another minute, he had his arms in the air. “I’m saved!” he shouted.
The fisherman over by the sink sniggered. “Sully, I told you it was fucking heartburn.”
The five men tried to thank the medics with offers of fresh fish. Burrows turned them down. One of the men pointed out to Webster the tiny shack in the middle of the frozen pond. Inside, Webster knew, would be a stove and some chairs and a hole through which the men dropped their lines.
He also knew this: most of a medic’s calls were mundane.
“Rescue should send the asshole a bill for wear and tear on the rig,” Burrows said as Webster drove.
“Why did you pass on the fish?” Webster asked.
“You like to clean them?”
“Not really.”
“Neither do I, and Karen won’t touch them. Don’t imagine Sheila would either.”
Webster couldn’t picture Sheila cleaning a fish of any kind.
The ambulance bounced along the ruts. “Fuckers,” said Burrows.
It took them twenty-one minutes to emerge onto a road that wasn’t made of dirt. Thirty-six minutes from Rescue, twenty minutes at the scene, another thirty-six back. Nearly an hour and a half wasted. Burrows was in a mood.
“You look like shit, Webster, you know that?” Burrows said. “Baby not sleeping?”
“Baby’s sleeping fine.”
“Marriage good?”
“Fine,” he said.
“It’s my job to ask questions. You not performing at top notch, I gotta be paying attention. What’s up?”
“I’m not performing at top notch?” Webster asked, concerned.
“No, you’re fine. You look like you’re on dialysis, though. So what’s up at home?”
“Not sure,” Webster said.
“Bingo. I knew it was the marriage.”
“You’re full of shit,” Webster said. “I could have financial troubles, for all you know.”
“But you don’t. I’m right, aren’t I?”
Webster sighed.
“Man, that woman had you pussy-whipped. You were so fucking nuts about her.”
“I still am.”
“She love you back?” Burrows took out a toothpick and began to clean his teeth.
“Yes,” Webster said.
But did she?
“So what’s the problem?” Burrows asked.
“I don’t know,” Webster said. “Look at this. A traffic jam in Hartstone?”
“You could use the siren.”
“We’re almost there.”
A sudden siren might give the guy ahead of him a heart attack.
“Sheila’s restless. Chafing at the bit.”
“To do what?” Burrows asked.
“She won’t say. She can’t say.”
“You sure it’s not that postpartum shit?”
Webster could see the beginning of town, but he couldn’t get to it. A large semi blocked his view. “Is there a parade today?”
“Dunno.”
“It’s not that. She’s not depressed,” Webster said.
Burrows turned and squinted at Webster as he drove. “So what is it?”
Webster had never discussed Sheila with anyone. It felt like a breach, going outside the marriage. But he knew Burrows wouldn’t stop until he had what he wanted. And there might be some relief in talking about it.
“She’s drinking,” Webster said.
“Oh, sweet Jesus.” Burrows briefly closed his eyes. “You drinking?”
“No.”
“Well, that’s all right.”
“It’s not all right.”
“I’ll bet it was romantic in the beginning, right?” Burrows said. “The first bottle of wine… the second…”
“Yeah, maybe.”
“Then you find you’re drinking at every meal because it’s just so fucking romantic, right? Candles, the pretty glasses, you get laid. It’s cool, right?”
Webster was silent.
“Then one night you discover that one of you has a problem, and it’s not you.”
The jam broke up for no good reason that Webster could see. No parade. No accident. “How do you know all this?” he asked.
“Been there, done that. You need a marriage counselor?”
Webster shook his head, as much from surprise as from denial. “I think you can pretty much forget that. Not happening.”
“Good, ’cause I don’t know any!” Burrows cackled. “Just curious, t
hough. Would Sheila go?”
“Would you?”
“Not on your fucking life.”
Webster felt as though he lived inside an irregular heartbeat. For weeks, Sheila seemed normal, loving, and even, on occasion, sassy in the way Webster had once liked. Each time the three of them went sledding or shopping or to Webster’s parents’ for a Sunday lunch, and he watched the way Sheila read to Rowan, or took her for walks in the woods, or smiled when Rowan smiled, Webster had hope. For a moment, his heart seemed lighter, and he’d think, cautiously, We’ll be fine now.
Even so, he continued to be vigilant. Inevitably, after a month or six weeks, he would see a sign that rattled him. The one sign made him look for others. Sometimes he felt that he was poisoning the marriage simply by looking for the tells, that somehow the search made them appear: a looser face, a slight slur of words, an unwillingness to kiss him. Sheila sometimes went out, but not with him. Webster searched for liquor bottles and found them. A cloud of distrust filled the apartment.
One night, Webster found a bottle of Bacardi behind Rowan’s stuffed animals on a shelf. That Sheila had used Rowan’s toys for a hiding place especially infuriated him.
“That’s it,” he said to Sheila as he went into the living room, brandishing his find.
Sheila turned her head away. Rowan looked up at her dad.
Webster thought his daughter had caught on to the tension between him and Sheila, and, now that she was starting to talk, might understand more than he wanted her to. He put the bottle behind him.
“We’re going to get you to AA,” Webster said to Sheila.
“The person has to want to go.”
“Believe me, you’re going to want to go.”
“And how’s that, exactly?” asked Sheila whose eyes never strayed from the TV.
Webster had an answer. It was something he’d been thinking about for weeks. “I’m taking Rowan, and we’re going to my parents’.”
Sheila turned off the TV. “What’s that mean, exactly?” she asked.
“It means Rowan and I will be living at my parents’ house, and you will not.”
“Nana?” Rowan asked.
Webster smiled at his daughter. “We’ll see,” he said, and he thought the words We’ll see the most used phrase in a parent’s repertoire.
“You wouldn’t dare,” Sheila said.