In the corner of the room are Rowan’s guitar and clarinet. Webster hasn’t heard her play either in months. Webster knows that if he opens Rowan’s desk drawers, he will find various tubes of lip gloss, several dozen Bic pens with the tops chewed, a photo of Sheila and Rowan shortly after the baby’s birth (the photo viewed so often that it no longer holds any power over Webster or Rowan—or does it?), costume jewelry Rowan received as presents years ago and can’t bear to throw away, and various coins. Periodically Webster has Rowan collect all the loose change in the house, put it into wrappers, and take it to the bank, Rowan getting half the score. One recent Christmas, Webster gave Rowan a machine that sorted and wrapped the coins. Before Christmas dinner, Rowan presented her father with $260 in neat tubes.
But Webster will no longer look through Rowan’s drawers, the result of an agreement on Webster’s part not to pry. In the fall, right after Rowan’s seventeenth birthday, Webster found a card of birth control pills in the desk and called her on it. It was a mistake that led to the worst fight father and daughter had ever had. Webster winces just to think of it, his own anger (at what, really? His daughter’s sexuality? Her preparedness? Her common sense?) just as immediate and sharp as Rowan’s, with all sorts of pent-up frustrations leaking out on both sides: a mysterious dent on the front bumper of the Toyota neither would claim; a C– on a Spanish test that Rowan defended by proving that she knew the material—she brandished the corrected paper annotated with sympathetic comments from her teacher—but couldn’t finish the test on time; and a curfew that Rowan thought punishing and laughable. The invasion of privacy, Rowan insisted, was unforgivable. In the end, Rowan took care of the dent in the car, though Webster paid. Webster relented on the curfew. Both agreed that a Spanish tutor might be a good idea. Webster promised never again to pry.
He rolls, and his radio digs into his waist. He takes it off.
Before he died, his father sold the store for a modest sum that after taxes and debts went to Webster. He was thirty-two then with a ten-year-old daughter and no wife. The bulk of the money went to day and night child care over the years, and he set aside most of the rest for Rowan’s education.
Now Webster makes $57,000 a year. He’s reached the top. He’ll never make more than that, apart from yearly incremental raises. Not even yearly lately. The next four years will be rough, but not impossible.
Or maybe they will be impossible now. He thinks of the present Rowan gave him at breakfast. That forecast might as well have been a picture of his daughter in the space of any given day: a sun, a sun with cloud, rain, and another sun.
His radio sounds the tones. “Webster,” he says.
“I need you to come in early. Actually right now,” Koenig says.
“Be right there.”
“No. You’re closer.”
Koenig gives Webster the address.
“What is it?”
“Forty-eight-year-old male. Difficulty breathing.”
The patient, confused and sweating, is sitting on a Persian rug and leaning against a wall. Webster has enough time to register the cathedral ceiling, the oversized flat-screen television, and the wall of glass with the view of the Green Mountains beyond. Koenig finds the man’s radial pulse and applies the blood pressure cuff. The redheaded wife stands, puts her hands to her head, and spins with anxiety. Two girls with similar hair, about five and eight, have been banished to the kitchen, but Webster can see small toes hugging the doorsill.
“Where does it hurt?” Webster asks the man.
The patient puts his hand on his chest and runs it down his left arm.
“BP seventy-eight over thirty-six,” Koenig reports. “Can’t get a pulse. Respirations thirty-two and shallow.”
Webster applies the electrodes from the monitor. Right arm, left arm. Right leg, left leg. “Get a line in,” he says to Koenig. “He needs a fluid challenge to get that pressure up.”
“We were just having coffee,” the wife says in a high-pitched voice, as if she can’t believe it. She’s jumping up and down, and Webster wants to tell her to knock it off, she’s scaring the children. In the kitchen, the kids are crying.
“On a scale of one to ten,” Webster asks the man, “how bad is the pain?”
The man loses consciousness and lists to one side. Webster and Koenig line up the backboard and the two lift him onto it while checking his carotid pulse.
“What’s his name?” Webster yells.
The wife hesitates long enough that Webster has to turn his head.
“Mr. Dennis!” the kids shout from the doorsill.
Mr. Dennis?
“Dennis!” Webster shouts.
No response.
“Dennis, stay with us!” He checks the monitor. “V-fib,” he says to Koenig. “Any pulse?”
“Can’t find one,” Koenig reports.
“Remove the oxygen.”
Webster checks to see that the pads are in the proper position. He yells, “Is everybody clear?” He scans to make sure no one is touching the patient. He shocks the man.
The wife begins to keen—an eerie sound that rises to the ceiling.
Webster completes a round of CPR, then sets the machine at 100 joules again. He administers another shock. He gives the patient epinephrine and then raises the level to 150 joules. It takes four tries before Koenig reports a pulse. Koenig secures the airway by intubating the patient.
“Let’s load him,” Webster says.
“Where are you taking him?” the wife asks as they head toward the door.
“Mercy,” Webster answers. “We’re doing everything we can for your husband.” He glances at the children, who are white-faced now.
“He’s not my husband,” the woman says in a small voice.
Webster nods. Of course. The way the children yelled Mr. Dennis while the woman hesitated. The way she hasn’t touched or talked to the patient in all the time they’ve been at the house.
Never make assumptions.
“Ma’am, I want you to wait for someone to get here for the kids and then drive yourself to Mercy. Then get someone to drive my car to Rescue. Leave the keys under the seat. You need to calm down a little. We’re doing everything we can for him.”
But boyfriend Dennis is not OK. Again, he falls into V-fib, and this time, in the ambulance, Webster can’t shock him out of it. They wail down the ridge, sparsely populated with expensive vacation homes, the owners thrilled at the prospect of six times more square footage than they have back in Manhattan.
Webster and Koenig approach the ER with lights and sirens turned off. Jogging alongside the stretcher, Webster gives his report, being precise about the order of the procedures, the amount of medication, and the number of shocks. “No pulse since nine forty-seven,” he says.
As good as dead.
He wonders if the girlfriend will come to the hospital and if the man was married. If the woman’s spinning meant more than just distress, meant, This can’t happen here.
After leaving Mercy, just outside the town limits, Koenig and Webster head to Rescue, passing a sign that announces that Hartstone is tobacco-free. Webster and Koenig are silent because no matter how hard they’ve worked, a death is a failure. As they drive south with the Taconic range to the west and the Green Mountains to the east, Webster thinks about the girlfriend. Koenig put her address in the report, and maybe that will be fine with her, but Webster doubts it. Had the woman been unconcerned about anyone finding the boyfriend at her house, she’d have been more forthcoming with information. She’d have gone to her children and would have spoken to Dennis. Webster wonders who the next of kin really is. The true wife might be back in Manhattan or she might have her own six thousand on an adjacent ridge. Webster is a cynic. Too many of his calls unearth infidelities. Other calls are often marital disputes gone spectacularly wrong. He thinks he’s seen pretty much everything one spouse can do to another.
Koenig parks the rig in its spot: facing out, ready to go again. Webster heads for the buildi
ng while Koenig finishes cleaning out the rig. No blood, Webster notes in passing, which is a blessing.
“What happened to Pinto?” Webster asks when Koening enters the squad room. Koenig walks to the coffee machine and presses the lever six times to get half a cup. Webster checks his watch again. Three hours since his daughter made him breakfast.
“He called in sick,” Koenig says, setting his cup on the Formica counter that runs the length of the room.
“Again?”
“Burnout,” Koenig says. Koenig isn’t a probie, but he has less seniority than Webster.
“After only two years?” Webster asks.
“He’s always been a stressed-out dude.”
Burnout. Webster knows all about it. Emotional anxiety coupled with physical damage to backs and knees from having to lift patients causes many rookies and veterans to leave the field before their time. Some go back to school to study to be nurses. A few of the younger ones try for the police academy. Others merely drift away or, in the case of his first partner, Burrows, die in their living rooms. Burrows in his last year a burnout and, at the end, a cardiac. Webster, out of service, heard about Burrows’s death an hour later, which sent him into a frenzy. If only he had been on duty. He was certain he could have saved his old partner, whom he’d come to love like a cranky uncle.
Only once has Webster had to deal with personal burnout. After Sheila left, Webster was unable to answer a single call. He lay on the couch as he watched his mother take care of his two-year-old daughter. It wasn’t entirely burnout that was causing his paralysis, but it was the job that took the brunt of his anger: the bloody messes, the fat bodies, the houses that smelled of urine and cat food, and the sudden deaths of teenagers, suicides the worst. He’d seen guys lose it at the scene, screaming at the rookie and terrifying the patient. He’d watched them sob in public or throw equipment back at Rescue. Worse, he’d known them to start down the short path to alcoholism. Unwilling to resign, the burnouts always found a way to force themselves off the job.
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.
Webster 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.”