“I had this lady at the register went nuts on me,” Rowan announces, sitting at the table, glass in hand. “All of a sudden she starts screaming that I’m trying to cheat her. I haven’t even totaled her order yet, much less taken her money. And she’s screaming—I mean screaming— that I’m ripping her off.” Rowan downs the juice in one go, looks for a napkin. Webster tears off a piece of paper towel and hands it to her. “The assistant manager comes over, takes the tape out, and compares it to every item in her bags. Then the lady says she’s entitled to two boxes of strawberries for the price of one, and that I charged her for both—she’s pointing her finger at me now—and Mr. T explains that was last week’s offer. And before he gets a chance to tell her he’ll extend the offer, she throws her purse at him, and all this crap falls out. Coins, keys, dollar bills, used tissues, breath mints… a jar of makeup breaks and gets all over my sneakers and Mr. T’s shoes, and then the lady starts sobbing. Mr. T tries to put everything back into her purse except for the used tissues and the makeup. He gives her pocketbook back, bags her groceries, and wheels them out to her car for her, and of course she hasn’t paid for anything.”
Gina laughs. “I love the makeup.”
“You wouldn’t if it was all over your sneakers,” Rowan points out. “I had to clean that up and pick up the tissues and the millions of pieces of glass.”
“So,” Webster asks, “what are you two up to tonight?”
“Gina’s over because her computer broke again,” Rowan says, “and she needs to get some notes and a take-home quiz off mine.”
They both know this to be a white lie. Gina’s mother doesn’t have the money for a computer, and Gina is expected to use the one in the library, which always has a long line. At least two or three times a week, the girl comes to the house to use Rowan’s laptop. Gina had to complete all her applications on it, and some of those applications had four essays. Despite the hardship, Gina has excellent grades, which proves something, though Webster isn’t sure exactly what. He likes it that Rowan spends time with her.
“There’s homemade pea soup in the freezer,” he says.
Sometimes Webster worries about what Gina is getting to eat at home. The girl lives with her mother, Eileen, and a housebound grandmother. Eileen works part-time as a receptionist at Blake Ford because she can’t leave the grandmother alone all day. Eileen is probably pulling in twenty-five, thirty at best, Webster guesses. Gina will be able to go to Columbia only because she has a full ride.
On Saturdays, Webster doesn’t make dinner. Gina and Rowan are eating the first of two meals they’ll have that afternoon and evening, the other away from home and not a real meal—more like cows grazing. On Saturday nights, Webster consumes leftovers and watches TV until he can’t keep his eyes open. Rowan used to wake him up when she came in, but she’s stopped doing that.
“Well, I’ll let you be,” Webster says, eyeing Rowan, who returns his gaze and shrugs.
“You’ll do the windows today,” Webster announces on Sunday morning. “It’s going to rain tomorrow, so it has to be today.”
Rowan, sleep hanging off her face like a net, nods.
“Nana used to love the days when Gramps would wash the windows in the spring. ‘I’ve got new eyes,’ she’d say.”
Rowan, in her flannel pants and T-shirt, says she has to go to Liz Foster’s at four. “We’re finishing up a physics project.”
“Fine. Don’t be too late. I’m guessing you have a lot of homework.”
“A ton of reading.”
“What book?”
“Gravity’s Rainbow.”
“What’s that?” Webster asks.
“A really stupid seven-hundred-sixty-page book.”
Webster turns from the stove with a pan of fried eggs and bacon. “They’re asking you at the end of your senior year to read a seven-hundred-sixty-page book? Mrs. Washington assigned it?”
“She says it’s the best novel in the English language.”
“Your class make fun of her this year?” Webster asks as he slips the eggs and bacon onto Rowan’s plate.
“No. Maybe. A little.”
“You reap what you sow.”
Rowan shrugs.
“Bad luck for you,” Webster says. He puts a plate of toast between them.
“No kidding.”
“You and Gina have fun last night?” he asks.
“Pretty much.” There’s a trim of tiny pimples at her widow’s peak, a rose growing near a nostril. Rowan’s morning smell—the sweet scent of her hair, the particular fragrance of her skin—is so familiar to Webster that he thinks he’d know the girl anywhere: in the woods, in a crowded department store. He remembers a trip to Boston he and Rowan made during spring vacation when she was nine. After touring the Freedom Trail, he took her to the Aquarium and promptly lost her when he became engrossed in an exhibit on penguins and she wandered away. Panicked, he snagged a security guard, which alerted other security guards. Rowan was startled to find herself the center of attention at an exhibit of dolphins. “I knew where he was,” she said, bewildered.
“Rowan, eat. You need your strength.”
Rowan rolls her eyes. Webster wonders how many times he’s said that to her. Sometimes he gets into a groove, and he can’t get out. “It’s just that Friday, at breakfast, you went from zero to sixty in nothing flat. Everything OK?”
“Everything’s fine, Dad.”
“Well, good,” he says, though he knows now that it isn’t.
Rowan scratches her left arm, a sign that she’s anxious.
“You OK?” Rowan mimics as she points to her father’s untouched breakfast.
Webster stabs a cold egg. “You don’t have to take that tone with me.”
Rowan sops up her eggs with a slice of toast.
Webster puts his fork down and glances at the dirty windows. He can’t eat the eggs. Wrong breakfast. He’d have done better with something sweet. “Rowan, I’m getting tired of your moodiness.”
“Dad, just fuck off, OK?”
The word, like a scratch of fingernails against a blackboard, creates a physical reaction along his spine. Webster can see that Rowan is waiting for him to reprimand her, punish her. When he doesn’t, she pushes her chair back. “Where’s the hose?” she asks.
From the garage, Webster watches as Rowan washes the outside windows. She stands on a stepladder and starts with the back attic window of her bedroom. She points the hose with the attached Windex and sets the switch to “soap,” letting the foamy water shimmy down the panes. Rowan waits a few seconds, turns the sprayer to “water,” and washes the soap away, leaving a clean window with droplets that will shortly dry. Just the way he’s taught her. He’s had to assure her that the fluid won’t damage the bushes and the grass, and though he wonders how that can possibly be true, neither the bushes nor the grass has been hurt. He wishes Windex would invent a product to wash the insides of the windows as easily as the exterior ones. Old houses are great, but a bitch to keep clean.
She climbs down the ladder and washes the next level of windows, two at a time. Soap two, then rinse two. She’s wearing her rubber boots, her pajama pants, and a slicker that once was yellow. Her boots are already wet from the sprayer and the dew in the shaded grass. He likes the flowers of late May, early June. The crab apple, the lilacs, the trillium. One day the color isn’t there; the next day it is.
He thinks his not mentioning the fuck rattled Rowan more than if he’d laid into her.
Rowan reaches the front of the house and tackles the other attic window. She untangles the hose and takes it with her up the stepladder. She aims it, soaping up the mullions. She slips past the frame of the window and points the nozzle at the vinyl siding.
What the hell? Is she trying to give the house a wash, too?
Rowan makes wild loops and crazy brushstrokes. An angry sound escapes her. She turns her weapon on the bushes with their new leaves, at the lilacs with their potent scent, at a pine tree that she covers with wh
at looks like wet toilet paper.
Rowan shoots as far down the driveway as she can. Then she raises the hose and lets it rain straight over her.
Webster takes off at a run. Rowan lets the hose fall and begins to climb down the ladder. When she stumbles, Webster catches her, keeping her upright. He pulls her head, soapy hair and all, into his shirt.
Webster and Koenig are backup, second rig on the scene. A six-vehicle pileup on the road coming off the mountain. The fog moved in fast, visibility nil. The fog halos the whites and blues on the cruisers. Webster spots five of them and another rig. He and Koenig report to incident command, and Webster is told to head for the bus. He sees a tractor-trailer on its side, a yellow school bus mounting it like a dog. A crumpled red Mercury, a navy Jeep that looks to have skidded into a tree, a silver Touareg that has accordioned a foreign car, a Hyundai maybe. Webster grabs what he can from the back of the rig and heads for the school bus. He and Koenig are part of a larger team now.
Children are always top priority. He notes the noise as he jogs: the cruisers, ambulances, fire engines, tow trucks, and the screams of the injured or frightened.
Two cops have pried open the front door of the bus. Webster hoists himself up and in. The driver is unconscious but is being rapidly extricated by a medic and a cop. Webster heads down the aisle, bracing himself against the seat backs. Kids are calling out, but Webster is more worried about the ones who aren’t. No seat belts on the local school buses, and some of the bodies have been thrown as far as their backpacks, most toward the rear of the bus, which can’t now be opened because of the Mercury. Cops have broken the emergency exits, crawled up and in, and are handing out children. Some of the kids look like grown men. A rural K-through-twelve. The place will be swarming with parents in fifteen minutes.
Knees bent, searching each bench, Webster finds a blond girl in a purple tank top wedged beneath a seat on his right, her ass so deep in, it’s almost on the floor of the next bench back. Lying on her side, her knees and shoulders are caught by the steel bars that support the seats.
Webster gets down on his hands and knees and lets the shouting and the screaming float away, concentrating on the single case. He fears spinal injury, maybe paralysis. No blood. No movement. He speaks to the girl in a loud voice, trying to rouse her. He checks her airway and listens for breathing. He feels her carotid and finds a weak pulse. She’s alive but in bad shape. He fastens a c-collar around her neck. He checks her pupils. Equal and reactive to light. Probably not a spinal injury.
When he looks up, he sees a boy, maybe thirteen, in a brown zip-up, sitting three benches down with his head in his hands. “Hey, son,” Webster calls. The boy looks up. Dazed, but not in shock, Webster hopes.
“What’s your name?”
“Edward.”
“You OK to move?”
“They told me to stay here.”
“Give me a hand. I’ve got a girl who’s stuck.”
The boy pulls himself upward to get to Webster, who points to the bench he wants the boy to sit in. The kid falls backward, straddling the girl’s butt with his feet.
“You got any injuries?” Webster asks.
The boy shakes his head.
“OK, listen. On my count, I need you to gently push her behind forward so I can get her out and check her. You feel any pain yourself, you stop at once. Am I clear?”
The boy nods. “What’s wrong with her?”
“I don’t know yet. You know her name?”
The boy pulls himself up and over the bench to look down at her face. “Jill,” he says.
“Jill!” Webster yells. No response. He calls again. No response.
Webster opens the belt of the girl’s jeans, making sure the leather is in symmetrical loops so he can pull her forward. “My count and gentle now. One. Two. Three.” With the boy’s help, Webster, arms extended through the bars of the seat ahead of Jill, drags her straight toward him. She’s slight, maybe 105.
“OK, now come around and help me get her onto her back and straighten her out. When I say so, you’re going to gently draw her legs into the aisle. I’m going to get behind her and lift her shoulders forward.”
It’s one of the many decisions a medic has to make. Moving the blond could harm her already hurt body, but not to move her, to wait until an emergency crew can unbolt the bench, could cost her vital minutes.
The boy crawls into position. Then Webster has the girl supine, her feet into the aisle and then some. The boy straightens them.
Webster does the acronyms and looks for lacerations. He performs a neuromotor scan and checks her pupils again. Equal and reactive. Her knee jerks and she shifts her leg.
“Keep calling her name,” Webster instructs Edward.
An older boy in the back is screaming, an EMT’s yellow coat blocking Webster’s view. Webster is losing focus and has to exert his will to concentrate on the task at hand.
One, maybe two, dislocated shoulders. A contusion the size of a baseball at the back of her head. Blood pressure 110 over 72. Pulse rapid and thready. He presses lightly against her clavicle and can feel the break. She should have woken screaming at the touch.
“You stay here,” he says to the boy. “I’m going for the stretcher and the oxygen. Don’t move, no matter what. And do not let anyone step on her.”
Webster exits the vehicle the way he entered, most of the other medics using the side door that the cops have now freed. Webster runs for the stretcher and sees a unit pulling in from New York. He puts out a hand.
“Come with me,” he tells the medic. “Bring your backboard, your stretcher, and your portable O2. I’ve got a patient.”
Webster and the medic climb back into the bus. They turn the girl’s body into the aisle and slide her onto the backboard. They strap her on, and Webster applies a head restraint. They inch her toward the front door. Webster exits first, shouldering the weight, but the medic has the trickier maneuver—getting out of the bus without losing his grip on the backboard. They put Jill on a stretcher and walk her back to the waiting ambulance, Webster leading, the EMT and Edward following. The other EMT from New York has the back door open. “We’ve got it,” he tells Webster.
“Unresponsive, breathing shallow, pulse rapid and thready, BP hundred ten over seventy-two, one, possibly two dislocated shoulders, broken clavicle, suspect head injury, name’s Jill.”
Webster turns to the kid standing to one side. The boy is quivering like a heart in V-fib.
“Take this kid with you,” Webster says to the EMT. “His name is Edward. Give him a phone to call his parents or do it for him. Get him to tell you the girl’s last name and call it into Dispatch.”
Webster helps the kid, who has lost all his strength, up into the passenger seat. “You did good, Edward,” Webster says, buckling him in.
Webster shuts the door and steps back. He checks his watch, a digital. He’s been at the scene nineteen minutes.
As far as he can see up the hill, there are emergency vehicles, lights strobing in the thick fog. Critical injuries, some fatalities. The smart medics have made U-turns on the shoulders before stopping so that later they’ll be able to exit the scene. The other emergency vehicles will serve as mini–trauma centers with EMTs and medics dispensing urgent care.
Webster, being among the first to arrive, is almost the last to leave, negotiating the shoulder on his way to Mercy, with Koenig and two hurt but not critical patients in the back. Mother and son, from the Touareg, she with face and chest bruises from the air bag, the boy, nine, with a broken wrist sustained when he tumbled, long after the accident, from the passenger seat of the car onto the road, and otherwise unhurt.
Four dead at the scene, three of them children, the fourth the driver of the Hyundai. An unhurt woman from an adjacent vehicle hysterical, sobbing that she couldn’t stop in time, until finally a cop put her into a cruiser and took her home just to shut her up. Local news channels from two states criminally blocking the exit routes. Small children on short
boards, red and blue sweaters peeking through the thermal blankets. Webster has called in to Dispatch to find out where Jill was taken, but no one has an answer yet. Webster thinks of Rowan, of how the girl in the purple tank top might so easily have been her.
It isn’t the first mass-casualty incident Webster has had, but a school bus ups the ante, flooding the scene with anxious parents, some of whom had the good sense to dig in and help. The driver of the Jeep looked bad ten different ways when the stretcher carrying him raced past the bus. Webster treated broken bones, mild concussions, lacerations, two serious wounds. He kept his eyes averted from the parents who had to learn that their children hadn’t made it. Webster can’t bear the deaths of children; the images haunt him at night. It’s a parental grief he can imagine so well that he’s occasionally brought himself to tears.
On the way back from Mercy, Koenig, in the driver’s seat, says, “Fucking nightmare. They ought to outlaw semis on 42.”
“Where would they go?” Webster, one hand on the wheel, sitting back now. “It’s the only route up the western side of the state.”
“Put the stuff on smaller trucks. That semi had no business on that road going that fast.”
“How fast?”
“The estimate from the statie was sixty.”
“Never buy a Hyundai.”
“The Touareg on the other hand…,” Koenig suggests.
“Like you could afford one.”
“The cops just drove it away.”
“I hate these kinds of calls,” Webster says.
“No shit.”
“How was the wedding?”
Koenig shakes his head. “Almost a disaster.”
“What happened?”
“Annabelle’s smarter than I gave her credit for. She cried in the car, and I had to wait a good twenty minutes for her to stop. She was scared. She didn’t want to marry Jackson before he shipped out, but she didn’t think it was morally right to let him go off without being married. And she couldn’t bear the thought of leaving him at the altar, or whatever you call it when you have a wedding at an inn.”