An owl called out, and Webster could hear in the distance the whine and downshift of a semi. He turned off the flashlight, stayed on his knees, and turned his face away. After he felt the whoosh, he switched his light back on.
It took him twenty-five minutes to find the keys. With them, he stuffed the rabbit’s foot and the coiled belt into his jacket pockets, got back into his cruiser, and let himself shiver until the heat came on. Fuck, it was cold.
Two hours later, Webster, showered and dressed, said hello to his father at the breakfast table. He lived with his parents, trying to save money for a piece of land he coveted. He was pretty sure he could convince the guy who owned it to sell it to him when the time came because Webster had helped to save the man’s wife from dying of cardiac arrest a couple of months earlier. Normally, Webster didn’t think like that. He and Burrows were a team, and it was usually his partner who shocked the patient and pushed the meds. But only Webster had known instantly where the farm was located, having driven past it a dozen, two dozen times, just to see the hillside with the view of the Green Mountains. He’d told Burrows over the radio where to go and had taken the cruiser. When Webster got to the farmhouse, the woman was barely responsive and sweating profusely. After she lost consciousness, he cleared her airway. He started CPR. He worked on her for over two minutes before Burrows arrived. They had her on a demand valve, an oral airway in place, and on the cardiac monitor inside the Bullet, pushed the meds seconds after that. With that kind of a call, a minute could make a difference.
Webster’s father, Ernest, ran a hardware store in town and was up at six every morning. A man who believed in routine, he ate Raisin Bran and bananas for breakfast, four cookies with lunch every day, and had a nighttime ritual that seldom varied: two Rolling Rocks when he got home, the only time he and Webster’s mother, Norah, kept to themselves; then dinner; then a half hour with the paper. Another half hour with the catalogs. One television show. Then bed at nine. Webster couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen his father with a book, but the man knew everything there was to know about hardware and what to do with it. On the place mats at Keezer’s Diner was an ad for his father’s store: Webster’s Hardware, depicted with a likeness of Webster’s grandfather, a banner, and the tagline “Quotes Cheerfully Given.”
Webster’s mother taught fifth grade at Hartstone Elementary and, at sixty-one, was thinking of retiring soon. Webster had been a late baby, his parents unable to conceive until his mother was thirty-nine. Once a blond, but now gray, she had wide hazel eyes and a widow’s peak she’d bequeathed to her son. Every night, she’d take an armful of papers out of her briefcase and sit down to grade them. She was the peacemaker in the family but could be stern when the occasion called for it. Webster had sometimes wondered what she was like with the more unruly students in her classes.
“Can I make you some eggs?” she asked as she stood by the counter.
“No, toast is OK,” Webster said. “I have to get back to Rescue.”
He didn’t. He intended to return to the hospital.
“You were just there, weren’t you?” she asked. “I heard you come in.”
“Just some follow-up,” Webster said. “I’ll be back home soon.”
“Well, I think you’d better,” she said. “You need to get your sleep.”
Webster was a part-time EMT, hoping to work his way into a full-time position, one that would require that he be at Rescue while in service. For now he got the calls at home, and his parents were used to the tones and to watching their son stand up from the dinner table without a word and take the stairs three at a time, or to hearing a car door close in the middle of the night.
Just before Webster’s senior year in high school, when his father suffered his own mini-recession at the hardware store, Webster began to look at junior colleges he could commute to, convinced that by the time he graduated there would be money for the University of Vermont in Burlington. But when Webster graduated with a certificate in business—about as useful as an old Christmas card, he’d decided—he chose not to take over his father’s hardware store, which had always been the family plan.
The idea of it filled him with dread. He wasn’t for the open road like a lot of guys he knew, but he wanted to do something more exciting in life than stand behind a register six days a week. He remembered the evening he told his parents at the kitchen table, his father stoic and nodding, his mother stunned. They assumed he had something better in mind. He didn’t, but he’d seen an ad that had triggered his curiosity.
“An EMT,” he said.
“An EMT?” his father asked, incredulous. “You’re kidding.”
“How long have you wanted to do this?” His mother’s voice was higher pitched than normal.
Webster lied. “A year or so.”
“It doesn’t pay very well,” his father, ever the pragmatist, said.
“Eventually the pay’s OK.”
“You’ll see horrible things, Peter.” This from his mother, her eyes distant.
“Where do you train?” his father asked.
“I’m looking into that right now,” Webster said, and with that his future seemed destined.
He took an EMT course at Rutland Hospital, went on observation tours, and passed the exams. His interest in emergency medicine grew steadily the more he learned about it, and it seemed to him that he had accidentally made the right choice for himself. He was twenty-one when he got certified.
For his graduation present, his parents gave him a sum of money that he used to buy a secondhand police cruiser, all the markings gone but still as fast as the day it had rolled out of the factory. Speed was everything for a medic, though in winter, when he had to put the studded tires on, he lost some of that.
Webster studied the woodwork around the window over the sink and guessed there probably wasn’t a right angle in the entire house. He doubted the farm had ever been prosperous. When his parents had bought the place—Webster had been seven—the kitchen floor was linoleum, the walls made of lath and goat’s hair, and the dining area was white with plaster dust. Up a flight of stairs was a sitting room with a blocked-up fireplace, a porch that had been finished off to make a sewing nook, and a decent-sized bedroom that his parents took over. In the attic were two small rooms that his cousins and aunts and uncles used when they visited.
Until Webster was twelve, he’d slept on a loft bed that his father had built in the sewing nook. When Webster turned thirteen and his body grew too long for the bed, his father knocked down the wall between the two attic rooms and made one big one. It had a sloped ceiling and a window at either end. The back window overlooked Webster’s mother’s vegetable garden, a large hydrangea bush, and a tall mimosa tree that produced puffy salmon-colored balls each August. Two Adirondack chairs were set underneath that tree, and it was there that his parents often sat in summer, trying not to pay too much attention to the vast tract of land they’d sold off to finance improvements in the hardware store.
Webster said good-bye to his parents and drove into the Vermont morning, the sun just rising, steam coming out the backs of the vehicles in front of him.
They couldn’t have sent the woman home yet, Webster reasoned, not with that level of alcohol in her blood, three and a half times the legal limit. Webster wanted to see her face and hear her voice. He’d done an “after” call only once before, with a ten-year-old who’d nearly drowned in a marble quarry. Webster had needed to see the boy alive. Needed to feel the reward of what he’d done. Needed to hear the parents thank him. At the time, three months into the job, he’d had a two-week run of lousy calls that had caused him to want to quit before he’d barely begun. Two children burned to death in a trailer fire. A cardiac call they might have been able to do something about had they been summoned sooner. A three-car collision on the ice on 42, an entire family of French Canadians wiped out: mother at the scene, father in the Bullet, baby daughter at the hospital.
Webster parked and walked into the ER. Th
e staff knew him, and they didn’t. He cornered a nurse he thought he recognized.
“I brought a woman in last night,” Webster said. “DUI, stomach laceration.”
“They’re giving her fluids. She’s still got a Foley catheter. They’re going to discontinue her IV in half an hour.”
Webster checked his watch. “Half an hour? She could get the d.t.’s.”
“Doesn’t matter what I think. Towle’s orders. Signs of old bruises on her body, by the way.”
“I found something at the site that belongs to the woman,” he said.
“I’ll take it,” the nurse offered.
Ordinarily, Webster would have left it at that. “I’d like to see her if you don’t mind. Just to see how she’s doing.”
The nurse narrowed her eyes. “Visit away,” she said. “Bed number eight.”
Webster pulled the curtain aside. The woman’s face was pale, with bruises ripening beneath her eyes. She had a mouth that might be French like her name. Her hair was still glossy. He moved closer to the bed. The alcohol was depressing her system. When they took the fluids away, she’d get a headache and the heaves.
Under the thin coverlet, the bandages made a runway across the woman’s stomach. He noticed the narrow outline of her body, her nipples under the cloth. Her johnny was open at the neck, and Webster could see the place where Burrows had rubbed her sternum. Hell of a bruise, but you had to make it work. He remembered her long legs, the bikini underpants.
Webster said her name.
An eye fluttered.
He touched her arm and raised his voice a little. “Sheila?”
She opened her eyes. He watched as she tried to focus. She said nothing.
“My name is Peter Webster,” he said. “I’m with Hartstone Rescue, and I worked on you last night.” He paused. He hadn’t meant to say it that way. “You had a close call. You nearly died.”
“No, I didn’t,” she said, already defensive, the eyes sharpening up. In better shape than she looked.
He thought of walking out of the cubicle right then and there. Later, he would often wonder why he hadn’t.
Webster let a week pass before he tried to find out Sheila’s whereabouts. He assumed the wallet had been returned to her, but there might be a record of her address at the police station. Possibly at the hospital, too, though they were tight with information. That left Webster no choice but to call the station. He prayed it would be McGill at the other end of the line.
Webster wasn’t surprised when he heard Nye’s voice. The Weasel was everywhere: the left eye with its squint and the mouth in a permanent sneer—not necessarily the result of Nye’s disposition, but because the man’s right eyetooth stuck out a quarter inch. Webster wondered whether instead of developing a face that showed his character, Nye had grown into his face, viewing the sneer in the mirror every morning when he shaved.
Nye might not know that Webster had already visited the hospital. He decided to take a chance.
“The rabbit’s foot?” Nye asked.
“Yup.”
“What’s the point?”
“She might need the keys.”
“The car was totaled, her license was suspended for two months. Massachusetts license, by the way.”
“Any local address?” Webster asked, and waited.
“You know I can’t give out that kind of information.”
“Jesus, Nye. I might have saved her life.”
“That means exactly zero over here.”
Fucking Nye was going to make him beg.
“I suppose as a probie, you’re not familiar with proper procedure,” Nye added.
Webster took a chance that guff would win out over pleading. “Cut the crap.”
Nye made Webster wait so long, he was sure the Weasel had hung up. Then he heard the tapping of a pencil point on a desk.
Nye gave Webster the address. “Don’t do anything stupid, probie.”
Webster knew where the house was. Just inside the northern town line stood a pale blue Cape with a front porch not fifteen feet from the edge of 42, the porch encased in jalousie windows. Webster pulled into what might have been a driveway in an unkempt yard. Before he opened the door of the old cruiser, he thought about what he’d say: he was just following up, wanted to know how she was. She would see right through that, might even call him on it. He remembered her defensiveness in the hospital. But Webster’s curiosity outweighed his judgment, had been outweighing it all week. When he knocked on the door, it was Sheila who answered.
“Who are you?” she asked at once, both hands on the door, ready to slam it fast.
She had on a plaid shirt with the sleeves rolled to the elbows, a pair of jeans. Her hair was longer than he’d thought, curling at the ends, as glossy as he’d remembered. He found it hard to take his eyes off her mouth. Did she really not remember his visit to the hospital?
“I’m Peter Webster. I was at the scene when you had your accident.”
“Are you a cop?”
“No, I was one of the EMTs.”
“OK,” she said.
“I just wanted to follow up, see how you were doing.”
She wasn’t buying it. In her stocking feet, Webster put her at five nine, five ten.
“How do I know you’re who you say you are? And, more important, why the fuck should you care how I am?”
Not as tough as she wanted him to believe. Something wary in her eyes. Webster took out his ID. She studied it and stepped to one side. “Come in,” she said. “I’m freezing.”
Coke cans, empty cigarette packs, a mess of Devil Dogs wrappers, and a Stouffer’s box on the counter. A tin pail overflowing with trash and tissues. The rectangular table had a soiled green and white oilcloth tacked to the edges. A spoonful of purple jelly lay on the cloth inside a dozen coffee rings and toast crumbs and a smear of what might be butter. Clots of illegal wiring on the kitchen counter.
“This isn’t exactly all mine. The mess, I mean. The Devil Dogs are theirs,” she said, pointing to the ceiling.
“How long have you been here?” Webster asked, looking around.
“Couple of days.”
He unzipped his jacket in the overheated room. “Renting?”
“Not right now. I will be when I get a job.”
“How’d you end up here?”
“A nurse.”
Webster nodded.
“So you’ve seen me,” she said. “I’m fine. You can go now.”
Webster didn’t move.
“The old folks live upstairs,” she said. “They hardly ever come down except to make a meal. He never comes down at all.” She crossed her arms over her chest. “He’s sick with something. I can hear him coughing at night. I think I’m supposed to do their dishes, but no one’s ever said. The old woman is the nurse’s aunt. Why the fuck am I telling you all this?”
He didn’t answer, but the question didn’t stop her.
“The nurse came once and took the old lady out to do some shopping. The old lady’s a mouse, hardly speaks at all. I think she’s afraid of me, though I can’t imagine why.” She smiled as if she knew precisely why. “I have the ‘front room’ here,” she added, putting her fingers in quotes, “and I can use the kitchen and the bathroom. I sit in the living room and watch TV. I steal their booze.”
She raised her chin slightly, daring Webster to reprimand her.
“You drink too much,” he said. “You were drinking too much the night you rolled your car.”
“And that’s your business how?”
“You might have injured someone else, and that is my business.”
“What’s next?” she asked. “The physical exam?”
She walked out of the kitchen and into the jalousie porch. Because it was frigid outside and overheated inside, the windows had steamed up, leaving a small ellipsis in the center of each pane.
“They keep the heat up to God-knows-what, and I can’t touch it.”
No curtains at the windows. A bed pu
shed against the shingles of what had once been the outside of the house. The bed was neatly made. A few clothes hung from a portable rod on wheels. A suitcase had been tucked behind the portable closet. In the corner were a round wooden table and two chairs.
Sheila sat on the bed.
Webster pulled out a chair. “I wanted to see if you have any remaining injuries or difficulties from the accident.”
“Are you a social worker?” she asked.
“No.”
“OK. I don’t have a driver’s license anymore. I’m in this lousy shit hole. The nurse gave me a hundred bucks. I have to find a job. Other than that, I’m fine.”
She reached over to a leather jacket at the end of the bed and removed a pack of cigarettes. “I’m here because the old lady needed someone in case of emergency.” She took a drag on her cigarette. “Where do you live?” she asked.
“In Hartstone,” he said, not mentioning his parents.
She gestured with her lit cigarette to her jacket. “The cops gave me the wallet back, but guess what? No license and no money.”
“How much was in it?”
“Hundred and twenty.”
Fucking Weasel.
“Did you ask for it back?”
She gazed at the frosty glass. “They said it was never there. Was I surprised? No.”
“Do you mind if I ask you what you were doing in Vermont the night of your accident? The police said you had a Massachusetts license.”
“Is this in your manual? Question number thirty-eight?”
“No.”
“I live in Chelsea. Lived. Near Boston. I had a boyfriend who drank so much he started pissing the bed. I threw him out, told him to get lost. He came back. Stuck to me like a booger you can’t get off your finger.” She glanced quickly in Webster’s direction to see how he was taking the booger. “Finally I couldn’t stand it anymore. I packed a bag, got in the car, and drove. Didn’t stop till I rolled the car.”
“You could have called the police, got the guy arrested,” Webster said.