Cage of Stars

  A mother from St. George answered my ad. Her daughter was thirteen and had been taking lessons since she was eight. They came twice to see Jade, and Jade behaved like a movie star. They paid me eight thousand dollars. That would get me a car with some left over.

  On the last night that sweet Jade would be mine, Clare and I rode her, twin bareback, down to our old willow hut. Years had blown away the mud we’d chinked so carefully, and branches had dried up and popped free until there were holes in the walls. We hoped there would be water in the pool, but it was dry. “We brought our dolls here,” said Clare, “and our wicked tea.”

  “Oh, weren’t we bad? We acted like it was cocaine. All the nights we slept out. Remember hearing a coyote sniffing around the outside?”

  “I think it was a cougar,” Clare said as Jade stepped daintily into the creek bed. “I still think it meant to eat us.”

  “If it meant to eat us, it would have,” I told her.

  “I’ve been accepted to the Boston Conservatory,” Clare said. “Full tuition.”

  “Oh, sister!” I cried in honest joy. “You’ll see the Atlantic Ocean! You’ll learn to be . . . everything. Oh, Clare. Did you defer going until after your mission?”

  “No,” Clare said, “I’ve plenty of time for that. I might take a year off after freshman year and go then. I think it’s best that I . . . take this step now, while I have the courage.”

  “I didn’t know you’d gone to audition.”

  “I didn’t. I sent a DVD we had made in Cedar City. It cost me two hundred dollars, Ronnie! I sent it to three schools and BYU; and Boston offered me the best scholarship. And anyone would want to go there . . . except for . . . leaving you . . . and the little boys, home . . .”

  “That’s what growing up is, Clare,” I said, feeling no braver than she did.

  “It hurts,” she said, and we hugged, both of us on the edge of tears, knowing that the willow fort would either blow away altogether one windy night some years from now or be rebuilt by Clare’s little brothers or the little Tierney kids.

  It was not ours anymore.

  How I wanted to tell her then, and how I wished my own fate was not so dark and complex. I wished I could tell her that I knew I needed to face Scott Early in my own way, how I would have to get my feet under me and do it on my terms. I wanted Clare’s absolution for a monstrous lie to my family, a sin of omission, letting my parents know and yet not know. How sick it made me to wonder whether they would fear for me or fear for him. I wanted terribly to tell Clare all about it, ask her what I should say to Scott Early and to his wife, how I could get them to see that my pain, as distinct from my parents’ absolution, deserved attention, how I still wanted to punish him. I wanted to ask her, in her purity, whether what I felt I must do was simply an illusion, sent to seduce me by Satan, or if it was like the verse my Bible opened to, Isaiah 30, which I had almost memorized: “Thine eyes shall behold thy Teacher, and thine ears shall hear a word behind thee, ‘This is the way, walk in it,’ whether thou turnest to the right or the left.” In the fading sunlight, Clare looked like Lewis Carroll’s Alice, her blond sheet of straight hair swinging forward, a purple coneflower between her hands, as if she could disappear in a moment, like a magical, innocent creature, down the rabbit hole.

  “I wish we were sisters,” she said. “And I don’t mean in God’s way.”

  “Me too,” I confessed. “Do you know that Becky would be almost as old now as I was then?”

  “She’ll always be little to me, her rear as big as a teacup, and her jeans falling down,” Clare said.

  And then, just as before—just exactly as before—we heard my father shouting. We knew the baby was coming. But we looked into each other’s eyes, and neither of us got up to answer him; and soon we heard the van start and pull away up the gravel drive. Hours later, after we had prayed together and sat for a long time in silence, until Jade’s green eye shone like a cat’s in the dark, Clare and I walked back to my house arm in arm, the way European girls do—although I didn’t know that then. We did our own special hand touch at my door as I walked Jade, closed fists, then palms, then a clasp. “BFF,” said Clare.

  “Always,” I said. “Best friends forever.”

  It was past midnight.

  There was a message on our answering machine. Rafe was at the Tierneys’ house, because my parents hadn’t been able to find me, but was probably already asleep, so no need to fetch him until morning. I had a healthy little brother, Jonathan Thoreau Swan, whom we would call “Thor” as he grew up because he was so burly and strong, like a little Norse prince with his ruddy hair. He weighed nine pounds nine ounces.

  While my parents were at the hospital, I found my mother’s button box and took out the letters from Scott Early’s family, from his wife and him. There were more than a dozen. I laid them on the kitchen table, making sure they were out of Rafe’s reach.

  When he was asleep, I asked the Holy Ghost to guide me as I opened a search engine and asked for a list of good technical schools that offered emergency medical technician training. If the one I found was not in California, I would know I must not go there, and I would feel limp with relief. When the page opened, I closed my eyes and put my finger on the screen. The name of the town was La Jolla, pronounced “La Hoya.”

  I looked at the return address on the letter from Kelly Englehart, Scott Early’s wife. It was in San Diego. I plugged the names of the cities into a map search. La Jolla was 13.2 miles from San Diego. I put my head down on the table and cried.

  Chapter Fifteen

  We’re going to begin with the emotional side of the work you’ve chosen to do, or that you think you’ve chosen,” the instructor told us.

  A woman about the age of my mother, she told us she’d put in twenty years as a science teacher and then became a paramedic. We all watched this crisp, compact little person as though we could inhale what we needed to know through our eyes. A class of more than thirty people, we didn’t look like the ordinary college types. I was the youngest, but some people were older than the teacher. Many of the students had full-time day jobs and could take only the intensive night course. We’d start our practicum on the streets after only one semester of jam-packed classes. The day students at La Jolla Tech took other courses, too, and ended up after two years of work with associate degrees that included an EMT certificate. We would get only our certificates. Class began at five P.M. and lasted each weeknight until eight. This instructor was one of three, a firefighter who worked day shifts.

  She told us, “What you will see, as a basic-level emergency medical technician, will be situations that will certainly frighten you, and may be unlike anything you’ve ever seen before. How many of you have seen a person die?”

  A young Asian guy raised his hand. I looked at my list. Kevin Chan. His name was next to mine, I supposed, because the seats were assigned alphabetically. We’d gotten a list of everyone’s names, phone numbers, and e-mail addresses the previous day, and we were told to learn them as part of the bonding essential to our work. Some of us would end up on crews together. We were urged to study together and to learn one another’s strengths and habits until we understood one another instinctively. We’d had a picture taken together first thing, all of us grinning with fists held high. Each of us would get a copy, and one of our exercises would be, within a week, to take that photo and write everyone’s name on the back in five minutes. One day, all that knowledge might help us save a life—maybe even our own.

  “It was my grandmother,” Kevin Chan began, “and she died when she was eighty-nine, of pneumonia. All of us were with her. It was as though she took a long breath and then simply left. Quiet. Peace.”

  “And how did that affect you?” the instructor asked.

  “Naturally, I was very sad to lose Grandmother. I’d never known any life without her. But I could see that she was not in pain, and she had lived a long life, and all of us had outlived her. It helped me decide that I could do this, for some r
eason, that I could try to save people, and prolong life, and face death, that I could be a paramedic someday. That seemed to have more meaning for me than teaching English, which is fine, by the way, but this seemed to combine a little bit more of my sports life—I play hockey—and my head life. It sounded like I just said ‘head lice,’ didn’t it?”

  The rest of us began to laugh, but the instructor’s voice sliced through. “What if your grandmother had been shot in the thigh, and the exit wound tore apart her abdomen?” she asked. “What if she was in horrible pain, and you and your crew had to unload a backboard in seconds, and everything you would need to try to stop the bleeding, and what if your hospital destination told you to divert, that they were full, and you had to call the medical director for your station house, and get an advanced life support system unit to intercept, and still your grandmother bled out before you could get her to the hospital? And what if it weren’t your eighty-nine-year-old grandmother, but a thirteen-year-old boy or a seven-year-old girl who’d been playing with her father’s gun?”

  “I’d be . . . terrified,” Kevin said.

  “Well, good, because that’s the appropriate response to that kind of situation. That, and the thrill of the challenge of trying to intervene in a life-and-death emergency,” said the teacher. She sat down, perching one lean hip on the corner of the desk, for the first time since the class had started ninety minutes earlier. “If you weren’t adrenaline junkies, you wouldn’t be here. Most of the time, EMTs save lives. Sometimes no one can save those lives. From now on, you will encounter death. Death will become familiar to you. The families and friends of those who have died will be no strangers to you. Their suffering will break your hearts. You will feel anger, moments of hopelessness, even worthlessness. That’s normal, unless it lasts. After a ‘bad call,’ you won’t be able to get over it on your own. You shouldn’t try. Everyone involved, from the police to the firefighters to the paramedics to you and your crew chief, will be pulled in a few days later, the next day if possible, and gather in a room with professionals who will talk you through those emotions of pain and fear, because otherwise what would happen?”

  Without pausing to think, I said, “You’d relive them every night of your life.”

  “Exactly. . . . What is your name? Veronica,” she said. “You’d relive them, and you’d ask yourself over and over, Did I do the right thing? Did I do what I was trained to do? Did I do enough? And your heart would start to pound, and you might feel you couldn’t breathe. That’s why a CISD, a critical incident stress debriefing—which is just what that meeting is called—is essential. Once you talk through what happened and why it happened, and why it wasn’t your fault, you’ll be able to resume a normal life in a profession that exposes you to the side of life we don’t consider ‘normal.’

  “You’ll have to learn that high levels of stress come with the territory. And you’ll have to learn how to cleanse yourself of that stress, through talk, exercise, prayer, whatever it is you do. Not only will you experience stress because you’ll have to work on Christmas Day, and you will, and not only because you’ll be rolled out of bed in the middle of the night, and you will, or because you may have to keep going with no sleep for many, many more hours than anyone else you know. It will come because there could be a child in your arms who could go south on you in seconds if you can’t clear whatever’s blocking that child’s airway. Because the subject you’re watching, as you wait in hiding across the street for the go-ahead, is armed and could turn your way; and you could see that man taken down by the police, and then go in and try to repair what the police had to do to save your life and the lives of everyone else on the street. Because you might come into an accident scene and the injured may be a kid you knew from high school who pulled out of a blind drive and got creamed by a cement truck. You’ll see hundreds of car accidents in your first year on the job. You’ll see, perhaps, dozens of fatalities. The stress will come from what you see and touch and smell and feel. There’s no sense in denying those feelings, because those who deny them end up trying to drink them away or medicate them away. You have to face them, but you’ll have help, every step of the way. If you don’t know that you can do that, and still go out dancing with your friends the next weekend, become an accountant.”

  We all laughed then, again, but it was more like a release of tension.

  “You came here because you want to help other people,” she went on, “but the first thing you have to keep in mind is that to help other people, you have to take care of yourself first.” Her face softened as she added, “You have to override your instinct to dive right in sometimes. If you come into a scene where there’s been a domestic incident, or there is one in progress, even if there are injuries, stop. Don’t intervene. The cops will do that. Think of the people you’ll never save if some crazy husband brains you with a baseball bat. Keep your own safety and well-being in mind, first, at all times. Assessing a scene will become second nature to you; you’ll feel danger if it’s there. But if you try to be a hero in a threatening situation, you could end up being the one transported to the ER.” She began to tell us about our other instructors, their names and backgrounds and what they’d teach us.

  I knew what she was saying was essential, but I drifted for a moment, wondering what other people in the room would think if they knew how I had first encountered death. I was already spent, halfway through my second day of classes, overwhelmed by the information in my books. I’d only glanced into my big text, slamming it shut after learning that I’d have to memorize the names of all twenty-eight bones in the human foot, from the calcaneus, to the five metatarsals, to the cuboid and the talus, not to mention a couple of hundred others, along with a thousand other things about the way the human body worked and how to make it work that way if it was in trouble. I’d had to jump right in after a two-day drive, a sleepless night at a cheap motel, a day of searching for a place to stay, looking at a dozen studio apartments I couldn’t afford.

  At last, I’d found one that I could.

  The last possible address I’d circled had been a tall, lavender Victorian near the beach. It was unlike any other house on the street. A big willow hamper of afghans sat on the porch, along with several rocking chairs. Flowers in bloom climbed the porch rails. I wanted to just stop and sit on the steps and listen to the waves. But I rang the doorbell. The lady who answered the door was gorgeous, if it’s possible to say that about a woman who was probably, when I met her, seventy-five. She had white hair, truly white, that foamed back into a perfect thick wave caught at the back with a tortoiseshell comb. Her face was soft and as pink as one of her hollyhocks. “I’m Alice Desmond,” she said in an accent I didn’t recognize then but would later learn was Australian. “May I help you?”

  “You have a room to rent, I think,” I said.

  “I do. That’s already in the newspaper, is it?”

  “Well, I need a room. I’m going to school not far from here.” I put out my hand. “My name is Ronnie. Veronica Swan.”

  “Hello. You seem very young to be in college.”

  I pretended to laugh. “Everyone says so, but I’m older than I look.”

  “I take great care with my rooms and my guests.”

  “Well,” I said wearily, and sighed, “I do, too. I take great care with everything I do.”

  “Come in, then,” said Mrs. Desmond.

  The room was at the very top of the house, two flights up. Except for a thick comforter with a gold-and-blue quilted top, with squares of shells and lighthouses, it was entirely white. White bookshelves, empty but for a single shell or starfish, marched nearly to the ceiling in one corner. The walls were white, and there were picture frames on the walls that had no pictures in them, with perhaps a sprig of sea oats stuck in one corner. I liked that; it reminded me of something my mother would do. All of it was so spare and serene. White metal hooks caught back gauzy curtains, and from a window seat I could see a corner of the misty blue fan of the harbor. There
was a button board counter with a tiny half-size refrigerator and a little stovetop. The room had its own tiled bath, with a deep claw-foot tub, and I nearly began to cry when I saw the stack of thick towels.

  “This is exactly what I’m looking for,” I said. “And thank you for showing it to me. But I can’t afford it.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Well, I’ve looked at eleven other places, so I know the going rate,” I said. “You’re very kind to have shown me.”

  “Well, you look shattered. I’ll give you a cup of tea, at least. I was just making some.”

  I would learn that this was Mrs. Desmond’s first response to anything that puzzled her; and in time, I would find that reassuring. She poured boiling water into a china pot through a tiny, egg-shaped tray of aromatic leaves. Carefully, she folded a blue linen napkin over a plate and placed six iced lemon cookies on it.

  “Do you like biscuits?” she asked.

  “Oh, my word, yes,” I said.

  “Do you take sugar?”

  “I just . . . I can’t have tea. I’d love a hot drink, but I can’t.”

  “Are you allergic to it?”

  “I’m not. I’m not able to have caffeine. I’m a Mormon.”

  “I see.” She sighed and reached into her cupboard for a tin. “You can have Ovaltine? I don’t know. Are you the polygamy bunch, then, or the ones who make the quilts?”

  “Yes, sure,” I said. “About the Ovaltine. I can have that, and I’d love some. . . .”

  “Though it is rather like chocolate, and chocolate has caffeine.”

  “We just . . . We can have Ovaltine.”

  Without thinking of how embarrassed I would be, I ate all the biscuits myself while she boiled the water. Mrs. Desmond smiled and laid out six more.

  “Now, the Mormons,” Mrs. Desmond continued as she carefully prepared her own tea, pouring the steeped tea into a cup over milk and sugar cubes. I watched her with the fascination of a dog watching its dinner scooped from the can. I was so tired, and Mrs. Desmond’s movements were so precise and yet measured, it was like seeing a ballet in slow motion. I think I could have fallen asleep at that table, and I think she could tell.