Cage of Stars

  “Don’t be so sure,” I told her. “Nothing will ever shock me.”

  “Why’s that? You grow up in a railroad car? Because I did.”

  “Just . . . nothing will,” I said, and shut my mouth.

  “What did you mean?” Kevin asked me later when we met at L.M.N.O. Tea.

  “I’m just not very shockable, Kevin,” I told him. “Mountain life. Let’s forget it.”

  “Shira said you lost your boyfriend.”

  “Funny, ’cause I never had one.”

  “She said a boy from home—”

  “Just a friend. I had a crush on him when I was, like, twelve.”

  “Chas, the forward on my team,” Kevin said, “did you meet him?”

  “He’s a great player.”

  “He’s a great guy, too.”

  “I know you’re going to say he’s a Mormon, Kev. I’m not going to necessarily like a guy because he’s the same religion.”

  “He’s also a nice person.”

  “Well . . .”

  “We have our team picnic next Saturday. You could meet him. Shira’s coming down.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Ronnie, you have to live a little.”

  “Don’t go trying to fix me up,” I pleaded with him. “Promise, or I won’t come.”

  He crossed his heart. He did it anyway.

  A dozen of us had a picnic at the gorgeous Balboa Park, some of the team members and some people from class. We’d finished our first stage of classwork and were ready to begin our practicum, actually riding with and working with licensed EMTs and paramedics under the direction of a medical supervisor. So there was plenty of cause for celebration. Kevin’s team was in the playoffs, and all but two of our class had made it through. We ate chicken sandwiches and sweet rice balls courtesy of The Seventh Happiness, and then we played Frisbee. It was when I dived for a catch that I felt my necklace strain and pop. It didn’t have a real clasp. That had broken years ago, and I’d replaced it with a series of loops I made with scraps of my mother’s art wire and my father’s needle-nose pliers. Desperate, I dropped to my knees and began searching the grass. Dusk was coming on. How would I ever find a loop of brownish hair in brownish yellow grass in the dark? Chas, who actually was very cute once I saw him without a helmet on, got down on his knees to help me, as did Shelley and some others.

  “What was it? A locket? Was it your mother’s?” Chas asked me.

  “Like that. I have to find it. It can never be replaced,” I told him.

  “Don’t worry,” Kevin finally said. “I have an idea.”

  He ran to get one of the ever present service people who zip around the park in golf carts. With the lights of two carts shining directly on the turf where we’d been playing, Kevin assigned us grids we walked shoulder to shoulder, from one section of fence to the section on the opposite side. It was dark and I had given up when another guy from the team, Dunny, shouted, “Is it a long silver chain with some kind of ring made of thread or something?” I leapt for it, nearly tearful with relief, hugging Dunny, then Kevin. The braided ring hadn’t even come off the chain, but a link was torn away. Then I turned to Chas and kissed him. There was a big silence.

  Then Kevin whistled.

  Chas said, “Well, I guess I can ask you to go to the movies, now that we’ve been introduced.”

  And so we started dating. We went to museums and once to a theater for a production of Our Town. Mrs. Desmond, who was about my height but skinny, lent me this long black skirt and a black crepe top from Italy. All night I moved around as if I were a porcelain doll, for fear I’d rip it. I’d never seen the play. Chas loved it. But I cried all the way through it, imagining Becky in Emily, seeing Becky being eleven, being my age, being a grown woman.

  Afterward, Chas drove me up to a peak where I could see the whole city of San Diego spread out beneath us, twinkling like the Christmas diorama they used to have in Salt Lake. He kissed me, on the lips, on the chin, gently on the neck. And then he talked about his mission, in the worst of the projects in Harlem, where he said he’d been happier than he’d ever been anywhere. He wanted to go back there to teach school once he got his degree. “But I’m being scouted,” he told me.

  “Scouted?”

  “By the pros, for hockey,” he said. “The Blackhawks. It would be hard to turn down.”

  “I know,” I said. “I used to play basketball. I used to dream in basketball, like it was a language.”

  I thought of my father talking about hitting the trifecta—back when Ceci was marrying the stuck-up Professor Patrick. Hmmm, I thought. A former missionary who could also end up a pro athlete. But I couldn’t feel what I wanted to feel about Chas. No string thrummed in my stomach when he kissed me. Still, he was respectful and admired my wish to become a doctor. He listened to me as if I were the most interesting person on earth. Maybe the humming would come in time. Kevin was clearly ultrapleased with himself, having found what he believed to be the only two Mormons in California, never mind that there were hundreds in the ward I attended in La Jolla alone. About every other weekend, when Shira came to stay, we would go to the beach and have a campfire. I would lie in Chas’s arms, under the riot of California stars, and feel romantic: How could anyone feel anything but? Except I’d watch Kevin through the orange, popping flames, watch him scoop Shira beneath him, stroking her body beneath their blanket, moving them out of the light; and I would think not of Chas, but of my own arms around Miko’s neck.

  Meanwhile, my work was becoming exciting. Because I was under eighteen, I couldn’t start practicing officially after forty-six class days, the way the others could. I would get to do everything else, though. And finally I got the chance for my first ride-along.

  Everyone expects the first ride-along to be nothing. And we all hope it’ll be a three-alarm fire—not because we want anyone to get hurt. Otherwise, it’s like getting dressed up for a formal and then spending the evening playing cards with your aunt in the kitchen. I’d learn the routine of a firehouse, but I could do that anytime. I thought maybe I’d be able to watch as the EMTs transported an elderly person with chest pains, to see them assess the vital signs, which I could do by then in my sleep. I’d help try to take a verbal history as they administered nitro if the systole was less than 90. We’d bring the patient on in, and she’d be fine. Someone might ask me to hand him something. That would be it. For me, I thought, that would be it. And it would be cool, exciting enough.

  But on my first ride-along, I went through what everybody used to joke about, calling it C-Spine Immobilization 101, the short course, because I was the only one there who could do it.

  That would have been enough.

  But then, that same night, something else happened, something I still don’t fully understand.

  Almost the instant we sat down at the firehouse where we were stationed, the first call came. One of the EMTs hadn’t yet shown up for his shift. It was a head-on collision on a beach road, with numerous possible head and neck injuries.

  The crew chief looked around more in annoyance than fear. “Come on, Swan,” she said to me, “kid games are over.” My mouth went dry.

  We got to the scene and were assigned to this . . . kid. He was younger than me. He was lying in the road on his back, blood just foaming from his shattered lower leg, where a tooth of broken bone poked through the skin. “That’s the least of our worries,” the chief said. “What you can’t see is always worse than what you can.”

  And she was right. The kid was alert and responsive, although he quickly began to get sweaty and agitated, sure signs of shock. While one of the EMTs took his pulse and looked at his eyes with a penlight, the chief pulled me aside. “We can’t wait for an assist,” she said. I nodded. “We’re going to have to immobilize him and run with lights and sirens straight to the ER at Loyola.” I nodded again. There were six of us, including Shelley, the girl Kevin and I knew from our class. She watched as one of the regular crew applied pressure to the wound with a
huge bandage, trying to get the bleeding stanched for transport, but every big wad of gauze was soaking through. The chief then told me to hold the kid’s head still, without touching his ears. I slipped from my brain into my body and let all the words I’d heard in classes take over.

  “If you need to tell me where it hurts,” I said, “or answer my questions, don’t try to nod or shake your head. Promise? Say yes or no. You’re going to be just fine, but you have to stay still until we get you on the bed.” The boy was looking up at me, his brown eyes transparent in the van’s headlights.

  “Yes,” he said. Then he said, “My mom was driving.” I saw tears begin to leak out of the corners of his eyes. “We were fighting about my grades. Is she okay?” I knew his mother was bad off. Another truck arrived.

  “Don’t move, sweetie,” I said as if I were years older and he a child. I saw a girl named Douglas, whom everyone called “Doogie,” who worked for another unit, doing chest pushes on a woman lying in the deep grass at the sandy verge of the road. “I think your mom will be fine, too,” I told him as my chief and the others lifted him onto the backboard and put the immobilizing pillows in place on either side of his head. Shelley’s eyes locked on mine. I knew that she was thinking the same thing I was. At that instant, I realized what this work was about. This boy would have to live seventy years knowing that his smart-ass remarks might have cost his mother her life. Whatever his body had endured would heal. But unless that CPR worked, he would leave Loyola wearing a cast that would one day be removed and an invisible yoke across his shoulders that never would. I could give him only two things, a safe ride and ten more minutes of the life he still understood as his. I also knew that the edge of things, as the instructor had called it, where so much could be changed in an instant, was where I wanted to work for the rest of my life—maybe because I knew how that ground felt under my feet. I prayed for his mother to live as we rocketed through the silent streets.

  We weren’t at Loyola for ten minutes, and the chief barely had time to give her hands-off report, when we got another call.

  “Damn,” she whispered. “Is there a full moon?”

  We were not even two minutes, straight shot, to the Pacific Ice Palace.

  En route, we listened to the dispatcher flatly describe the victim as a young Asian male whose heart had stopped after having been struck in the chest with a puck. A player for the San Diego Sailors. He’d been in goal. There were three goalies. Only one was Asian.

  “No,” I whispered, and the inside of the van darkened as if we were fish in an aquarium of ink. I reached out, totally unprofessionally, and took Shelley’s hand. Then we turned away from each other and began our equipment check.

  We sped through the side streets, flickered past the silhouetted figures of girls in short skirts standing outside coffee shops, men unloading the backs of trucks, a teenager walking her dog toward the beach, all distinct signs that there would be a tomorrow, that the player whose heart had stopped from the blow was not Kevin. Mechanically, we tidied up the unit, slipping on fresh gloves and disposing of a used bandage roll in a red hazard bag, spraying down the backboard and wiping it clean. Outside, people continued to flip past the windows—shoppers, runners, kids skating, an old man with a cane—as if the world outside were a picket fence and we were the stick running along it. I realized why veterans called people outside “civilians.” They saw an ambulance, and to them it meant everything would be okay. We saw a hole in the world.

  Then the driver hit the brakes and it was all sensation. Thought would have been a luxury of time we didn’t have.

  I remember crashing through the doors of the auditorium, our sneakers finding purchase on the ice. Politely thanking the coach, who’d been giving CPR and doing mouth-to-mouth. One of the regular EMTs checking for obstructions before she hyperextended Kevin’s neck and inserted the oral airway, attaching the bag, the BVM—bag valve mask—device. Leaving me to pump the bag while she connected the portable oxygen unit, watching it begin to inflate. Chas from somewhere, saying my name, speaking to me from somewhere. The noise of the rink receding, muted, distant, as the chief cut open the Sailors jersey. The bruise an impossibly perfect circle just south of Kevin’s perfect left shoulder. Listening for the charging of the AED, the automated external defibrillator. The shock. Carrie Bell, our chief, taking an anxious inventory. No rhythm. Charging, ninety seconds, and shocking him again, the horrible rag doll leap of Kevin’s body as the unit’s jolt slammed into him. No rhythm. Another round of oxygen as we loaded him onto the backboard and lifted the backboard onto the collapsible wheeled support cart. Charging. Leaning clear. No rhythm. The voice of the driver: “Loyola, this is La Jolla unit sixty-eight, how do you copy? We are less than five minutes out with a subject, Asian male Kevin Chan, age twenty-one, pulseless nonbreather, chief complaint arrest due to trauma. Subject is unresponsive to repeated defibrillation attempts. He was struck in the chest with a hockey puck . . . administering oxygen, followed by defibrillation attempts. Continuing CPR.”

  As if I were the only one there, I prayed aloud, “Heavenly Father, in Thy tender mercy, help us, Your clumsy servants. We beg You, spare Thy servant Kevin Chan, who is good in the world. Let him live to be of service, to work Thy word.” The whine of the AED. The thump. Kevin’s arms reaching up as if he were pleading, then flopping back.

  “It’s been fifteen minutes,” Shelley whispered. “If we did get him back now . . .”

  “No,” I said. “Let me give him another two minutes of oxygen.”

  “If we did get him back—”

  “No! Not yet!”

  Carrie said, “Ronnie. He might have been gone when we got here.”

  But mine was a child’s voice, begging. “He’s one of us. Try once more, please try once more.”

  The chief sighed. There came the whirr. Charging. And then, before our crew leader could administer the shock, another voice spoke, muffled and indistinct.

  “Ronnie?” He reached up and fumbled at the airway. Shelley, although she wasn’t supposed to, removed it. “What are you doing? Where am I?”

  Shelley gasped. “Jesus almighty. Kevin?”

  “Yeah?” he said, his voice a rasp.

  “Do you know what day it is?”

  “Uh, Wednesday. Why . . . am I here? What happened? Is the game over?” Kevin asked. I reached over and felt for his pulse; it was steady and slow.

  “What did you do, witch girl?” Shelley asked. “That boy was gone. You some kind of saint?”

  “Saints are in heaven,” I said, and knelt on the floor of the unit, my arms wrapped across my chest. I knelt as the others flung open the door. With two ER doctors and nurses waiting, they ran with Kevin, the rattling cart disappearing beneath a light, yellow as the blink of a firefly in a jar, through the doors that swung open with a hiss.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Kevin’s family closed the restaurant the following week and feasted the team and the ambulance crew.

  Kevin’s sisters carried out platter after platter of the most expensive dishes on the menu. Nothing was spared. The story had traveled, and word had it that I had something special—a sense some EMTs have. The whole night, Shira sat next to me and kept petting my hair. Jenny Chan hugged my shoulders from behind every time she crossed the room. Finally, Mr. Chan made a toast to crew sixty-eight. “When Kevin brought Ronnie to meet us, we thought she was a special girl. When he was in the hospital, Kevin said he had told her about the red thread. But we had no idea that the red thread that bound Kevin and Ronnie was a lifeline.” We all clinked our glasses. “The red thread is destiny, in legend. It connects people who are meant to have a meaning in each other’s life. You can’t always understand your destiny, but it always knows you. Ronnie, you have our thanks . . . and our love.”

  “It wasn’t me!” I told them all, laughing and blushing. “Everyone, including the manager of the rink, saved Kevin. We just did our jobs.”

  “Don’t say it was just your job,” Shira sa
id. “We know what happened.”

  “It was my job,” I said. “But it was also . . . it was Kevin. Everyone who was there would do anything for anyone that we did for Kevin. But Kevin helped us save him. Whatever else happened wasn’t because of me, Shira. I think your sweetie is meant to be around for a long, long time.”

  Shira and Kevin gave me a bracelet she had made herself from black jet beads, with a slender red thread of garnet beads running through the middle. It must have cost a lot just for the beads, not to mention the time spent. When they helped me put it on, everyone clapped.

  I was pretty thrilled.

  I also was pretty terrified.

  I thought that my name would somehow show up in the paper; but the story, though it did make page one of the sports section, only mentioned “La Jolla paramedics” and quoted our crew chief, Carrie Bell, saying, “Sometimes, when it seems you have to give up, there’s one more try left in you. We had some hotshot young people out there, and I’m proud of all of them. Some were on their first ride. And three lives were saved that night.” I sent my father a copy, and he wrote back, thrilled. Serena wrote, too, sending a card in a bright yellow envelope. The front read, “It’s always about YOU, isn’t it?” Inside, she’d written, “I’m so proud of you,” and enclosed a picture of her and me that summer on Cape Cod. She told me she’d sent Miko a copy of the story, too.

  The week after the banquet, Chas dropped me off and kissed me good night on the porch. I still hadn’t figured out my feelings about him, and I knew he felt the same way. He told me once that my mind was always somewhere else when we were together. I blamed school, but I knew he wasn’t convinced. Mrs. Desmond had met him and said she thought he was a bit “skimmed milk” for me.

  “You expect me to show up with the Mormon Russell Crowe,” I kidded her.

  “That’s right, Veronica,” she told me. “A nice Australian. I’ll keep my eyes open when I’m away in a few months.” She was expecting me to watch the house for her. As it turned out, I barely had time to return my key.