Chapter 20
The ambulance came in less than half an hour. It felt like a lot longer.
I heard it before I saw it, the siren cutting off at the access entrance, and then the white and orange rig bounced into the clearing with its lights cycling red against the green timber.
Two paramedics stepped out. A woman in her forties with her hair pulled back tight, and a younger man, maybe thirty, both wearing navy blue uniforms with reflective striping. They carried a jump bag and an oxygen kit as they moved across the grass toward Abner.
The woman kneeled beside him. Fingers on his wrist. Penlight in his eyes. She unzipped the bag and pulled out a pulse oximeter, clipped it to his finger, and watched the reading.
"Sir, can you tell me your name?"
Abner's lips moved under the labored breathing.
"Flint."
"Mr. Flint, we're going to get you on some oxygen. You're going to feel a mask on your face. Just breathe normally."
The younger paramedic had the mask out and connected to a portable tank before she finished the sentence. He fitted it over Abner's face with two hands, settling the elastic behind his head.
The woman asked for medical information from Scout as her partner worked on Abner. Abner's eyes tracked from one to the other with the sharp, assessing intelligence I'd come to know well.
"O2 sat's at seventy-eight," the younger one said.
"Let's get the stretcher."
They worked together without wasted motion. Stretcher lowered, brakes set, backboard positioned. They log-rolled Abner onto the board and lifted him onto the stretcher in one coordinated motion.
The younger paramedic raised the head of the stretcher thirty degrees so Abner was semi-reclined. The woman hung a bag of saline from the stretcher's IV pole and started a line in the back of Abner's hand while her partner secured the straps.
"The nearest critical access hospital is in Forks," she told us. "You can follow us if you have a vehicle."
"Is he going to be all right?" Scout asked.
"His oxygen levels are low and he needs evaluation we can't do in the field. Forks will have what he needs to get stabilized. You should follow us now. Not directly behind us, though. That's illegal. Give me your mobile number so I can contact you if needed."
They loaded the stretcher into the back of the ambulance. The younger paramedic climbed in beside Abner and the doors swung shut. Scout watched the white panels close over her father. The ambulance pulled across the clearing and down the access road, lights strobing through the trees.
I put my hand on Scout's shoulder.
"My truck. Let's go."
The ambulance was out of sight by the time I pulled onto the county road.
I drove fast without driving recklessly.
Scout sat in the passenger seat with her back straight and her hands flat on her thighs, palms down, fingers spread.
Her face was set, her jaw was clenched so tight I could see the muscles working at the hinge.
I didn't tell Scout it would be okay. I didn't tell her Abner was strong or that the paramedics were good or that Forks wasn't too far.
She knew all of that already, and the things she didn't know, neither did I.
What she needed was forward motion and someone beside her who understood that silence was not the absence of concern.
Just ten miles in, my phone rang. It was the ambulance. Scout picked it up and held it to her ear.
"This is Liberty Flint."
I watched her face. Her expression didn't change, but something behind her eyes went still.
"I understand."
She set the phone back in the cupholder.
"The hospital in Forks can't handle this," she told me. "His oxygen levels are critical. They're calling for a helicopter to take him to Seattle."
Her voice was level, but her face was ashen.
"That's good, that's what he needs," I said. "The flight will get him there fast. Pulmonary specialists, real equipment. Seattle's where he should be."
"Yes, but how do we get there?"
"We drive. Four hours from Forks, roughly. We take the Tacoma Narrows Bridge route instead of the ferry. Ferry's unpredictable on weekdays. Could add an hour waiting for a spot."
She nodded, finding comfort in facts and logistics. It was the solid ground she could stand on while everything else gave way beneath her.
The hospital in Forks was a low building with a cramped parking lot. We pulled in behind the ambulance, which sat in the bay with its rear doors open and the stretcher already gone.
Inside, the fluorescent lights were glaring. The smell hit me next, that universal hospital smell of antiseptic and floor cleaner and recycled air.
A nurse directed us to a room where Abner lay on a gurney with the oxygen mask still on and a monitor clipped to his finger. His color was marginally better. His eyes found Scout the moment she walked through the door.
She went to him. Took his hand. Didn't speak.
Abner's fingers closed around hers. The monitor beeped in a steady rhythm.
A doctor came in, young, tired around the eyes. He explained what the EMTs had already told us. Abner's oxygen saturation was dangerously low. He needed imaging and pulmonary evaluation, which this facility wasn't equipped for. The helicopter was en route from Seattle, ETA twenty minutes.
We waited. Scout held her father's hand. Abner's eyes stayed open, watching his daughter's face with an expression I had never seen from him before. Something unguarded and vulnerable, something that looked almost apologetic.
Then we heard it. The distant rumble of rotor blades, growing louder, the sound filling the building until the windows vibrated with it. The helicopter landed in a designated spot beside the hospital. Its downdraft hit the parking lot and sent loose paper skittering across the asphalt.
Two flight medics came through the doors in orange jumpsuits, a man and a woman, moving with the same focused urgency the ambulance crew had shown. They transferred Abner to their stretcher, checked his lines, confirmed his vitals with the attending nurse, and wheeled him toward the helipad.
Scout walked beside the stretcher until they reached the doors to the landing area. One of the flight medics put a hand up.
"We'll take him from here. You can follow to Harbourview Regional in Seattle."
Scout leaned down. She pressed her forehead against her father's.
"Be thou as lightning in the eyes of France," she whispered.
Abner's eyes crinkled above the mask. His hand lifted and touched her hair, just once, and then the stretcher was through the doors and moving across the pad toward the helicopter.
We stood at the window. The rotor wash flattened the grass around the pad. The medics loaded Abner through the side door and climbed in after him. The pitch of the blades changed. The helicopter lifted, tilted its nose east, and climbed over the treeline.
Scout watched it until the sound faded and the sky was empty.
I drove east on US-101 toward Bremerton. Late afternoon traffic thickened as we passed through the small towns strung along the route.
Scout sat still. Sometimes she watched the road. Sometimes she watched the sky. Sometimes she watched nothing, her eyes focused on the middle distance as the miles accumulated behind us.
Four hours later I exited the freeway and followed the signs to Harbourview Regional Medical Center. The parking garage swallowed us. I killed the engine. The silence was heavy around us.
"Let's go find your father."
The emergency department directed us to a waiting area on the second floor. Scout spoke to the intake nurse and gave her father's name. They told her Abner was being evaluated and someone would come for her shortly.
We sat. The waiting room was half-full of people in various states of worry and boredom. A television mounted in the corner played the news with the volume off. The chairs were upholstered in a teal fabric that had absorbed years of fear and coffee and the restless shifting of anxious people.
A nurse came after twenty minutes and took Scout in. When Scout came back through the double doors, her face told me everything.
"He's doing better," she said quietly. "Oxygen levels are rising."
"Good. That's very good."
She sat down beside me. Put her hands in her lap. Stared at the floor. I stood up.
"I'll be back in a few minutes."
The gift shop was on the first floor, a bright alcove filled with flowers and magazines and stuffed animals and the small comforts people buy when the big ones aren't available. I quickly found what I was looking for. A prepaid flip phone, basic model, one year of service included.
I walked back toward the elevators with the phone in its plastic clamshell package. The corridor was long and the light was that flat, even light of institutions that never close. My shoes squeaked on the linoleum.
I came around the corner to the waiting room and stopped.
Scout sat alone in the row of teal chairs. Her braid hung over one shoulder. Her canvas pants had grass stains on both knees from where she'd caught Abner in the clearing. Her denim shirt was wrinkled and untucked.
She sat with her back straight and her hands clasped, the same posture she'd held in the truck, and she looked both mature and impossibly young.
It struck me that she was twenty-one years old in a hospital waiting room in a city she'd never visited before, four hours from the only home she'd ever known, wearing clothes she'd mended herself as her father was hooked to machines... and she was holding together.
I stood in that corridor and something shifted in my chest, a recognition I'd been ignoring for a long time. It settled, the way a foundation settles when the weight above it finds its true bearing.
Scout had told me she loved me in a hotel room in Port Townsend, and I had said nothing. The age difference. The complications. The wreckage of my own history with the word and everything it carried. All of it had made me uncertain, and I had let that uncertainty get between us.