Emergency
Emergency
M ore than one million people have watched Ed Freeman’s news conference from last year on the Internet. About fifty of them are lined up, now, on a walkway outside the museum, wearing face masks and waiting to be let in, two at a time, to see the exhibit on its first day. One of them is a sixty-year-old woman, a longtime emergency dispatch operator and instructor. She squints in the morning light, thinking she’s been spending way too much time inside. She closes her eyes, now, and tilts her face toward the sun. Feels its strength, despite the chilly air.
One of the dispatcher’s roles is to make sure whoever calls in an emergency stays on the line, if possible, until help arrives. She is good at her job. But sometimes the caller drops the phone or cuts the line. She thinks back to the year 2000. October, it was. When the ten-year-old child called, upset but lucid. She gave her name and explained that her brother had been shot by two men who had come into their home. He was now bleeding on the floor of their father’s study. She gave her brother’s name and age. You could always tell when a child’s parents had drilled them on how to call emergency services for help.
“Ebony, are you injured?” the dispatcher asked.
“No, I was upstairs.”
“Did you get a good look at the men who shot your brother?” the dispatcher asked.
The girl hesitated. “No,” she said quietly.
The dispatcher recognized that kind of no . It was the kind of no that you say when you’re afraid to tell what you’ve seen. Part of the dispatcher’s job is to glean pertinent information. But the dispatcher, too, must tread carefully. Must keep the caller on the line.
“Ebony, I’d like you to answer me, now, with just a yes or no , all right? Is there someone else in the house with you? Besides your brother, I mean?”
“No, I don’t think so.”
“Do you know for sure that those were two men who shot your brother? Did you see them?”
A small intake of breath. Then silence.
She saw them, didn’t she? And she’s terrified.
The emergency dispatch operator was forty years old at the time. A seasoned professional. She had heard some dramatic situations over the phone in her career. But this one would stick with her. This one would haunt her. She remembers how the girl, Ebony, began to call her brother’s name quietly, then grew more agitated. Then she heard the phone receiver collide with a hard surface. The floor. Ebony had dropped the phone.
“Ebony? Ebony?” The dispatcher couldn’t get the child to answer, but she could still hear her.
That’s when that poor little girl began to shriek. Baz! Baz! she kept shouting. Then the words left her altogether, and her voice mushroomed into a kind of keening that hit the dispatcher square in the chest, funneled down through her veins and into her feet. The dispatcher pulled off her eyeglasses and wiped the sweat off the bridge of her nose.
In this world, there were too many things that a child should never have to witness.
She heard a woman’s voice, now, and muffled sobs, as if someone had embraced the girl.
“Hello? Hello?” the woman said. She identified herself as a neighbor and friend of the family. The dispatcher was back in contact, but she was shaken. One of her responsibilities was to be ready to take the next call with a calm and communicative disposition, no matter what had gone before. She was proud of the dedication she brought to the job. But after what she’d heard that day, the dispatcher had to ask to be excused for twenty minutes from her duties. This, too, was professionalism. To understand when you needed to step away.
At the end of her shift, the dispatcher skipped going to the supermarket and drove, instead, straight to her own daughter’s high school. She was early. She sat in the car for an hour. She sat there until her daughter had finished band practice and came walking out of the main entrance with two other girls. She watched the fifteen-year-olds walk down the steps of the high school, toothy and leggy and beautiful. She took in a deep breath, filled with relief and love.
The Freeman family are standing off to the side now, greeting the first visitors from a distance, as the dispatcher enters the exhibit hall. She sees an elderly white woman and a white man in a wheelchair with them. She recognizes the woman from the old news photos. The next-door neighbor.
None of the photos the dispatcher has seen have prepared her for how lovely the Freeman girl is. She would be, what? Thirty, thirty-one? Young, but mature. Composed and smiling. Ebony Freeman turns toward her now and nods at the emergency dispatch operator, unaware, of course, of who she is. Their eyes meet and the light in Ebony Freeman’s eyes is a gift. It eases some of what remains with a person who must listen, every day, to other people in distress, knowing that she cannot undo what has been done to them.