Chapter Fifteen · Sienna
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
SIENNA
I want to be careful here.
There are things about that call I will not put in any account of it, not in a chapel and not in a courtroom and not here, because they belong to a woman whose name I am not going to say and to three children who did nothing at all and who will be grown before anybody forgets.
So I am going to tell you the shape of it and the parts that are mine, and the rest stays with me, which is where the rest of it always stays.
That is the actual job. Everybody thinks the job is the hands.
The job is what you carry out of the house.
Dispatch had it as unresponsive, possible overdose, caller is a juvenile.
That last part is the one that gets you in the chest before you ever put the truck in gear.
Amos drove. He is twenty-four and he has been on the job fourteen months and he took the Ruritan road turns exactly the way I taught him, hard on the entry and easy off, and did not say one word the whole way, which I appreciated more than I could tell him at the time.
I got the kit ready in the back and said the sequence out loud so my hands would know it before we stopped moving.
Airway, breathing, dose, wait, dose. And under that, running the whole way in, the thing I could not say in front of a twenty-four-year-old: six tenths of a mile behind 173, on the ninth, in the second half of the window.
Sheriff’s deputy was two minutes behind us. Copperheads were on the corridor a mile and a half away in six places, and I knew that the whole way in, and I did not think about it once until later, which is the truest thing I can tell you about how a person’s mind works when it is busy.
Three children. Nine, six, and two. The nine-year-old had called it in.
She had a ponytail that she had done herself, crooked, and she was wearing socks and no shoes, and she met us at the door.
She had done everything right. That is the part that has never once left me.
She had put her mother on her side. She had unlocked the front door and put the porch light on in the daylight so we would know the house.
She had taken the two-year-old into the back bedroom and put a cartoon on so he would not see, and she had come back out and stood by the door and told me, in order, what her mother had taken and when, and how much, and where she had gotten it, and she had said all of it in the flat competent little voice of a child who has done this before, and then she asked me if she had done it right.
I said she had done it right.
I said it while I was working, over my shoulder, in about a second and a half, in the middle of drawing up a dose, in the voice you use when ninety percent of you is somewhere else.
I have said a lot of things to people in eleven years.
Some of them at three in the morning to men who were dying and knew it.
That is the one I would go back and say better if I got one.
I would have stopped. I would have put the syringe down for two seconds and gotten down to where her face was, and I would have said it to her like it was the only thing happening in that trailer, because for her it was.
She was thirty-four years old.
I am going to say one more thing about her and then I am going to stop.
She had a work badge from the poultry plant clipped to a lanyard on a hook by the door, and a child’s drawing on the refrigerator with four stick figures on it and all four of them had smiles, and a printed schedule on the counter with somebody’s shift times highlighted in yellow in two colors, because she was working two jobs.
That is a woman keeping a household together with both hands.
Whatever else was true in that trailer, that was true too, and it is true in almost every one of these houses, and no newspaper has ever once printed it.
We got her back. It took two doses and a long six minutes and everything I know, and we got her back, and she came up fighting the way they come up fighting, sick and furious and ashamed inside of ninety seconds, which is the part nobody understands about that drug.
You do not save somebody and get thanked.
You save somebody and get cussed at by a person in withdrawal in front of their own children, and then you go back the next month.
And the batch. I have to say the batch, because it is the whole reason any of this is in a book instead of a run sheet.
Two doses. In April it was one, most times.
Since the second week of May it has been two, and twice it has been three, and every medic in this end of the state has quietly changed what they carry without any state office telling them to.
The deputy took the children out to the porch.
Social services was thirty-five minutes out of Fincastle.
Rae came on her own, off shift, in her own car, because she heard the address on the scanner and did not ask me if I wanted her.
She sat down on those front steps with the nine-year-old and let that child hold her hand for thirty-five minutes without saying one word about it, and when the social worker got there Rae stood up and told her, quietly, in three sentences, exactly what that girl had done, so it would be in the file that she was competent and not a caretaker, which are two different things that get written down the same way if nobody’s paying attention.
Rae Tillman is forty-seven years old and has been a medic in this county for twenty-two years and gets paid nineteen dollars an hour.
We transported at 5:41.
And at the hospital, when it was done and the chart was closed and Amos had been sent to restock the rig because he needed a task more than the rig needed restocking, I went out through the bay doors and around the corner into the gravel behind the building where they keep the oxygen cage.
I got about four feet past that door before my legs quit taking instructions.
I sat down on an upturned milk crate between a fence and a gas cage, in uniform, and I did not cry, because that is not what happens.
What happens is you sit there and your hands shake and you go through the call again looking for the place where you could have been faster, and there isn’t one, and you go through it again anyway.
Eleven minutes. Then I stood up, and washed my face in the bay sink, and drove Medic 1 back to the station, and did the paperwork, and signed it.
He was at the barn when I got home at eight.
Not in the lot. Down at the road, at the mouth of my driveway, sitting on the tailgate of his truck with the bike parked behind it, a good hundred yards from my house, and when my headlights came around the bend he raised one hand and did not get down.
I stopped in the road beside him with my window down and the engine running, and neither of us said anything for a second, and out of the dark to the west the heat lightning went off over the ridge with no sound to it at all.
“How’d you know,” I said.
“Rae called Evelyn. Evelyn called Grace, because that’s the order it goes in now.
Nobody said a name and nobody said an address.
Grace said, one seventy-three, three kids, the supervisor worked it.
” He looked out at the dark field. “I’ve been sitting here since seven.
I wasn’t going to come up the drive.” He turned the phone face down on the tailgate beside him.
“You get to a hundred yards and that’s it.
That was the whole plan. If you’d gone on past me and up to the house I’d have sat here till the light went off and then gone home, and that would have been fine, and you’d never have had to say a word about it. ”
That is when I quit.
I do not have a better word for it. It was not a decision.
Whatever it is in a person that keeps the shift running just set the load down in the middle of the road.
I had gotten through the call and the ER and the paperwork and the drive, and I had planned to get through a shower and a beer and about four hours of not sleeping, and instead I put my truck in park in the middle of my own road with the engine running and put both hands on the wheel and could not make myself do the next thing.
He did not move off that tailgate.
“Sienna.”
“Don’t get up.”
“I’m not.”
“Don’t.” I had my eyes shut. “Rule six is the only thing keeping me in this vehicle.”
“Then it’s doing its job,” he said. “I’ll sit right here. You can idle in that road all night, and I’ll sit on this tailgate all night, and neither one of them’s a rule violation.”
Something in my chest came apart.
“She was nine,” I said. “She had done everything right. She put her mother on her side and she unlocked the door and she put the porch light on in the daytime and she took the baby in the back and put a cartoon on so he wouldn’t see.
Nine years old. Nobody taught her that in a class, Cutter.
She’d learned it. That’s a curriculum. And she stood there and asked me if she’d done it right. ”
He did not say anything, which was correct, because there is nothing. In eleven years the only people who have ever gotten that right on the first try are other medics and men who have been in a cell.
“And you know what the county will do,” I said.
“The county will say what a shame. And Preston Vogel will say we need more resources, and he’ll mean it, and in November somebody will cut a ribbon on a four-bay station at 178 and that little girl will still be nine, and there will be a photograph of me in the paper standing next to the people who put the batch on the shelf a mile and a half from her porch. ”
“Don’t do that.”
“Don’t do what.”
“Don’t do the arithmetic where you come out being the villain,” Cutter said. “You had two doses and six minutes tonight and you won. That’s the only column that’s yours.”
“That’s not how it works.”
“I know it’s not how it feels.”
“And a mile and a half from that porch light there’s a trailer sitting in the sun with true paperwork on it, and a man at a rail with binoculars, and a company that wants to build me a station,” I said, “and I have been telling myself for two months that I am doing something. I’m not doing something.
I’m the cleanup. I’m the county’s cleanup, and I’m good at it, and being good at it is what lets everybody else not look. ”
“That’s not true.”
“It is true tonight.”
“It’s true tonight,” he said. “It’s not true, and it’s true tonight, and I’m not going to argue you out of tonight.”
The engine ticked. Off in the field the fireflies were doing what they do in August, which is get lower and slower and sadder.
I shut the truck off. I got out. I walked over and stood in front of him with my arms crossed, six feet, and my whole body shaking in a way that had nothing to do with being cold.
“I need hands,” I said.
He came off that tailgate so fast the springs knocked.
“Say what and where,” he said.
And that is my rule, in my words, out of his mouth, and I stood in my own road under a sky full of August and understood that this man had memorized the exact sentence that would let me ask, and had been holding it since the first night of the class against the possibility that I would ever need it.
“Just hold on,” I said. “I don’t care where. Just hold on and don’t say anything and don’t let go until I do.”
He put his arms around me and held on.
He did not say anything. Not one word, for a long time, in the road, with the fireflies going and the whippoorwill starting up and a truck going by somewhere far off on Eleven with a load, and I cried the way I have not cried since 2016 in a parking lot in Craig County, and he did not shush me and he did not pat me and he did not tell me one single time that it was all right.
He smelled like gravel dust and cigarettes and the inside of a truck that has been sitting in the sun, and under my ear his heart was going about as fast as mine was, which he could not hide and did not try to.
When I finally let go, he let go, immediately, and stepped back to six feet, which broke my heart worse than the holding had put it back together.
“Come up to the house,” I said.
He stood there in the dark.
“Sienna, I want to be sure about what you’re asking me, and I want to be sure at the bottom of the driveway and not at the top of it.”
“I’m asking you to come up to the house,” I said. “That’s all I’m sure about, and I’m sure about it, and if I get to the porch and I’m not sure about anything else I’ll tell you and you’ll go, and I know you’ll go, which is the only reason I’m asking.”
He shut his tailgate.
“Then I’ll follow you up,” he said.