Chapter Twenty-seven · Sienna
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
SIENNA
I spent the two weeks after that funeral doing the least dramatic thing anybody in this story does, which is trying to get a laboratory in Richmond to run a test.
I want to lay it out in order, because when this is over people are going to say that the system failed, and the system did not fail. The system worked exactly the way it is built to work, which is the whole problem, and I have the emails.
September fifteenth. I filed a supplemental narrative to my run report, which is a thing any provider may do, adding detail to my objective findings and noting the inconsistency between the pupillary finding and the preliminary determination.
Two paragraphs. No opinions, no conclusions, no accusations, no names.
I did not write the word overdose and I did not write the word Kesterly and I did not write the word homicide.
I wrote what my eyes saw at 6:02 in the morning on the seventh of September and I wrote why one finding does not sit with the other, in clinical language, with a citation to the state’s own protocol.
It took me four hours to write two paragraphs. Rae read it twice and struck one adjective, and the adjective was “clearly,” and she was right to strike it, which is the difference between a document that survives and one that gets somebody fired.
September sixteenth. Sturgill submitted a written request for expedited toxicology, attaching my supplemental, and got back a form response in nineteen hours saying the request did not meet criteria for expedited processing.
Nineteen hours. This is the fastest anything moved in this entire story, and it was a refusal.
September eighteenth. I called the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner myself and got a very decent woman on the phone who explained to me, kindly, that they run eleven thousand cases a year, that toxicology is a hundred and ten days statewide, that expedite is reserved for cases with an identified suspect or active investigation, and that a preliminary determination of cardiac arrhythmia with no trauma does not open one.
“So we need an investigation to get the test,” I said, “and the thing that would open an investigation is the test.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Ma’am, I’m not fussing at you. I want to make sure I understand it, because I’m going to have to explain it to a thirty-one-year-old woman with a two-year-old on her hip.”
“Yes, ma’am,” she said. “I’m sorry. I have this conversation about four times a week.”
She was not lying to me.
That is the sentence I keep having to write.
Nobody in these two weeks lied to me one time.
Not the woman in Richmond, not Sturgill, not Wanda Prather, not one soul.
Every person I dealt with was competent and honest and doing the job they were hired to do with the resources the Commonwealth gave them.
September nineteenth. Grace filed on behalf of Charity Teague, as next of kin, a written request that the full panel be run and that the specimens be preserved regardless of finding.
That is the one thing a family can demand.
It costs nothing. There is a form. Almost nobody ever files it, because almost nobody knows it exists, and because most families in the two weeks after a death cannot find their own keys, and because the only people who reliably know about it are lawyers and the funeral homes, and the funeral homes do not bring it up.
Grace filed it on the fourth day. She had it written before the funeral.
I asked her once, later, how she knew to do that, and she said, “Because in 2011 I didn’t,” and did not elaborate, and I have never asked her again.
September twenty-second. The county administrator’s office sent me a memo.
It was two paragraphs and it was signed by Wanda Prather and it was, I will be accurate, entirely correct.
It reminded me that county EMS providers are not investigators.
It noted that my supplemental narrative had been forwarded to the sheriff’s office, as is proper, and that any further inquiry was a law enforcement function.
And it directed that I make no further contact with the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner regarding this or any other case except through the county’s designated channel, which is her office.
It did not say I had done anything wrong. It said, in the flat voice, that a woman under a thirty-day liability review with a paused funding agreement and a gag on public statements was now also not to call Richmond.
I read it standing at the printer in the station.
Then I sat in my truck in the Wilkes Ford lot and read it twice more, and then I did something I have never done since I started, which is that I laughed, alone, in a parking lot, for about fifteen seconds, until it turned into something else and I put my hands over my face.
Because it had taken them fifteen days.
Fifteen days to close the last door, and every single person who closed it was doing their job correctly, and not one of them had any idea they were part of anything at all.
Wanda Prather has no idea to this day. That woman is not corrupt.
She is careful, and she was handed a county employee with a federal look attached to her and a paused eleven-million-dollar agreement, and she did the prudent thing at every single step, and the prudent thing at every single step is exactly what a man in a canvas coat needs a county administrator to do.
That is what I finally understood in that parking lot on the twenty-second of September.
He does not corrupt anybody. He never has.
He finds systems that are already working the way they are built to work, and he stands where the working of them does his job for him.
The state runs a hundred and ten days behind.
A preliminary finding closes an inquiry.
A county protects itself from liability.
A board pauses a project under a cloud. Every one of those is a good rule, made by decent people, for good reasons.
He just knows where they all point, and he stands there, and he waits, and it takes fifteen days.
There is no one to expose. It is the thing I could not get anybody to understand in September and could barely stand to understand myself.
If you took every person who closed a door on me in those two weeks and put them in a room and showed them what they had collectively done, every one of them would be horrified, and not one of them would have done anything differently, and they would all be right.
I called Grace and read her the memo.
“Do not violate it,” she said immediately. “Not once, not by accident. That memo is the first thing anybody has put in writing that could be used to end you, and the way it ends you is if you disobey it.”
“Grace, the samples are going to sit in a refrigerator until January.”
“Yes.”
“He’ll have finished whatever four months is by then.”
“Yes.” A pause. “Sienna, I am going to say something to you that I have said to four clients in nineteen years and never once enjoyed. You have done everything correctly. Every single step, better than anybody could have asked. And it is not going to be enough, and it is not a failure of yours, and the temptation now is to do one clever thing outside the lines to make it move. That is exactly when people like us get destroyed, and I need you to promise me you won’t. ”
I stood in my kitchen with the memo in my hand and looked out the window at the barn with no chairs in it.
“Grace, can I ask you something that isn’t legal?”
“Yes.”
“Do you believe me? About the pupils.”
There was a pause on that line that I have turned over many times.
“I have never once doubted you,” Grace said.
“Not for a second, not from the first phone call. And I want you to understand that what I believe is worth precisely nothing to a laboratory in Richmond, and that the reason I am able to be useful to you is that I have spent nineteen years learning to keep those two facts in separate rooms.” Her voice came down a little.
“You saw what you saw. You wrote it down within the hour, in the objective section, with a witness present, before you knew whose bay you were standing in. Sienna, that document is going to matter one day. It is not going to matter this month.”
“I promise,” I said.
And I meant it, and I kept it, and I want that on the record because of what happened in November.
Cutter came out that evening without calling first, which he does not do, and did not come up to the house.
I found him sitting on my bottom porch step in the last of the light with a thermos and nothing else. No groceries, no speech, no plan folded up in his shirt pocket. He heard my screen door and did not turn around.
“I’ve got a memo in my glovebox that says I’m not allowed to call Richmond,” I said.
“I heard.”
“Did you come out here to tell me what to do about it?”
“No, ma’am. I came out here because it’s Monday and you got gagged by your own county today, and I did not want you sitting on this porch by yourself while you got used to it.” He held the thermos up without looking back. “It’s the good coffee. You want quiet or company?”
“Both.”
So we sat on my step and drank his coffee and watched the ridge go dark, and he did not fix one thing, and he did not offer to, and about every ten minutes I felt the place where the anger was sitting in my chest get a little less interesting.
“Grace made me promise not to do anything clever,” I said, at full dark.
“I know. She called me after.”
“Why.”
“To make me promise the same thing,” Cutter said. “Word for word. She said we were the two most dangerous people she has ever represented and neither one of us knows it, and she would rather promise-proof the both of us in one afternoon.”
I laughed, once, for the second time that day, and this time it did not turn into anything else.
Then a strange thing started happening, which nobody planned and which I did not understand for about a week.
The class kept growing.
Thirty-one on the fourth. Thirty-eight on the eleventh.
On the eighteenth, six days after the funeral, Bobby Sowder had to turn people away at the door of his own fire hall and start a second list, and I stood up in front of forty-four people in a bay in Wilkes Ford with the engine pushed out into the lot to make room.
They came for different reasons and I gave up sorting them.
Some of them came because a man had died in a fab bay and everybody knew and nobody could say.
Some came because their cousin was on the ninth of August. A woman from the plant told me she came because her boy is seventeen and drives that corridor at night and she had decided she was tired of being a person who could only call somebody.
And they had started bringing things.
Somebody left two cases of gauze on the tailgate of my truck with no note.
The poultry plant’s safety manager, a woman I had never met, sent an email asking whether her company could buy tourniquets for the class and would sixty be enough.
A man from Ammons Creek who had once written to the newspaper about the Copperheads brought a homemade plywood training board with four bleed sites cut into it, and it was not very good, and I have used it every single week since.
Renata Sowder came on the eleventh and sat in the front row with her reading glasses on and took actual notes, and asked the only question anybody asked that night about legal exposure, and then answered it herself before I could, correctly.
Amos taught the whole third station on the eighteenth by himself and I sat down in a folding chair at the back of my own class for twenty minutes and watched a twenty-four-year-old do it better than I did at thirty.
On the twenty-fifth, Charity Teague came.
She stood in the back by the coat rack and she did the whole two hours, and she has her father’s hands. At the end she came up while I was packing the kits and she said, “I want to be on the list for whatever comes after this one.”
“There’s a first responder course in the spring. It’s a hundred and eighty hours.”
“Put me down,” she said.
And I put her down.
She stood there a second longer with her hands in her jacket pockets.
“They’re saying it was his heart,” she said.
“That’s what the preliminary says.”
“I know what the preliminary says. I’ve read it till I know it by heart.
” She looked at me straight, with her father’s jaw.
“I’m not asking you to tell me anything, Sienna.
Miz Walsh explained to me what you’re allowed to say and what you’re not, and I’d not put you in that position for anything in this world.
” She got her keys out. “I just wanted to stand in a room where you were and let you see my face. That’s all. Good night.”
Then she went out, and I finished packing the kits, and then I went out to my truck and sat in it in the dark of a fire hall parking lot for a good while.
Because here is the arithmetic I could not get away from that night, and cannot now.
They took the station and I got a fire hall. They gagged me and the county started leaving gauze on my truck. They put a thirty-day liability review on a barn with fourteen chairs in it, and six weeks later there were ninety-odd people who could stop an arterial bleed, when in June there were nine.
Nine. That was the number in June. Me, Rae, Amos, and six others across two shifts.
That was the entire trauma capability of Blackthorn County, Virginia, and it lived in three vehicles, and if it was on a call at the south end then the north end had nothing at all and everybody just called it geography.
He cannot stop that. This is the thing I sat there working out with my hands on the wheel.
He can pause an agreement, because an agreement has a signature on it. He can put a memo in a personnel file, because a file has a drawer. He can make a laboratory in Richmond take a hundred and ten days, because a laboratory has a queue.
There is no drawer for what happened in that fire hall.
There is nobody to call about it. Forty-four people learning a thing with their hands is not a system and does not have a door on it, and the only way to stop it is to go door to door in a county this size and tell them to forget, and there is no memo in the world that does that.
It is not a plan. Let me be honest, because I was sitting in a parking lot with a memo in my glovebox and a hundred and ten days on a refrigerator in Richmond and an old man in the ground at Little Bethel.
But it is the only thing that grew all summer.
It grew in June when nobody would look at my spreadsheet.
It grew in August when they took the station.
It grew in September when they closed the last door, and it grew fastest of all in the two weeks after they buried the one man who ever told that fella no to his face.
It grew every single time they cut it, and I do not think anybody involved has noticed yet.