Second Chances: The Seahaven Series - Book One

Chapter One

It takes a lot to surprise me in my line of work. If you can imagine it, I've seen it. Every aspect of human nature is on display for me every night whether I'm ready for it or not. I've come to expect the worst, but I've learned to sidestep it. I do everything I can to help however I can, but I also know how to get out of the way of the things that can hurt me. It's not a bad way to live your life in general if you think about it.

Tonight has been mostly calm. In fact, Danny and I are starting to relax a little bit, which of course always means the next call is going to be a whopper. And sure enough, just as we're about to pull over for coffee, the radio springs to life.

“Unit nine-three, elderly woman at four-six-one-one Seymour Street Apartments in cardiac distress. Victim conscious, complaining of arm pain, jaw pain, sweating. Please respond.”

Danny's driving, so I pick up the radio from the passenger seat. “Nine-three responding,” I say. Danny silently holds up four fingers. “ETA four minutes out.”

I flip on the lights and sirens and put the address into the GPS. Danny has already flipped a U-turn and is heading toward the residence. He knows this town like the back of his hand, all of its backroads and all of its shortcuts.

He drives quickly, but not dangerously. Cardiac cases require speed, because the difference of a minute or two can mean life or death. While en route we always try to guess what the situation's going to be like: critical, or non-life threatening. Someone's actually dying, or they just ate a bad piece of fish for dinner.

Danny looks at me, smiling hopefully. “Probably anxiety. It'll be fine.”

Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn't. We'll have to go check her out to be sure. That's what we're here for.

We get to the address and locate the caller's apartment door, which I knock on. This is an area of town known for a little drug dealing, a little prostitution. I look at Danny and he looks at me, and we're both on high alert. There's no answer from inside.

We watch our police officer escorts pull up to the curb behind the ambulance, and I hear a dog bark once from somewhere close by. Danny and I exchange a glance about it, and I raise my hand to knock on the door again.

Then before we can even register what's happening, a giant animal flies out of the darkness and lands on Danny. It's the barking dog, and a big one, and it's snapping and snarling at him and pinning him to the ground.

Danny's trying to kick it away, I'm screaming for the owner, and the cops are running toward us with their guns and sticks out. It's total mayhem until a gigantic man comes out of nowhere and pulls the dog off of Danny with one big yank.

I run to Danny and drop down next to him and the dog has definitely bitten him—once on his arm and once on his ankle, and the bites look pretty deep.

Now the cops are screaming at the man: “Control your animal!” “Leash your animal!” and the gigantic man is tying the dog to a post, but is starting to get mad, too—you can see his eyebrows forming an angry “V” as these policemen are screaming at him, and he starts to push back first with words, and then with his big body. So I jump up and get in between them.

“Guys! Hey!” I yell, and shove my hands into their chests. “There's a woman inside who called 911 for chest pain!”

The gigantic man's angry “V” flattens into concern as he steps toward her apartment.

“Miss Vicki?”

He forgets about his fight with the cops and bangs on her door.

“Miss Vicki! It's Ellis! You call 911?”

We all hear a low moan from inside. Ellis doesn't hesitate or ask permission, he just side-smashes the door and tumbles into the room. And there's Miss Vicki on the floor, holding her left arm, barely responsive.

We load her into the ambulance at lightning speed. I start an IV and one of the cops drives the rig while I work on her in the back. Danny and his dog bites ride with the second officer in the car behind us.

I yell for the cop to call in and tell them we're coming and who and what we're coming in with. Cottage Hospital serves our local Seahaven community, so that's where we're headed. They're equipped for almost all emergencies except for the most extreme trauma cases, which get airlifted to the university hospital in the larger metropolitan area about two hours away.

I've only had this job for a month. I mean I've been a paramedic for thirteen years, just not here. I was in that big metropolitan area working at that university hospital two hours away for all of that time, and this town is different from that town in almost every way.

My old town was huge, while this one's tiny. The old town has mountains, this has the ocean. I could see a movie on a giant screen in 3-D there, and here your best Friday night option is to rent a crumbling VHS tape from the local video store.

I lived there for almost a decade and a half, but I grew up here. My ex-husband is there, and he is not here. See, lots of differences.

Miss Vicki has had a hard time, but she's mostly stable now, and when the cop pulls into the ER ambulance bay I push open the doors and bring her gurney down. I swing it out and towards the entrance just as the other cop drives up with Danny inside. Danny jogs towards me, which is more like a painful-looking lope.

“Let me help,” he says.

I point to another gurney. “You need to be on that,” I say.

I turn to the cop, “Put him on that.”

“I'm fine,” Danny says, and he limps down the hall next to me as the ER staff takes over. Dr. Solomon, the attending cardiac specialist, has been called, and she and her nurses take the gurney from us after asking for vitals and the details of procedures initiated in the back of the ambulance. I give Miss Vicki's hand a squeeze and she blinks at me gratefully as she's wheeled away.

“Now you,” I say to Danny.

I inspect him in the middle of the floor by the ER intake desk, with all the nurses watching. When I lift his shirt I hear a couple of snickers, and when I squat to check his ankle I get a catcall.

“Really?” I say to the group. “A dog bit him. It's not sexy.”

“Looks kind of sexy,” says Maria, drinking coffee and watching from behind the desk. “Off with the pants!” she calls out, cupping her hands around her mouth, like we're in a burlesque show.

Some of the nurses giggle. I roll my eyes.

Danny shrugs and smiles, letting them think what they want.

I stand up, grab him by the hand and take him into an exam room.

“Take off your shirt,” I say. He smiles and pulls his t-shirt over his head. But he sucks in his breath and winces as the shirt rubs the bite on his arm.

“Hurts?” I ask.

“That dog bit the crap out of me. How bad is it?”

I look at it closely. The dog got him deep. “Not good. I'll clean it, and you'll need antibiotics for sure. Rabies meds, too, just in case. I'll go get a doc—”

“Ellie, wait.” Danny stops me with a hand on my arm. I turn around and he has a funny look on his face. Kind of serious, kind of nervous.

“I'll get you something for the pain, too.” I say.

As I'm talking his hand slides down my arm to my hand. I look down at our hands holding, confused.

“I need to tell you something. You coming back here after all this time... it's like you never left. I want to... I just wanted to say that—”

The curtain flies open. We both turn around. A tall blonde doctor stands in front of us holding a chart. He looks at me, blinks, looks at our hands, glances at Danny's arm.

Then he moves toward Danny and the wounds, saying, “Got a dog bite or two, mate?”

He's Australian. And he smells good, like clean soap and salt water. Something jumps in my chest for a second and I make a quick mental note to stop drinking so much coffee.

I drop Danny's hand and move aside so the bites can be checked out. Danny looks at me, then back to the doctor.

“Yeah,” Danny says, “Out on a call, dog came out of nowhere. This one, and one on my ankle.”

The blonde doctor glances over his shoulder at me, making minimal eye contact. Rude.

“If you'll wait outside I'll get some information from you in a few minutes,” he says. He turns back to Danny and resumes checking the wounds. I take a step backwards toward the door.

“Come back in a few, Ellie,” says Danny. “Don't go home yet.”

“I'll be outside,” I say, and escape the small room with my dog-bitten high school friend turned EMT partner turned maybe wants to be something more. I take a deep breath, trying to get my bearings about what just happened. What was he about to say?

I can't, I won't, I don't want to go there. He's been my friend forever, he's like a brother. And maybe more importantly, I've decided not to have any kind of relationship for a year, two years, maybe five, while I'm recovering from what might have been the most terrible marriage in the history of marriages. When did that blonde doctor get to town? I've never seen him before. Anyway, everybody and their mother knows that rebounds never work out. And in a tiny town like this, me and high school Danny getting together would make the evening news within the first week. In fact, I won't be surprised if news of our brief hand-holding finds its way into the morning paper.

I stand in the hallway and check my phone while I wait and there's nothing from my ex, which is a nice surprise.

The last few weeks have provided a cascade of insulting emails, then followup emails apologizing for the insults. He didn't want me to leave town to move here. Even when the divorce became final, even though we don't have children, he kept trying to find a way to make me stay in the area. He cajoled, he threatened. He refuses to acknowledge the finality of it, even now that I've been here for a month. But he'll have to come to terms with the fact that it's over. We're completely over.

Then there's an email from my brother, Cesar, asking if he can borrow money. I'm so happy to be near Cesar again that I don't even mind him occasionally treating me like an ATM. I work hard for my money and always have, and I'm not rich by any stretch, but compared to Cesar I'm a millionaire.

He's on the right track now after a battle with drugs, and he's recovering and doing better all the time. He's a sweet kid with a good heart, which is sometimes a tough combination if you don't have the armor to shield you from all the bad stuff in the world.

I'm typing away on my phone when the doctor comes out of Danny's room. He clears his throat and I look up. I feel something in my chest again. My pulse is faster. That's it, I'm switching to herbal tea.

“So,” he says, “your boyfriend has some pretty good puncture wounds there.”

I shake my head. “He's not my boyfriend. He's my EMT partner. We're in the ambulance together.”

Dr. Blonde lifts an eyebrow and smiles down at me. “Right. Better to tell that story so the boss doesn't get wind of it.” He makes notes in Danny's file.

Did he just say that? He doesn't know me and he's calling me a liar?

“Wait,” I say. I reach out and put my hand on the arm he's writing with. He stops writing immediately and I pull my hand back.

“You don't know me and you just met him and you're making assumptions you shouldn't be making. I don't want some fake rumor making me look bad. I take this job and my professionalism very seriously.”

Now my pulse is really racing. Who does this guy think he is? We lock eyes for a few seconds and I can't get my heart to slow down. He finally looks away.

“My mistake,” he says. He taps his pen on the chart, scratches an eyebrow, then engages me again. “Let's talk about your professionalism. That man has second degree bites in two places from a dog that may or may not carry rabies. Has the dog been quarantined for testing? Did you irrigate the wound at scene? No and no. Because of your 'professionalism', your friend could end up fighting a serious infection.”

He's calling me out. This arrogant jackass who has probably never even put a band-aid on a patient is questioning my procedure like I've done something wrong.

I take a step towards him. Too close, maybe. My heart is still pounding.

“Did you know we were there for an acute cardiac call?” I start. “And Danny was attacked while we were trying to enter the patient's apartment? And that if I'd attended to him and ignored her she would have died? So, yes, while he will end up with an infection which a round of antibiotics will fix, our patient will be alive because of me.”

The doctor eyes me levelly. Yeah, I'm way too close. I don't want to step back in defeat, and I don't want to look away, but it's difficult not to stare into his eyes. They're green-gold with a brown outer ring, a color I've never seen before. My gaze drifts involuntarily over his face and I see that he has freckles on his nose and a day's worth of blonde stubble, probably from working a too-long shift like the rest of us. I glance at his lips for a moment and then I'm sorry I did it. We're at war, and I'm not going to surrender over a full set of lips. I look back at his eyes and stare hard.

He looks away from me and back at his chart. “You made the right choice with the patient. I'll write your partner prescriptions for antibiotics and a course of rabies meds. He can pick them up at the desk.”