Whirl Away (7 page)

Then I got the shock of my life from the back of the rig. Because Bill was talking to me. Honest.

For at least a mile, Bill was talking to me. I turned the siren off then, still driving fast. He told me that he'd been watching hockey and that someone had scored—he couldn't even remember which team was playing—and the next thing he knew, he was out on the floor. He was getting it out in short sentences, breathless, a few words at a time, as if he was feeling the shape of each individual one of them in his mouth, like hard candies.

Then I was walking through all the heart attack symptoms with him—crushing pain in the arm, shortness of breath—and he had them all. But he was lucky: he had been stopped and then started again. On any medications? “Insulin diabetic.” Any allergies? “Cats—but I hate 'em anyway.”

I swear, once in the conversation he even laughed, telling me he had heard his wife scolding him while he was lying there, that she was sitting there yelling at him for dying. I remember thinking right then, the ambulance roaring bright through the night, that this might actually work, that I might get him there in time. I remember also, at virtually the same instant, thinking, “Don't even think it,” because you might not believe this, but in EMS we're the most superstitious people alive. When we walk back to the station with a coffee, we'll hop, skip and jump to miss every crack in the pavement. We'll stop to pick up lucky pennies. We'll count crows, “One for sorrow, two for joy,” and if we see just one crow, we'll stop dead until we're sure we can find another, even if we have to pretend that a green garbage bag caught in a tree is really a bird.

There's enough working against you already. All you need is to jinx it, all you need is to make it a little bit worse. You take every single bit of luck you can get, and still lots of people die before you even get close to the hospital.

Then, from the back of the rig, I heard a short, hacking breath.

“Thanks, bud.”

It was breathy and thin, and it was the last thing Bill said.

Then I heard a grunting sigh that sounded like it was rattling right up from his stomach, a big sort of gurgled breath, and I knew it was bad. I knew that sound, and if I had been working with John, I know what kind of glance would have gone between the two of us. It's a bad sound.

“Bill?” I called towards the back of the ambulance, my eyes still on the road, the lights cycling off the trees in bright red and white splashes as we flicked by. “Bill?”

Nothing.

And if they've coded, if their heart has really stopped again, you've realistically got four minutes on the road before their brain starts to burn out. Every cell in their body crying out for oxygen, and not finding it, because the blood's not trucking it around anymore.

I did the math. I couldn't stop to check, not by myself, because it would take too much time, even if I managed to shock him again and get everything going. Bill had been gone once already, and the odds just weren't in my favour.

So I started screaming.

I was screaming “Talk to me!” through the walkway back to Bill, and I was screaming down the road from White Rock
too, my foot right to the floor, the ambulance shaking wildly on the dirt road, and I could hear that everything in the back was coming apart.

I knew exactly where I was—up over the top of the ridge now and heading down the hill towards Wolfville—and I thought hard and decided that I might be able to make it. Four minutes, and if I drove fast enough, if I didn't get stopped anywhere, I really could be there in under three. I had the siren back on again by then, and the engine in the TopKick was going flat out.

Everything in the back of the ambulance is held behind Plexiglas sliding doors—blood pressure cuffs, pressure dressings, IV bags full of sterile saline—and the faster I went, and the more potholes I hit, the more things were raining down on silent Bill in the back. It would be like a ticker-tape parade of medical gear back there by the time I got to the hospital, but if I got there in time, who would care?

The rig felt like it was in the midst of shaking apart, like the wheels were going to fly off or I was going to break an axle or something. There are rules for how fast we're allowed to go. You might not believe it when you see an ambulance ripping up behind you in the rear-view mirror, leaning out to change lanes and moving so fast that it tilts, so fast that, in your car, you can feel your body cringing, waiting for the speeding rig to clip the side of your car, but there are rules about how you drive. I'd pretty much broken all the rules anyway, so I had 003 wide open, the engine roaring in under the hood, not another vehicle in sight out in front of me.

I was calling over my shoulder again to Bill when I piled hard into a big pothole I didn't see in time, and the whole front end of the TopKick sagged. It sagged, leaned to the right, and then the headlights didn't even line up properly anymore. The steering wheel didn't seem to be attached to the wheels. And I saw thistles, a crisp, even green line of them, just for a moment. Thistles, like a line of exclamation points, the punctuation at the end of a sentence, a run, a career.

They told me Bill was dead before we crashed.

“All of the injuries on his body were post-mortem.” That's what the final report said, and that's coroner talk to take home with you to rub on your conscience like ointment, because it's supposed to mean, “You didn't kill him.”

The stripe of the strap cuts below his shoulders, even the gash over his eyebrow where the monitor unit had come off its brackets and hit him, the crushed bone where his ankles had been—none of them had bled at all, not even a little seepage, meaning his heart had completely, absolutely stopped before we crashed.

The ambulance went straight down into a ditch, the front right tire blown out, with me high up over the steering wheel so that I cracked four ribs and smacked my temple when we hit the embankment on the other side. And the whole TopKick must have almost stood right up on its nose then, everything inside flying apart, before landing on its roof and crushing the light bar.

The ambulance from Waterville found us, rattling their way back down the hill from a house where they'd been told
an ambulance had already left, and they had no idea who it might have been. They found us because the headlights stayed on, and they said I was still unconscious when they got there. It's a wonder I remember any of it.

My partner John came to the hospital—Kate waiting with the kid in the car—and he was still on days with pay, a free vacation. He told me that the ambulance had held together all right, that even completely upside down the clamps hadn't let go of the gurney wheels, and Bill had been hanging from the ceiling like a stranded parachutist when they had forced their way into the back, the back doors crushed up and into his legs.

John looked at his hands when he talked. “You're in shit this time, Tim,” he said. “You're surely in shit this time.”

He kept looking at his hands, scratching at the rough patches, pulling off a fragment of fingernail. “Any one of us, we would have done the same thing,” he said, but the words sounded wrong, as if he was suggesting they wouldn't have done quite the same thing, really.

No one from any of the other crews came in to see me. The union sent me a fruit basket, but I didn't even take the Cellophane off it.

I might as well have been infectious.

So, do they fire me because I was out on the call alone, because I didn't wait for a duty crew to finally make their way up there? Or will it be because I wrecked an ambulance with a patient strapped into the back? The insurance company was certainly going to raise hell, because I was suspended
and driving an out-of-service rig. Just about the only people who weren't mad at me were Bill's family. They even sent a card.

I'm going to get canned now, I remember thinking, just because I couldn't help but do my job. You'd think I'd be the kind of guy they'd be desperate to keep. I've had three sick days in five years, I've taken every scrap of overtime they've ever asked me to take, and I've got a whole year's vacation banked because there didn't seem to be any point in taking it.

When Bill's wife came in to visit me, I didn't recognize her. She had to tell me who she was. Away from that house, away from the scene, she didn't look like anyone I'd ever met before.

“You did your best,” she said. “Sometimes that's all you can do.”

I shook my head, told her I was sorry. But I didn't tell her that it was our fault, that we should have had more rigs on the road. That maybe her husband wouldn't have died.

She stayed by my bed for a while, while I thought about what I hadn't said, and what it all meant.

And I'd be stupid if I didn't know what was coming next.

Riley's expecting to give me a lecture and a chance to get out clean, a chance for me to quit and save him a raft of problems. Riley's waiting to tell me that I rode a full wagon into the ditch and someone died as a result. Riley's a vicious bastard; he might lean in real close and whisper, “I've got you this time, fucker,” when my union rep's picked up my file and turned away towards the door.

But I don't think so. Because Bill's wife is sitting by my bed, and I know exactly what I can tell her, and exactly what the ambulance system doesn't want her to know.

Lying there, I had a message for our precious administrator.

I want my goddamn rig back. I'll trade him the vacation and the sick days if he wants, offer them up to burn off a suspension if he wants.

But I want my rig and my partner and my goddamn job.

And he's going to give it to me, too.

Because if he tries to hang me out to dry, I'll hang him too.

Not enough rigs on the road. Not enough of us to work in the shit and the blood and the rest of it, the siren rippling past the thistles and through the black night, the rig all lit up and heading for another bad surprise.

If I have to tear the whole place down around me, damn it, they're going to have to put me back out there.

H
ENNEBURY
versus Hennebury was up on my computer screen. It was Nova Scotia case law, and I wasn't really sure it would apply here, but I read it anyway, trying to see if there was anything worth keeping, even hidden between the lines. I wanted to collect all the pieces, to try to see if there was any way they might fit into the case I was working on, to see if they had a slightly different take. Looking for something I could toss up in front of the judge, as much to confuse as anything else. Give them more detail to chew over. More for them to think about.

Applicant and respondent were married for twenty-three years, two children, one of the kids already in college. The judge calls them the husband and the wife all the way through the decision, even though it's basically the last official time that anyone will ever call them that.

Hennebury is fighting with Hennebury over pensions, the pair of them having finally settled the child and spousal support in mediation, but the whole case is now breaking on the shoals that he has registered retirement savings plans
and that, while she does too, hers are considerably smaller.

I took notes, marvelling as I sometimes do that my handwriting can be so small and round and even, so preciously trained into my hand, despite the turmoil that's overtaking everything else I do.

The judge, who was named Doyle, reduced the entire case to spare prose and straight lines. I envy that kind of simplicity: simple language and obvious, basic logic, no stopping for broken dishes, revenge and recriminations. No late night crying silenced with fists pressed up to your mouth so the children don't get woken up. No vicious words that smack into each other and hurt, words that you no longer even have the will to try to undo. Just huge amounts of two intertwined lives reduced to mathematics: this share of the matrimonial home set off against that share of the summer place and the car.

There was bitter late March sleet coming in over the harbour in St. John's, straight off the ocean and completely unforgiving, and it was catching like a solid orange curtain in the lights over the pier where the offshore supply boats dock.

It was eight-thirty, and I was still in my Duckworth Street law office, staring through the big square windows out into the night. The office is in a three-storey green clapboard building that I and my partners bought and renovated. We rented out the ground floor to a souvenir store, so sometimes in the daytime when there's a quiet moment I can hear the bells they have hanging over the door to let them know when customers come in.

Down on the street, everyone had been reduced to the oversized black wet footprints they left behind after they'd gone. It was a hopeless kind of night, a frustrated, nasty kind of storm, a leftover scrap of winter that should have already given up but wouldn't take no for an answer.

There were cases I should've been working on, scattered across my desk in buff file folders with multicoloured tabs, and hours full of work that was supposed to be billed out to clients. Instead, after endless Internet searches of marriages gone wrong, I found myself sitting at my desk, occasionally balling up scraps of paper and throwing them across the room into the wastepaper bin, wondering just how I ever got into this business.

And why I stay in it.

Well, the why part—actually, I know that. There's an explanation right out front on a brass plaque by the front door:
Williams, Carter and Wright, Family Law
. Williams and Wright have gone home, along with everyone else in the office. We do well on other people's misery; the money's good for partners, even in a town with a clear oversupply of lawyers. I'm the Carter in the middle of the sign. Michael Carter, twenty years out of law school now, forty-seven years old and greying at the temples in a way I tell myself is distinguished.