by Anne Calhoun
“That’s fine,” Trish said after scrolling through her calendar on her phone. “I’ll figure out a way to market it. How was your night with your EMT?”
“Paramedic,” Sarah said as she stood. Her legs quickly reminded her of the previous night’s athletics.
“There’s a difference?”
“Paramedics have more training. They can respond to more complex situations, like heart attacks and traumas, have more knowledge of anatomy and physiology, medications, that kind of thing.”
“Doing some research, were you?” Trish said, then shoved Sarah’s foot with her own when Sarah blushed.
“I was curious about the life he lives,” Sarah said.
“Sounds like a superhero to me. When I was eight, my uncle had a heart attack at my mom’s birthday party. One minute he was fine, the next he was gray and lying on the floor. When the EMTs showed up they were totally calm, totally in control. Got his heart started again, got him to the hospital, and a couple of days later he was home, on a low-sodium diet and a strict exercise plan. My brother ran around wearing his Superman cape and a stethoscope out of a toy doctor kit, pretending to save people’s lives.”
The story struck a chord inside her. She’d spent enough time with doctors and nurses to know some of them had rescuer complexes. Maybe Tim was trying to be an everyday superhero—not a bad goal in a city that could get preoccupied with money and fashion—but even a superhero needed downtime to process what he saw.
She showered off the day’s smells, changed into pj’s, and padded back out into the living space. Trish was deep in the day’s financial news. Sarah sank down again, topped up her glass of wine, and wondered what she’d gotten herself into. The pace here was supercharged, faster and more urgent than any other city she’d lived in. She was over the initial adrenaline rush of moving across the continent, setting up the food truck, hooking up with Tim. The sensation inside her felt familiar, like the cliff edge following a cancer diagnosis. There was the diagnosis, the emotional storm, the research, the planning, the determination to beat it. Then came the day-to-day reality of living with it, planning chemo appointments. She dealt with that by making soup and blogging about it, incidentally blogging about Aunt Joan’s health at the same time.
Somehow she didn’t think what was happening between her and Tim was suited to a blog and slow Sunday afternoons in the kitchen, watching bread rise, simmering stock.
She reached for the bottle and poured another glass, then topped off Trish’s. It’s just a spring fling, she told herself. A little afternoon delight, a challenge, a way of getting her old, carefree self back.
But she couldn’t shake the impression that that self was gone forever.
Chapter Five
The bus tilted as Casey careened around a corner. Tim shifted his weight to secure the patient on the cot with one hand and reached to steady the IV bag with the other. Casey shouted, “Oh, shit!” and braked hard. Off balance, Tim crashed headfirst into the partition between driver and patient, and everything went black.
His vision swam into focus. It took him a moment to orient himself. He was slumped in the corner behind the driver’s seat, looking at the top corner above the back door of the bus, and he was still reaching for the patient, so he hadn’t been out long. She twisted to peer over her shoulder, took one look at Tim, and started screaming
“What?” Casey yelled. “What’s wrong?”
“Did you hit a person?”
“What? No!”
“Then drive!” Tim bellowed back.
The woman’s eyes rolled back in her head. Tim ran through the ABCs, because at this point in his life they were drilled into the marrow of his bones, then remembered her particulars and did a more appropriate head-to-toe scan. Casey swung to look over his shoulder, blanched with horror, and said, “Jesus, LT. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”
Tim swiped at his forehead with his forearm, then peered at it. Blood coated the hair and skin. He must look like an ax murderer took a swing at him, and head wounds bled like nobody’s business. “Just drive,” Tim said through his teeth.
***
“What the fuck happened to you?” the cop on duty in Bellevue’s ER asked. He’d taken up residence in Tim’s curtained room and was grinning and rocking up on the balls of his feet. Wednesdays at nine in the morning were slow, even in the ER.
“Fuck off,” Tim said.
“I’m sorry, LT,” Casey said.
“Stop fucking saying that,” Tim said. “I know you’re sorry. It’s not a big deal. I’m six feet fucking five. I hit my head all the time.”
“You do have a nice assortment of scars,” the ER doc said, peering at his forehead through a lighted magnifying lens. “This one’s going to be a nice addition to your collection. Six stitches, probably.” She flipped a penlight at his eyes. “Maybe eight.”
Tim flinched away from the light. “Knock that off.”
She ignored him. “You might have a concussion.”
“I don’t have a concussion. I have the mother of all headaches and a little cut over my eyebrow.” He swiped at it, felt bone under fatty tissue, felt his stomach flip, and took a deep breath.
“I just cleaned that out,” the doctor bitched.
“I’m sorry, LT.”
“Shut up, Casey.”
“Lie down,” the ER doc said.
Tim did, only because it was starting to seem like a really good idea. His head hung off the top end of the gurney until he scooted down so his feet hung off the bottom end of the gurney. “Just put a butterfly bandage on it. I’ve got a shift to work.”
“You do your job and I’ll do mine,” the ER doc said. Tim tried to read her name badge and failed, because blood still matted his eyelashes. He squinted at her. Midthirties, thin, smelled of Marlboros, so a smoker, but most of them were, with kind eyes. How did she keep those eyes when so many didn’t? The room was tilting slightly. He shut his eyes and resolved to ask her. Later.
She pinched the skin above his eyebrow and slid in a needle to inject the lidocaine. The cop’s grin widened. Misery loved company, all right. “Don’t you have somewhere else to be?” Tim said.
“Nope,” the cop said, rocking up on the balls of his feet. “Slow morning.”
Fucker.
“How’s your neck?” the doctor asked.
“I used it to carry my head from the bus here, so fine.” He’d also gotten the patient into the ER. That was just before people started gasping and pointing and the room spun ninety degrees on a vertical axis.
The cop was all but giggling. “You passed out.”
“The fuck I did.”
“What happened?” the cop asked Casey. Nosy bastards. This story would be all over the radio before the lidocaine wore off.
“There was an obstruction in the road,” Casey said, clearly clinging to what was left of his dignity with his fingernails.
Tim’s eyes were already closed, but he could hear identical snorts from the doc and the cop. Might as well get it over with. “What kind of obstruction?” he asked.
“A dog.”
And there went Casey’s dignity, buried under an avalanche of laughter. “Jesus, kid, I say that all the time,” the cop said when he regained control of his breathing.
“It was! It was a dog. A yellow lab! It looked like it was somebody’s pet, you know? It had a kerchief around its neck and it bolted into First Avenue! I couldn’t hit a dog.”
Casey’s voice was high enough to break glass. The way Tim’s day was going, he’d end up trawling the streets of Kips Bay, looking for the lost lab that didn’t die when Casey sent him face-first into the divider. “I believe you, Casey,” he said, because he was going to hear this story over and over for weeks, and if he could make it stop now, that would be fucking awesome.
“I’m sorry, LT.”
“I know.”
“All done,” the doctor said, and snipped the last stitch. “Usually you guys make shit patients, but you were a very good boy.
”
“My head hurts,” Tim said.
The room went silent at that, then the doctor pried open his eyelids, one after the other, and flashed the penlight at his pupils again. Casey loomed up into his vision, peering over the doctor’s shoulder. “Same size and responsive to light,” he pronounced, “so no concussion, right? Right?”
“Probie,” Tim said to the doctor.
“Obviously,” the doctor said. “You’re done for the day. I’m sending you home. Take some pain meds. If the headache gets worse, call here and make the duty nurse track me down.”
“Okay,” Tim said, because he’d say anything to get out of here.
The doctor put her hand on his chest and looked at him. “Look me in the eye and say ‘Yes, doctor,’ or I’ll call your chief and take you off duty for the rest of the week.”
“I will,” he said. “Jesus.”
“I’ll drive you home,” Casey said.
“You’re not wasting time taking me home. Drive the bus back to the station and check in,” Tim said, and sat up. Bad decision. A big troll swung a golf club at the interior of his skull. He winced, closed his eyes, and held his breath. This was going to slow him down. The trick now was to minimize the downshift. “I’ll get a cab.”
“I’ll drive you home,” the cop said, sounding serious.
“I’ll take a cab,” he repeated.
“One of these fine gentlemen is going to drive you home, Lieutenant Cannon,” the doctor said, and snapped off her gloves. “Or someone else. Do you have family you can call?”
Sure, but they all worked, like he did, and he wasn’t getting his sister out of her office job to babysit him over a headache. “They’re working.”
“Choose your chauffeur.”
He blew out his breath, then regretted it. “Officer Chuckles here can make himself useful and take me home. Take the bus back to the station,” he said to Casey. “I’ll call Jonesy. I’ll be fine. It’s just a headache.”
***
The cop, needing no more instruction than a street address to find his way through the Lower East Side, thoughtfully kept his mouth shut on the way to Tim’s apartment. He drove like he had a newborn in the backseat. Tim adjusted his opinion up a couple of notches.
“Thanks,” Tim said when he pulled up in front of the building.
“No problem. I’m still going to spread this all over, so don’t die, all right?”
“I’ll do my best,” Tim said, and levered himself out of the passenger seat.
Inside the apartment he lowered the blinds and the Murphy bed, then stretched out across it. He wasn’t tired, but watching TV was out of the question, as was moving. The painkillers kicked in eventually, but he still didn’t feel like doing much, so he closed his eyes and watched the light shift through his lids.
The front door buzzer went off, sending a spear of pain through his left eye into his brain. He sat up, gripped his head against the resulting throb of agony, and shuffled over to the intercom, because if he didn’t the person would buzz again, and that might kill him. “Yeah?”
“It’s Sarah. You weren’t at the park today, and I wondered—”
He cut her off by leaning on the buzzer to open the front door, because this conversation wasn’t happening over the intercom. He unlocked his door and cracked it open, then shuffled back to the bed and lay down again to track her progress by sound. Front door slammed. Clogs on the stairs, then the landing, then more clogs on his hardwood floor.
“For the love of God, take your shoes off,” he said. “Please.”
The thumps stopped, replaced by bare feet padding first to the kitchen counter, where plastic rustled, then to the bed. “My goodness. Superhero down.”
“It’s fine,” he said with a vague wave in the general direction of his stitches, which were, in fact, also throbbing. “I have a headache.”
“I don’t doubt it.”
The bed sagged as she sat on the corner and gently brushed his hair back from his forehead. It wasn’t long enough to make that move necessary, but he remembered his mother doing the same thing when he was a kid. Soothing him.
“That looks awful. What happened?”
“Casey, the probie I’m training, braked to avoid hitting a dog in the middle of First Avenue. I proved Newton’s first law when my head made contact with the metal wall.”
He heard a sympathetic suck of air through her teeth, followed by the gentle stroke again. “I’m sorry.”
He shrugged. “It happens.”
“I brought you lunch.”
The thought of food didn’t make his stomach flip, so that was an improvement. “I’m not really hungry,” he said. “But thank you. You didn’t have to do that.”
“I know,” she said, the smile evident in her voice. “Want me to clean you up a bit?”
“You don’t have to do that, either.”
“I know I don’t. I’m offering anyway.”
“That’d be great,” he said. The dried blood was beginning to itch. “Kit’s in the bathroom.”
She found the cotton swabs and rubbing alcohol under the sink and returned to the bed. As she cleaned his forehead, the side of his nose, and his beard, he lay still under her touch, relaxing for the first time since he’d blacked out in the bus, or maybe for the first time in weeks. Maybe months. Switching to plain water, she daubed at his closed eyelids.
“You’ve got a nice touch,” he said, surprising himself.
Her hands didn’t pause. “I’ve got some experience with taking care of someone,” she said. “Want me to make you some soup?”
If it didn’t come out of a can, soup was a commitment. A couple of hours, a trip to the store, then chopping and slicing and cooking because he didn’t have anything other than Pop-Tarts and beer. “No, thanks,” he said.
More plastic rustling. Cleaning up, he deduced. He was a regular Sherlock Holmes with his eyes closed.
“You smell good. Kimchi and barbecue.”
“That’s what I brought.”
“My favorite.”
“Let me know if you want me to heat it up.”
“In a bit, maybe.”
“How’s your head?”
He thought about this. “Better than it was.”
“Do you have a concussion?”
He opened his eyes and looked at her. “How are my pupils?”
She bent over and studied them closely. “They’re the same size.”
“I’m Tim Cannon, and I’m in my apartment on Orchard Street. You’re Sarah Naylor, formerly of San Francisco. You live in Brooklyn, you work at Symbowl, you don’t wear perfume, and you make killer desserts. I don’t have a concussion. Just a pounding headache,” he said, and closed his eyes.
The bed dipped again. Cotton rustled, then the whump of fists hitting pillows, then more shifting. “Come here,” she said gently.
He moved until he lay with his head in her lap. She stroked his hair again. “Go to sleep. I’ll wake you up in an hour.”
“I don’t have a concussion.”
“Shut up and sleep.”
***
He did, awakening to rhythmic patting on his shoulder. “Wake up, sleepy head,” she said.
“I can hear you smiling.”
“That’s because I am smiling.”
“This is funny?”
“It’s touching, perhaps. Superhero laid low by an itty-bitty dog.”
“Fucking dog,” he said without any heat. “I like dogs, just not in the middle of First Avenue. I’m not a superhero, either.”
“How do you feel?”
He took stock. Headache closing down on tolerable, even when he was due for pain pills. Hollow. “I could eat.”
“I’ll heat your bowl up when you’re ready.”
“Did you have somewhere to be tonight?”
“Nope,” she said. He opened his eyes and didn’t feel like screaming, so he’d live to ride in the back of another bus driven by Casey. Her hand rested on his shoulder, and
her thumb gently stroked his neck. It was nice; he was in no hurry to end it, but eventually his stomach growled and he really had to take a leak.
Pressure on his shoulder stopped him from sitting up. “Where are you going?”
“Bathroom,” he said.
“Oh. I thought you were going to heat up the food,” she said, and let him sit up.
Squinting against the light, he peered at himself in the bathroom mirror. The stitches gave him an unfortunate resemblance to Frankenstein’s monster, but Sarah had quite competently cleaned up his face and neck. He stripped off his uniform and emerged wearing only his boxers. She was in his kitchen, heating up the food. He pulled on a pair of basketball shorts.
“How are you feeling?”
“Okay,” he said. “Where’s yours?”
“I only brought lunch for you,” she said. “I’ll eat when I get home.”
He shook his head. “My appetite’s not that big. Get a fork.”
His back to the wall, she curled up next to him. “Big hands are useful,” she said when he steadied the bowl to keep it from tipping as she gathered a forkful of meat and rice. “Want me to stay?”
“You don’t have to.” He shifted, like his skin was two sizes too small, hating being seen so vulnerable, but he couldn’t bring himself to be rude, either. She wasn’t fussing. She was just there, quiet and certain and still, right down to the marrow of her bones. He wondered where she’d learned to handle injuries with a professional’s calm, but maybe she was one of the naturally compassionate types. But asking that question would take this even further out of the realm of their agreed-upon challenge, into the past. Talking about pasts paved the way for thinking about futures. If he was really on his game, he’d find a way to make this about sex, but God help him, the last thing he wanted right now was sex.
“I know that,” she said patiently. “I didn’t have to bring you lunch or clean you up or watch you sleep, but I did, because I wanted to. Do you want me to stay?”
“Yeah,” he said. “But I’ll be up early for my shift.”
“You’re going to work tomorrow?”
He opened one eye and squinted at her. “Hell, yes, I’m going to work. Why wouldn’t I go to work?”