by Abby Bardi
Finally, the ambulance jerked to a stop and its doors shot open. The paramedics slid Pam’s stretcher out of the back. I yanked my mask off and tried to follow but found I couldn’t stand up. “Where are they taking her?” I croaked. No one answered me. “Where are we?”
“Shock Trauma Center,” one of the paramedics said.
“I’m her sister.”
“You need to go do her paperwork, then,” he said. “Go to the front desk.” Then he eyeballed me. “You don’t look good. Tell them to check you out, too.” Before I knew it, I was in a cubicle where a nurse gave me another oxygen mask and told me to breathe into it. I tried to get up and leave, but a male nurse came in, stuck an IV in my arm, and ordered me to stay put. I tried to make him promise he would bring me any news of Pam, but he refused to commit to this. Somehow he reminded me of my ex-husband Brandon, not in a good way. I wondered if they knew each other, though nowadays, Brandon lived in Iowa with his new wife and a couple of ugly kids (Pam showed me their pictures on Facebook).
“Don’t move,” he commanded as he left me there alone. I never saw him again, which was probably just as well, since in my woozy mind, I had already married him and had ugly kids with him, if only to get back at Brandon.
Lying there was torture. I had no idea why I couldn’t breathe, maybe smoke inhalation, asthma, or panic, but my lungs were shutting down. I tried taking the mask off and standing up, but the room started to spin, and I fell back down again. With the mask on, I forced myself to take long, even breaths, and after a while, the air started to feel like air again, like the first real air I had ever breathed. I guess I passed out then, and when I opened my eyes, a doctor was standing over me with a stethoscope. She listened to my chest and said I was okay, though I didn’t feel okay.
“I need to see my sister.”
“She’s in our hyperbaric chamber.” She explained a bunch of stuff about that, but I didn’t understand it. “The other two went to Bayview. They have the best burn unit.”
“Is there a phone I could use?” I asked. She handed me her cellphone. I called the only person I could think of.
“Where the hell are you?” Norma sounded hysterical. “I’ve been watching the fire on TV and I’m about to lose my mind. They said five people were injured but they didn’t give their names. Are you okay?”
“I’m fine. I’m at Shock Trauma,” I managed to choke out. “Pam’s in here, too. They put her in this special chamber thing.”
“Where’s Ricky?”
“Bayview Medical Center. Can you go over there? I’m going to stay here with Pam.”
“On my way. I’ll call you when I get there.”
“I don’t have a phone. I left it at work.” In fact, apart from my car keys and the tiny buffalo in my jeans pocket, I had nothing. When she hung up, I handed the doctor her phone, then lay down on the gurney and tried to catch my breath while my brain filled up with the nothingness. My building was on fire. My car was parked on Main Street, so maybe it was on fire now, too. I had nowhere to live. I had no kids, no husband, not even a goldfish, and now the restaurant I had put my whole heart and soul into was burning down. And I didn’t even have a fucking phone.
And I was stuck in a hospital. The night Donny had his motorcycle accident, we all sat in the county ER for hours not saying anything until finally the doctor came in, and we could see from his face what had happened. My mom fell on the floor screaming, all 400 pounds of her, and Frank rushed to her side and held her, rocking her like a baby, though he could barely get his arms around her. Norma was screaming, too, while Ricky, who was ten at the time, cried his eyes out, Tim punched a wall and stormed out, while Pam sobbed, and I sat there paralyzed, unable to cry or even move because part of me was gone. We needed Donny to come in and make clown faces, tickle my mom till she smacked him, tell us bad jokes, do a moonwalk, mess up our hair, then laugh at us, with his big goofy face that looked just like mine.
I hated hospitals, just hated them.
“Are you all right?” the doctor was asking me.
I was about to say sure, fine and dandy, when I started seeing spots. When I opened my eyes, I was in a wheelchair back in the goddamn ER, being steered through waves of people. I had no idea why the ER was so crowded. While I had been out there living my ordinary life, all these people were in crisis. I felt a crushing pain in my chest, and for a moment I thought I was having a heart attack, but I was just feeling sorry for the whole damn world.
In a new cubicle, I started puking my guts out at the same time as I was having another asthma attack. It took hours before they let me out of there, but finally, I talked a guy in scrubs into wheeling me up to the hyperbaric chamber, where I found Milo in the waiting room. I had no idea how much time had passed since the fire, but just judging from his appearance, it was centuries. He was normally clean-cut and preppie, like someone from Annapolis, but now he looked like one of those guys who tries to clean your windshield when you stop at a light.
“Julie, thank God,” he said when he saw me. He leaned over the wheelchair and put his arms around me carefully. I hugged him back, hard, burying my face in his jacket, though it reeked of smoke. It had been a while since I had hugged a man, and it felt amazing. I could have stayed like that forever, but he peeled me off him and asked, “Are you okay?”
“Oh, sure, fine. How is she?”
“They don’t know yet. She has to stay in the hyperbaric chamber for a while.”
“Did you see her?”
“They let me stay with her in ICU, before they put her in the chamber. I told them I was her husband so they’d let me in.”
There was something incredibly sad about this. I didn’t know much about his wife, but I knew she had died of cancer, and it had taken a long time. I figured he had spent some serious time in ICU and knew the ropes. “Is she awake?”
“Not yet.” He sounded so hopeful that I was almost able to stifle the voices of doom in my head. For me, hospitals meant death and destruction, but he seemed upbeat, telling me about the chamber and how great it was, how it housed twenty-three people and was the only multi-chambered hyperbaric unit in the state, and other facts I wasn’t interested in. I only wanted to hear him say that Pam would be okay.
After a while, we lapsed into a tired silence. I tried closing my eyes, but pictures crowded my brain, smoke and fire, plates of food, weird images from Madame Rosa’s cards. I opened my eyes again and saw Milo was gone, but a guy in a Yankees cap was staring at me. He was apparently not aware that no one in Baltimore should wear Yankees gear.
“Are you one of the fire victims?”
I nodded.
“I’m from the Sun. Can you describe what happened?”
I told him a short version of the story.
He scribbled in a long spiral notebook. “Where were you when the fire started?”
“Across the street.”
“What were you doing?”
“Well, actually,” I said, not stopping to think better of it, “I was having my fortune told.”
“Seriously?” He perked up. “By whom?”
I told him “whom,” and because I probably still had too much carbon monoxide in my brain, I went into a whole explanation of the Sacred Road cards. “And just before I heard sirens,” I said, “she told me my future looks bright.”
“Is that so,” he said, taking notes like crazy.
“Yeah.” I laughed and shook my head, which almost seemed to rattle. He was staring at me curiously and seemed to expect me to keep talking, so I said, “I guess everything that happens is for a reason. I just wish I knew what the reason was.”
He looked so pleased about this that I decided it would be a good idea to shut up. “I’m not feeling so good,” I said. “I think I need medical attention.”
“You’re in the right place.” He thanked me for my statement and disappeared.
When Milo returned from badgering medical personnel about Pam’s condition, I asked him if I could borrow his cell
phone, turning sideways so no one could see me, since the sign said it wasn’t allowed, and dialed Norma. “It’s me,” I said.
“Oh God, Julie.” Her voice had a note of hysteria, like she could barely hold it together. “Ricky’s alive. I identified him.” This should have been great news, but something about the way she said this sent panic shooting through me. “That was him you pulled out of the building.”
“Is he okay?”
Loud sobbing. I waited a while, saying, “He’ll be fine, don’t worry, everything will be fine,” over and over until she could answer.
“He has second and third degree burns, fifty percent.” I could hear her blowing her nose. “But they think he has a fair chance. They say younger people tend to heal well.”
I chose to ignore the “they think” part of her sentence. “That’s fantastic!” I tried to take a deep breath of relief, but breathing still wasn’t going well. “I wasn’t sure who I carried out.”
“They said that happens all the time, like they’ll pull someone out of a fire or car accident and it takes hours before they realize they know them.” Then she started blathering about silver nitrate and intubating and CAT scans and Foleys.
I had no idea what any of that meant and I didn’t really want to know, so I cut her off. “Should I come over there?”
“Well, he’s unconscious. They’re giving him lots of morphine. That girlfriend is there and won’t leave him alone. Some nurses tried to get her to go, since she wasn’t a relative, but she started screaming so they let her stay. I’ve got to run home and deal with the boys. They’re at my neighbor’s.”
“Where’s Bob?”
There was a short silence, then she said, “He moved out.” She sounded relatively calm now, and I didn’t want to stir things up so I said, oh, okay, like everything was hunky-dory. She asked about Pam, and I gave her the update, and she said she was going to come over there after she gave the kids their dinner, and her neighbor was going to watch them.
“So you should stay there,” she said. “She needs family.”
“I’ll be here.” There was nowhere else for me to go.
Milo and I waited outside the hyperbaric chamber for hours, not saying anything. After a while, someone wanted my wheelchair back, so I moved to an uncomfortable plastic chair next to him. I closed my eyes and concentrated on breathing. When I opened my eyes, I saw Norma leaning over me. She wasn’t wearing any makeup, and her hair looked like she had combed it with an eggbeater, as my mother would have said. She gave me a quick, painful hug and sat next to me.
“Is it morning?”
“It’s six.”
“A.m. or p.m.?”
“A.m. I just came from Bayview. He’s holding his own.” She gave my hand a weird little squeeze. “And they identified the person who died.”
“Who was it?” I asked, though I already knew.
“That guy who lived in a tent in the woods. They could tell it was him because all his stuff was in his pockets and it all melted together.”
If I hadn’t hired Ray to be my dishwasher, he’d be alive, drawing pictures on napkins and saying crazy shit about the stars. It wasn’t until Norma put her arm around me I noticed I was making loud barking sounds like a seal. I sat and sobbed, and nobody took any notice at first, but then I started wheezing pretty bad, and she flagged down a nurse who told me to go back down to the ER and get more oxygen. I didn’t want to, but Norma dragged me and before I knew it, I was in a hospital bed with a mask on my face and an IV in my arm. Someone on the other side of the curtain in the center of the room was moaning. I wanted to sleep and shut it all out, but everything hurt too much.
XVII
A nurse was holding my wrist. Light streamed through the window blinds.
“Do you need anything?” She stuck a thermometer in my mouth.
When she removed it, I said, “I need to leave.”
She said the doctor would be there soon. I asked for specifics, but she ran off without answering and someone else came in. She asked if I wanted a newspaper and I said okay, so she handed me The Baltimore Sun.
The fire was front page news. According to the fire marshal, someone had tossed a lit cigarette into a pile of cardboard boxes that were stored in a rear area next to the creek, just behind the kitchen. The fire had climbed up the back wall, spreading to the second floor and to the building next door. Three people had been trapped in the kitchen, and one of them had died, Raymond Steele, 32, while two others were in critical condition. The article didn’t mention that Ray had resided in a tent, but it did say that his father was CEO of a large paper company and that the family lived in the fancy section of Baltimore. Go figure. The funeral was scheduled for Saturday, but it was just for family. There wasn’t much background information about Ricky or Pam, but it did say Ricky was in the burn unit at Bayview.
I read a little further about the fire. On page two, there was an article in a little box next to the main story, where they generally ran silly items, with the headline, “Psychic Fails to Predict Fire.” The article said, “When the fire broke out, Julie Barlow, owner of the restaurant Falling Water, was across the street with a psychic reader, one of Main Street’s eclectic storefront businesses, having her fortune told by Loretta Bayliss, 42, better known as Madame Rosa. ‘She told me my future looked bright, and then I heard the sirens.’”
“Shit, shit, shit,” I said out loud, and went on reading.
“Barlow, 37, opened the restaurant six months ago and had just turned it into a popular destination on historic Main Street when the fire decimated her business. ‘I guess everything happens for a reason,’ Barlow said. ‘I just wish I knew what the reason was.’
“Maybe Barlow should ask Madame Rosa,” the last line of the article said.
I rang for the nurse. “Get me out of here,” I said when she finally appeared.
“You have to wait, hon. The doctor will be here soon.”
I was just about to yank the IV out of my arm when Norma walked in. She noticed the newspaper on the bed and took it away from me.
“Do they think this is funny?” I yelled. “Ray is dead, and this is a cute story?”
She made a tsk sound and patted my arm. “Good news about Pammy. They moved her from the chamber to ICU last night.”
“ICU is good news?”
“It means she’s doing better. She’s not conscious yet so they’re putting her back in the chamber for a while today.”
“Wow.” Suddenly, just for a second, I felt wild with happiness, though it seemed crazy to be happy that someone was in intensive care.
“Do you need anything?”
I lay there thinking for a moment. What did I need? “For this not to have happened?”
“How about coffee?”
“Coffee would be great.”
She came back with a Starbucks latte. I had no idea where she had found it but I sucked it down. Someone came in with a tray of gross hospital food and I tore into it. I couldn’t even remember the last time I had eaten, not counting IV fluid. I had always thought it was sad that people could take great ingredients like eggs and wheat and turn them to rubbery slop, but now I was damn glad to get them.
“Try not to worry, Jools,” Norma said as she was leaving. “Everything will be fine and dandy.”
I nodded, like she’d just said something really smart. I was dozing off again when Milo came in. He picked up my hand carefully, since it had an IV in it. “Are you okay?” He still looked worried and tired, and he hadn’t shaved.
“Oh, sure, never better.”
“I was here earlier but you were sleeping.”
Probably drooling, I thought, and come to think of it, I must look truly disgusting. Some nurses or whatever they were had tried to clean me up when they were shoving me into a hospital gown and stealing my clothes, but I was pretty sure it hadn’t helped.
“Don’t you need to sleep?” I asked. He still looked rough and dirty, with the beginnings of a beard. I had no id
ea what time it was, or what day. When this is over, I thought randomly, I’m buying a watch. You could strap a watch to your arm and maybe it would stay there.
“I slept a little.” He let go of my hand and pulled up a chair.
“Milo.” I wasn’t sure what I wanted to say. I went with, “Thanks for being there for Pam. For all of us.”
He gave me a strange look, and then I was sure: he was in love with my sister. You poor bastard, I thought. I closed my eyes and tried to breathe, but I felt like I was falling through space. Before I knew it, someone was shoving another mask on my face and I was out again.
When I woke up, Milo was gone, and there was no light coming in the window. The person who had been moaning was gone and the curtain was open, so I had the whole room to myself. I lay in the dark for hours, in and out of sleep. Every time I started to drop off, I’d find myself in the middle of a fire, or a flood, or an alien invasion, and I was always trying to find Pam, or Ricky, or my mother. I’d wake up panting like a dog—oh God, I thought, suddenly wide awake: the dogs had been locked in the house for hours, maybe days. I wanted to phone someone and tell them to walk them or at least let them out in the yard, but I didn’t have a phone, and anyway, there was no one to call except maybe a nurse, and I didn’t want anyone to think I was having a medical emergency. I lay there breathing into the mask, stiff with panic, until the sun started to pour in the window and I fell into a real sleep and into my old dream where I was walking along that mountain path, wearing my moccasins and winding through the trees.
Just before noon, they released me, handing me an asthma inhaler for the road. I made them wheel me upstairs, where I pulled up next to Norma. She gave me a hug and said, “Pammy’s back in that chamber.”