Pain & Wastings

by Carrie Mac

  Holly steers me back into the hall. “Why don’t you go wait outside?”

  I turn a foggy circle, knowing the stairs are right in front of me, but not knowing how to work my feet to take a step forward, let alone navigate the stairs without falling.

  “Mommy?” I shake her. Nothing. “Mommy? Wake up!” I sit beside her on the cold bathroom floor for a while, eating crackers out of the box, dipping my fingers into the peanut butter jar. When I’m full, I try to wake her up again. I want her to go get some milk. There’s none in the fridge. In fact, there’s nothing left in the fridge. I want her to wake up so we can go to the store together. I push with all of my kid might, and she budges, but all wrong. All stiff and hard. Not floppy, like when she’s been like this before.

  Chapter Seven

  I don’t remember going back to the ambulance, but that’s where Holly finds me when they’re finally ready to go. They had to wait for the police to come before they could leave. I don’t know how much time has passed. I’ve just been sitting in the back of the ambulance with the cot lights off, thankful for the cool dark quiet.

  “Ready to go, kiddo?” Holly secures the oxygen tank back in its place.

  “What the hell are you trying to prove?”

  She smiles at me. A generic smile that gives nothing away. “If you don’t cinch it tight, it rattles when we drive.”

  I meant what is she trying to prove by dragging me along? I meant what is she trying to prove by making me see stuff that brings it all back? I meant what the hell is she trying to prove—that I’m not the badass everyone thinks I am? And who the hell is she? And what does she know about my mother?

  She pats the tank. “Snug as a bug in a rug.”

  I glare at her.

  “You want to talk about the call?”

  “The call?” I ratchet my glare up a notch.

  “The dead lady.” John’s at the back door, putting away the jump kit. “The call.”

  “No.” I let him in on the glare too. “I do not want to talk about ‘the call.’”

  “Okay, then,” Holly says. “Put your seat belt on.”

  I put my seat belt on. John and Holly climb in the front.

  “Chinese food?” John says, even though it’s barely seven in the morning now.

  “I’m more in the mood for a hamburger, I think.” Holly turns in her seat. “What do you feel like eating, Ethan?”

  “I don’t.”

  “First dead person, kid?” John says as he pulls the ambulance into traffic.

  I decide not to answer him, because I don’t want to get into it. I eye Holly, but she’s not answering for me. How much does she know?

  The silence stretches out awkwardly. “Well,” John glances in the rearview mirror. His expression is generous for once, and not patronizing. “Either way. If you want to talk about it, we’re here.”

  Chapter Eight

  That first shift is the longest twelve hours ever. We only get back to the station twice, for less than twenty minutes each time. We do thirteen calls, all in the Downtown Eastside, my old neighborhood. I haven’t really spent any time there since I was little, but it hasn’t changed much. Drug dealers, hookers, junkies, crazies, bums, winos, street kids, johns and pimps. Pawnshops selling stolen goods, seedy bars with rat-hole rooms for rent upstairs, twenty-four-hour porn shops and convenience stores with buzzing fluorescent lights, storekeepers with baseball bats and tall cans of mace behind the counter. Every alley reeks of piss and festering garbage, each shadowed doorway has a drug deal going on or someone shooting up or a pile of cardboard and blankets hiding someone trying to sleep.

  When we’re finally done, Holly offers to drive me back to Harbor House. We get into her car and turn onto Hastings without saying a word. Neither of us says anything until we’re well out of the Downtown Eastside.

  “You okay?” she says without looking at me.

  “Sure.” I keep my glance trained out the window.

  “Mind if I smoke?”

  “Nope.”

  She lights up. The cigarette lasts until we pull up in front of Harbor House. She tosses the butt out the window as I get out. “See you tomorrow?”

  “Yup.” I stand at the curb and watch her drive away. Her car complains every time she shifts gears. It needs a new clutch. I thought about offering to do it for her, because we learned how last year in shop and I was pretty good at it. I’ve done three since. I was going to tell her that when we’re done the four shifts she should leave her car with me at the school garage and I’d put it in for her, if she paid for the parts. But then I was afraid that if we started talking, she might bring up my mother, so I didn’t mention the clutch at all.

  Inside, everyone is home. Nikki, Tyrone, Stinky, Doob and Kelly. Mostly we ignore each other, but tonight Kelly has nothing but questions.

  “Did you see anything gross?” she asks as we set the table for Marshall’s famous frozen lasagna and bagged salad. “Like an amputated arm?”

  I lay out forks and knives, and she follows me with plates and napkins.

  “Or, like, a nasty crash or something?”

  She’s following way too close. I can smell her perfume. “Are you on something?” I ask, my voice low so Marshall can’t hear me.

  Right away with that wounded look she has perfected. “Screw you, Ethan. I was trying to be nice. I was interested, that’s all.”

  “Interested, huh?”

  “Yeah! Interested, you jerk!” She’s shouting now. So much for not getting Marshall’s attention.

  “Whoa, hold up there, princess party-pooper,” he says.

  “What the hell?” Kelly throws a plate to the floor, where it clatters. Places like this always invest in plastic plates and cups for times just like this one.

  “Peace,” Doob interjects. You can imagine how he got the nickname. He arranges his considerable bulk on one of the kitchen chairs and puts his hands into prayer formation under his chin. “Let us give thanks and feast as brothers and sisters.”

  “You can be the sister,” Stinky says as he switches the cup at Doob’s place with his smaller one.

  “That’s sweet.” Kelly picks up the plate from the floor because if she didn’t, Marshall wouldn’t let her eat until she did anyway. “Really sweet, to get totally dumped on for trying to be nice.” She sits down and glares at me. “That’s right, Ethan. I was trying to be nice.”

  “Sorry, I couldn’t tell.” I shrink a little as she lifts her plate, like she might lob it at me like a Frisbee.

  “Psych,” she says and sets it down. “Loser.”

  “Junkie.”

  “Orphan.”

  “Throwaway.”

  “Lasagna?” Marshall lets the pan drop heavily onto the table. Stinky grabs the serving spoon and helps himself to what would be three portions for most of mankind. We hand him our plates and he slops spoonfuls on each one. We dig in. Stinky, Kelly, mute little Nikki, Tyrone muttering to himself, Marshall, and Doob, who takes his plate back with earnest words of thanks.

  “Shove it,” Stinky says with his mouth full.

  “How was your ride-along?” Marshall says in one of his attempts at engaging us in meaningful conversation around the dinner table.

  “Didn’t you notice?” Kelly says. “He obviously doesn’t want to talk about it.”

  “Thank you, Kelly.” I grin at her. “Tyrone,” I say, “how about you tell us about the bomb plot the voices inside your head are organizing?”

  Tyrone clutches his fork and knife in his fists and holds them out to me. He tilts the knife in my direction and gives me a menacing look. “Not funny.”

  “All right then.” I raise my hands in a truce. “Moving right along...Marshall, how’s your boyfriend?”

  “The one I never see?” Marshall moves the watery pasta around his plate. “He’s just great.”

  “Nikki?”

  She lifts her eyes. She’s caked the black eye makeup on extra thick today, and with the white face powder and red lips
tick, she really does look like a vampire. She has two piercings in her bottom lip meant to look like fangs, matching little hoops with one blood-red bead closing each. And they do look like fangs. She curls her lip at me and says nothing.

  “Well, I saw a dead woman stuck to a toilet,” I say. But it’s too late. Everyone is spaced out, miserably forking the food to their mouths, each of them daydreaming of where they’d rather be. Me included, although I don’t know where that’d be. I actually like this place. It’s better than a foster home, and Marshall is as good as it gets when it comes to the adult version of the species, even if he is gay, which is gross. Anyhow, no one is interested in my dead lady, so I go ahead and finish my supper without another word. We are a table of dysfunctional monks, with our silence the only thing keeping the peace.

  Doob is blissful, thankful for the calm. He eats with a smile on his face. Sometimes I envy him. He’s always happy, even if it’s chemically induced at times. But he never seems to be bothered by anything. Even when he was shipped here after three years in one of the seediest foster homes, known to kids citywide, where the rumors include the little kids being locked in cages at night and the older ones being pimped out, he gave the foster mom a hug goodbye when she dropped him off. He wouldn’t say a bad word about her when we bugged him for details. “She tries her best,” he’d say, or “We are all children of the universe, even Mrs. Medwid.”

  Not me. Everything gets to me. Sometimes I think I might be crazy, like Tyrone, because I can’t let things go. I go over and over things in my head until I want to bash it against the wall just to get some peace. Like my mom.

  I’d been better for a while, but now she’s all I can think about, ever since Holly mentioned her back on the night the dog ripped my leg apart. And I’ve had a headache ever since too. And I feel panicky all the time, like any minute I might scream at the top of my lungs and bust through the front door and start running. And keep running until I collapse. That’d feel good, actually. Way better than this constant dread I’m feeling now.

  Chapter Nine

  That night in bed, I toss and turn and think I probably won’t sleep a wink. To keep my mind off my mom, I go over all the things I saw on the ambulance, playing them like commercials in my head, short noisy bursts of color and sound. I’m too wired to sleep. When I do get sleepy, my thoughts turn to my mom, so I pinch myself awake again. At some point, sleep gets the better of me, because the next thing I know the alarm is going off.

  Chandra drops me off at the station after telling me that I should’ve thought to wash my uniform. I tell her it’s not a uniform.

  “You know what I mean.”

  “It’s not too bad.” The pits kind of stink, and there’s a red streak from the pasta sauce.

  “It’s disrespectful.”

  “It wasn’t my laundry day.” This is true. “I don’t care.”

  I would keep going, giving her a hard time, but we’re heading back into the Downtown Eastside, and the panic is back in full. I take a deep breath and let it out slowly. My fingers drum on my knee, the other hand clutches the door.

  “You okay?”

  “Sure.” My voice has flattened in the space of three blocks. It’s not even 6:00 am, but the sad, strung-out hookers are on the corners already. Do they have children? Do they have a home? Of any kind? When my mom worked the stroll, she’d lock me in our room with anything sharp stashed away up high. She’d leave me a box of crackers and a stack of cheese slices and a sippy cup of juice and tell me to watch tv until she got back. Now I wonder where she went with her johns when she didn’t bring them back to the room. The back of their car? A hotel room somewhere? A flophouse? I don’t know.

  A few times she brought me along when she went, usually when someone found out I was left alone and called social services on her. Then we’d move to another bug-infested room and she’d take me along for a while, tucking me in warehouse doorways with a backpack full of crayons and coloring books and getting another girl to keep an eye on me for the twenty minutes or so she’d be gone at a time.

  We’re just around the corner from the station now. There’s a man lurching into an alley, his heroin shuffle like a palsy. And another guy sprawled across the doorway to a boarded-up Chinese laundry, intently fishing for a vein. The cops don’t care. Even if they did go after every junkie down here, it wouldn’t matter. New ones would fill the spaces so fast with the same drawn faces and empty lives that you’d never even notice there was a gap.

  Chapter Ten

  Holly and John are stretched out on the couches with the morning news on the TV. There are four ambulances stationed here, and they’re all in. That makes eight paramedics sharing one very small common room, plus me. There are three couches, two easy chairs and a dining table with office chairs pulled around it. I take one of these. Holly and John don’t even say hello. Holly just lifts a hand in response to my greeting and then folds her arms and lets her chin fall to her chest and is asleep again in seconds. I sit there, watching the cheerful banter of the hair-sprayed TV crew, hoping we go out soon.

  An hour passes. Two cars have gone out. Another hour passes. The morning news is still on. I’ve watched the same headlines three times now. Every time the hotline rings with a call, I leap out of my seat, but there’s some order to the cars that I don’t understand, and so far we haven’t gone anywhere. John is snoring. Holly’s mouth is open, and with each breath she lets out a little wheeze. The phone rings. John leaps up, wide awake in a nanosecond, and grabs the red phone. He announces his crew number and starts writing on a little pad.

  He hangs up and hands the pad to Holly, who is already standing at the bay door. I missed that. She went from sound asleep to ready to rock in seconds. She glances at the paper.

  “Code three,” she says to me as I push myself out of the chair. Code three means serious. I learned that the day before. Code three means lights and sirens. It also means we get there and it’s usually not a big deal, but still, it’s pretty exciting.

  “What for?” I follow them to the car.

  John flips on the lights and pulls out of the bay.

  “Short of breath,” Holly says. “Don’t get your hopes up.”

  “Yeah.” John punches the sirens on and pulls out against traffic. “He’s a frequent flyer.”

  Harold has chronic pneumonia. In addition to hepatitis C, HIV, and diabetes that’s so bad his left foot is scheduled for amputation. While we’re loading him up, he horks up great gobs of dark yellow phlegm into an old tobacco tin. I gag every time. Even if I look away, there’s the sound of it as it lands with a ping in the tin. And the man stinks worse than anyone I’ve ever met. He smells of sweat and cigarettes and dirty clothes. By the looks of it, he only has the outfit he’s got on—brown slacks with a rope for a belt, a too-small shirt with countless stains and four buttons missing, and a polyester cardigan dotted with singe holes from where he probably fell asleep with one of his hand-rolled cigarettes still burning.

  It’s a tight fit getting the stretcher into his room above the Dodson Hotel. It’s not like a real hotel. More a rooming house. My mom and I lived here once. Room 340. It faced the back, overlooking the alley. We had a cat. I was really little, maybe three or four. My mom only left me alone when Mrs. Charlie across the hall was gone to visit her grandbabies. Usually I stayed with her, and we played tic-tac-toe and watched game shows on her tiny black-and-white TV. She crocheted washcloths, giving them out to everyone in the building. Thinking about it now, did she think that would make people like Harold wash?

  I haven’t thought about Mrs. Charlie in a long time. She’d talk about Mr. Charlie, especially if she’d had a beer or two. He worked in the diamond mines up north. They had eleven children and ran a trapline year-round. How they ended up down here, I don’t know. But Mr. Charlie died of liver failure, so that gives you an idea.

  “Where you going, Mommy?” I am sleepy. We played at the park all day. It’s not dark out yet, but my eyes are droopy.

&
nbsp; “You’re going to Mrs. Charlie’s for a while.” She rummages around, packing a bag for me. Teddy bear, toothbrush, change of clothes. Jazz is playing on the tape deck. Charles Mingus. The album is called Mingus Ah Um. I love the diddly bits. I’m four. It was my birthday the day before. The leftover cake sits in its bakery box on the windowsill. It has a music note on it because I love music. Especially jazz, although I don’t know that. I just love the tapes she plays when she’s getting ready to go out, or when she’s sad and stays in bed all day reading picturebooks from the library to me.

  We’re backing up to the hospital. Holly is staring at me.

  “Hey,” she says.

  How’d we get here? The last thing I remember was stuffing myself into the tiny elevator at the Dodson. Harold is still hacking up garbage, but Holly’s given him a barf bag to hork into. He grins at me, teeth yellowed, gums red.

  “She was talking to you...” Cough, cough, hork. “...And you was a million miles away on some other planet.” Cough, hork, spit.

  He is sweating his stink all over the back of the ambulance. Holly catches me grimacing. Instead of asking me where I went, which is what people usually do when I blank out like that, she kindly ignores it and says instead, “Grab his cane, would you?”

  As we wheel him in, the sounds of the bustling emergency department are muffled to me. My head is clattering with thoughts. Chandra used to think I had epilepsy. She figured when I blanked out like that it was a kind of seizure. She had me tested, but nothing showed up.

  “It’s psychological,” she pronounced. I was about ten and wasn’t sure what that word meant. I only knew that I’d lose great stretches of time, and when I came to, I was often covered in sweat and breathing hard. She explained what psychological was and told me I’d be going to an art therapist once a week from then on.

  My foster mother at the time thought art therapy was a stupid idea. I can’t remember her name, but I can remember her voice, deep and hoarse like a man’s. “Sounds retarded to me,” she’d said when she dropped me off at my first session. Even in the hallway, I loved it already. Windows lined one side, letting in bright spring sunshine and lighting up the opposite wall, which was plastered, floor to ceiling, with art. My foster mom yanked me along as I lagged behind, looking at the dragons and sailboats, houses and happy-face suns, dark clouds and lightning bolts and handprints forming colorful flowers. “Stuff for dimwits. You should fit right in, Evan.” And I remember that, that she could never get my name right.