Pain & Wastings

by Carrie Mac

  I turn and bang on the locked door of the station. John opens it. He frowns when he sees me. I’m guessing I look kind of grim.

  “Are you all right?”

  “Let’s just get this over with, okay?”

  “Sure.” He half smiles and opens the door wider. “That’s what we all say on our last nightshift. Come on in.”

  Now that it’s my last shift, I’m finally getting used to the paramedic thing. Get the call, find the address, lights and sirens on the way there, or not, depending on the emergency. Find the patient, ask the questions, load them up. Go. And in there somewhere, there might be a splint to put on, medicine to deliver, even cpr to do, but every call uses the same pattern. I could actually see Kelly being good at this. As much as her life seems to be chaotic, she likes structure. And along with the structure, there is the freedom of the job. Just you and your partner running the show, unless you have some kid riding along with a great big chip on his shoulder, like me.

  I’m leaning against the wall in a fusty hallway of yet another three-story walk-up rooming house, holding on to the chair cot, waiting to be called in to set it up. It’s a contraption to carry people downstairs when there’s no elevator or it’s busted or the stretcher doesn’t fit in the puny elevator there is.

  Holly comes out. “Only wants John to touch him. Fine by me.”

  She looks at the wall. “That thing’s filthy. I wouldn’t lean against it if I were you.”

  Instead of engaging in her attempts at casual conversation—which I’ve been ignoring since the shift started—I pull the sticky note out of my pocket and stick it to her name badge. After a pause, she plucks it off and stares at it.

  “I know the address,” she says. “We go there all the time.”

  “Did you go there ten years ago?” I don’t look at her when I ask it because I’m not sure I want to know. But I can’t go on like this, the tension pulling so tight that I’m considering various means of killing myself just to make it ease.

  “Sure,” she says. She lights a cigarette. I’ve never seen her do that before, light one during a call. Usually she waits and sneaks one behind the hospital with the other paramedic smokers. She takes a long drag off it and then nods. “I’ve been working down here for fourteen years.”

  All of a sudden it becomes easier just to ask it than to hold it in anymore. “Is that how you knew my mom?”

  “Nope.”

  This startles me. I had already decided that must be how she knew my mom.

  “Then how?”

  “Narcotics Anonymous.” A tap of the ash.

  “Oh.” I don’t know what to say. I was so sure she had something to do with what happened. I try to rearrange my anger into something less loaded.

  “That’s where I met her first. You were just a baby. She was trying to get you back from the courts, and going to NA was one of the things they wanted her to do.”

  “You were in NA?”

  “Still am.” A big grin. “Seventeen years clean.”

  John calls for us from inside the guy’s room. Holly stubs out her cigarette.

  “Did you know her when...I mean, just before?”

  “I hadn’t seen her in a while,” she says softly and takes a step inside the room. “Later, okay?”

  Chapter Eighteen

  At first I thought she was asleep, and then I thought she’d overdosed. I knew about that. She’d done it before. But this time was different. The man had finished, zipped up his pants and had a drink of water she offered him in the coffee mug with her real name on it. Christina. They murmured back and forth for a bit, and then their voices got louder and he told her she wasn’t worth a penny let alone the price she was asking. And then he hit her, and she fell and he kept on hitting her. I was in the closet by the front door where she tucked me when she had no other option but to bring them home. I heard him punching her. She made little “ooph, ooph” sounds. She didn’t scream, not once. Sometimes I think it’s because she didn’t want me to be afraid. Maybe she thought he would leave, and I would run into the hall and scream for help. Like the other times we needed help. When he was finished with her, he opened the closet, almost like an afterthought, and found me there.

  He took a stick of gum from his pocket and offered it to me. He held his fingers to his lips and said, “Shhhh.” And then he climbed out the window and left by the fire escape. I sat beside my mother in the bathroom, her head bloody, one hand reaching for the shower stall, like all she wanted was to rinse him off.

  I go through the rest of that night in a haze. We are out until 5:00 AM, dealing with assaults and sick people, little old ladies with chest pain, an old man who passed out during an all-night game of mah jong in a storefront in Chinatown.

  “Any pain?” Holly asks, pointing to various places. Head, heart, gut. “Tong ma?”

  I want to answer in his place. Yes, pain. I have pain in all those places. Head, heart. Gut. I want to ask her more about my mother, but our night is so busy that we don’t get a chance to eat, let alone sit for a minute and talk about my mother. I want to hear what she has to say now, and now that I am willing to hear it, we can’t get a second of quiet.

  We go back to the station at 5:00 AM, only to be called out again ten minutes later for a car accident at Main and Hastings.

  Pain and Wastings

  We careen around the corner and stop off to the side of the crash. A motorcycle had been going straight through the green light when a cargo van turned left in front of him. The biker plowed into the side of the van and flew another thirty feet, landing in a crumpled heap in the middle of the road. His motorcycle is totaled. His helmet is cracked in four places, and he is unconscious.

  “Get the spine board,” Holly orders as we get out of the ambulance. “And collar kit.”

  I collect both from the cubby at the back and run to her side. A fireman is already holding the guy’s head steady as he sucks in irregular gasps. John thrusts his cut-all scissors at me and tells me to cut off the man’s leather jacket while he puts on the hard collar.

  “Don’t jostle him!” Collar on, John lines himself up beside the fireman to orchestrate the roll that will get the man onto the spine board.

  The man comes to as I am cutting through his jacket. “Brand-new...” he blurts through a mouthful of blood. “Bastard...” He gurgles something more, but I can’t make out what it is.

  “Sorry, sir.” I slice neatly down one arm, then the other. Up one pant leg, down the other. Both his femurs are busted—that’s the thighbone. I only learned the word yesterday. Several firemen are holding him in place, bracing the fractures, while Holly has a listen to his chest with her stethoscope.

  “Decreased breath sounds left side. Let’s make it quick, guys. On three—” They roll him onto the board and lift him onto the cot. Another ambulance shows up. One of their crew joins Holly in the back as they set up for an IV line.

  I’m not sure if I should maybe ride up front this time, but then Holly waves for me to get on board, and we take off for the hospital with the sirens blasting and lights all lit up. I cut off the rest of his clothes. When I peel off the last piece of his jeans, I see a white waxy burn along his lower leg. Pink is good in a burn. White is not. Holly told me that after the call with Amir.

  “Did you see this?” I say to Holly.

  “No.” She glances at it, delegates the other paramedic to douse it with saline and put a sterile dressing on it. “Good job, Ethan. Thanks.”

  We cinch up the spider straps that hold him to the board, and then Holly hands me the man’s wallet and tells me to find out his name.

  I find his driver’s license.

  “Hey, Reginald!” I lean over him. “That your name?”

  “Reggie,” he coughs out with a mouthful of blood.

  We’re at the hospital now. They’re waiting for us in the bay. We pull out the cot, and the emergency room team grabs on to one end of it. John pushes, and Holly jogs alongside, giving them the details as they wh
eel out of sight into the trauma room.

  Of all four shifts, that was the best call. I feel alive and useful and puffed up with ability, like there is work to be done and I can do it. I am practically flying when we leave the hospital. It’s almost 7:00 AM, the shift long over, so dispatch lets us go back to the station to switch crew. For the last hour and a bit, I’d forgotten all about my dead mother.

  “So now you understand the term adrenalin junkie?” Holly laughs at me as I bounce around the station, going over the call.

  “We might even miss you,” John says, and then he and Holly both shake their heads and go, “No, we won’t.”

  But they invite me back any time. I tell them about Kelly, and they say they’ll see if she can do a ride-along too, so long as she sticks it out at detox first.

  When I get into Holly’s car, I tell her I can put in a new clutch for her. She cranks it into gear and says she’ll think about it. And then I remember that we were going to talk about my mom. It’s “later” now.

  “Still want to?” she says, as if reading my mind. “Up to you.”

  “I guess so.” I do want to know. I am curious. Despite everything. Despite trying to push it all away for so long. “Yes.”

  “Okay.”

  “Do you have time now?” We’re at the light at Main and Hastings. “Or do you have to head straight home?”

  “Sleep can wait.”

  “Can we go there?”

  “Sure, Ethan.” She turns right instead of left. She knows where I mean. She still has the sticky note somewhere, but I don’t need the address written down to remember it and neither does she.

  We pull up out front of the squat red-brick building. It was the best place we lived in down here. It had its own bathroom and a little kitchenette. It was still only a bachelor, but it felt enormous compared to the other places we lived.

  “You think we can get in?”

  “Sure.” Holly is still wearing her uniform. We get out and carefully lock the car. This is the rougher end of the roughest part of the city and the poorest neighborhood in the whole country. Someone is curled up in the doorway on a square of cardboard. Several earnest drinkers are already into the rice wine in the concrete park across the street. Holly pushes the buzzer marked Manager.

  After two tries, we’re let in by a very grumpy but obliging woman in a housecoat and slippers, her thin hair in three drooping rows of curlers. Is this the same woman who ran the building when we lived here? I frown at her, studying her features, trying to remember, but being inside the building is like being in a dream. Or a nightmare. The edges of my vision become fuzzy, and the present is slipping away, no matter how hard I clench my fists around it.

  I was eleven and a half by the time I told Marigold how I got out. Five years after it happened.

  “Everyone’s always wondered how you got out, Ethan. When you didn’t have the key for that upper lock.”

  “Same way he did,” I said.

  “How’s that?”

  “He came back and opened the door,” I said matter-of-factly. “The key was hung up and I couldn’t reach it. But he could.”

  If she was surprised, she did an amazing job of not showing it. “Wow. That was nice of him.”

  “He’s not nice at all.” I scratched out the frog I was drawing, covering it in black marker.

  “You’re right, Ethan. He’s not.” She slid a fresh piece of paper in front of me. “Do you want to tell me more?”

  Chapter Nineteen

  Holly asks the woman if there is an empty apartment, one we could just have a quick peek at. The woman eyes the two of us, takes another look at Holly’s paramedic uniform and heads off down the hall. We follow her. She stops at her suite to collect a ring of keys.

  “What do you want to look at it for?” she asks, with a grunt for the question mark.

  “I used to live here,” I say, not giving Holly the chance to make something up.

  “You did not,” the woman says firmly. “I’d know. Been here twenty years.”

  I remember her name all of a sudden. “Delores, right?”

  She hesitates in her search for the right key. We’re standing at the back on the second floor. My mom and I lived exactly one floor up.

  “That’s right,” she finally says. And then, as she’s fitting the key in the lock, “I know who you are. I know you. You’re Christine’s boy.”

  She opens the door and shuffles away before I can say anything else.

  “Thank you,” Holly calls after her.

  I step inside the dim front hallway. Kitchenette to the right, bathroom to the left. Closet. And then the rest of the room, with only the one window at the back. Exact same layout.

  “You okay?” Holly hangs back at the door. “Want me to leave you alone?”

  “No!” I didn’t mean it to come out so desperate, but I am. I don’t want her to leave. I open the closet. It seems so small, but I remember it being much bigger. My mom used to lay out a sleeping bag with a flashlight under the pillow and all the stuffies I wanted to keep me company. It was the closest thing to a bedroom I ever had. I loved it.

  “I’m right here,” Holly says. She lights a cigarette and moves into the kitchen so she can tap her ash into the sink.

  “How much do you know?” I ask.

  “All of it.”

  “Tell me.”

  “How much do you know?” she counters as if she is considering what to tell me.

  “I was here.” I point into the open closet. “Right here. There’s nothing you can tell me that I don’t already know.” In my head or heart. Or gut.

  “Your mom’s name was Christine,” Holly starts. “But she was called Ella on the streets. She was an amazing singer. She could sound just like Ella Fitzgerald one night and Nina Simone the next. She was amazing. So talented. I’d go watch her sometimes at the Honey Lounge. She was like something out of another era, you know? With beautiful dresses and her hair swept up. She was native—Mi’kmaq—you’d know that, of course, and she had this beautiful long black hair that went down to her waist. Do you remember that?”

  I nod. “Go on.” I open the bathroom door and see her there, black hair matted with blood, her body naked and splotchy with bruises. I blink. The vision vanishes.

  “And then it turned into the same story of so many of the girls down here. She got into heroin, started turning tricks to pay for it. You came along. She cleaned herself up for a year or so and then slid back down.”

  “She was only half Mi’kmaq,” I say. “Her father was African American. From South Carolina. A blues musician.”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  “Want me to tell you the rest?” I ask.

  After a pause, Holly nods. “Sure. If you want to.”

  “She brought this guy home. Big, tall, with a beard. They did their thing. Then he beat her up and left her for dead. I was right here.” I turn and point at the closet again. “I saw the whole thing. He found me after. And then he left out the fire escape. He gave me a stick of gum and left. Maybe he thought I could undo the locks. Maybe he didn’t bother to check if the door was locked. Maybe he didn’t care, or maybe he got off on the idea of me starving to death with my dead mom to keep me company. I don’t know.”

  “But he came back,” Holly says. “I remember that.”

  I cross the room to the window, prop it open and lean out. I twist and look up. Right above. That’s where it happened. We lived right up there.

  “They figure it was a week or so later,” I say. “I’d eaten everything in the place, which wasn’t much. Even dried pasta and a jar of mustard. I remember that all I wanted was some milk. Ice-cold milk. Other than for my mom to wake up, that’s all I wanted. When he came back through the window, I wasn’t even surprised to see him. He threw up, because of the smell. Then he rushed to the front door, undid the three locks, cracked the door open and left again out the fire escape. He didn’t say a word, not even one word.”

  “You think he felt
guilty?” Holly lights another cigarette. “You think that’s why he came back and let you out?”

  I shrug. “I don’t know.”

  “Seems so strange, that he’d come back a week later.”

  “Sometimes I think it was my mother haunting him, keeping him awake. Driving him crazy until he came back and made sure I’d gotten out.”

  After he left, I jammed my feet into my boots and stepped out into the hallway. I remember standing there for a moment, waiting for my mom to stop me. When she didn’t, I headed down the stairs and outside. I was going to get some milk. I was going to bring it home and make her drink some and then maybe she would wake up. I smile now at my six-year-old logic. Dumb kid.

  “I was working that day you showed up at the Ovaltine,” Holly says. “I was the paramedic who checked you out.”

  I stare at her. I remember the bear. I remember being lifted into the back of the ambulance. I remember being tucked in a blanket, clutching that bear.

  I remember something else too. Something new. “You bought me the carton of milk.”

  “That’s right.” Holly laughs, but it’s a sad laugh. “And you said thank-you. And then I asked you your name and you told me. I hadn’t seen you since you were a toddler, but I knew who you were. And I knew your mom was dead, or very sick, because you were in a terrible state.”

  “You probably thought she overdosed, right?”

  She nodded, slowly. “When we found out she was murdered, we were all surprised.”

  Chapter Twenty

  “What’s your name, honey?” I am sitting in her lap, holding on to the bear she gave me. She’s keeping the cops at a distance, tells the social worker to give me a minute.

  “Ethan Mingus Kirby.”

  “Christine’s boy?”