In Case of Emergency (8 page)

When was the exact moment when something switched between Jared and Elizabeth? I still want to know how it happened. It was after I’d already moved out that I realized: when he and I were making plans to vacation in Hawaii, they were already fucking; when he and I were discussing whether to become pet owners, they were already fucking; when he and I were rearranging the living room furniture, and got into a stupid argument about a lamp I didn’t even like, which led to us yelling at each other, and then to having sex on the floor (even though the couch was five feet away), they were already fucking.

The last vision I have of either of them is my boyfriend standing, head tilted, jaw tight, one hand resting on the pumping hair of Elizabeth’s thick ponytail. This took place in the bathroom,
our
bathroom, the bathroom with awful peach tile and the photograph of Rodin’s
The Thinker
scuplture over the toilet, which we bought for two dollars at a garage sale. We took soaking salt baths in that bathroom, while Jared displayed his latest glass sculptures along the edge of the tub, the swirling colors he’d created mixing with amber light.

When I get to my room, my hair dripping down my back, instead of getting dressed I reach for the phone. When my brother answers, I tell him I don’t want to date anyone ever again, to which Ryan says what he always says when I’m being resistant to something he thinks is good for me: “Pipes, it’s time.”

The back of Sustainable Living is less attractive than the front. No mural of colorful vegetables dances over the loading dock. Instead there’s a large blue dumpster and some kind of compost bin. Ayla sits on the edge of the concrete bay, her green apron removed to reveal dark blue jeans and a black T-shirt. Her Vans-covered feet swing, hitting the side of the low wall. She hops down when she sees me.

“Let’s just walk to Luna Café,” she says as a greeting. “It’s close, the food’s good—they have sandwiches, soup, that kind of thing—does that work? You’re not going to find any parking over there.”

“That’s fine,” I say. The roots of my hair are tingling. Ayla’s friendly expression disappears; she shoves her hands into her pockets and keeps her gaze just ahead of her, occasionally darting her eyes to the cars and pedestrians. If I weren’t queer already, she would turn me. Even moving slow with her hands in her pockets, her energy is palpable, coiled up, humming just beneath the surface. I picture us in some dark hallway, her pinning me against a wall, sliding her hands under my shirt.

She leads the way up Silver Lake Boulevard, its four lanes taken up with honking drivers all trying to get somewhere on their lunch break. We pass a small bakery. I breathe in the fresh-bread smell.

“I’ve got an hour,” Ayla says.

“Okay.” I have to think of something to ask her. Not about her job, not how long she’s lived in Los Angeles or what neighborhood she lives in. Something else. My hands are shoved into my pockets. I chose my best pair
of jeans and a form-fitting orange tank top, and topped off the outfit with white flip-flops, earrings in the shape of two thin spirals, and lip gloss. My straightened hair is pulled back.

We arrive at Luna Café. The flooding sunlight gives its oak floors and tables a warm glow while the fans and open windows fend off the eighty-degree heat. I feel a strange satisfaction when the hostess says “Two?” before reaching for a couple of menus. She seats us near a window in the main space and I focus intently on my meal decision. I’ve said only three words so far.

“You know, you don’t look gay,” Ayla says after a few minutes have gone by. She folds her menu, tosses it onto the table, and interlaces her fingers in front of her, a wry expression on her face. “But I could tell you were.”

I must have been holding my breath, because when I try to respond there’s no air to move words. Lifting one knee at a time, I release the trapped hands I’ve been sitting on and decide not to correct her. “How could you tell?”

“You hook your keys on your belt loop with a carabiner,” Ayla says. “That’s pretty gay. I could hear you coming over to me from the tea aisle.”

“You didn’t think I was a rock climber?”

“It might as well have been a pink triangle.”

“Did you know I was going to ask you out?”

“Oh, is this a date?” She peers out at me from under her tousled hair. “How did you know
I
was gay?” I suck on my teeth while I contemplate this; she grins. “Only kidding—everyone knows. It’s flipping obvious.”

The waitress arrives. I pick the chicken sandwich with a cup of tomato soup and Ayla asks for a hummus wrap. As she looks up to order I see her jugular vein running along the right side of her neck, from her jawline to the jut of the collarbone poking out above her black T-shirt. It is a thing of beauty, this vein. A blue tendril like a tree root.

“Where’d you go?” Ayla asks, turning back to me.

I dive into my water glass and try to recover. “How long have you been working at Sustainable Living?”

She nods, as if expecting this. “About a year. But I’ve worked a lot of jobs. Long story.”

She seems embarrassed, and there’s an uncomfortable pause. “I like long stories,” I offer. I can’t help thinking there is no context more ill-suited for getting to know a stranger than a first date.

“What about you, Piper, what do you do?”

“Ambulance. I mean, I’m an EMT on an ambulance. Emergency—”

“Medical technician, sure. How do you like doing that?”

“I love it.” I find myself for once not wanting to pretend I’m tougher than I am, so I add, “I kind of suck at it, though.”

“You suck at it?” She’s amused. “If I suck at my job, things don’t get arranged right. If you suck at
your
job—”

“Well, I’m new. Only a couple shifts in.”

“Ah.” She rubs her palm against her sternum, her fingers tapping her collarbone. “I moved to California a little over two years ago,” she says, “and work was hard to find. I took random jobs for a while, I mean every kind of crap job, and pretty much left them as soon as I found them. Distributed posters, worked as a security guard, got trained in home lice removal—don’t get me started on that, I quit after one day—and answered an egg donation ad.”

“I’ve heard that’s really painful.”

“It is—don’t ever do it. I’ll spare you the details since we’re about to eat, but I got fifteen thousand for it.”

“Where did you move from?”

“Wisconsin. You know, cows. They play any pranks on you yet?”

“No, but they don’t really have to.”

She cocks her head to one side, interested. So I tell her about snapping the elastic of the pediatric oxygen mask I heroically managed to place on the 250-pound man, putting gloves on backward
and
in the wrong size, filling out my birth date instead of the patient’s on paperwork, and staring
blankly at a cursing car thief. The reward for my self-deprecation is the way her mercurial eyes lock on my face as I spin one story after another. She laughs in all the right places.

“Sounds about right,” she says when I stop to catch my breath. “You’re lucky. In the military, you would have earned some awful nickname by now.”

The waitress arrives, and we lean back as our plates are placed in front of us.

“The military?”

Her fingers hover over an enormous hummus wrap, as if deciding how best to capture it. “I was in the army, did two tours in Iraq.” She saws the wrap in half, ignores her fork, and takes a bite out of one triangulated edge. Swallowing, she says, “One guy I knew was obsessed with adding hillbilly armor to the piece-of-shit Humvees we had. I’m talking plywood, chunks of two-by-fours, sandbags, scrap metal, anything he could find. Sometimes he’d just sit and tack welds onto it, as if the extra cauterization would help.” She snorts. “He would have pulled into a scrap yard in the middle of a mission if we’d let him.”

Taken aback by this new information, I ask the first question that comes to mind. “What was his nickname?”

“We called him ‘A-Team.’ For the time he did something incredibly stupid, but fortunately it worked out really well.” She pauses. “Funny, I can’t remember what it was.”

I run my tongue over my teeth to sweep for bits of arugula, and she continues, telling me between swallows that she got an honorable discharge for injury. “It was bad when I first got back,” she says. “I had nightmares all the time.” She picks up the second half of her wrap, stares into the face of it, sets it back down.

“And now?”

She shrugs. “I got discharged in 2006. So, what? Almost six years.” Picking up her paper napkin, she folds and refolds it until she’s holding a thick
white square. “It’s not gone, never will be, but at least it’s better. These days the only thing I have nightmares about is the giant teddy bear that likes to chase me down the street, but I’ve had those since I was a kid.”

I’m drawn to how frank she is, but this time I don’t buy it. “What—”

“TBI. Traumatic brain injury.” She starts to shrug but falters. Her expression has shifted—what was warm is now wary—and her eyes are flat. Her voice is so emotionless she could be talking about anything. I remember how I used to casually tell people that my ex had been fucking my friend behind my back, as if I could make it a small and unimportant thing that way. There’s also something in her voice I can’t quite place: a challenge. Like she’s saying,
If you think you’re interested in me, you need to know these things, and then maybe think again.

We stare at each other for what feels likes several minutes—that weird close-up that happens when you’re looking into someone’s eyes and some part of your brain hits the zoom button. Her eyes are green-gold streaks flecked with amber, a mix of wistfulness and resolve, and I can see her respond to the empathy that is swelling in me, see her soften and even look a little frightened, until she breaks the eye contact and shifts in her seat.

The table suddenly seems wider between us. Finally, I say, “I’m glad you’re here and not there, Ayla.”

She laughs, looks out the window, laughs again, and shakes her head. “Me too.”

12

When I pull into the lot I notice both of the rigs are gone, which means yesterday’s 24-hour crews are out running late calls instead of sleeping. Technically the oncoming crews don’t relieve the outgoing crews until 0700, but I wanted to get here by 0630 to restock the rig supplies. I park my
Corolla next to Ruth’s hatchback, because of course she is already present and accounted for. The stiff uniform collar is a cold edge against my neck as I grab my bag from the car.

It feels like a first day again, and not just because of the four days off. I’ve been daydreaming since saying goodbye to Ayla yesterday. I can already tell we will have great sex, and I will struggle to understand her three years in the army, and part of me will continue to scream that I should run the other way. I can already tell she’s worth it.

I go inside and say hi to Ruth, who looks up at me from above a bowl of oatmeal. Throwing my duffel bag onto the floor of the workout room, I button and tuck in my uniform shirt, finish lacing my boots. None of the other oncoming crew members have arrived.

The wall of lockers. Two stories of metal rectangles; only Ruth’s is bare. J-Rock’s has a black-and-white picture of a mob of zombies, but most are plastered with firefighter logos. One locker, belonging to someone named Phil, is covered in muscles. Faceless, headless close-ups of taut and shiny biceps, bulging lats, a waterfall of abs, a medley of quads, calves, and even feet.

Because Ruth wants to ensure I run as many calls as possible, I haven’t seen much of the two-car crew. I have yet to learn J-Rock’s real name or have a conversation with him. He’s a quiet guy, a little older than Carl and Pep but probably younger than Ruth, always hunched over either eating sunflower seeds or chewing tobacco, and a small plastic cup of soppy, dark material is a virtual extension of his uniform. The company-issued baseball cap J-Rock wears has the A & O logo on the front, but he must have paid extra to get his nickname stitched across the back. He wears the hat backward—the blue cursive stitching arcing between his thick eyebrows—and flips the bill forward when he climbs into the rig for a call.

His partner is gorgeous and knows it. Pep’s dark skin is flawless, and he has dimples and thick eyelashes. Even though he’s much prettier than I am, he gave me a look when we first met that seemed to suggest if I ever
found myself experiencing a lonely evening, I shouldn’t hesitate to ask for his company.

If I clear training, there is a spot already waiting for me, on B shift with a guy named William Leone. I’ve been trying not to think about what Carl told me, that William is a cocky son of a bitch and no one likes working with him.

First call of the day comes in at 0732, and delivers us a chest pain from the glass office buildings at 88
^th
and Vermont. As we wheel the man into the back of the ambulance, Ruth whispers to me that it doesn’t get any more “standard” than this. Our patient is fifty-nine years old, has a history of hypertension, and is experiencing an episode of sudden onset crushing chest pain that radiates to his left arm. His suit is rumpled, his tie loosened, and sweat has soaked from his undershirt to the tips of his white collar. He nods at us anxiously, hands fluttering along the side rails of the gurney, and he keeps lifting the oxygen mask off his face in order to talk to us, insisting he feels better after the nitroglycerin and aspirin. Ruth firmly reminds him to leave the mask on. I’ve taken his blood pressure three times, and it has finally lowered from a frenzied 212/108. I don’t know what that feels like, but it can’t be comfortable.