Rescue (13 page)

Sheila wanted to break the rules. OK, fine. But Webster could change the rules.

He struggled to get Rowan into her light blue snowsuit. Sheila had left the car seat at the foot of the stairs. Webster held
Rowan’s face close to his chest to protect her tender skin. He put the car seat in the cruiser. After he strapped her in,
he walked around to the front seat, sat down, and put the key in.

He turned to look at his daughter, but all he could see was a
pair of blueberry eyes in a snowsuit. Something fragile bounced around his chest. The edgy, restless Sheila had returned.
The Sheila who drank.

Webster backed out onto 42 and drove to the Giant Mart. With Rowan strapped against his chest, he searched the aisles for
baby formula. He could figure out how to make up bottles. In the morning, he would tell Sheila to stop nursing. He thought
she might agree if only for the freedom it would give her.

When he returned to the apartment, he put Rowan to sleep and searched for liquor bottles. He found nothing. Either she’d taken
it with her or she was more cagey than he’d thought. The word
squirrel
popped into his head, and he made an ugly sound.

Sheila returned during the night. Webster didn’t ask her where she’d been.

In the morning, he made up four bottles of formula before he left for work.

T
he tones sounded, and the deadpan voice from Dispatch requested help. “Suspected cardiac, male, severe chest pain radiating
through the jaw.” Webster asked for the address. Burrows said,
Fuck
. He continued swearing the entire way as the Bullet took a beating over the frozen ruts. Burrows was unusually attached to
his rig.

“Where is this place, anyway?” Webster asked.

“Hell if I know,” Burrows said.

They reached a fishing cabin at the edge of a small frozen lake. Five trucks were parked outside. The enormous late-model
vehicles looked ridiculous next to the tiny shack.

“Ice fishing,” Webster said.

“You ever see the movie
Deliverance
?” Burrows asked.

“No.”

“Never mind.”

Webster noticed that Burrows knocked on the front door instead of barging in as he usually did. Maybe he thought there might
be a shotgun on the other side. A man yelled, “Come in,” and it didn’t sound like an ambush. Not that any medic Webster knew
had ever run into an ambush, but he’d read about them happening in the cities.

Inside, there were four men standing, one lying on the floor. Five men, five trucks. Nobody offered anyone a ride?

The floor was made of gray indoor-outdoor carpet tiles, badly stained. With what, Webster didn’t want to know. The man down
was crying and pressing his chest.

Webster and Burrows pushed their way through pizza boxes and beer cans.

When Webster knelt beside the patient, he was confused. The patient’s skin looked too pink to be cardiac-related, but the
man was panting hard. Webster went through the basic assessment. The patient wasn’t sweating or short of breath, and he wasn’t
nauseated. His blood pressure was high.

“What’s his name?” Webster asked.

“Sully,” a man over by the sink said.

“Sully,” Webster said. “Have you ever had this pain before?”

“Once,” the fisherman cried out. “At my niece’s wedding!” He spoke as if he were in agony. “They almost called the medics
then.”

“Sully, on a scale of one to ten, how high is your pain?”

“Eight,” the man said. “Maybe nine! It’s terrible!”

“Can you show me where it hurts?” Burrows asked.

The man put his fingers just under his ears and ran them to the middle of his chest.

“Chest pain radiating to jaw,” Webster said.

“Call my wife!” the man yelled.

Webster stood and spoke to Burrows. “We got to take him in,” Webster said.

“Nice ride.”

“Long ride.”

Webster sat Sully up and asked if he could walk to the ambulance. Sully tried, and after several attempts was able to stand
on his own. Webster heard the belch before they’d reached the front
door. Sully said, as Webster had expected, “The pain is easing off a little. I’m feeling a little better. Let’s wait a second.”

“Let me check your vitals,” Webster said, as protocol demanded, though both he and Burrows knew exactly what they were dealing
with. “Sit down right here.”

Webster cuffed the patient, then reached for a radial pulse. Before Webster could report, Sully stood again as if he’d had
a tentative recovery from a near-death experience. After another minute, he had his arms in the air. “I’m saved!” he shouted.

The fisherman over by the sink sniggered. “Sully, I told you it was fucking heartburn.”

The five men tried to thank the medics with offers of fresh fish. Burrows turned them down. One of the men pointed out to
Webster the tiny shack in the middle of the frozen pond. Inside, Webster knew, would be a stove and some chairs and a hole
through which the men dropped their lines.

He also knew this: most of a medic’s calls were mundane.

“Rescue should send the asshole a bill for wear and tear on the rig,” Burrows said as Webster drove.

“Why did you pass on the fish?” Webster asked.

“You like to clean them?”

“Not really.”

“Neither do I, and Karen won’t touch them. Don’t imagine Sheila would either.”

Webster couldn’t picture Sheila cleaning a fish of any kind.

The ambulance bounced along the ruts. “Fuckers,” said Burrows.

It took them twenty-one minutes to emerge onto a road that wasn’t made of dirt. Thirty-six minutes from Rescue, twenty
minutes at the scene, another thirty-six back. Nearly an hour and a half wasted. Burrows was in a mood.

“You look like shit, Webster, you know that?” Burrows said. “Baby not sleeping?”

“Baby’s sleeping fine.”

“Marriage good?”

“Fine,” he said.

“It’s my job to ask questions. You not performing at top notch, I gotta be paying attention. What’s up?”

“I’m not performing at top notch?” Webster asked, concerned.

“No, you’re fine. You look like you’re on dialysis, though. So what’s up at home?”

“Not sure,” Webster said.

“Bingo. I knew it was the marriage.”

“You’re full of shit,” Webster said. “I could have financial troubles, for all you know.”

“But you don’t. I’m right, aren’t I?”

Webster sighed.

“Man, that woman had you pussy-whipped. You were so fucking nuts about her.”

“I still am.”

“She love you back?” Burrows took out a toothpick and began to clean his teeth.

“Yes,” Webster said.

But
did
she?

“So what’s the problem?” Burrows asked.

“I don’t know,” Webster said. “Look at this. A traffic jam in Hartstone?”

“You could use the siren.”

“We’re almost there.”

A sudden siren might give the guy ahead of him a heart attack.

“Sheila’s restless. Chafing at the bit.”

“To do what?” Burrows asked.

“She won’t say. She can’t say.”

“You sure it’s not that postpartum shit?”

Webster could see the beginning of town, but he couldn’t get to it. A large semi blocked his view. “Is there a parade today?”

“Dunno.”

“It’s not that. She’s not depressed,” Webster said.

Burrows turned and squinted at Webster as he drove. “So what is it?”

Webster had never discussed Sheila with anyone. It felt like a breach, going outside the marriage. But he knew Burrows wouldn’t
stop until he had what he wanted. And there might be some relief in talking about it.

“She’s drinking,” Webster said.

“Oh, sweet Jesus.” Burrows briefly closed his eyes. “You drinking?”

“No.”

“Well, that’s all right.”

“It’s not all right.”

“I’ll bet it was romantic in the beginning, right?” Burrows said. “The first bottle of wine… the second…”

“Yeah, maybe.”

“Then you find you’re drinking at every meal because it’s just so fucking romantic, right? Candles, the pretty glasses, you
get laid. It’s cool, right?”

Webster was silent.

“Then one night you discover that one of you has a problem, and it’s not you.”

The jam broke up for no good reason that Webster could see. No parade. No accident. “How do you know all this?” he asked.

“Been there, done that. You need a marriage counselor?”

Webster shook his head, as much from surprise as from denial. “I think you can pretty much forget that. Not happening.”

“Good, ’cause I don’t know any!” Burrows cackled. “Just curious, though. Would Sheila go?”

“Would you?”

“Not on your fucking life.”

Webster felt as though he lived inside an irregular heartbeat. For weeks, Sheila seemed normal, loving, and even, on occasion,
sassy in the way Webster had once liked. Each time the three of them went sledding or shopping or to Webster’s parents’ for
a Sunday lunch, and he watched the way Sheila read to Rowan, or took her for walks in the woods, or smiled when Rowan smiled,
Webster had hope. For a moment, his heart seemed lighter, and he’d think, cautiously,
We’ll be fine now
.

Even so, he continued to be vigilant. Inevitably, after a month or six weeks, he would see a sign that rattled him. The one
sign made him look for others. Sometimes he felt that he was poisoning the marriage simply by looking for the tells, that
somehow the search made them appear: a looser face, a slight slur of words, an unwillingness to kiss him. Sheila sometimes
went out, but not with him. Webster searched for liquor bottles and found them. A cloud of distrust filled the apartment.

One night, Webster found a bottle of Bacardi behind Rowan’s stuffed animals on a shelf. That Sheila had used Rowan’s toys
for a hiding place especially infuriated him.

“That’s it,” he said to Sheila as he went into the living room, brandishing his find.

Sheila turned her head away. Rowan looked up at her dad.

Webster thought his daughter had caught on to the tension between him and Sheila, and, now that she was starting to talk,
might understand more than he wanted her to. He put the bottle behind him.

“We’re going to get you to AA,” Webster said to Sheila.

“The person has to want to go.”

“Believe me, you’re going to want to go.”

“And how’s that, exactly?” asked Sheila whose eyes never strayed from the TV.

Webster had an answer. It was something he’d been thinking about for weeks. “I’m taking Rowan, and we’re going to my parents’.”

Sheila turned off the TV. “What’s that mean, exactly?” she asked.

“It means Rowan and I will be living at my parents’ house, and you will not.”

“Nana?” Rowan asked.

Webster smiled at his daughter. “We’ll see,” he said, and he thought the words
We’ll see
the most used phrase in a parent’s repertoire.

“You wouldn’t dare,” Sheila said.

“Try me.”

Webster turned, went into the bedroom, found his suitcase at the back of the closet, and began packing his clothes and personal
items. When he headed into Rowan’s room with a large canvas bag, Sheila stood.

“All right,” she said in a small voice.

“All right what?”

“I’ll go. To AA.”

Webster took the suitcase and the canvas bag back into the bedroom. “I’ll find out where and when the nearest meeting is.”

“I already know,” Sheila said.

So Sheila had gone as far as to investigate AA? That was a start.

“Mommy sad?” asked Rowan, who always needed to know. As if asking whether she should be worried or not.

“No, Pumpkinhead,” Webster said. “It’s all good.”

It wasn’t all good. But it might get better.

He parked outside the church, as far away from a streetlight as he could. It was illogical, since Sheila would be walking
into the basement meeting soon enough. He thought maybe he was protecting her identity—although preserving one’s anonymity
was almost impossible in Hartstone, or even the next town over. Behind them, Rowan was asleep in her car seat.

Sheila had smoked two cigarettes in the car. Ordinarily, Webster would have called her on that, too, with the baby in the
backseat. Maybe he really was becoming a self-righteous prig, an epithet Sheila had once hurled at him. Lately, Webster had
found himself wanting to go to a bar with his buddies at Rescue. Stay out all night, come home with a good one on. He couldn’t.
She’d never listen to him, then.

“You’ll be OK,” he said to her.

“I want to do this about as much as I want to have a root canal,” she said.

“You ever have a root canal?”

“No.”

She had on jeans and a white shirt. It was getting dark later and later, even though the early April nights could be frigid.

Webster checked his watch.

“I know, I know,” Sheila said. “I have three minutes before I have to go. Actually, I could go in at any time.”

“You’ll just draw more attention to yourself.”

“It’s not going to work in just one night,” she warned. “So don’t get your hopes up.” She turned to look at him. “Are your
hopes up?”

“I don’t know whether I dare,” he said.

He patted the middle of her back. He thought she flinched. It reminded him that they didn’t touch as often as they used to.

But this touch seemed to have released something in Sheila. She sighed and bent her head. “I’m sorry, Webster,” she said.

He wanted to hold her, but their positions were awkward, like those of teenagers trying to make out in a car. He wondered
if Sheila would one day feel compelled to make amends. He didn’t want amends. He wanted her to stop drinking.

“I love you,” she said.

He undid his seat belt and pulled her close. “You do?” he asked.

She nodded, and he kissed the top of her head. “I love you, too.”

She put her hand on his thigh. “It’s not like a hypnotist, you know. I won’t come out cured.”

“I know that,” he murmured, resting his chin on her head. “You just keep going to meetings,” he said.

After a minute, she wiggled out of his hold and stepped out of the car. She hesitated a moment. He watched her walk, hands
in pockets, shoulders straightened, toward the basement door.