Rescue (18 page)

She climbs down the ladder and washes the next level of windows, two at a time. Soap two, then rinse two. She’s wearing her
rubber boots, her pajama pants, and a slicker that once was yellow. Her boots are already wet from the sprayer and the dew
in the shaded grass. He likes the flowers of late May, early June. The crab apple, the lilacs, the trillium. One day the color
isn’t there; the next day it is.

He thinks his not mentioning the
fuck
rattled Rowan more than if he’d laid into her.

Rowan reaches the front of the house and tackles the other attic window. She untangles the hose and takes it with her up the
stepladder. She aims it, soaping up the mullions. She slips past the frame of the window and points the nozzle at the vinyl
siding.

What the hell? Is she trying to give the house a wash, too?

Rowan makes wild loops and crazy brushstrokes. An angry sound escapes her. She turns her weapon on the bushes with their new
leaves, at the lilacs with their potent scent, at a pine tree that she covers with what looks like wet toilet paper.

Rowan shoots as far down the driveway as she can. Then she raises the hose and lets it rain straight over her.

Webster takes off at a run. Rowan lets the hose fall and begins to climb down the ladder. When she stumbles, Webster catches
her, keeping her upright. He pulls her head, soapy hair and all, into his shirt.

W
ebster and Koenig are backup, second rig on the scene. A six-vehicle pileup on the road coming off the mountain. The fog moved
in fast, visibility nil. The fog halos the whites and blues on the cruisers. Webster spots five of them and another rig. He
and Koenig report to incident command, and Webster is told to head for the bus. He sees a tractor-trailer on its side, a yellow
school bus mounting it like a dog. A crumpled red Mercury, a navy Jeep that looks to have skidded into a tree, a silver Touareg
that has accordioned a foreign car, a Hyundai maybe. Webster grabs what he can from the back of the rig and heads for the
school bus. He and Koenig are part of a larger team now.

Children are always top priority. He notes the noise as he jogs: the cruisers, ambulances, fire engines, tow trucks, and the
screams of the injured or frightened.

Two cops have pried open the front door of the bus. Webster hoists himself up and in. The driver is unconscious but is being
rapidly extricated by a medic and a cop. Webster heads down the aisle, bracing himself against the seat backs. Kids are calling
out, but Webster is more worried about the ones who aren’t. No seat belts on the local school buses, and some of the bodies
have been thrown as far as their backpacks, most toward the rear of the bus, which can’t now be opened because of the Mercury.
Cops have
broken the emergency exits, crawled up and in, and are handing out children. Some of the kids look like grown men. A rural
K-through-twelve. The place will be swarming with parents in fifteen minutes.

Knees bent, searching each bench, Webster finds a blond girl in a purple tank top wedged beneath a seat on his right, her
ass so deep in, it’s almost on the floor of the next bench back. Lying on her side, her knees and shoulders are caught by
the steel bars that support the seats.

Webster gets down on his hands and knees and lets the shouting and the screaming float away, concentrating on the single case.
He fears spinal injury, maybe paralysis. No blood. No movement. He speaks to the girl in a loud voice, trying to rouse her.
He checks her airway and listens for breathing. He feels her carotid and finds a weak pulse. She’s alive but in bad shape.
He fastens a c-collar around her neck. He checks her pupils. Equal and reactive to light. Probably not a spinal injury.

When he looks up, he sees a boy, maybe thirteen, in a brown zip-up, sitting three benches down with his head in his hands.
“Hey, son,” Webster calls. The boy looks up. Dazed, but not in shock, Webster hopes.

“What’s your name?”

“Edward.”

“You OK to move?”

“They told me to stay here.”

“Give me a hand. I’ve got a girl who’s stuck.”

The boy pulls himself upward to get to Webster, who points to the bench he wants the boy to sit in. The kid falls backward,
straddling the girl’s butt with his feet.

“You got any injuries?” Webster asks.

The boy shakes his head.

“OK, listen. On my count, I need you to gently push her behind forward so I can get her out and check her. You feel any pain
yourself, you stop at once. Am I clear?”

The boy nods. “What’s wrong with her?”

“I don’t know yet. You know her name?”

The boy pulls himself up and over the bench to look down at her face. “Jill,” he says.

“Jill!” Webster yells. No response. He calls again. No response.

Webster opens the belt of the girl’s jeans, making sure the leather is in symmetrical loops so he can pull her forward. “My
count and gentle now. One. Two. Three.” With the boy’s help, Webster, arms extended through the bars of the seat ahead of
Jill, drags her straight toward him. She’s slight, maybe 105.

“OK, now come around and help me get her onto her back and straighten her out. When I say so, you’re going to
gently
draw her legs into the aisle. I’m going to get behind her and lift her shoulders forward.”

It’s one of the many decisions a medic has to make. Moving the blond could harm her already hurt body, but not to move her,
to wait until an emergency crew can unbolt the bench, could cost her vital minutes.

The boy crawls into position. Then Webster has the girl supine, her feet into the aisle and then some. The boy straightens
them.

Webster does the acronyms and looks for lacerations. He performs a neuromotor scan and checks her pupils again. Equal and
reactive. Her knee jerks and she shifts her leg.

“Keep calling her name,” Webster instructs Edward.

An older boy in the back is screaming, an EMT’s yellow coat
blocking Webster’s view. Webster is losing focus and has to exert his will to concentrate on the task at hand.

One, maybe two, dislocated shoulders. A contusion the size of a baseball at the back of her head. Blood pressure 110 over
72. Pulse rapid and thready. He presses lightly against her clavicle and can feel the break. She should have woken screaming
at the touch.

“You stay here,” he says to the boy. “I’m going for the stretcher and the oxygen. Don’t move, no matter what. And
do not
let anyone step on her.”

Webster exits the vehicle the way he entered, most of the other medics using the side door that the cops have now freed. Webster
runs for the stretcher and sees a unit pulling in from New York. He puts out a hand.

“Come with me,” he tells the medic. “Bring your backboard, your stretcher, and your portable O
₂
. I’ve got a patient.”

Webster and the medic climb back into the bus. They turn the girl’s body into the aisle and slide her onto the backboard.
They strap her on, and Webster applies a head restraint. They inch her toward the front door. Webster exits first, shouldering
the weight, but the medic has the trickier maneuver—getting out of the bus without losing his grip on the backboard. They
put Jill on a stretcher and walk her back to the waiting ambulance, Webster leading, the EMT and Edward following. The other
EMT from New York has the back door open. “We’ve got it,” he tells Webster.

“Unresponsive, breathing shallow, pulse rapid and thready, BP hundred ten over seventy-two, one, possibly two dislocated shoulders,
broken clavicle, suspect head injury, name’s Jill.”

Webster turns to the kid standing to one side. The boy is quivering like a heart in V-fib.

“Take this kid with you,” Webster says to the EMT. “His name is Edward. Give him a phone to call his parents or do it for
him. Get him to tell you the girl’s last name and call it into Dispatch.”

Webster helps the kid, who has lost all his strength, up into the passenger seat. “You did good, Edward,” Webster says, buckling
him in.

Webster shuts the door and steps back. He checks his watch, a digital. He’s been at the scene nineteen minutes.

As far as he can see up the hill, there are emergency vehicles, lights strobing in the thick fog. Critical injuries, some
fatalities. The smart medics have made U-turns on the shoulders before stopping so that later they’ll be able to exit the
scene. The other emergency vehicles will serve as mini–trauma centers with EMTs and medics dispensing urgent care.

Webster, being among the first to arrive, is almost the last to leave, negotiating the shoulder on his way to Mercy, with
Koenig and two hurt but not critical patients in the back. Mother and son, from the Touareg, she with face and chest bruises
from the air bag, the boy, nine, with a broken wrist sustained when he tumbled, long after the accident, from the passenger
seat of the car onto the road, and otherwise unhurt.

Four dead at the scene, three of them children, the fourth the driver of the Hyundai. An unhurt woman from an adjacent vehicle
hysterical, sobbing that she couldn’t stop in time, until finally a cop put her into a cruiser and took her home just to shut
her up. Local news channels from two states criminally blocking the exit routes. Small children on shortboards, red and blue
sweaters peeking through the thermal blankets. Webster has called in to Dispatch to find out where Jill was taken, but no
one
has an answer yet. Webster thinks of Rowan, of how the girl in the purple tank top might so easily have been her.

It isn’t the first mass-casualty incident Webster has had, but a school bus ups the ante, flooding the scene with anxious
parents, some of whom had the good sense to dig in and help. The driver of the Jeep looked bad ten different ways when the
stretcher carrying him raced past the bus. Webster treated broken bones, mild concussions, lacerations, two serious wounds.
He kept his eyes averted from the parents who had to learn that their children hadn’t made it. Webster can’t bear the deaths
of children; the images haunt him at night. It’s a parental grief he can imagine so well that he’s occasionally brought himself
to tears.

On the way back from Mercy, Koenig, in the driver’s seat, says, “Fucking nightmare. They ought to outlaw semis on 42.”

“Where would they go?” Webster, one hand on the wheel, sitting back now. “It’s the only route up the western side of the state.”

“Put the stuff on smaller trucks. That semi had no business on that road going that fast.”

“How fast?”

“The estimate from the statie was sixty.”

“Never buy a Hyundai.”

“The Touareg on the other hand…,” Koenig suggests.

“Like you could afford one.”

“The cops just drove it away.”

“I hate these kinds of calls,” Webster says.

“No shit.”

“How was the wedding?”

Koenig shakes his head. “Almost a disaster.”

“What happened?”

“Annabelle’s smarter than I gave her credit for. She cried in the car, and I had to wait a good twenty minutes for her to
stop. She was scared. She didn’t want to marry Jackson before he shipped out, but she didn’t think it was morally right to
let him go off without being married. And she couldn’t bear the thought of leaving him at the altar, or whatever you call
it when you have a wedding at an inn.”

“Jesus.”

“She’d been agonizing over this for weeks.”

“So what did you tell her?” Webster asks.

“That I felt bad for her. I knew that Ruth, sitting right up front as mother of the bride, would have a fit if Annabelle backed
out at that late stage. But I told Annabelle that all I had to do was put the car in gear, and we would drive away, and I
would go back and explain it to Jackson and Ruth and the guests. I put the car in gear and went about ten feet before she
begged me to stop. I finally said she either had to get out of the car or let me drive on. She fixed herself up as best she
could, and then I took her into the inn. It felt like I was leading her to the slaughter.”

“Hey, I’m sorry,” Webster says as he makes the turn in to Rescue.

“She seemed happy enough at the reception, so maybe it was mostly nerves. That’s what I’m hoping, anyway. She’s going to have
a lot of time over the next year to wonder if she did the right thing.”

“She’d be better off not to think about it at all,” Webster says. “She can’t undo it while he’s in Afghanistan.”

Webster drags himself from the cruiser and through his own back door. Twelve thirty a.m., the end of one of the longest and
worst
days on the job he’s had in ages. A shift and a half. Rowan is sitting at the kitchen table with leftovers waiting to be put
in the microwave.

“You’re still up?” Webster asks, surprised. “You cooked?”

“Just stew. You look tired.”

“Rough day.”

“I heard about the pileup. What was it like?”

Webster has always answered Rowan’s questions about emergent care and its aftermath. Lately, he’s been hiding nothing, even
the gruesome deaths. “A horror show. Four dead, three of them kids. I worked on a girl who was stuck under a bench on a bus.
Head injury, I think, though I hope not. She can’t have been more than fifteen.”

“How did the adult die?”

“Crushed, in her Hyundai.”

Rowan is silent at this news. Does she try to picture it?

Webster peels off his jacket. He wants to take everything off right then and there and carry it to the washing machine. All
deaths still make him feel slimy.

“It’s great what you do,” Rowan says, looking up at her father.

She’s waited up all night to tell him that.

“Thank you,” he says. “That makes it all worthwhile.”

“Good,” she says, standing.

“You’d better get to bed. You have to get up for school in six hours.”

“I took a nap.”

Webster watches his tired child climb the stairs.

Reparations. For the
fuck?
For shooting the leaves and flowers?

I
n the afternoon, after his nap, Webster is working in his newly dug garden. He hears the squeak of the back door and glances
up. For a second, not even a second, he thinks it’s Sheila. Not as she might be now, but as she was then: the long brown hair,
the slightly defiant posture, the gray sweater and jeans, the sunglasses back on her head, even the dress boots. But it isn’t
Sheila—it’s his daughter looking about two years older than she did the last time he saw her.