The Paramedic Who Knew My Name
I never once thought I would do it in my kitchen, in my robe, on my own husband.
But my hands knew where to go. They went where Brenda had taught them, and I locked my elbows and I pushed.
The dispatcher counted. “One and two and three and four.” Her voice was a church organ on a slow hymn, low and level, never rushing and never dropping. I found out later her name is Pam, that she works the overnight desk, and that she was ten minutes from the end of her shift. She has never met me. I would like to buy her a casserole.
About the fifth push, something gave under my palms. A crack, a soft one, like a green branch. I yanked my hands up.
“Ma’am, did you stop?”
“I think I broke his rib.”
“That’s all right,” Pam said. “That happens. Ribs heal. I need you to keep going. Right now, hands back down.”
So I put them back down.
I counted out loud with her, and then without her, because the numbers filled the room in my head where the other things wanted to go. Eighty-eight, eighty-nine, ninety. “Hands only,” Pam said. “Don’t stop.” So I didn’t. My knees found the one cold spot on the floor, by the table leg where the furnace vent does not reach, and I stayed on it.
I could see the oven clock from where I knelt. I do not know why I looked at it. Maybe because that is what a teacher does. Four minutes to seven. Two minutes to. A bar of morning sun had come across the floor and was lying over Gerald’s one bare foot, and the foot did not move.
“They are about three minutes out,” Pam said. “You are doing exactly right, Faye.”
I thought: he hasn’t had his coffee. And I thought: I should have found the filters last night.
Then the red lights came across the kitchen curtains, slow, like someone turning a page, and I heard the siren wind down in the driveway before the ambulance had even stopped moving.
Two of them came through the back door, because that’s the door everyone in Rensselaer uses.
The first was a woman about my age or a little younger, tall, with a long gray braid down her back and a bag the size of a suitcase. She went down on the far side of Gerald without a word and started doing four things at once. The second was a man, much younger, with a monitor the size of a toolbox in one hand. He set it by Gerald’s hip and knelt beside me.