The Paramedic Who Knew My Name
He did not answer for a long time. I gave him a tissue from the box on my desk, in case, and I waited. I have always been good at waiting. Then he said, “Yes, ma’am,” so small I almost missed it.
That was the start of Tuesdays.
There was nothing special about the arrangement. My lunch period fell at eleven forty, when his class went to the cafeteria and then out to recess. On Tuesdays I told the lunch aide that Marcus was helping me with a project, and he sat at the little table by the pencil sharpener with his tray on one side and a book on the other, and we did twenty-five minutes. I used a sounding-out method I had learned at a workshop in Lafayette. A sound at a time. It is the slowest thing in the world. You would be amazed what a boy can do with a single sound, once he has decided to trust you.
I picked the book carefully. He went through the stack in the back of the room like a customer in a shoe store, picking them up and putting them down. Then he found one at the bottom, a picture book marked to be thrown out, the cover soft as cloth. It was about a rescue squad in a small town, a day in the life of an ambulance, with drawings of the inside and every item labeled. Oxygen. Stretcher. Heart monitor.
“Can I have this one?” he said.
“It’s a library book.”
“It’s marked.”
He was right. There was a red stamp inside the front cover that said Discard. I had a pencil in my hand, and I wrote his name under the stamp, and the word Tuesdays, and the date.
I would like to say I remember the day he read his first full sentence out loud. I do not. What I remember is turning to look out the window at the buses, because there is something in a child’s face when he first gets it right that is not mine to look at. I remember counting buses. It was November. That’s all.
It was a small thing, and I want to be clear about that. I did what a teacher does. I gave up twenty-five minutes of my lunch on eleven Tuesdays. The following year he moved up to fourth grade, and the year after that I heard his mother had taken a job in another town and he’d gone with her, and I never heard of him again.
I sat in that waiting room in my robe, with the barn on the wall, and I thought: Harrison Street. He was the boy in the plaid shirt.
I thought, not fully believing it: he was the ambulance book.
He came at twenty minutes to eleven.