The Paperboy Who Cleared Her Walk

I lay there on the linoleum with my cheek against the cold, and my knee, the titanium one, folded under me wrong, and I could not make it work. The telephone was on the counter, four feet above my head. It might as well have been in Concord.

I called out. A woman’s voice at ten to five in the morning, in a closed house in January, carries about as far as the next room.

And then, at five past, I heard the scrape of the shovel on the top step, and I have never been so glad of a sound in my life.

“Remy!” I called. “Remy, I’m in the kitchen. I’ve fallen.”

He could not hear me. The storm door was shut, and the front door was shut, and the wind was up. The shovel went on. Scrape, sweep, scrape. I cried out until my voice cracked. The scraping moved down the steps and onto the walk.

Then it stopped.

I think that in six winters he had learned the sound of my house. At ten past five there ought to have been a light in the kitchen, and a curtain moving, and the sound of a kettle. There was none of it, only a long, still silence out in the dark.

Then somebody knocked on my front door.

In six winters, nobody had ever knocked on that door at that hour. Three raps, and then a fourth, and then a voice, thin and high and frightened.

“Mrs. T-Tarbell?”

“I’m in the kitchen!” I shouted. “Remy, I’m in the kitchen, I’ve fallen, I can’t get up!”

I heard the knob rattle. The door was locked. I heard his boots on the porch, and then going down the steps, fast, not careful of the ice, and I heard them go off across the street.

I did not know where he had gone. I lay there for what seemed like an hour and was, as I found out, eleven minutes.

I will tell you what happened in those eleven minutes, because I was told by the dispatcher afterward. She goes to my church. Her name is Carol Ann Beaudoin, and she has worked the night desk for the county for twenty-two years.

Remy ran across Pleasant Street to the Dufresnes’ and beat on the door until old Mr. Dufresne came down in his union suit. Mr. Dufresne had a spare key to my house. He had it on a nail by his back door, with a tag in Clement’s printing that said Tarbell, because Clement had given it to him in 1994.

But Mr. Dufresne was seventy-nine and slow on the stairs, and Remy did not wait for him. He picked up the telephone on the kitchen wall and dialed 911.

Carol Ann told me that the first thing she heard on the line was a breath. A long one, the way a person breathes who is about to go off a high dive. Then a boy’s voice said, “I n-need an amb-bulance.”

“Okay, hon,” she said. “What’s the address?”

“F-fourteen P-P-P…”

She said it was the longest “P” she has ever heard in twenty-two years on that desk. It went on and on, and in the background she could hear Mr. Dufresne saying, “Give me that, son, I’ll tell her,” and the boy saying, with his whole body behind it, “N-no.”

She told me what she said. She said it very gently, the way you talk to a horse in a burning barn.

“Take your time, hon. I’m not going anywhere.”