“Hydrochloric acid,” Burrows said to Webster. “We have to flush it out. Get me a large pitcher of cool water. Jesus, it’s in her eye. It’s full thickness on the cheek.”
Burrows cut her clothing off and removed all of her jewelry. There might still be acid on her clothing. He covered her with a blanket.
He gave the woman fentanyl for the pain.
When Webster returned with the pitcher, Burrows began the flushing, making sure he wasn’t causing any acid to spill onto healthy tissue.
“You guys were just here, right?” Nye asked.
“Yes,” Webster said, “but everything was fine.”
Nye stared.
“Everything seemed fine,” Webster amended. “No injuries.”
“Why did you leave?”
Burrows spoke. “It looked like a hoax. The girl saying the mother’s boyfriend had raped and beaten her. The girl struck me as lying about the injuries.”
“Did you examine her?”
“No. She wouldn’t let me touch her.”
“You take the mother to Mercy. We’ll deal with the daughter. I’d say you and the probie here just stepped in a big one.”
It was worse than either Burrows or Webster had predicted. Evidence of sexual assault was collected from the daughter at the hospital. At least two crimes had been committed: a fifteen-year-old girl had been raped; the same girl had thrown acid at her mother. The mother had serious burns, including to her cornea.
“I’m gonna get my ass hauled,” Burrows said to Webster on the way back from the scene.
“I was with you every step of the way,” Webster said.
“Noble, but it doesn’t fly. I was the crew chief. I was in charge.”
“I’ll back you up.”
“You’ll stay out of it. You hear me, probie? You followed my orders. That’s it. Me, I’ll keep my job. You? You’ll be outta Rescue before you finish washing down the Bullet. They question you, you say you followed orders. Is that understood?”
Webster nodded.
“What was that?” Burrows asked again, this time in a loud voice.
“I got it,” Webster said.
“All we had to do was fucking stay put,” Burrows muttered, shaking his head.
Webster had had patients die on him, and that was hard enough. But to have harmed a patient by not remaining at the scene was brutal.
They drove past the town hall, a brick ranch turned into the seat of government. The library had two stories and a stone facade, but it, too, looked fake, as though it might once have been a feed and grain store. Webster had never been a scholar, but he read at night for pleasure.
The rig passed by Keezer’s Diner, nearly full now at 11:30, every vehicle outside a pickup truck with tools and blue tarps in the back. He wondered if Sheila was working. Mother’s Country Kitchen had gone out of business, but the Quilt Shop was still hanging in there. Webster was familiar with every shop and service in town. Sometimes he liked to cross the border into New York and drive to a place he’d never been before. Explore a town in which he knew no one.
They passed the Maple Leaf Gift Shop, Armand’s Pizzeria, and Roberts Funeral Home. On a lane behind the funeral home was the American Legion Hall, the place where just four years ago his class had held its senior prom. Webster took the next left into Fire Rescue. He parked the Bullet in its spot: facing out, ready to go again. Burrows headed for the building.
Webster walked to the front of the Bullet and stared out into the morning. The snow was still on the trees from the night before, and the sun turned it all into crystals. He had a hankering to go skiing. He wondered if Sheila skied and thought not. He’d looked up Chelsea on a map, and it was a long way from anything with a chairlift.
He moved just outside the garage door opening. He would go to see her as soon as he got out of work.
He longed to get Sheila out of that porch room with the creepy landlords who ate Devil Dogs. He couldn’t imagine what they looked like, and he hoped he’d never have to meet them. But get her out where? He couldn’t bring her to his parents’ house. Out of the question. She didn’t have anything but the earnings from her hustle and maybe a week’s paycheck. He’d like to get on a plane with her and go someplace warm. It would take him months to earn enough money for two plane tickets, without dipping into his savings. Where would they go? Florida? Mexico? The two of them on the beach, he in bathing trunks, she in a bikini, a pair of piña coladas between them.
“Webster!”
Webster turned to the door of the squad room.
“What the hell are you doing, probie?” Burrows asked. “Making snowmen?”
“No, sir,” Webster said.
“You’re still on duty, in case you hadn’t noticed.”
Webster pulled back the curtain. He knew what town he and Sheila were in, but he’d seen it only at night when they’d driven to the B and B, both of them a little drunk, she more than a little. The streets had been dead at eleven, but now the town had action: pedestrians pitched forward against a sharp wind, pickup trucks traveling in both directions, a glare already on the crust of the snow. The B and B was Sheila’s idea. On recent successive Saturdays, they’d gone on day trips, stopping at a bar and a cheap place to eat on each excursion they made farther and farther away from Hartstone. But this time she’d wanted to make a weekend of it. Webster sometimes felt as if he were a rubber band, liable to snap back to Rescue at the first tones from his radio. He’d have to learn to ignore that summons. He was off duty.
He stood in his boxers. The room was overheated, and they had no control over the temperature. When they’d arrived the previous night, the heat had been welcome. Almost three months in Vermont, and still Sheila hadn’t bought a winter jacket or hat or proper boots. Spring’ll be here any minute, she’d say whenever Webster brought up the subject, as if she’d never have to experience winter again. Never another winter in Vermont anyway.
Two weeks after that night under the .9 moon, Webster had been promoted to full-time and stayed at Rescue during his shifts. He’d been given the graveyard tour: midnight till eight. Sheila worked days at Geezer’s, as she’d come to call it, which made him wonder why someone else hadn’t thought up the nickname earlier. When his tour was over, he’d hang around Rescue for twenty minutes to talk to the new team, and then he’d go over to the diner for breakfast. She looked demeaned in the shiny gray uniform with the white apron. She usually told him he looked like hell, and he told her she looked nice. Sometimes she’d manage to brush her hand against his. Once she’d bent down and wrapped an arm around him, pretending to be reading an article in a newspaper Webster had spread on the counter. For Webster, breakfast in the diner was a necessity, but he ached when he left. He thought of Sheila as a drug that had hooked him after only one hit.
Sometimes Sheila asked him questions about his night. He’d tell her everything about each case, getting rid of the images and smells. She never made wisecracks about his work. Maybe the memory of her own accident was too fresh. He wondered what she did at night.
Four days into the third week, he’d ridden into Rescue with Burrows. They’d had a bad night, and the images weren’t pretty. Webster unloaded the back of the Bullet and hefted as much equipment as he could into Rescue and onto the counter in the squad room. So intent was he on getting the equipment into the basins without dropping something that he missed her over by the coffee machine. He noted an odd silence in the room and looked up to see Sheila with Callahan, a new recruit who’d arrived for the next tour.
For a moment, Webster felt paralyzed. What the hell was Sheila doing there? She had on her leather jacket, a black turtleneck, a different pair of jeans. Her hair was pinned up. A jolt traveled from his groin to his chest and back again. Burrows put a hand on his shoulder. “Relax, Webster,” he said. “It’s not as if anyone can keep a secret in this town.”
Webster joined Sheila at the coffee machine, and Callahan slid away. A manufactured banter behind him broke the silence.
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“What are you doing here?” he asked.
“I came to buy you a drink.”
“It’s eight o’clock in the morning. There isn’t a bar open in the entire state of Vermont.”
She leaned against the counter and cocked her head. “How about Albany?” she asked, teasing him. “That’s a city, isn’t?”
“I’m not driving to Albany.”
She put a finger to her cheek, mock thinking. “The bar at my place is open,” she said, as if it had just occurred to her.
“At this hour?”
“Yup.”
“Don’t you have to work?”
“I’m at the dentist’s,” she said with a smile. “That’s what Geezer thinks, anyway.”
“I have to clean the equipment, pack it away. Talk to the next crew. Give me twenty minutes.”
Webster worked steadily, aware of the glances of the other medics. If one of them was going to report him for fraternization, then so be it. He should be mad at Sheila for so casually jeopardizing his job.
After he left Rescue, he got into his car, Sheila already in the passenger seat.
Once inside the house with the jalousie porch, he took a quick glance around the kitchen, then grabbed her by the soft sleeve of her jacket, turned her around, and kissed her. She broke away and laughed at him. She guided him onto the porch. He didn’t care about being close to the road. Let the whole world watch.
She sat on the daybed and took off her clothes in a perfunctory way, as if she were alone. Another woman might have made a tease of it. For the first time, Webster saw her breasts, her pubic hair, the scar across her belly.
“You’re fucking gorgeous,” he said. Then he nodded in the direction of the scar. “Won’t that hurt?”
“I doubt I’ll notice it,” she said. “Though if you stand there with your jacket on much longer, I might get bored and fall asleep.”
The Sheila who’d had a no-nonsense way of removing her clothes slipped into a woman who was at least as pent up as Webster. It might be weeks before they could learn to take it slow.
Webster watched Sheila sleep in the overheated room of the B and B, the sheet pulled up over her breasts, a slender arm exposed and relaxed. The glossy brown hair on the pillow had always been a talisman for him. Around her, the flowered wallpaper and the antique reproductions faded out to nothing. In recent weeks, she’d become a tourist.
“You have wanderlust,” he’d once said to her in the car.
“What’s that mean? I like to fuck and walk at the same time?”
Webster slipped back into the bed, unwilling to be away from her. He knew how her skin felt everywhere—the down of her arms, the hard muscle of her inner thigh, the sweet curve of her hip. If she woke with a hangover, she hid it well, apart from a terrible thirst.
He stroked her arm from the shoulder to the wrist. He wanted to wake her. He liked to see her eyes flutter open, the moment of pleasure when she saw him. Sometimes, she smiled. He had the water glass ready. She would prop herself up on an arm and drink it down, and eventually, after they’d had sex, he’d get her another and a couple of Excedrin.
That morning, however, she woke as if reluctant to enter the world. Webster enjoyed the anticipation. But then she bolted up in bed, putting her fingers to her nostrils.
“What’s that awful smell?” she asked.
Webster sniffed the air. “Coffee? I used the coffeemaker on the bureau. It’s terrible, but I didn’t want to walk out naked in search of a coffee shop.” He ran his fingers from the base of her spine to the nape of her neck.
“Webster,” she said, bowing her head.
He didn’t like the way she’d said his name. He waited. “What’s wrong?” he asked.
“Fuck.”
She can’t do this anymore, and she’s going to say it. He shut his eyes. He couldn’t stop her.
“You want it straight out?” she asked.
“Always.”
“I’m pregnant.”
The word stunned him. Pregnancy had never crossed his mind.
“You sure?” he asked.
She brushed the hair off her face and turned to look at him. “Very.”
“How far along?”
“Ten weeks.”
“Have you seen a doctor?”
“Yes.”
A dialogue repeated, he imagined, thousands of times between thousands of couples. Only this time it was unique, as if he were the first man ever knocked out by a single word.
Under the .9 moon, he’d asked her if she was on the pill, and she’d nodded. Then later, she said she preferred a diaphragm. Had she really nodded? Had he been mistaken?
Fucking biology. It didn’t give a shit what Mother Nature was doing on the outside.
He almost said, “How can you be sure it’s mine?” but stopped himself just in time.
Don’t go there.
“I don’t know what happened,” she said. “I was on the pill, and then I started getting these bleeds and I switched to a diaphragm. They’re both supposed to work.”
He studied the quilt. A blur of colors slowly came into focus. He noted red flowers on an ivory background, whole squares of blue, knots of thread in the corners of the patches. For a moment, he imagined Sheila happy, the happiness infectious. Then he pictured her wanting an abortion, and supporting her decision. Finally, he saw her as frightened, at least as confused as he was.
“I’ll be such a good mother,” she said, and Webster was surprised a second time. She turned and stared at him, as if she knew she might have pushed him too far, as if he might still be in shock.
“How will you know what to do?”
She kissed him. “We’ll figure it out together, Webster.”
She was not going to ask him how he felt about the pregnancy.
Again, Webster imagined Sheila happy. He tried to see past the sheet to the flat of her belly. His child was lodged somewhere just below the runway scar.
All he had to do was let go, let it happen.
If he asked another question, she’d see his uncertainty, and once the baby came, she’d never forget that waffling and would always wonder. Webster would regret that. He loved Sheila, of that he was certain. The idea of not being with her hurt. Besides, he was just as responsible for the seed inside her as she was. More so. He was the guy, for Christ’s sake. He was an EMT! Why hadn’t he just used a condom?
He stroked her hair where it fell against her back. He liked the way the two sides curled toward each other. He imagined other women paying big bucks over the years to achieve what Sheila came by naturally.
A baby. Settling down. Maybe a place of their own. And he’d be with her every step of the way. As much as he could. He thought about the long nights he’d be gone, and for just a second, he had an image of Sheila with a baby sleeping in her lap, a glass of Bacardi under the sofa. He made the image vanish as quickly as it had come.
He thought about how much she’d had to drink the night before and felt a little sick. Why had Sheila done it? She’d known. A last hurrah?
He told himself to flatline his anger.
This was risk. Risk of the most dangerous and wonderful kind. To bet your life on something as tiny as a sprout.
“I’m in,” he said.
Webster, in a clean shirt and a pair of khakis, fresh from his day’s nap after a Friday-night call, found his father, two Rolling Rocks in hand, in the kitchen.
“OK if I join you?” Webster asked. Occasionally, during the last year, Webster had been invited to have a drink during his parents’ hour together. Sometimes he would. Sometimes not.
“Sure,” his father said, clearly happy to have his son spend time with the old man. He nudged the fridge open with his elbow.
“I’ll get that,” Webster said.
His own beer in hand, Webster followed his father into the living room. If his father had looked happy, his mother was delighted. Webster winced. If either of them detected a summit, they didn’t let on.
&
nbsp; A cheese ball, studded with chopped walnuts, had been placed on a dinner plate, surrounded by saltines. “We hardly ever see you,” his mother said, patting her hair. She plumped the cushions next to her with something like giddiness. “You must be working all the hours of the day.”
His mother drank beer in a wineglass. Webster sat next to her and fingered the condensation on his Kelly green bottle.
“In another few weeks,” said his mother, “we’ll be sitting on the porch this time of night. I really have to clear out all that winter dirt.”
“How’s the job going?” his father asked. “You save anyone I know?”
His father knew almost everyone in Hartstone.
“Asa Bennet had a fall yesterday,” Webster said, forgoing the “Mr.” as he wouldn’t have just two months earlier. Crazy how a single word could signal a change in a father-son relationship. “Broke his hip.”
“What will the poor man do?” his mother asked. “He’s how old now?”
“Eighty-four.”
“And Alice passed away, oh, at least two years now.”
Three, Webster knew from the patient report. “I don’t know what he’ll do after he recovers,” Webster said. “I see them only as far as the hospital. Sometimes I know what happens after that, but most of the time I don’t.”
“What a job you have!” she exclaimed, not for the first time. Webster was never sure if she meant, “What a horrible job you have,” or “You have such a wonderful chance to help people.” As far as being an EMT went, both were true.
Webster cleared his throat. “I’ve been seeing someone,” he announced.
His mother coughed on her beer. Webster patted her back. “That’s nice,” she said when she could speak, her voice scratchy.
“Who is she?” His father sat in the upholstered wing chair, always known, since Webster was a boy, as “Dad’s chair.”
“Her name is Sheila Arsenault. She’s from Boston but is in the process of settling in Vermont.”
“I used to know some Arsenaults,” his mother mused, “but they were from Quebec.”
“How long have you been seeing her?” his father asked.