Erin was saying my name like a chant, her fingers hooked into my right deltoid, I realized she was shaking me. The look I must have given her as I took my hands off the body.
“It’s been five minutes since you started, superhero,” she said. “No change. We need to transport.”
I was breathing hard, as she had been, and I could feel the slick cool sweat patches at my back and chest. But the addict’s body was quiet; everything was finished, wasn’t it. The police officers watched us pull back from the body, the still point of sound when everyone understands.
“Transport,” Erin said again.
She was gone and returned with the gurney, bashing it up the steps with one of the officers, bright metal crashes as it hit each stair. I was still doing compressions until we lifted him into the gurney, then rolled it back down the stairs and into the wide-open back of the ambulance. Erin legged up into the back with the gurney, and had started to close one of the ambulance doors when the patient sat up calmly, spat Erin’s plastic rescue breath guard from his mouth, and said, “Holy, holy, holy.”
We froze: Erin reaching for the still-open door, me about to secure the other, we stared across the gap between the end of the rig where we were and the risen body in the back. Even from that distance I could see the yellow-blue flush had left his skin, the wrinkles shallowing, his hair thicker, it was as if he’d been made younger by fifty years. He looked, in a word, healthy. He curled his spine forward and hacked a wave of vomit onto the snow-white sheet covering his lap.
His mouth was slack. He looked down at his mess, then back up at us, wiped his jaw with his wrist. Glanced again at his lap, where the sheet had swelled into a pyramid with a thick knob at the apex.
“I think I have a boner,” he said. “What happened?”
* * *
IT WAS OUR last call of the shift. We weren’t even sure if we should still take him to the hospital, every vital sign was perfect all of a sudden, nothing to report, and what could we have said that wouldn’t have put us both in the psych ward anyway. But it seemed even worse to leave him there with the officers, who were already folding the other addict into the back of a car, ready to be done with him and back to their desks, the reports. So we took the risen one to the hospital with a single police escort and ran down the situation to the ER staff, who said, “If he isn’t dead he can wait in line with everyone else,” and Erin said, “Thank God,” and the addict demanded cigarettes of everyone that passed our chairs in the waiting room, until a female nurse said, “Jesus Christ, shut up,” and produced a loosey from a desk behind the attendant’s window and placed the cigarette in the addict’s palms like a dog treat. Erin and I started back for the rig and saw the officer’s slow-blinking face and purpling nose as he realized how much longer he’d be the responsible one. We signed our papers and drove out from under it all.
Back at the station Erin cleaned the rig, running through inventory as loud as she could, she wasn’t saying a word, but the slapping of tape rolls and trauma shears and intubation packs in and out of their places, the crackle and squealing zip and scratchy Velcro tears, she was still telling me her opinion. Are we doing this again, I thought, so I waited, leaning against the outside of the rig, behind the open back door, listened to her fumbling with a hose as she moved it back and forth, the fold and rustle of a duffel.
“I’m going to go sit down,” I said as if the door weren’t there. “Maybe just a quick granola bar or something.”
She leaned around the door so she could see me. “You go do your thing.” She flapped a wrist in my general direction. “The way you always do.”
“At least a cup of coffee?” I said. “You look tired.”
“So do you.”
“But I’m not,” I said.
“Right, I forgot, Mr. Invincible.”
“Did I do something to offend you?” I asked. I was always the one that had to be the adult this way, although Erin was two years my senior.
“I knew that addict’s heart had stopped beating,” she said. She moved out of sight, back behind the door, then locked a buckle, the clean clip-sound echoed in the flat morning of the garage, us all alone then for a minute, the other paramedics and EMTs back in the lockers or the kitchen. “And I knew that there was risk to the femoral artery when we were extracting the biker,” she went on, “and I knew not to give insulin to the hypoglycemic drinker. But there you were.” I crossed my arms and waited, it was always better to let her boil over, there was even something to enjoy in it, almost a taste to her fury, when she’d really get going, when she’d call me a snot-nosed book rat or wonder-boy mansplainer, all my attitudes and ass-stuck explanations, she’d been here so much longer and why was it so hard for me to remember that. She came back out of the ambulance.
“You always have to say something, don’t you.”
“Only when I’m right,” I said.
“There you go,” she said. She was finally looking at me, her cheeks hot, a flex and pulse to her throat. Her eyes were ringed with bruise-colored skin. “I can’t wait until you go to med school.” She started toward the side entrance to the station, the hall with the bathrooms where every shift we scrubbed off all the remains of everyone we’d touched that day.
“I don’t know how he came back, either, Erin,” I lied, loud enough for her to hear. “He was almost gone. I don’t know how he came back.”
She stopped walking, but stayed faced away from me.
“But you were following the right procedure,” I said. “The chest compressions.”
“You’re lying,” she said. “You did something.”
I turned back to the ambulance, considered all the stinking howling leaking hours we’d spent in it. What did I do, Erin? Even I was still trying to understand, I only knew that when I touched a broken body, I held an idea of what that body should be, and that idea became the muscle of a heartbeat, or the fusing of bones, or the electrochemical bolts storming through synapses. I’d felt the addict’s body wanting to be repaired, and then the body had done just that, chased the overdose from its own blood and brain.
“All I did was work,” I said. “Just followed procedure.”
We both knew she’d made a mistake with the paddles, I’d seen it in her eyes, the panicked flex of recognition that I had caught the mistake, as much as she had. “You did what you were supposed to,” I said. “I’d say that to anyone who asked.”
She was still facing away, but I saw her exhale.
“Okay,” she said.
“Get some sleep,” I said.
“Fuck you,” she said, but I could hear the ease returning to her.
* * *
THE NIGHT ECHOED IN MY HEAD, the burning-cat-piss stink of the meth house, the air of hate and rage between the men inside, the stickiness of death and neglect. And something deeper, the trembling understanding of what I was becoming capable of. I was home now, considering my open refrigerator, all condiments and partially finished boxed mac and cheese. A queasy knot in my stomach. I closed the refrigerator and stared at the biology anatomy chemistry textbooks that were propping up the thrift-store television in the corner.