“What is that?” the girl whispers, shuddering as she eyes the needle. “Not more needles. Please. We’ve had enough needles—please.”
“Your boyfriend needs medicine,” I tell her as I work. “This is going to counteract the effects of the opioid. It will let him breathe properly again.”
“But he hates needles,” she whispers, rubbing anxiously at the track marks up and down her arms. She looks like a lost little lamb and, suddenly, I get an image of Wyatt in a place like this, shuddering on the floor.
I push it aside, just like the others.
She’s talking fast now: “… and if he has another needle it’s gonna kill him—gonna kill him and I love him and we shouldn’t even be here—”
“Ricky,” I say. I jerk my head towards the girl. Do something, my eyes add.
“Roger.” He moves between the girl and me just in case she tries to get involved. “Just calm down. Hey, what’s your middle name? Can you tell me that?”
She pauses. “Joan. My grandma was named Joan, so my parents named me after her.”
“And your favorite color, sweetheart. You got one of those?”
I administer the naloxone and then wait, and wait, and …
“Shit,” I curse. “Ricky, he’s not responding. We need to get him into Betty, stat.”
Ricky has done a good job at calming the girl down, so when we load him onto the stretcher and carry him through the apartment, she just trails behind us. We hook him up to oxygen because the naloxone hasn’t done its normal magic. His breathing is getting even worse. Ricky adjusts the levels, peering down at him, shaking his head. We meet eyes and we both know it doesn’t look good.
“Hold his hand, sweetheart,” Ricky says. “Keep talking to him.”
I drive like Wyatt is the one overdosing back there. When we get him into the hospital, we hand him over to the nurses and then our job is done. Side by side, we stand there and watch him receding down the hallway on the stretcher. Then he rounds a corner and he’s gone.
I doubt I’ll ever see him again.
Despite my best efforts, it’s impossible not to think about Wyatt. I picture his freckly cheeks and his bright eyes and his red hair. I remember how graceful he was in his little gymnastics outfits, doing back handsprings across the floor like gravity didn’t apply to him.
“Wanna bet he won’t last a coupla hours?” Ricky says as we make our way back to Betty. We already have another call to make. “He didn’t look good.”
Anybody else would think Ricky didn’t care, but that’s not the truth. The truth is we care too much and if we didn’t make jokes about it, we’d be forced to quit.
But right now, I’m not up for even that.
Ricky is, though. “I should’ve asked for an autograph,” he says when I don’t respond to the first joke.
I sigh exhaustedly. The long shift is weighing down on me all of the sudden. “Why’s that, Ricky?”
“Pretty sure I saw him on the Walking Dead last week.”
I laugh grimly, if only to get him to stop talking for just a minute or two. I can feel a migraine coming on. I pray that the radio stays silent, that the city stays safe, that no one picks now to start dying.
But fate is as annoying as Ricky tonight, because it’s hardly thirty seconds of silence gone by before the radio crackles to life.
Another overdose.
I want to yell so badly. I want to pound my hand against the steering wheel and cry out to any gods who might be listening, What the fuck? Why here? Why are all these young people dying, dying, dying?
I don’t say anything, though. There’s no one listening tonight. Just like there was no one listening two years ago, when Wyatt nearly joined the city’s growing mountain of fatalities.
That day, I came home early because a stomach bug had pretty much KO’d me and my supervisor didn’t want to risk the infection spreading. So there I was, dragging my sick behind up the stairs to the apartment Wyatt and I shared before he went off to college, when I heard this rattle.
At first, I literally thought there was a snake in there. That’s how sick I was. I really thought I was going to open the door to find a rattlesnake on the coffee table, doing a little shimmy.
Then I opened the door and saw Wyatt. He was sitting on the couch, facing away from me. All I could see was the back of his head and hear that rattle coming from his throat.
Suddenly, I wasn’t so sick anymore. I was running, in EMT mode, talking to him in a voice that seemed really far away.
I called my partner at the time and, thank God, he was right around the corner by sheer dumb luck. But if I’d just been some regular Joe without EMT connections, Wyatt almost certainly would’ve died.
I remember sitting at his bedside and sort of hating him, like, You’re my brother and I’d do anything for you, but what the hell are you doing to yourself? Is getting high really that important?
What I said instead was, “You have to promise me. You have to swear you’ll never touch that stuff again. I’ll help you in any way I can. But you have to want it, Wyatt. I can’t force you. You have to want to get clean.”
He cried and held my hand. I felt his warm tears on my face as I kissed his cheek. He whispered, “I promise. I don’t want that shit. I don’t even enjoy it anymore. It’s just like this—shit, I dunno. I hate it. I need help.”
And he got help: rehab, support, the whole shebang. What happened next was just predictable and sad. He went to a party and, hey presto, there were some drugs there, because of course there were, because this is a goddamn epidemic. Wyatt told himself he’d only do a little, just one line.
But it’s never just one line. Not with people like Wyatt. That’s what Ricky will never understand. He can go out and have fun and then forget about it the next day. But for Wyatt, doing just one line is like trying to fall down just one step of a staircase. Once the fall starts, the end is a long way down.
I don’t have long to brood on morbid thoughts before we pull up to the next location.
“You good?” Ricky asks, actually seeming tender and genuine for a moment.
I swallow, bury those awful memories, and nod. “Let’s go.”
I switch off my emotions as we head into the upscale townhouse. The furniture is different and the place smells a lot better. The girl who greets us this time has a fancy sort of Upper West Side accent and she’s wearing pearls and a pencil skirt.
But the scene is pretty much the same: some idiot wanted to get to outer space, so he injected the goods straight into his arm.
Thankfully, the naloxone works on this one, like it usually does, and we’re able to take him to Betty knowing that he’ll most likely live. Then it’s time to go downtown for a traffic collision call.
But hey, at least I can look on the bright side. At least it’s not another overdose.
When my shift is done and the sun is rising, I ride the elevator up to my apartment and try not to fall asleep as I stagger in. My roommates are sitting at the kitchen table, eating breakfast. Their day is just beginning.
“Is it Halloween?” Zora laughs, eyeing me through her stylish hipster glasses “Because you look like a zombie, girl.” She’s covered in tattoos and works as a graphic designer. She wears fishnets to work. She’s awesome.