Emergency Run

By Lynn, David H

So, okay, Caroline has done this a thousand times. Or if not, then it seems like it and it’s been plenty enough. Sometimes they’ll be gone already by the time the emergency squad arrives, and there’s nothing she or the team can do. CPR. Defibrillators. The body will jerk and jump and flop back. Nothing. Others, they look like nothing’s wrong at all, them a bit vexed at the fuss or puzzled maybe. Maybe they’ll be cradling their left arm like it hurts or is suddenly heavy. What made them decide it was a heart attack and call 911? She wonders that sometimes. Of course, many’s the time they’re wrong-no attack, just indigestion or the flu.

But this run is tense. Out of sync from the get-go.

Randy Jenkins, their squad leader, has paged her twice in four minutes, even though at the first buzz from the dispatcher she rushed straight away from the old woman whose blood sample she was collecting. (The insurance company won’t reimburse for a second visit, but that goes with doing this job.) The damn pager trills again on her belt as she’s pulling in next to the squad’s ambulance- she can see Randy at the wheel. Then she’s up shotgun and no joke from him, no flirt, nothing, (a relief for sure, but also goes to show things are out of whack), and he’s already got the vehicle rolling.

Not that there’s far to go, just up the road to the Student Health Center. Even on a short run the squad is supposed to use the siren. Randy doesn’t bother. But as they wheel into the drive, Caroline thinks it’s as if some kind of silent siren has been blowing its head off anyway, a special whistle that has the college students milling around outside, watching, glum and scared. They’ve only come here so Doc Hazzard could check them out for STD’s or asthma or strep.

The nurses and receptionist aren’t doing much better. They’re flapping themselves about in little circles as the squad skids up on the loose gravel, its lights flashing silent and wild.

As team paramedic, Caroline is swinging out her door before the vehicle has fully stopped, jogging quick but under control onto the porch. Randy and Steve Coady, a student trainee who’s been riding in back, will hump the equipment behind her.

Like most every afternoon, Doc has been on duty in the two-and- ahalf story clapboard house. He’s waiting for them in his office. Subdivided over decades and added onto by happenstance, the health center is a complete hodge-podge of elbowed hallways and improvised partitions.

Caroline realizes-the kind of thing you realize in a rush-she’s never actually been in Doc Hazzard’s office before. She plunges through the door, and the dark little room is crammed with books and random bits of medical equipment, and maybe a dozen old clocks, some of them with their pendulums happily wagging away. Oh yeah- somewhere she’s heard that he collects them. But she’s never been in this office before, which strikes her as kind of strange now that she doesn’t really have time to think about it.

He’s sitting in an old wooden desk chair, gazing towards her and very still, which is also something she can’t remember ever seeing, him sitting down. Except maybe when he’s crammed hunkering on his haunches next to her in the back of the medic, tending whoever is lying on the gurney, the two of them rolling with the sway of the vehicle on its rush toward the county hospital.

“Hey, Doc,” Caroline says, all sweetness and light as she wraps the pressure cuff around his arm. “When did this all start?”

“It’s nothing,” he says. Just as she expects him to say.

“Okay, I hear you.” She’s working quick, already pumping the cuff tight and reading her watch. “But when did you first notice this nothing?”

He won’t look her in the eye, and with his pale blue eyes and his pout and his shock of wild hair, even if it’s thin and graying, he might be impersonating an obstinate schoolboy. “Yesterday. It was just stress. It’s probably just stress.” But the doctor is also gray, his skin clammy, blood pressure low and pulse not what it should be.

“I’ll bet you never even called it in, did you? Did Nurse Radcliffe figure it out and make the call?” Caroline’s shaking her head and not giving him time to reply. “You ought to know better,” she mutters.

“Can you get that thing in here?” she yells. But the gurney won’t make it into the cluttered office, so Randy and Steve set the brake and tear the straps loose on the other side of the door.

“You come on now,” she orders.

“I don’t need this. I can ride with you,” he says, not quite whining and not even convincing himself.

She helps him up from the chair, a hand under his elbow, lifting, urging him forward at his own pace. He makes it to the gurney, and he’s panting now, and sweat beads are popping on his neck and brow. First he sinks onto the padded seat, then sort of rolls full out. While the boys are strapping him down, chest and legs, Caroline notices him close his eyes, letting go just a little bit, just for a moment.

She fumbles with the buttons on his starched and ironed shirt- she knows there’ll be hell to pay if one pops off-so she can put the stethoscope against his chest. The long scar startles her, though at some level she knew it would have to be there, a blue-white rip that’s probably more pronounced right now anyway, slicing from the top of his sternum down at an angle across his ribs and into the softer flesh below his belt. seeing it, she’s surprised the wound didn’t kill him after all, all those years ago.

And that’s when a sudden surge of warmth catches her by surprise, almost a thumping blow to her chest. As if an attack sympathetic to his own has flushed through her. Except it’s different. She recognizes it right away and falls back a step, startled, needing to consider or get a better look, while Randy and Steve roll the gurney toward the medic.

She’s worked with Jeremy Hazzard better than nine years now. At first she lived in mortal terror-him brusque and impatient, demanding a perfection that always seemed just beyond the furthest finger-tip-reach of achievable when it came to equipment properly sanitized and stowed, procedures precisely choreographed, and patients triaged, bandaged and, most precious of all, stabilized.

Down time could be just as awkward. Doc Hazzard never made small talk easily, never went out with the crew for a simple beer. Or if he did try and hang out, say in the ready room on a Sunday, maybe football on the big TV and pizza slices passing hand to hand, he’d be restless and stiff, twitching almost.

The E.M.T. training he supervised was tough too, every detail, every drill. But she didn’t mind the toughness. It honed her, challenged her.

But early on she was scared, no-wary-of him because he seemed, well, so out of place. Almost like he came from a different planet. Look at the way he was about his shirts-the only personal possession he’d fuss over. She knew some of the girls at the laundry, and they’d just roll their eyes. His collars had to be ironed just right. Not too much starch -but they better be crisp. And those precious cuffs. French cuffs, for heaven’s sake. Who in Ohio did that? Except Caroline knew he didn’t actually wear them full out with cufflinks most of the time. Routine and ritual: first thing every work morning, standing in the window of the health center, he pops the little studs out of the cuffs, slips them in his pocket, and folds the sleeves back, once, twice, exactly so.

Once, she’d thought about buying him a set as a thank you, given all he’d done for her. His birthday was coming up-a fact she discovered only by chance from one of his ex-wives, Sandy, who maybe was still married to him at that point. But the only kind they had at Wise Jeweler’s on Mulberry Street, cufflinks with little train engines or gold hearts soldered on, they didn’t look like the ones he wore, somehow so simple and elegant, and she felt stupid even caught studying them in the glass case like it was for some exam. She bought a nice card instead. Which she suspects he never got around to opening.

But what intimidated her, early on at least, was more than his education (which you’d have to spy in his voice anyway because, unlike every other doctor in the county, diplomas weren’t hanging overhead to prove him some kind of blue-ribbon stud) or where he came from or even the damn cufflinks. It was in the bits and pieces she’d pick up through the grapevine, from ex-wife Sandy and others too-stuff anyone else would parade around in stories for the rest of their lives. How he’d been wounded as a medic in Vietnam, for starters. Apparently the healing of that scar across his breast and belly was slow, difficult, never really complete, though he was already in med school by then. Afterwards, he builds a practice up in Cleveland. Only to abandon it, no warning, no explanation- Caroline figured that must have been the beginning of the end with Audrey, ex-wife number one.

So why pick Coshocton County? Talk about rhyme, reason, and none of the above. No one has an answer to that one. First, sort of out of the blue, he volunteers to take over the emergency room at County, duty none of the local O.P.’s want to touch. It’s always been a low-mantotem-pole rotation. Then, maybe five years later, the college dean begs him to fill in for Dr. Shepard, who’s been ministering to students almost since horse-and-buggy days. In his seventies, he’d become a little too eager offering breast exams to the coeds. Dr. Hazzard’s responsibilities will last only a few months while they hire someone permanent. Promise. And then comes the years she knows almost first hand. Did they ever really search for a replacement? Doc Hazzard steps in to the little student health center-almost starting from scratch to where it is today-and unlike the emergency room or his own practice, the duties of college physician give him off-duty time for training the emergency squad. And there’s the women’s shelter too. And the homeless services, and the county jail. Any local organization with sense enough to ask his help, because he can’t, won’t, ever say no.

This all is what’s puzzled her. Doc Hazzard a mystery, like a foreigner or a strange pet you don’t ever understand but get used to. It was who he was, and after a while it just didn’t bother her anymore.

She never expected to be doing this anyway. She volunteered to join the squad because that’s what Randy was doing after he dropped out of the Nazarene College on the other side of town. It was a way to spend more time with him, because they were together then. Then after a couple of years they weren’t together, because Randy had been doing something more than flirt with Rhonda Jean Owens. At least that was the excuse she told both him and herself when she broke it off. But by then she’d already passed the first two levels of E.M.T. certification, and Doc Hazzard was encouraging her, baiting her, daring her through the final rigorous stages of paramedic training. She wasn’t about to leave and go back to what her life had been.

When the moment finally arrived, he was the one carrying the long cardboard tube like a baton out into the fire station’s parking lot. He motioned for her to climb into their ambulance. “Look at that,” he said admiringly. “Do you realize? You just worked some magic, Caroline.” He gestured from front to back with a wave of the baton then handed it up to her. Inside was her paramedic certificate. “All you had to do was set foot up there and this squad wagon became a medic. I think that must mean it’s for real.” He shook her hand. “I’m proud of you.”

She’d felt a rush then too, for sure. Gratitude, pride, not a little disbelief.

She jogs out to that same medic just as the boys finish hoisting the gurney up into the back. They turn, waiting for her to scramble in as well. They’ll ride up front, this time with both siren and lights at full blast for sure. ‘

But Caroline hesitates. Not so much a hesitation as a hiccup, a double bounce on her toes before she’s up and through and the door is swinging shut behind. And she’s watching herself tend to him. His eyes are closed again, his breathing shallow, a light pant. She should touch him to check his pulse again and she hesitates, again. His eyes flicker open and he looks up at her.

“Hey,” he murmurs. “Last time I was on my back this way, they’d brewed up a whole war around me. I hope there’s no fuss like that this time.”

The wan little smile he gives her is like a knife, slicing through the muscle of her chest, releasing the warmth and pressure that flooded there only moments ago. Caroline never cries-she’s one tough broad, as Randy often boasted, sometimes not a happy boast, but she’s come to like the notion-so naturally the tears are already running down her cheeks and dripping off the tip of her nose. When she wipes at them with the back of her hand she makes an almighty mess.

Fortunately, Doc Hazzard’s eyes are closed again. And his vitals are stable, so she takes two seconds to wrestle a tissue out of her jeans pocket. Here she is, breaking one rule after another of the hygiene he’s been so insistent on while teaching her.

Shit, she’s thinking. Shit, shit, shit.

No goddamn warning or hint or nothing, just the overwhelming fact and certainty smacking her between the eyes.

Why now? she wonders.

It’s horrible.

Not to mention absolutely nuts.

What it’s not is anything like that platonic stuff that Randy is always gassing about while trying to get back in her pants. But it’s not really hot either-about sex. She doesn’t want to sleep with him.

Well, maybe she does, but that’s not the point.

It sure as hell isn’t maternal.

She just wants him. Every little bit and scrap of him.

Caroline never cries and she’s thirty-five years old and never been in love, not like this, and she’s been so proud of it. Now what the hell is she supposed to do?

Normally, she’d make a clean hand-off at the emergency bay, but this time she’s walked the gurney all the way through to the curtained cubicle and helped transfer him up into the hospital bed. No one seemed to notice her, not even him. Well, why the hell should he?

Back out at the medic she cooks up a ragged excuse about checking on some one else who’s already been admitted. So Randy and Steve make the five-mile run home without her. It’s not like she’s essential. There are two other paramedics they can call and seven E.M.T.’s.

She just needs some space to calm down. To think.

This isn’t life or death, not in any immediate sense. If he’s actually suffered a heart attack, it hasn’t been catastrophic. They can almost certainly deal with it. She’s sure of that. Once they’d got him off the gurney, the doctor on duty had them pushing an I.V. into his arm with the usual cocktail of blood thinner, muscle relaxant, anti-coagulant.

Ahead there may be surgery, of course. Angioplasty or even a bypass. But she knows he’s not about to die on her.

Maybe life would be easier if he would.

She shakes her head at that thought and then discovers that the thought has set off a trembling from her legs right up to her throat.

He must be fifty. She figures for a moment. Probably more-closer to sixty.

That doesn’t matter either.

Wandering into the waiting room was a bad idea. It’s sure as hell no refuge. She’d hoped to slip into a seat in the far corner and let the rush and swirl sweep around her while she calmed down and thought it through and recovered herself. But it’s a quiet Tuesday afternoon. She knows too damn many people. seems like half the folks she’s ever rushed here in the wagon are back for some kind of procedure or test. They’re all so grateful, and have just got to express it.

Not to mention the nurses, the techs, even some of the doctors, ones not convinced they’re the second coming.

Everyone figures it’s real nice to say hi.

Sometimes, she thinks and not for the first time, living in a small town is a pain in the ass.

Steve Coady is still working on the squad wagon when Caroline returns to the station late in the afternoon. He’s already emptied the cabinets and storage bins in the back for a thorough washing out. Now he’s restocking as she comes in the door. If he’s had any classes today-and she knows he’s been developing a bad habit of skipping-they’d be over anyway. It’s not like he’s involved in athletics or a frat. Training as an E.M.T., being part of the emergency squad, has become the center of his social life.

No one else is hanging around. The weekly training session will be tomorrow night, Wednesday, as usual. So once the cleaning is done, all he can do is wait for the next emergency call while playing video games in the rec room.

For the first time in better than six months Caroline wishes she had a smoke. She drops her backpack in a corner and hangs her coat on a peg.

“Hey,” she says to him.

“What’s up?” Steve glances round at her.

His jeans are riding so low on his hips-and he hardly has hips to begin with-she’s not sure what keeps them up. Which proves to her, as if she needs the proof, that there’s a decade difference between them. But she likes the look of those plaid jockeys peeking out and the non-hip hips.

“Pretty quiet,” she says. How lame can you get?

“For sure.” He shrugs.

“Listen,” she rushes into it and won’t hesitate any more and here it comes because otherwise it’s never going to happen and she doesn’t know how she’ll get through the evening on her own and she’d thought about Randy for maybe one-millionth of a second and how he’s been angling for it and how Rhonda Jean sure would deserve it, and how she knew she’d enjoy it too, except that he’d be just so damn pleased with himself and she couldn’t live with that, and spending the night as per most every other night with one of her girlfriends sure as hell won’t do, what with little Stevie unexpectedly waiting right here. “1 was on my way, you know, just going to throw some dinner together,” she says. “It’s just as easy to cook for two. And I think somewhere there’s this bottle of wine someone left behind. Anyway. Or are you supposed to do the cafeteria?”

Steve looks at her, trying not to show how astonished and eager, both, he is. “Whatever,” he says, a beat too quick to be as cool as he wants it to be. “Sure.”

Back in her apartment above the laundromat, she pan-fries a flank steak. Which is a mistake because in about five seconds smoke is billowing up to the ceiling. Naturally the smoke detector sets off in the doorway. Steve climbs on a wobbly chair to yank the battery while she’s shoving windows open on both sides of the room. A blast of steam from the dryers below blows through. And they’re laughing, howling at the idea of their own crew rushing over here to the rescue. Which is good, the laughing.

By the time they’re sitting at the table most of the smoke has cleared and the steaks are damn good. And before the bottle of rioja is quite empty she’s leading him back to the small bedroom, letting him think he’s the one doing the leading.

The wine has worked its way into her head and she’s a smidge high and into this. Nothing delicate or romantic about it-they’re both peeling off clothes and clambering towards the unmade bed. The boy has a silver ring in one ear. And a small tattoo, maybe a flower or a dolphin, he’s squiggling too much to get a good look it, above his right nipple.

He’s trying to be a bad boy, she thinks, and he’s so not.

He’s just cute.

And with that thought it starts to go wrong.

He’s already on top of her, in too much of a hurry, just like boys his age always used to be, she remembers too well. And she’d like him to go down on her or maybe have a little fun with this. But that’s academic anyway because she’s thinking now, so already it’s too late. Naturally, it means she’s going dry.

“Ow,” she gasps, biting her lip, as he pushes into her.

“Huh?” he mumbles, thrusting.

“Nothing. You go ahead.”

She’s lying back and trying not to let it hurt too much. She’s gone from thinking about what a nice boy he is, even if he’s a baby, to not even thinking about him at all. It’s Doc Hazzard now and only him, and she feels guilty, as if she’s being unfaithful.

No, it’s worse than guilty-she feels bad, this is what hurts, because she’s being unfaithful to herself.

It’s him she wants, more than ever, as this nice boy finishes more quickly than he wanted. He’s the one feeling guilty, she can tell, as he lies panting on top of her breasts, because he thinks he’s disappointed her.

“There, there,” she murmurs, running her fingers through his hair to comfort him.

After Steve has retreated to his dorm room-no way she was going to let him stay the night, not that he seemed inclined-Caroline gets dressed again and storms around the apartment, cleaning and rearranging, doing the dishes, stacking her videos and compact discs. Panting and flustered and thoroughly wretched, she undresses again and starts to climb into the shower but thinks better of it and runs the bath, hot as she can stand. Luxury for a midweek evening.

What now? she at last permits herself to wonder as bubbles billow over her breasts and belly. Hijacking the boy wasn’t a mistake, at least as far as she’s concerned. But it hadn’t distracted her the way she hoped. Might as well never have happened. Point is, it sure didn’t help with the real problem. Even if Stevie does what boys do and it gets back to Randy, so what?

That thought stops her for an instant. How many years, decades, has it been since she’s felt anything like that? Felt nothing. Not caring what Randy thinks or says or does-it ought to be liberating, something to toast. If the fact it took her this long weren’t so sad.

But none of that matters either. Only Doc Hazzard. He’s a dull ache just under her breastbone. Each breath aggravates the bruise.

Oh God, she sighs and inhales a stinging wad of bubbles.

The real problem -he’s twenty years older than her. More.

No, it’s not that either. It’s that he’s never noticed her as anything other than a trainee or an apprentice, maybe finally a colleague, even if she’s not a doctor. But never a hint that she might mean more than that to him. She doesn’t take it personally- she’s known him long enough. Through two wives for certain.

Caroline didn’t really know Audrey from up in Cleveland. She still visited occasionally when Caroline was first volunteering with the squad. And later, with a gap of three or four years between, there was Sandy. Who Caroline did know and liked a lot, and through Sandy she got to see what the man was like to live with.

He was a saint.

He is a saint.

Saints are hell to live with.

Would he notice her now, if she thrust herself upon him?

Could she live with such a man if he did take notice?

Something else long on her mind: it would seal that deal once and for all. She’d never have kids. She knows from what Sandy once confessed-it was during the divorce, Sandy gabbing blearily after too much chardonnay at a solidarity lunch-that he decided on a vasectomy while he was in med school, before either Audrey or she came along. He didn’t want the worry or responsibility of his own children. He was too busy worrying about other peoples’.

Caroline is still creating the list of reasons why it would drive her crazy, living with this man, as a second tub of water cools.

She’d wind up killing him or, more likely, herself.

This little game she’s playing helps. It really does.

It’s convinced her, totally, that she is beyond help or reason altogether.

In the days that follow she has the feeling she’s wading through a kind of dream or dare-that she’s testing herself or the limits of a fantasy that can’t possibly be real or work out any way she might imagine.

Tracking his physical status is easy. Given his importance to their operations, the emergency squad receives regular updates. And the early news is modestly reassuring. The initial attack was relieved quicklyonce Doc relented, once Nurse Radcliffe called 911, and once the squad finally got him to emergency. But now the question is how much damage the heart muscle suffered. A CAT scan has been ordered, and of course they’re monitoring his vitals.

For the time being Caroline quietly cancels the rest of her life, anything beyond her regular shifts for the squad. She isn’t available to run medical checks for insurance companies. Or to administer flu shots at the health department. Or to stand by with her kit in the dark corner of the high school gym during a big basketball game (though that alone costs her seventy-five bucks).

Not that she can muster the courage to visit his bedside. That would be too weird.

From time to time she finds it hard to breathe.

On the fourth day after arriving at Coshocton County Hospital, an impatient Doc Hazzard is scheduled to be shipped up to the Cleveland Clinic for further tests and, most likely, an angioplasty procedure. By rule and insurance regulation he’s supposed to travel by ambulance. Like any other private citizen he’ll have to go private. (The college township rescue vehicle can’t be out of commission for most of a day to ferry him.) Which is exactly what he expects, though over the course of a day and a half he also declares loudly and often to his colleague, Harry Nemitz, who is also now his cardiologist, that none of this is really necessary. Why not let him drive himself the two hours and no one be the wiser? Naturally, reports of this dialogue spread across the small community within a very little while, provoking knowing nods and not a little laughter.

What takes some doing is Caroline calling Vince Clippinger, who owns a private ambulance and also serves as local pest control consultant, and convincing him she might be interested in working some overtime after all. She has a sudden need for the extra pay, and no, she isn’t going to explain. He hesitates. Vince has been after to her to come over to the private sector longer than his own patience. As a good faith gesture, she adds before he can draw that next breath, she’d be willing to ride shotgun up to Cleveland no fee, just to get the lay of the land in his operation.

Doc Hazzard is more annoyed than surprised when she climbs out of the strange vehicle at the hospital entrance and swings the back open for him. He’s supposed to be strapped onto the gurney again for safety’s sake, but that far he won’t go and she’s not going to press him. With a hand from her he steps up into the ambulance, almost as if they’re heading off on a regular run. Abandoning her shotgun post in front, Caroline perches on the bench opposite him.

“Ready to roll,” she calls to Vince, who’s catching a quick smoke by the electric doors with one of the ER nurses.

“How long have you been moonlighting?” Doc asks, once they’re on the highway.

She’s finding it hard to look at him, partly because the full, deep sweep of her feelings has flooded from her belly into her chest and up into her throat, partly because he doesn’t look well, not at all. “Just started,” she mumbles, eyes on the gurney between them.

“I’m sure Vince Clippinger pays better than the township can do.”

“For sure.” She nods vigorously, miserable. ‘ *

He’s wearing his street clothes, khakis, a perfectly ironed, perfectly blue shirt, its cuffs invisible within a windbreaker. But the clothes seem to belong to someone else, his belt cinched tight an extra notch to hold his pants up. His skin is pale, almost bluish, with the papery fineness she’s seen in plenty of older people, her own father first among them. And a crease has appeared between his eyes-she’s sure it’s new. Who knows what caused it? Pain or worry, or something else entirely.

How does she take all this in without looking at him? She wonders at that.

She reaches for a stethoscope and surprises herself with her own impulsiveness. “I want to check you,” she says. Not waiting for a response, she comes closer to him and opens the top button of the shirt. She listens to the valves controlling ebb and flow, the pulsing whoosh of a heart. From the corner of her eye glimpses again and recognizes the pale purple-blue scar. Now, an intimate after tending him those few days ago, she knows its secret route across his breast and heart and belly. Oh, that scar. She draws the stethoscope away and averts her eyes as he buttons his shirt.

When Caroline was a young girl, ten, eleven and twelve, she had an occasional dream of discovering that one or the other of her parents had died or gone away for good. Worst was that in all the dream’s variations, she never had the chance to say goodbye-no last hug or kiss or acknowledgement of love. It filled her with an aching and desperate sadness that lingered even after she woke. Their actual deaths, within a few months of each other and years later, hadn’t been nearly so painful, or painful in a different, stretched out, final kind of way.

The memory of the dream, which blossoms now unbidden for the first time in many years, takes her breath away but gives her courage to glance up and confirm that new crease in Doc’s dear and drawn face, the pale blue of his eyes, which have never been so pale before.

And it comes to Caroline, a caustic benediction of the old dream, that Doc Hazzard is going to die. Oh, not now and not in Cleveland, and maybe not for years to come.

Death has never scared Caroline. The idea has never plagued her, though she knows that others endure a horror of extinction all their lives. The practical reality, on the other hand, hand in hand with the profession she has chosen, has been inevitable and sad too almost always, and natural in its own way. Why worry or fear it? Her mother passed away first-there was surprise in that, certainly. A woman never sick, not even sick the day they found her. Time came to wake up and she didn’t. It was no surprise, however, when Caroline’s father followed his wife those few weeks later. What place on earth did he have without this woman who’d been with him from the small school in the small town and on through his life?

Others have died along the way, inevitably. More than a few while Caroline was tending them. She’d be trying to coax a little flicker of breath, a heartbeat, nursing them hard. Only for what had been life to flutter into coldness, into nothing. Sometimes the paramedic felt frustration at her own impotence. Sometimes, perhaps after a long struggle, where she felt she wasn’t wrestling just the body before her but something darker, almost willful-she sensed that, yes she did, and never spoke of it -after a spasm from the heart suggested she might win after all, only for the beat, one-two, one- two, one, to miss the next stroke and subside, then a sudden raw outrage might surge through her. It made her want to wail and pound her fists against the cooling body. To all appearances, however, she was always controlled, always professional.

But now it all feels like a cruel trick, a conspiracy of the universe. Not that she fears her own mortality-that’s no more an issue than ever. But why should Doc Hazzard have to die? Not the sound of his heart but the glimpse of the ancient scar has brought the truth home. Only now at this advanced age does the puzzlement arrive for her, when she ought to be too old to think of marriage or children or death. It is a gift of her dreams and of the scar and of the crease between his dear eyes. Ever and forever without end. That’s what death is, and he is going to die.

She looks that fact full in the face. And suddenly, gently, something lifts from her and passes away.

She’s surprised, feels a little guilty. Why should this be?

She’s able to gaze now at Doc as if he can be the one to answer.

“How you feeling?” she asks.

He answers with a shrug. “Never better.” Wry, impatient, distant, he sits opposite her, hands between his legs.

She loves this man, that’s as true as ever, and admires him, teacher and friend. A protective, possessive kind of love to be sure. She nods slightly to herself, confirming it.

But she’s come to a new place. She has been released from a spell as if a fever has broken suddenly and entirely. It’s a relief, but a weary, sad relief.

She feels a bit chilly, and lonely too, as if, in some manner, she’s been left behind.

Doc Hazzard smiles and notices nothing, knows nothing. How like him, dear man.

David H. Lynn has been the editor of the Kenyan Review since 1994. His most recent book is Year of Fire, Stories, (Harcourt, 2006).

Copyright Triquarterly 2008

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