At six a.m., four hours after Mason and I safely delivered Mollie to St. Joseph’s ER, it was finally the end of our shift. Tired and silent, we headed back to the station to clean and restock our rig. When we were done, Mason checked his phone as we walked to our cars. “Want to come over? Gia says she’s making waffles.”
“Really?” I asked, knowing full well that Gia’s culinary talents were mostly limited to boxes of macaroni and cheese and Bagel Bites.
Mason grinned. “Yeah, probably toaster waffles, but it’s the thought that counts. She might even manage to not burn them.”
I laughed, thinking it was a good thing that in order to maintain his beefed-up physique, my partner basically subsisted on protein shakes and the cooked chicken breasts he bought in bulk from a local butcher. “Sorry, man, but I’m wiped. Think I’m just going to head home and crash.”
“All right,” Mason said. “See you later.”
“You know it,” I said. I climbed into my truck, and pointed it toward home.
As I accelerated onto the freeway, I wondered if, despite my fatigue, I’d be able to fall asleep. I often felt wired after work, an electric panic buzzing through me, and there were few things that sanded down that anxious, jagged edge. My training had taught me that the fits of anxiety I’d struggled with since I was a kid were functions of brain chemistry, linked to emotion via the limbic system. My response to stress was, for lack of a better phrase, simply the way I was wired. But as I’d gotten older, especially after I started dealing with the often nerve-racking circumstances of my job, the symptoms I experienced had become acutely physical—shortness of breath, aching muscles, hot, angry pinpricks traveling in raging currents over my skin. I’d never told anyone—not Mason, not my mom, not even Amber—how bad it sometimes got. I simply pushed it down as best I could, doing whatever I had to in order to keep it from controlling me.
Now, I gripped the steering wheel, the muscles in my legs tensing as unthinking, I pushed my right foot down harder on the gas pedal. Without signaling, I changed lanes at the last moment before I might have rear-ended a white sedan, then put even more pressure on the gas. My shoulders hunched and I thought about whether or not I could beat my record of getting from the station to my apartment in under ten minutes. I’d have to hit 100 miles an hour in order to do it, and a glance at the speedometer told me that I was already at 80.
I felt the tension in my body rise even further as I hit 90 miles an hour, then whipped in front of a red Jetta and crossed over another lane in order to keep from missing the Lakeway exit. Horns honked and I heard tires screeching as I jammed on the brakes, my heartbeat beginning to slow down as my vehicle did, too. That hard and fast rush, followed by a sudden drop of adrenaline, was the only thing that relieved the internal pressure I sometimes felt, that helped me relax.
My apartment was just a few blocks off the freeway, a one-bedroom place on the first floor of a converted house at the bottom of High Street. There was barely enough space in the living room for a small, slightly ratty couch that I’d picked up for fifty bucks on Craigslist. But I had a flat screen hanging there and one in my bedroom, where my bed consisted of a box spring and mattress on the floor, and that, coupled with a functioning bathroom and the tiny galley kitchen, was all I really needed.
At twenty-five, I sometimes felt like I should move into something more adult—whatever that might mean—but the apartment was cheap and my neighbors were mostly college students, which worked well for my weird schedule. They tended to be on campus when I was home during the day and needed to sleep. My shifts were typically overnight, which were the peak partying hours for the young people in my building. They all knew I was a paramedic, though, and a few times I’d awakened to pounding on my front door when one of the students had passed out from having too much to drink, and their friend wanted me to make sure no one was going to die.
After parking in the small lot behind the building, I opened my front door and stepped inside, heading immediately for the kitchen to search out something to eat. I found only a lone pizza in the freezer and stuck it in the microwave to cook while I headed into my bedroom to change my clothes.
After wolfing down my freezer-burned meal standing next to the sink, I drank a big glass of water and took the few steps back to my bedroom, where I collapsed onto my bed, propping myself up with a few pillows. I clicked on the TV, more for the background noise than anything else, and when the news showed a clip of a house fire somewhere down in Tacoma, I wondered how Mollie was doing. That was often the hardest part of my job: not knowing the end of the story for the people I treated. I liked to believe she was fine. I had to tell myself that so I could continue doing my job.
I wondered what Amber was doing right then, if she was with Daniel or if she was already at the gym for work. I grabbed my phone, thinking I would send her a text, but then remembered that I’d promised myself to wait at least a few days before contacting her after she’d gone back to school. I didn’t want her to assume that I was just sitting around, thinking about her. Which I was, but she didn’t need to know that.
Instead, my mind wandered back to her almost three-month-long stay in the hospital during her sophomore year, where doctors had immediately hooked her up to a feeding tube so she wouldn’t die from malnutrition. I remembered overhearing a nurse say that Amber was one of the worst cases of anorexia he’d ever seen. That some cancer patients weighed more than Amber did, even after they’d been through several rounds of chemo.
“What’s the last thing you remember?” I’d asked her, when she was finally conscious long enough to have a conversation. I was there every day after school, sitting next to her bed, whether she was awake or not. I watched her sleep—her eyes twitching beneath closed lids, her emaciated limbs sticking out of her hospital gown, unmoving.
But that day, she was awake, and only a week into her hospital stay. She rolled her head to one side in order to look at me and pulled the oxygen mask from her face. “Walking up the stairs to my room, feeling dizzy,” she said. “And then . . . waking up here.” She glanced down at the PIC line in her chest that was delivering the nutrition she so badly needed. “I can’t wait to get this thing out of me. I can totally feel it making me fat.”
“Are you kidding me?” I demanded. I stood up from my chair and gripped the rail on the side of her bed. “Not eating is what landed you here, Amber. You can’t fuck around with this shit anymore, okay? It’s going to kill you. It almost did.”
“Getting fat will kill me,” she whispered, and then I couldn’t help it, I started to cry. Not the quiet, silently weeping kind of crying, either. I sobbed. My shoulders shook and tears dripped down my cheeks and landed on her arm.