Rescue - By Anita Shreve Page 0,47

a patchwork quilt Rowan’s grandmother made, the quilt and half the top sheet now on the floor. Webster, an inexpert bed maker himself, has never been able to teach Rowan the proper way to do hers. Webster sometimes finds the blanket drawn up to the pillows with what looks like one strong swipe.

In the corner of the room are Rowan’s guitar and clarinet. Webster hasn’t heard her play either in months. Webster knows that if he opens Rowan’s desk drawers, he will find various tubes of lip gloss, several dozen Bic pens with the tops chewed, a photo of Sheila and Rowan shortly after the baby’s birth (the photo viewed so often that it no longer holds any power over Webster or Rowan—or does it?), costume jewelry Rowan received as presents years ago and can’t bear to throw away, and various coins. Periodically Webster has Rowan collect all the loose change in the house, put it into wrappers, and take it to the bank, Rowan getting half the score. One recent Christmas, Webster gave Rowan a machine that sorted and wrapped the coins. Before Christmas dinner, Rowan presented her father with $260 in neat tubes.

But Webster will no longer look through Rowan’s drawers, the result of an agreement on Webster’s part not to pry. In the fall, right after Rowan’s seventeenth birthday, Webster found a card of birth control pills in the desk and called her on it. It was a mistake that led to the worst fight father and daughter had ever had. Webster winces just to think of it, his own anger (at what, really? His daughter’s sexuality? Her preparedness? Her common sense?) just as immediate and sharp as Rowan’s, with all sorts of pent-up frustrations leaking out on both sides: a mysterious dent on the front bumper of the Toyota neither would claim; a C– on a Spanish test that Rowan defended by proving that she knew the material—she brandished the corrected paper annotated with sympathetic comments from her teacher—but couldn’t finish the test on time; and a curfew that Rowan thought punishing and laughable. The invasion of privacy, Rowan insisted, was unforgivable. In the end, Rowan took care of the dent in the car, though Webster paid. Webster relented on the curfew. Both agreed that a Spanish tutor might be a good idea. Webster promised never again to pry.

He rolls, and his radio digs into his waist. He takes it off.

Before he died, his father sold the store for a modest sum that after taxes and debts went to Webster. He was thirty-two then with a ten-year-old daughter and no wife. The bulk of the money went to day and night child care over the years, and he set aside most of the rest for Rowan’s education.

Now Webster makes $57,000 a year. He’s reached the top. He’ll never make more than that, apart from yearly incremental raises. Not even yearly lately. The next four years will be rough, but not impossible.

Or maybe they will be impossible now. He thinks of the present Rowan gave him at breakfast. That forecast might as well have been a picture of his daughter in the space of any given day: a sun, a sun with cloud, rain, and another sun.

His radio sounds the tones. “Webster,” he says.

“I need you to come in early. Actually right now,” Koenig says.

“Be right there.”

“No. You’re closer.”

Koenig gives Webster the address.

“What is it?”

“Forty-eight-year-old male. Difficulty breathing.”

The patient, confused and sweating, is sitting on a Persian rug and leaning against a wall. Webster has enough time to register the cathedral ceiling, the oversized flat-screen television, and the wall of glass with the view of the Green Mountains beyond. Koenig finds the man’s radial pulse and applies the blood pressure cuff. The redheaded wife stands, puts her hands to her head, and spins with anxiety. Two girls with similar hair, about five and eight, have been banished to the kitchen, but Webster can see small toes hugging the doorsill.

“Where does it hurt?” Webster asks the man.

The patient puts his hand on his chest and runs it down his left arm.

“BP seventy-eight over thirty-six,” Koenig reports. “Can’t get a pulse. Respirations thirty-two and shallow.”

Webster applies the electrodes from the monitor. Right arm, left arm. Right leg, left leg. “Get a line in,” he says to Koenig. “He needs a fluid challenge to get that pressure up.”

“We were just having coffee,” the wife says in a high-pitched voice, as if she can’t believe it. She’s jumping up and down,