Rescue - By Anita Shreve Page 0,5

but he’d seen an ad that had triggered his curiosity.

“An EMT,” he said.

“An EMT?” his father asked, incredulous. “You’re kidding.”

“How long have you wanted to do this?” His mother’s voice was higher pitched than normal.

Webster lied. “A year or so.”

“It doesn’t pay very well,” his father, ever the pragmatist, said.

“Eventually the pay’s OK.”

“You’ll see horrible things, Peter.” This from his mother, her eyes distant.

“Where do you train?” his father asked.

“I’m looking into that right now,” Webster said, and with that his future seemed destined.

He took an EMT course at Rutland Hospital, went on observation tours, and passed the exams. His interest in emergency medicine grew steadily the more he learned about it, and it seemed to him that he had accidentally made the right choice for himself. He was twenty-one when he got certified.

For his graduation present, his parents gave him a sum of money that he used to buy a secondhand police cruiser, all the markings gone but still as fast as the day it had rolled out of the factory. Speed was everything for a medic, though in winter, when he had to put the studded tires on, he lost some of that.

Webster studied the woodwork around the window over the sink and guessed there probably wasn’t a right angle in the entire house. He doubted the farm had ever been prosperous. When his parents had bought the place—Webster had been seven—the kitchen floor was linoleum, the walls made of lath and goat’s hair, and the dining area was white with plaster dust. Up a flight of stairs was a sitting room with a blocked-up fireplace, a porch that had been finished off to make a sewing nook, and a decent-sized bedroom that his parents took over. In the attic were two small rooms that his cousins and aunts and uncles used when they visited.

Until Webster was twelve, he’d slept on a loft bed that his father had built in the sewing nook. When Webster turned thirteen and his body grew too long for the bed, his father knocked down the wall between the two attic rooms and made one big one. It had a sloped ceiling and a window at either end. The back window overlooked Webster’s mother’s vegetable garden, a large hydrangea bush, and a tall mimosa tree that produced puffy salmon-colored balls each August. Two Adirondack chairs were set underneath that tree, and it was there that his parents often sat in summer, trying not to pay too much attention to the vast tract of land they’d sold off to finance improvements in the hardware store.

Webster said good-bye to his parents and drove into the Vermont morning, the sun just rising, steam coming out the backs of the vehicles in front of him.

They couldn’t have sent the woman home yet, Webster reasoned, not with that level of alcohol in her blood, three and a half times the legal limit. Webster wanted to see her face and hear her voice. He’d done an “after” call only once before, with a ten-year-old who’d nearly drowned in a marble quarry. Webster had needed to see the boy alive. Needed to feel the reward of what he’d done. Needed to hear the parents thank him. At the time, three months into the job, he’d had a two-week run of lousy calls that had caused him to want to quit before he’d barely begun. Two children burned to death in a trailer fire. A cardiac call they might have been able to do something about had they been summoned sooner. A three-car collision on the ice on 42, an entire family of French Canadians wiped out: mother at the scene, father in the Bullet, baby daughter at the hospital.

Webster parked and walked into the ER. The staff knew him, and they didn’t. He cornered a nurse he thought he recognized.

“I brought a woman in last night,” Webster said. “DUI, stomach laceration.”

“They’re giving her fluids. She’s still got a Foley catheter. They’re going to discontinue her IV in half an hour.”

Webster checked his watch. “Half an hour? She could get the d.t.’s.”

“Doesn’t matter what I think. Towle’s orders. Signs of old bruises on her body, by the way.”

“I found something at the site that belongs to the woman,” he said.

“I’ll take it,” the nurse offered.

Ordinarily, Webster would have left it at that. “I’d like to see her if you don’t mind. Just to see how she’s doing.”

The nurse narrowed her eyes. “Visit away,” she said. “Bed number eight.”

Webster pulled the curtain