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.