The Replacement Child - By Christine Barber Page 0,40

of the article was a quote from a scientist: “We are five to ten years away from a cure.” Maxine started to underline the quote, but the pen poked through the paper, ripping into the words. She stopped, surprised, then pushed the pen harder, digging into the table and scribbling furiously.

At eleven thirty A.M., Lucy and Gerald were in the Piñon fire station writing their run reports. Two other EMTs had shown up to the accident within minutes. They had helped load the man into the ambulance and taken him to St. Vincent Hospital. Gerald told Lucy to sit in the front passenger seat of the ambulance—like a misbehaving child—while he and an EMT worked on the man in back. She felt completely ineffectual, sitting there staring out the window as the real medics helped the patient. She heard them moving in the back, talking to each other in low tones as equipment beeped and whirred. The EMT driving the ambulance never even looked her way. She knew what they thought of her, and they were right. She was not cut out for this.

The patient ended up having a closed-head injury, a broken leg, and possibly a ruptured spleen. Gerald had to explain to her in slow words what the injuries meant. Lucy was going to call the hospital later. She hoped he would live. His name was Earl Rivera, which they found out after his wife passed by the accident on her way to work. Lucy had first heard her screams over the buzzing extrication saw. Lucy had looked around crazily, afraid for a second that the saw was cutting into the patient. Then she saw a woman standing with a sheriff’s deputy. The woman was doubled over and shrieking. The deputy patting the woman’s back looked very scared and very young.

Lucy walked over to the woman without thinking and led her away from the scene. Lucy had her sit down on a running board of the fire truck, while she told a firefighter to go get Mrs. Rivera some water. Then she started asking questions about anything that might stop the woman from screaming. She found out that Mrs. Rivera worked for the state accounting office and that she and her husband had been married for twenty-one years. They had three children. The oldest, a girl named Joyce, was graduating from the University of New Mexico with a degree in engineering in May. Mrs. Rivera showed Lucy a picture of the family. Joyce looked a lot like her mother. Lucy helped Mrs. Rivera call her sister, who came to take her to the hospital.

Now, sitting in the Piñon fire station, Lucy was trying to figure out how to tell Gerald that she was quitting. She couldn’t do this work. She wondered how anyone could.

When Lucy was seven, she’d run barefoot along a creek and gotten a piece of rusted metal stuck in the bottom of her foot. Her mother had frantically called an ambulance. The paramedic who had taken care of her was smiling and soothing; he’d told Lucy that she had beautiful eyes. She was enthralled. He was her savior.

Earl Rivera might think she was his savior. The thought almost made her laugh.

She watched Gerald as he scribbled on his report. He hadn’t said anything since leaving the hospital.

Gerald looked up, catching her staring at him. He must have seen something in her face.

“How are you doing?” he asked, putting his pen down.

“Do you want the truth or a lie?”

He smiled. “The truth this time.”

“I never want to see something like that again.”

He sighed and finished off the last of the coffee in his chipped brown mug. “Did I ever tell you why I stopped being a full-time paramedic and became a volunteer?” Without waiting for her to answer, he said, “One night when I was working for the city, my partner and I got called out on a sick call. That’s as much as the 911 dispatcher told us. As far as we knew, this guy had the flu. It turns out the guy felt sick because he had been shot twice. So there we were, without any police around, trying to save this guy, and the shooter shows back up. He fires off two more rounds and kills our patient.”

Gerald went to get another cup of coffee, leaving Lucy waiting at the table. She watched him add cream and sugar. He stirred the cup a few times before saying, “I quit over that. I started