stand-in for all dinners, movies, parties, and nights out that I miss. She’d be out having fun, having drinks, having a life, but never far from the understanding that I was out there somewhere—in the middle of a bad neighborhood, a bad call, a bad night. She spent every holiday with someone else. One New Year’s Eve, after the toast but before Dick Clark signed off, I called to say I’d just run a bad call. A couple of bodies, one disemboweled, organs in the street. She could hear in my voice that it bothered me, but she was a million miles away, and there was nothing she could do. I told her to call me at midnight, and she said, “It’s almost one.”
“Oh,” I said. “Well, happy New Year.”
Driving down the street, with Atlanta slowly rolling past our windows, she says that recently, she’s been alone in other ways.
Yes, she thought it was creepy that I cut obits out of the newspaper and keep them in a folder, but for a long time she thought I hadn’t changed in any elemental fashion. I’d always considered myself invincible, she says, though not because I’m brave. In her view, I’m full of unearned confidence and possessed of a dreamer’s inability to dwell on the past. Death and dead people, the ever-present threat of folding under pressure, she didn’t think they affected me.
“You were having too much fun,” she says. “You were, I don’t know, like an adolescent in search of adventure.”
This sounds like the truth.
She didn’t expect me to take to the medicine the way I did, but what really surprised her was the way I took to the patients. “Remember Jane?”
I laugh. Jane was a homeless woman, a crack whore, and a regular. Sabrina and I bumped into her one day while we were tailgating a Georgia Tech game and she was digging in the trash. Jane walked right up to me like we were old friends, even knew my wife’s name.
“I could tell by the way she looked at you,” Sabrina says, “that you treated her with respect. You have a lot of good in you, and this job brought it out.”
We ride for a minute in silence, and she’s polite enough not to mention Ponytail, Jane’s boyfriend, who was also at the game. In what has become a legendary story among our friends, Ponytail nodded to Sabrina and said, “Holla at me, ’cause with an ass like that, I can make you some real money.”
After a minute, Sabrina says that something has changed. It’s been a while since I’ve looked forward to work, but I no longer enjoy the patients. I’m gone nights and weekends and most holidays, and when I return, I refuse to talk about it. If I met Jane today, would I still be kind to her? There’s no easy answer to that question, because what was once in me is gone. Not gone forever, probably, but gone until I break free. In the meantime, I’m somewhere else, and Sabrina is alone.
I’ve never thought of it like that before. I was simply a guy pursuing life’s darker edges. It never occurred to me that I wasn’t making the journey alone, that Sabrina was there the whole time and it was her fight, too. Our marriage has survived a career that breaks so many others because of a lack of secrets—mostly mine—but now Sabrina has laid hers bare.
It’s been a long decade for both of us. It’s time to come home.
“I think it’s time to quit,” she says.
I nod like I’ve seen this coming all along.
• • •
By chance, after I turn in my notice, I’ve got six days off. That’s a lot of time to think, to wonder about what I’ve done and whether, after everything, it’s time to go. The decision feels all wrong until I show up the next week. The smell of the ambulance, the scratch of a freshly pressed uniform, the clunk of the boots, all tell me my time has come. Grady is in the midst of a major overhaul—staff, philosophy, everything. They’ve even changed the uniform. The light blue shirts of my day are gone, and in their place is a gray shirt with black pants. It doesn’t look like a Grady uniform. All new employees have been issued the gray, and as existing employees have their annual review, they’re given the new color. One by one the old blue disappears. I’m the last holdout. I want to ride