But the spring before he’d got his teaching credential and in the fall he’d been hired to teach second grade, so he stayed on the “call-in” list only as a favour. In fact, he’d worked only two times since September, both times when no one else was available and someone had called in sick at the last minute. That day I didn’t even know he was coming in until I saw him on the pavement.
Gus Fraser found him. Gus goes outside every morning to look around and get some fresh air in his motorized chair. He’s the one who hit the alarm button on the desk by the front door, and when the team head and I came pounding down the hall to see what was happening, I thought at first he was the one in trouble. He takes chances sometimes, he had a huge argument with the administrator about his morning visits because what would happen if his chair turned over on one of the paths he likes to take along the top of the canyon?
But he was shouting. “Outside. Outside, there’s somebody in a pool of blood in the parking lot.”
I grabbed the cordless phone unit from the front desk while Doris charged out ahead of me. Should I call 911 now? I remember thinking. We’re not set up to handle big emergencies, see. We provide backup service, we have trained nurses and a couple of doctors on call, but aside from basic first aid we aren’t supposed to do anything that a doctor hasn’t told us to do. I couldn’t imagine anything terrible happening outside, though. There had been nothing unusual when I came in, the place is a long ways from any place where bad guys hang out.
Doris was already kneeling beside the body when I came up behind her. I couldn’t see much, except for long legs in jeans because her back blocked my view. “My God,” I heard her say, and I started to dial for help. Whatever had happened was not good.
But when she heard my voice telling the dispatcher that we needed an ambulance right away, she turned around and yelled at me. “No,” she said. “Go back in the building and send somebody else out.”
“What?” I said once I’d given the information about where the paramedics should come. “Here, let me help,” I added, going over and getting ready to kneel next to her.
“No,” she said. She stood up and almost pushed me off balance. “No, you don’t belong here. Get somebody else to come out.”
When I first started working as a practical nurse I might have moved out of the way without thinking. You do that when you’re young, when you’re inexperienced, when you’re not sure you’ve learned all the stuff you were supposed to. But I’ve been working in hospitals and nursing homes for more than twenty-five years, and I know I know my stuff. “Oh, come on,” I said to Doris. “Don’t hog it.”
“I mean it,” she said. “You don’t belong here.”
It sounded to me like a challenge, an insult to my competence, and it made me mad. Doris and I had worked together for years, she knew I could be counted on.
So I pushed her aside.
To see my son lying in a pool of blood. His eyes were shut, his head was turned a little as if he were looking toward the complex building. I could not tell if he was breathing, but in the seconds I watched I saw the blood spread outward across the front of his shirt.
I have no recollection of what I did then. If there’s any help around, you’re not supposed to try to treat a loved one, not in an injury as serious as this. You’re too involved, your judgment might be off, you’re thinking love and caring and help when you should be running down the possible actions to take and their possible consequences. You need a cool head, a steady hand, a critical eye. Maybe I remembered all that, maybe I just did what Doris told me to do. Whatever, at least they let me ride in the ambulance that took him to the hospital in Vista.
The other time, the time on the cliffs when he was just a little guy, I rode in the ambulance, too, but in the back. It was a very long ride, and he clutched at my hand and I tried to keep out of the way of the medics. I knew something about emergencies, about health care then, and even though he was crying, I was hopeful. He would be all right. We had come this far together, it wouldn’t be fair if anything happened to him, now that I was beginning to get it right.
This time I knew more. I knew enough to realize that if he were a patient coming in from outside, the docs would be ready to tell the family to prepare for the worst.
I grew up along the cliffs, that was part of the reason it seemed so wrong that Will was injured there. We bought the house when I was eight, it was one of the first nice ones built along there, but we probably would never have got it if it hadn’t been for the housing project at the end of Sunset Cliffs Boulevard. Azure Vista was built as military housing during the war, and navy people were still living there when we moved into our house. The last of them moved out over the next couple of years, and the government sold the property to developers.
But the man who built our house had been slightly ahead of it all. It was a really nice house with a picture window and a circle drive and a two-car garage. My mother noticed it right away when she went wandering around. She’d been looking for a good place that we could afford for a long time, but my dad ran a garage and he had very definite ideas about how much we could pay. The places she liked were all “rich people’s” houses, he said, we should have something less pretentious, we couldn’t afford more, we’d be poking our heads up higher than we should. But then she found this house, which the builder could-n’t sell because of the housing project. She watched it from the time construction started through the year a big real estate agency had it listed until a homemade “for sale” sign appeared. Then she had Dad call and make an offer, which couldn’t have been much more than the construction costs.
Like I said, I was eight then, and my brothers were thirteen, fifteen, seventeen, and twenty. I had my own room and the boys shared two bedrooms. There was a patio in back and a big kitchen and a living room with pale carpet that my mother really loved. The only thing wrong with the house was both an advantage and a disadvantage: it sat just across the road from a stretch of cliffs about twenty feet high. To look out the picture window you would think you were right on the water. The cliffs dropped off steeply, with red sandstone terraces spreading out at the bottom. The whole stretch along there is a park now, but then it didn’t belong to anybody and we were free to scramble up and down and play in the tide pools and race the waves when they roared in from the middle of the Pacific.
Nothing ever happened to me and my friends, we were old enough to have a little sense, I guess. But the place is not as safe for little kids, and when Will and I moved back in when I started the LVN program, one of the things I tried to teach him was that he wasn’t supposed to cross the road unless he had a grownup with him. Didn’t take, obviously, but I guess what matters is all’s well that ends well. Aside from the limp, he was okay. He even surfed for a long time.
I say that like surfing was a badge of accomplishment, as if it was some sort of ultimate proof of fitness or skill or well-being or rank. Silly ideas left over from when I was in high school, I suppose; it’s strange how they stick to you. Lord knows I’ve put a lot of that stuff behind me, but there are things that are still there.
Girls didn’t surf back then. No, that’s not completely true. There were a handful who did: all thin, strong, blonde girls who could handle the big boards, which hadn’t yet been replaced by balsa and fibreglass ones. But I wasn’t one of them. Girls like me didn’t surf, partly because it was too expensive and partly because it just wasn’t done. A lot of energy went into avoiding things that weren’t done back then.
Chuck says that high schools are all alike—you have the ins and the outs, and the rich and the poor. He says that at his high school the football and basketball players were the stars. He says he knows all about it. Well, maybe, I say, but he is from eastern Kentucky, from a little town on the edge of the Blue Ridge Mountains. He never took me back there, so I can’t say firsthand, but it sounds less like Point Loma than like Alpine or Julian in the Cuyamaca Mountains where Danny and