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The girl in the car is dead.
But she doesn't know it.
She doesn't look it, from the top. A little scuff on her face. You could mistook it for makeup, smudged by a careless hand. A little black and blue. A cut on her hairline that she would fret over as the doctor stitched her up to make her good as new. She's talking to them, her lashes fluttering, her breath in hasty little gasps as if she's perhaps simply nervous with all the commotion. Johnny can feel her pulse under his fingers - soft as midnight footsteps, a patter, quick, too quick he can see by the second hand sweeping around his watch, much too quick, as if all her blood was in a real big hurry.
Johnny thinks back to paramedic school. A trauma lecture. How blood clots. How the injury, like the tones dropping, signals the platelets to proliferate and for the blood plasma to form fibrin and for the blood to slow, to pack, to thicken and seal. When he was a boy he could skin his knees and forget, until his jeans peeled the scabs away and he would look down and see the denim darkened.
The girl in the car is going to die. She is already dead but she doesn't know it and it's better this way. It's better if he makes like to hold her hand when he checks her pulse. That dashboard is wedged hard against her legs and it's going to take time to extricate her and she doesn't have that time, and she's bleeding, and he can see the way the steering column is pressed against he belly and the way it's bent and he's pretty it's all what's holding her insides in place and they can crack this land yacht open like a coca-cola can and kill her now or they can wait, for the ambulance, and hope she doesn't die. But he looks into her dreamy eyes, the way her hair - long, straight, thick - falls around her face.
Back before paramedic school, at the fire academy, they told them about communication. Talk to each other, they said, no good to anyone if you go slinking off into a burning building and nobody knows where you are. Talk to each other.
Roy is with the girl's boyfriend. He has a broken arm and a t-shirt from the parks and rec department and blue jeans and fresh white sneakers. He has broad shoulders and a boyish face, with a split lip, but she was driving, and it's her side of the car that the little mustang - speeding, probably, but that's Vince's job - took out when it ran a red. Just in a real big hurry, it seems. The young man driving it, who is not much older than the boyfriend, is not drunk just real angry about his car. In a real big hurry. Some important meeting. He's not going to make it.
Neither is the girl. She's going to die and he knows it and he thinks she does, now, because her heart beats faster while her pressure drops and the ambulance isn't there yet, but isn't not going to matter. He's got an 18 in and wide open in her a/c, the bag hung up by his ear on the jesus handle, bent inward in the crash. The girl isn't crying. She has a sort of dreamy look on her face, and he tells her it's going to be okay.
He doesn't say that to people. But she doesn't know that.
Roy knows it, and looks up at him, and at the girl.
Her boyfriend is crying. Big boyish tears. He says she's going to be a camp counselor at a parks and rec camp somewhere up in the foothills. Going to spend the whole summer there. He was there last summer, he says, and it's real beautiful up there. He looks at her, and says, well, not as beautiful as you.
The girl, who is dying, looks into the sun. She's not afraid anymore not like she was when they cracked the door open and that's bad. Her boyfriend, who is crying, can't see her like this. Roy's gotta get him out of there. The ambulance is coming, and Chet is up against him with the jaws.
She shouldn't be alone, though.
But it's not the boy's job, is it. He loves her, surely he does like any boy, a good boy, with soft rounded cheeks who wants to spend a summer in the foothills with a girl, and maybe in another world where a mustang (a hot little convertible) didn't run a red light, they could get married. That's a long way off. The girl is dying. The ambulance is there and she is already dead. Roy is coaxing the boy to the ambulance and the boy is saying: you take care of her. You take care of her, alright?
He is briefly perplexed - something like a light, glancing off a broken mirror - he will take care of her. Why wouldn't he. He will take care of her, because she is dying, and she is -
Roy.
Talk to each other.
She codes. Rampart - he cannot, in the confusion, take note or care which doctor it is, but there's a heatedness to the voice that sounds more like Brackett - relays instructions, things his hands already know how to do. But it's not enough. The second ambulance will take her to the hospital and they will code her all the way because she is too young and she is too beautiful and because her boyfriend said take care of her -
But she was dead long before.
He doesn't know her. She doesn't even look like anyone he ever knew. She is pretty. She will be pretty for a little while longer.
This is not the first code he's run but this is not like all the rest as if there could be -
Something of the girl will linger. In her boyfriend's grief. In the shell-shock of her parents.
They need to go back. In service. To step into the sun and sit in the squad and squint past the visors and buy coca-cola and hot dogs and go on to the next call, or back to quarters, where the rest of shift will haunt them gingerly, and softly, because they have touched death and it is something peculiar and unseemly.
He wants to shower. He wants to run.
Roy probably wants to call his wife. His wife, too, is beautiful: sometimes, head cocked, at breakfast he imagines them as sweethearts, taking a drive. They have driven through every green light and stop sign unscathed and here they are, bickering gently in the kitchen, and one night at a party at the Florian Hall late, when the balloons were drifting on the floor and the crepe was wilted, he saw them dance, his chin resting on her head and his eyes half-closed, and dreamy, and perhaps he held her tighter than he needed to, because it was dark out by then.
"You wanna call Joanne," he says, standing by the ambulance bay doors, "I'll listen to the radio for us."
There is an orderly smoking nearby. He craves a cigarette. He has never smoked. His fingers want something to do so he fiddles with the strap on the HT.
"No, it's alright, I'll call her later," Roy says. He is squinting past the clean, white, pressed lines of the hospital - as clean and white and pressed as the doctors and nurses and orderlies.
"You always call her after a code, that's all."
Roy glances sharply at him. What he does when for once Johnny has the right words in his mouth, ready to go, at the right time, and manages to say them. "Yeah," he says. "Yeah, I guess I do."
"So I'm just sayin' you can call her. I got the HT. It'll be alright."
Roy hesitates. "No," he says. After a moment. "No. Let's go over to Red's. It's Tuesday. Red has two-for-one on Tuesday."
"You're not gonna call her?"
"No. No, it's alright. Let's go to Red's. You like Red's. Don't you still like Red's?"
"Yeah. Yeah, I do, I just - "
"Then let's go to Red's."
He opens his mouth. Closes it. Fingers the strap on the HT. The girl is dead. Beautiful girl, at that. Something of her will linger in the world.