I thought about how her family had come to the end of its line. I looked down and saw the dog standing next to me, looking in at her too. I thought about giving him a good kick, but then I thought, a dog, like a person, has to eat, has to do what it has to do to survive.
That was when a gleam caught my eye. It came from under the radiator. I went in and got down on my knees and looked. I knew what it was. It was her ring, her diamond ring. It must have fallen off her skinny finger when she died, and rolled under the radiator.
I reached down and picked it up. It was a beautiful ring. I imagined how she must have felt when she first received it. A ring like that had seen a lot itself, from the day it was clinked out of a wall in some South African mine. It had arrived at her house and glimpsed a young beauty, and then every day had seen her slowly age, and now rot. I wondered where it would go now, and if it would ever see the face of another young woman, and then it dawned on me.
The ring had been a curse to her. She’d be better off without it up in heaven, where she could be free to find a new man. And the ring, maybe it needed a new start too, a new chance to deliver on its promise. Plus, it was a big diamond—too big to go back in the earth. She had no family, no one to pass it on to.
I put it in my pocket. Who the hell would ever know?
“She good and dead?” Tom said.
I nodded.
“So what do I write?”
“Found pulseless and apneic in advanced state of decomposition.”
“Advanced state of decomposition. That works for me. My condolences,” Tom said.
“For what?”
“For your grief.”
“My grief?”
“On the passing of your old gal. Don’t fret too much. There are plenty of other old ladies out there who I’m sure would like the companionship of a younger man, someone to pick them up when they fall, wipe the shit off their butts.”
While he babbled on, I just looked out the window, much more serious thoughts on my mind. I pondered and planned.
Chapter 43
I looked at myself in the mirror that night. I saw the stark truth. I was twenty-six years old, but I felt forty. In two years on the road I had seen people at their best and their worst. I knew that death waited for all, from the lone man in the nursing home to the crying baby birthed on the bathroom floor. It might take a while to get the baby, but it would get all of us in the end. It could be as sudden as a bullet to the brain or as steady as a metastizing cancer or slow as the decline of Alzheimer’s. I had no doubt that someday I too would be in a nursing home, left to die an undignified death. I just hoped I wouldn’t have to suffer, wouldn’t have to lie paralyzed in a stroked-out crippled body, unable to speak or move, but fully aware of the hell around me. The question was, what kind of life could I have in the meantime?
I was no Superman, that was for sure. No George Washington, Abraham Lincoln or Mahatma Gandhi. Certainly no Mother Teresa. I was who I was. Even though I went to church now, I would not have been surprised, should I have been killed, to find myself redirected at the great pearly gates. Sorry, buddy, not everyone gets to go through, and you, ahem, you have some stains on your record, though I do note a few stars. I’m sorry, your sins were just too great to outweigh them.
Yes, I stole a diamond ring from a dead woman, but it was a ring that had fallen off on its own, and I had, after all, taken care of the woman who had owned it. In a way, I may have been the closest living person she had left—the closest person to being family. I believe that she wanted the best for me. I believed that finding her ring was a sign and not a test.
I know that I was just making excuses, but I was hoping for leniency. Even the Governor, who’d gone to jail, had been let off for good behavior, and now even had a popular radio show and was making big money as a consultant. This was my last lift, I was sure of it.
I stood at Carrie’s doorway and rang the bell. When she opened the door, I could smell her lasagna and the marinara sauce that came from a recipe of her mother’s. I had asked her to cook dinner for us, and she had agreed on the condition I do all the dishes. She wasn’t a bad cook, but she had never learned to clean the kitchen as she went. On most occasions I preferred to go out, even if it cost me money, just because it took so long to clean up the kitchen after she cooked. But I wanted tonight to be ours alone.
After a dinner and a dessert of strawberries and brownies, which we ate on the couch while watching a Chris Rock video that had Carrie in hysterics, I drew her a hot bath and massaged her back. I lit a candle and it gave a red glow and nice scent to the bathroom. I excused myself a minute and came back with my hand behind my back. While she asked me what I held, I knelt before the tub and looked her over in all her large warm nakedness.
“I want to ask you something, but I want you to think it over. You don’t need to answer right now.”
“What?”
“Wait a minute, I have a little speech I have prepared.”
“You’re not going to ask me something kinky, are you?”
“No, no. Just relax and listen. I’ve been thinking about this for some time, and I’m just saying I want you to think about it as well. I don’t need an answer right now.”
She was looking at me like what kind of trick question was I going to ask her.
“Like I said, I don’t need an answer now,” I told Carrie, “But I’d like you to try this on.”
And I pulled out the ring, and slipped it on her finger as she held her stunned hand out, her mouth wide open.
“My God,” she said.
“Carrie, I’d like to you to make an honest man out of me. Will you marry me?” And I was shaking like a boy asking for his first kiss.
“Oh, Tim,” she said, “I don’t know what to say.” She looked at me, and her face changed completely, and I saw tears come from her eyes, and she reached for my neck and hugged me to her, hugged me like I was a teddy bear she would hold onto forever. “No, I do know. Yes, yes, I will. I will,” she said.
Later, after we had made love in her bed, a long slow love with her looking at me like I was a new man, and she rolled on her back and stared at that ring on her finger, she said, “Where did you ever get the money?”
I hesitated a moment, and then said, “Some things are best kept secret. I have been working a lot of hours.”
“I never thought anyone would marry me, that anyone would ever want to actually marry me. I’m a bitch, you know, and yet you still want to marry me.”
“I do,” I said, though I felt a little trepidation, like maybe I had forgotten something I should have remembered.
She just stared at that rock like all her luck was changed for the better.
Chapter 44
I would like to say that we lived happily ever after, that fate had meant for me to see the glint of that ring under the radiator, and to put it in my pocket, and to take it home with me, and place it on the finger of a good woman, who would become my bride, the mother of my children, and fire and light of my life. I remember how that night Carrie looked at the ring with such hopeful eyes, as if she were seeing in the ring uncomplicated love, children and a happy old age in a nice house surrounded by a white picket fence. She saw a world that was fair and just, one that brought love to every little girl no matter how damaged or cold or cynical they had become.
We were married three months later in a small ceremony at Cheffries Lakeside up in Windsor. We had family and a few friends. My mom and my sister came. They even let my dad out of jail to come attend, though he and my mom sat at different tables, and his guard wouldn’t let him have but one beer. Carrie’s mom was there and she and her daughter both got drunk, and quite enjoyed themselves. It was a nice deal. I rented a tuxedo just like the one I had rented the first night we went out. We had the same limo driver, and I sent a few beers his way, believe me. I invited a few friends. Fred, who was able to get permission for a day release from the Institute of Living, and Tom were there. Fred was my best man, and he made
a nice toast about how I was the kind of guy who would give the shirt off his back to anyone who asked. He started bawling and we hugged, and everyone applauded. Fred and Tom, like most everyone else, had their share of beers. I had a few myself. I figured what the hell. A wedding is supposed to be a celebration. Fred ended up taking off all his clothes and jumping in the lake. They had to call the Fire Department to get him off the fountain. It was quite a party.
For a honeymoon we went to the Bahamas. They had a nice charter that ran out of Hartford, flew you right down there, where ten minutes after landing you were walking into the resort and they were handing you a Bahama Mama—a drink we had plenty of in the four days we were there. We’d sleep late, eat the breakfast buffet and head to the beach, a short ten-minute bus ride, where we’d lie on the sand and drink. A native woman braided Carrie’s hair for her and I admit it looked very sexy on her. We’d go back to the resort around five, drink more Bahama Mamas, hanging out around the pool and volcano-shaped Jacuzzi. Later we’d go to the casino where we played slots and had a game where you dropped fifty cents in the machine and bet on these mechanical horses that raced around the track. The waitresses brought us free drinks as long as we were gambling.
Back in Connecticut, I moved in with Carrie and predictably, I guess, we had our quarrels. I worked a lot, probably too much, but I was determined to pay off the credit card debt she had accumulated along with the bills from the wedding and our honeymoon.
I was used to working and could easily lose my own problems in those of others. When you work the ambulance enough, when you see the sun rise, and the sun set, when you see the changing seasons, spring, summer, fall and finally winter, all from behind the windshield of an ambulance, when you see babies born, and so many people die, when you know every road and street and apartment and restaurant and building and back alley and highway, when the work is a part of you, you almost stop being a person, and become a part of the city, a part of the rhythm of life. There is a comfort in that, a comfort I came to seek. Seeing the hurt in so many others dulls your own.
You probably saw the end before I did, though I would not be so foolish as to not have imagined it when considering the possibilities. We are who we are. Carrie was who she was. Life wasn’t all roses. We argued constantly about money. One night I found a message on her computer—some unknown person out there in cyberspace telling her how special she was.
The truth was the ring didn’t make a difference any more than our vows did. I knew then the hard truth. Our vows, like too many pronouncements in the world, were just words. Maybe we had just wanted to believe that we weren’t alone in this life.
I thought that night about stealing the ring back. I could slip it off her finger while she slept, and then journey to the cemetery where the rightful owner was buried. I could dig a hole down to the casket and drop the ring in, but as I had learned in this job, dead is dead. It doesn’t matter what you have done in the past, but what you make of the present and future. I try each day to be kind.
Carrie and I separated after a year of marriage. I still work the ambulance, but I don’t steal anymore.
—End of EMT Anderson’s manuscript—
Editor’s Postscript
Timothy Anderson died when he was twenty-nine years old. According to his mother he had married again, and moved to New Jersey so he and his new wife could be closer to her family. One night after his shift at work, he came upon an accident scene—a car had crashed into a utility pole and was aflame. He pulled a young woman from the burning vehicle. Moments later he stepped on a live wire. He suffered severe burns. The coroner said the electricity likely killed him instantly. There was talk of him receiving a posthumous award from the city, but nothing came of it. There was no funeral, just a small family service. Until his mother died last month, his ashes were kept in an urn on the family mantel, next to his faded Polaroid portrait and his silver EMT badge.
Also by Peter Canning
MORTAL MEN
Paramedic Troy Johnson battles trauma and sickness on the streets of Hartford, Connecticut. When a fellow medic is shot to death responding to a 911 call, a grief-stricken Troy vows to avenge the death, while struggling to come to grips with his own mortality.
Mortal Men examines the ancient bonding between friends and partners who count on each other to make it safely home. Written by veteran paramedic Peter Canning, author of the acclaimed Paramedic: On the Front Lines of Medicine and Rescue 471: A Paramedic’s Stories, Mortal Men provides a rare view into the real-life world of street medicine and into the lives of the men and women who fight its battles.
Diamond in the Rough Page 16
