The Engagements

by J. Courtney Sullivan

  “What?” she said.

  “Nothing,” he said. “It’s great news, that’s all.”

  Sheila, her sister, and their mother spent the next seven months talking nonstop about the wedding. He hadn’t known there were so many things to talk about—the food, the color scheme, whether to ask this friend or that one to be a bridesmaid. He stayed the hell out of it, and whenever she asked his opinion on some detail or another, James just answered, “Whatever you think is best,” which pissed her off, but really, what enlightening thought could he add about centerpieces?

  His grandmother liked to tell the story of how she and his grandfather got married for ten bucks. They had met at Castle Island three months earlier, and he proposed on their fifth date. After the ceremony, they went to a cousin’s house for sandwiches and beer and ice cream, and that was it, the only reception his grandmother ever got. For as long as he could remember, she had worn just a plain gold band on her ring finger.

  But James’s wedding was to be an event. Sheila’s parents were giving them a big party at Florian Hall complete with dinner, a band, and a two-hour open bar that would switch over to cash at four o’clock.

  Every Saturday for two months beforehand, they went to the rectory at Mary Star of the Sea for Pre-Cana classes, where the monsignor talked about forgiveness and conflict resolution and how to negotiate which spouse did what around the house. You had to take the classes if you wanted to have your wedding in the church.

  Who better to teach us about marriage than a celibate priest? James said on the way into class one afternoon. Sheila shooshed him, but she laughed.

  Rain was predicted for their wedding day. The night before, his mother hung rosary beads from all the trees on Willet Street to ward it off. When they woke the next morning, the sky was a cloudless blue. He remembered it now as a happy blur of familiar faces and champagne and music. Sheila and her father danced to “Daddy’s Little Girl,” and Big Boy gave a speech for which James had still not completely forgiven him.

  That night, in a hotel room bed that their wedding party had strewn with rose petals and rubbers, they sat on top of the covers still dressed in their wedding clothes and ripped open the stack of envelopes they had received, one by one. She did the opening, and he counted the money, placing the checks and crisp hundred-dollar bills in two neat piles. They made six grand all together. They went to sleep that night feeling as rich as a couple of kings. But the money was gone by their first anniversary.

  Sheila had always said she loved her ring, and the fact that he was thoughtful enough to consider the way she would wear it. But over the years, whenever he saw the rings on other women’s fingers—her sister Debbie’s, all of her friends’—James felt a deep sense of shame. He should have gotten her something wildly beautiful, something that would prove to everyone that she was loved by a worthy man.

  After the robbery, she said the only thing she really missed was her diamond. It had been on her finger for a decade and a half, and like all objects that once seemed incredibly important, it had faded into the background of their lives. But for the past month, he had looked at her bare hand with actual grief. He couldn’t remember exactly when he’d made up his mind to buy her a new one, no matter what, but that’s what he had done.

  Two years after they got married, his chief came to him with a proposal: they needed a few guys to shift into medic positions, and he thought James would be good at it. Up until Vietnam, it had been the job of police departments and funeral homes to take emergency cases to the hospital, the latter with the understanding that when you died, they’d cart your corpse away, which was why those creepy old ambulances looked like hearses—they were hearses. Hearses were the only vehicles in which a person could lie down. But people had begun to realize that the quicker you got someone to the hospital, and the better care they got along the way, the better their chances of survival. So now the fire department had taken over, and there was a school specifically designed for this new line of work. James took a ten-week class in life support, and went from being a Lynn firefighter to a Lynn EMT.

  He liked being part of the rescue unit at first. Sheila said he was made for the job—she had heard from some of the nurses she knew in the area about how good he was with his patients, how many close calls he had determined for the better. When it was going well, he got to feel like a hero. But there had been so many unhappy endings, too. They said those weren’t your fault. If that was true, then how could you take credit for the good ones? Over time, he came to think that probably 90 percent of it had nothing to do with him. It had to do with what happened and how quickly someone discovered it, and at which precise moment they decided to call 911. Traffic flow, phone-line congestion, rickety old elevators that took an hour to go three flights. All of it mattered as much as what he did or didn’t do.

  Twelve years had passed since he first worked in an ambulance, and now when he thought about it, James realized that he had never made an independent choice in his life: Sheila told him to become a firefighter, so he did. She told him to propose. His chief had been the one to decide that he would be a medic. None of it had been his plan.

  The only thing he was responsible for was losing the first and only good job he’d ever have. Back when he worked with the fire department, his partner had been a guy named Mac Kelly. Mac had charisma. The guy could talk a dog off a meat wagon. They were buddies, almost like brothers, though in the way that people imagined brothers would be, not in the way brothers actually were in James’s experience. They even looked alike: short, pasty Irish guys with dark hair.

  Mac drank a little too much. He had a temper. His wife was always threatening to leave, and once, she actually did. She came back a month later, but it seemed like that split had destroyed something in Mac. He had a nine-year-old son with Down’s syndrome and he talked about the kid constantly—not about the fact that anything was wrong with him, just My son loves this show, and My son said the funniest thing. In James’s book, this made him a quality guy. He felt lucky in comparison. Parker was four and healthy, and despite what people said about the strain that kids put on a marriage, he and Sheila were more in love than ever. James was making good money, and he finally felt like maybe things were coming together.

  He tried to help Mac. He covered for him on a couple of occasions when he came into work piss drunk. Mac was always on probation within the department for some violation or another. It was a running joke, since no one ever got fired from the fire department.

  A few months before the end, they were sitting at a red light when a homeless guy knocked on the driver’s-side window. Mac rolled it down. “What’s up, buddy?”

  The guy shoved a gun in his face and Mac peeled out of there faster than James would’ve ever thought that truck could go. The asshole shot at them; you could hear the bullets hitting the back doors. In Mac’s position, James was sure he would have blown it—frozen, or taken a wrong turn. But Mac kept calm, and just drove straight to the police station. He saved both their lives. The cops found the guy pretty fast, a lunatic looking for drugs, which they weren’t even allowed to carry.

  Crazy shit like that came in waves. A week later, a huge drunk guy in the back of the truck punched James in the face with no warning. James fell backward, and by the time he got up, the guy had a fresh gash in the center of his forehead—Mac had hit him dead-on with a clipboard. Blood dripped down his nose and into his eyes.

  There was a cop in the truck who had witnessed the whole thing.

  “That injury was there when we got here, right, man?” Mac said.

  The cop nodded. “Yup.”

  “Gonna need stitches, I’d say,” Mac said. “Now lie back and shut the fuck up.”

  The thing, as James and Sheila would come to call it, happened not long after that. Late one night, he and Mac were sent to a park on the edge of town, where crackheads had started congregating a few months back. Someone had called in a suicide attempt.

  “How did they even notice? Ar
en’t they all busy killing themselves over there?” Mac said. He was from Lynn, a working-class kid made good, at least compared to a lot of the guys he grew up with. His tolerance for druggies was nonexistent.

  Crackheads were unpredictable. If one of them resisted, you’d usually end up in a brawl. The guy on crack would get you every time—you’d need two or three other guys to subdue him. The crackhead had no fear.

  James took his time driving, not even bothering to run the siren.

  When they arrived, the park was so dark that they had to go back out to the truck and get the wheat lamps, which they strapped onto their heads before finding the path, like a couple of miners. Crack vials crunched under their feet as they walked. All you could hear, from some far corner, was a girl moaning. They moved toward the sound, looking out for stray needles, even though the people here probably couldn’t afford heroin. A couple years back, a guy on their squad had gotten pricked and contracted hep C. He died from it ten months later.

  When they found the girl, she was lying over her boyfriend, both of them covered in his blood and high out of their minds. The kid—skinny and white, about six foot two—had slit his wrists. He refused to come with them at first. Finally, Mac got him onto his feet. He had the kid laughing.

  James got in the front seat as Mac strapped the patient onto the stretcher. Everything was fine, and then suddenly it wasn’t. When Mac went to wrap his wrists up, the kid started thrashing around, his blood landing on every surface.

  “Calm down!” Mac yelled at him. “Come on, man.”

  The kid obeyed. But then he said, “I know you.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “Yeah. My cousin fucked your wife last year. You’ve got that retarded kid, right?”

  Mac’s response was instantaneous. One knockout punch to the head, which left the kid unconscious for three minutes. And a second punch, straight after the first, just because. James understood exactly why Mac had done it. He himself had never hit a patient, but he had come close. He wondered if what the kid had said was true, but other than that he didn’t give the incident much thought.

  A few days later, when they were called into the chief’s office, they thought maybe he was going to tell them they were getting a raise.

  Instead he said, “Which one of you jackasses do I have to thank for these?”

  He slid a slim stack of photographs across the table. In the light from the wheat lamp, you could see the kid flinching, the fist raised to his face. And then the punch landing, his head thrust back at a sick angle. James noticed their plate number, plainly displayed beneath the images.

  You could see him only from behind, but still the chief said, “Kelly, I presume.”

  James saw a drop of sweat run down the side of Mac’s face.

  Mac stammered, “Who took them?”

  “There have been surveillance cameras in that park for weeks.”

  James did a quick mental calculation: his partner was already on thin ice, but he himself had never had a single infraction. And first-time offenders always got off with a warning.

  “It was me,” he said. “Sorry, Chief.”

  The chief raised his eyebrows. “You? Really?”

  “Let me explain—”

  “Don’t bother. You’re fired, McKeen.”

  “What?”

  “You’re fired. That kid you hit? He has a little rich girlfriend. Her father’s threatening to send these to the Globe and take legal action unless someone loses his job over this. It sure as hell ain’t gonna be me. You shouldn’t have done it with the door open, buddy. That was just plain stupid.”

  James sat there, stunned. Mac didn’t step in to save him. He just let him hang.

  When he told Sheila what had happened, she got furious.

  “I was trying to help a friend,” he said.

  “Oh. What a prince you are. And did you ever stop to think about your own kid? What are we supposed to do now, Jimmy?”

  For two days, she wouldn’t even speak to him, except to say once, in the middle of the night, while they were both lying wide awake in bed, “I might have some respect for you if you had actually hit the guy. But this is just sick.”

  In the year he was unemployed, James thought constantly about the band. He dreamed of his guitar, and woke up in a panic, thinking of how he had let it all slip away.

  He hadn’t played music outside the house in ages, but deep down he still dreamed of making it big. He knew every guy he had grown up with fantasized about becoming either Ted Williams or Paul McCartney, but in his case he felt that he really had the goods. Was there any way to get that time back?

  He had a good ear, and he tried to keep up with what was going on in the music world, even though he was now essentially an old fogy. He watched MTV sometimes. He went to Tower Records and tried to converse with the pierced and dyed kids who worked there. They saw him as a kind of elder statesman. When they asked about Woodstock, James told them Monterey Pop could wipe the floor with it.

  “Monterey was the best,” he said. “Pre-corporatization. All about the music, man. Otis Redding. Hendrix just killing it. Grace Slick in her prime, when she was still so gorgeous. We used to call her ‘The face that launched a thousand trips.’ ”

  “Were you there?” one of them asked.

  “Nah, man, I was only fourteen. My brother went, though.”

  James had begged Bobby to take him. He saw the documentary at the Cleveland Circle Theater a year later, the day it came out.

  Back in ’81, one of the Tower kids had slipped him an import called “Boy” from the band U2. James loved the sound of it: the guitar repetitions, the voice of the young and angry Irishman called Bono Vox. Earlier this year, U2 had done a new, more polished (less impressive, but still great, in James’s opinion) record with Brian Eno, and now they were on their way to becoming the biggest rock stars in the world.

  “They’ve gotta be careful, though,” he said to the kid behind the counter when he bought his copy of The Joshua Tree last spring. “Too much attention too soon can fuck you. I mean, take the Clash. They fell apart pretty damn fast in ’82 when they went on tour with the Who and suddenly everyone was saying that the torch of rock music had been passed. The timing has to be just so.”

  He thought it was a smart observation. He could tell the kid thought so too. When he got home, he repeated what he had said to Sheila, who just replied, “You know you’re middle aged, right?”

  “P-four,” the dispatcher said over the radio now. That was them.

  Nona had been working in Cambridge forever. James would recognize her voice even if he went fifty years without hearing it—a smoker’s gravelly throat, a thick Boston accent.

  He was just pulling a fresh sheet across the stretcher. He raced around to the front, picked up the radio, and pressed the button on the side.

  “P-four.”

  “Patient fainted at Whitson Hall. Campus police en route.”

  “Don’t you have any shootings or suicides you can send me to?” he said. “Please, Nona. Anyplace but Harvard.”

  “Sorry.”

  He groaned as he got out of the truck. Cambridge was a strange place, full of extremes. On a single street, you might have millionaires living at one end and nothing but cops and Teamsters at the other. Working in this city, you dealt with all varieties of people, from bums lying in their own feces to the most entitled Ivy Leaguers.

  Personally, he’d take the bums. Harvard kids were just a bunch of rich spoiled brats who didn’t know how to drink. It was a job requirement that they treat each patient kindly, and with respect. Most of the time, you wanted to do that anyway, since you were coming upon people at their worst, their weakest. James always said the only thing his patients had in common was that they weren’t expecting to see him that day. But he really had to try with the Harvard types. It usually took some effort not to smack them. Sheila sometimes said she wanted Parker to go to Harvard one day, and James would think to himself, Over my dead body.


  On weekend nights, he’d be on campus six, seven times. When normal college kids got drunk, maybe their roommate gave them an aspirin and a glass of water, and then they went to bed and slept it off. Harvard kids called 911 and then puked all over the ambulance, saying they’d sue you if you tried to pump their stomachs or if this somehow ended up on their permanent record.

  In the neighborhood James grew up in, adults were constantly threatening you by making mention of your permanent record. The only things on his were a drunk and disorderly from a bar fight he was in the summer he was seventeen, and a petty theft charge from around that same time for stealing liquor from a place in Dorchester. A few of his buddies were still involved in some bad shit, and it was sometimes a temptation—they could make his annual salary in two months, just moving drugs around or messing with old ladies’ Social Security checks. But he knew he couldn’t do it and live with himself. He couldn’t look his mother in the eye.

  He went into the sandwich shop, nodded in Maurice’s direction.

  His partner was leaning against the counter, chatting with Phil, the owner. “Now? But I still don’t have my burger.”

  “Sorry, man.”

  Phil shook his head. “It’ll be ready when you get back.”

  When they reached the edge of campus, James looked out at the odd, slanted heating grates the university had installed on the sidewalks at the start of winter. They tore up the old flat ones so the homeless couldn’t sleep there anymore.

  They passed through the gates of Harvard Yard. Everything was incredibly still.

  “Why is this kid even here?” Maurice asked. “Isn’t it Christmas break?” James shrugged.

  In front of a dorm that vaguely resembled the White House, they pulled the stretcher out. James felt a crunch in his back, followed by a sharp, shooting pain. He grimaced.

  “You okay?” Maurice asked.

  “Yeah, I’m fine.”

  A campus cop waited by the entrance to the dorm. James had seen him a few times before, though he couldn’t recall his name.