Page 28 of Coram House

“Help.” My words are slurred. I sound drunk. “I need help.”

Somehow I manage to explain where I am and what’s happened. Don’t move her, the operator says, and walks me through CPR. I can’t do this, I think. But I must have said it out loud because the operator is saying yes you can and assures me that help is on the way. Hang on, he says. Fifteen minutes. But by then, his voice is cutting out. And the line goes dead.

Fifteen minutes. It isn’t long, considering.

It’s an eternity.

The woman’s eyes stare at me. The water around her is pink with blood. I notice a rock near her head the size of a grapefruit. It’s covered in blood and chunks of something I don’t look at too closely.

Chest compressions only, the operator had said. Something about spinal cord injury. I felt relieved—I can’t imagine putting my mouth on hers where the blood is drying to brown. A wash of guilt, for being disgusted, for being alive while she is dead.

I kneel in the freezing water and fold my hands together. I begin chest compressions.

For some reason, I think of this old woman from my neighborhood in Brooklyn. This tiny, hunched figure always pushing a wheeled cart full of things that seemed unrelated. An onion, a potholder, a jar of jelly.But she was always dressed beautifully in wool suits or silk dresses. Seeing her made me embarrassed to be out in sweatpants. But I felt sorry for her too. For all old people and their dignified decay. Or maybe I was just feeling sorry for my future self.

The woman’s bones give beneath the pressure of my hands. A regular thunk thunk thunk echoes through the cove. A woodpecker slamming its head against a tree. I think again of the sounds I’d heard right after the scream. The scrape. The thunk. Different than any other sounds in the woods. The way they’d gone silent when I called for help and then accelerated.

Someone else was here.

Lights bob in the trees, followed by the crackle of static. Blue uniforms appear above me on the rocks. I try to get up, but my legs aren’t working. “Down here!” I call. The EMT jogs down the stairs, blonde ponytail swinging. Then suddenly she’s there, taking my wrist in her hand, leading me away. “Can you tell me your name?”

“No.” I shake my head. “I mean, yes, but it’s not me that’s hurt, it’s—”

I don’t finish. Another EMT is already kneeling beside the woman, and calling to his partner. Airway, pulse, eye movement, motor response—negative, negative, negative. Something the opposite of adrenaline courses through me. The feeling of responsibility leaving my body.

Ponytail joins her partner at the water’s edge. They unzip the woman’s jacket to reveal a flannel shirt, then rip that open too. Buttons plink into the water. I tamp down the urge to pick them up. Beneath is a plain white cotton bra and the pale, spotted skin of an old woman. I turn away.

Ponytail inspects the head injury with gentle fingers. Her partner lifts the woman’s limp wrist, where a silver bracelet dangles in the water. “DNR,” he says.

“What does that mean?” I ask. Or try to. My lips refuse to cooperate and form words.

The EMTs turn toward me and rise, as if they’re one creature. Then they’re surrounding me, hands everywhere, feeling my wrist, my neck, wrapping a blanket around me. I want to slap them away, those fingers coated in death.

“I’m fine,” I say. They’d just left the woman there, lying on the ground. The blood on her face has dried to rust, nearly the same color as the rocks. “You can’t just leave her there.”

There’s a beep in my ear. “Ninety-two point four,” says Ponytail. She shines a light in my eyes.

“You have to help her,” I say.

“She has a DNR bracelet,” says the partner. His orange hat is pulled low over his eyes, so only his nose sticks out. “Do not resuscitate, which means no CPR.”

“Even if you’re pushed off a cliff?”

I don’t mean it to come out like that—angry and unhinged. They exchange a look. The high wail of sirens comes from the woods.

“There was someone else here,” I say, but a motor roaring drowns out my voice.

“We need another blanket,” says Ponytail. “And the warmers from the kit. What’s your name?”

“Alex.”

“Okay, Alex. You’re moderately hypothermic and possibly in shock. We’re going to warm you up and get you out of here.”

I nod, though the idea of walking feels absurd when I can’t feel my feet. Her partner returns with something that looks like a giant piece of tinfoil and wraps one around my legs, another around my shoulders. He offers two small papery packets, already giving off a chemical warmth. I press them against my face. The heat feels like coming back to life. I sit and he helps put two more in my shoes.

Both their radios crackle. Then the world explodes. A boat roars into the cove just as a line of police officers appear on the trail above us. They swarm the beach like ants in uniform, all of them shouting to each other or into their radios. When I look up, my medics have been swallowed by the chaos. I can’t see the old woman’s body anymore.

“Alex.”

---