The Engagements Read online

  Evelyn pictured that innocent baby, lying helpless and alone as his father flew planes overhead, searching, searching. Her whole body started to shake. She felt as though she couldn’t breathe. She became so hysterical that she had to go back inside the hospital, where she was sedated and placed in a bed for several hours.

  Three weeks later, Nathaniel woke up. The doctor warned them that nothing was certain yet, and they shouldn’t let themselves feel too excited. But after everything they’d been through, Evelyn couldn’t see why not.

  They were married in the hospital chapel the following afternoon. She wore a white skirt suit and tan pumps from her closet, her hair pulled back and topped with a little birdcage veil. Nathaniel sat beside her in a wheelchair, looking groggy but happy, as his family and Gerald and a group of nurses looked on. The nurses had taken a real interest in their story, and they liked Nathaniel, mostly because Gerald brought them candy and told them how marvelous they looked at the end of a long shift. One of the nurses baked a cake, and they pooled their money to buy Evelyn flowers and candlesticks and a pretty porcelain dish.

  After they were married, she slept beside him in the narrow hospital bed at night, her body pressed to his. For a brief while, she thought they had been spared. But a few days passed, and on a Thursday morning the doctors discovered an infection that had spread to Nathaniel’s blood. By the weekend, he was gone.

  Despite everything they had known about his chances, his death stunned her. Most of the time, she felt tremendously grateful that he had woken up: they had had those final days together; they were married now. But she could easily get herself worked into a rage wondering why God would give her such a gift, only to take it away.

  Evelyn took her time choosing the clothes he would be buried in. With each decision, she knew she would have to close one more door on him, until finally it was done. She stood alone in his tiny apartment in Cambridge, and though she wept, she didn’t want to leave. The place still smelled like Nathaniel. She picked the navy-blue suit he had worn when he proposed to her outside the restaurant where they’d had their first date. Aside from in the hospital they had never spent the night together, and now she wished desperately that they had. She slept alone in his bed that night, imagining that the sheets were his arms, wrapped tight around her.

  At the funeral, she busied herself with whatever tasks needed doing. She didn’t want to stand still. She was Nathaniel’s wife, but many people there did not know it. It was strange to think of these other parts of his life: the people who remembered him only as a son, or a brother, or a small boy from the old neighborhood. Rightly so, their sympathy was for his mother and sisters, who had endured one tragedy already, enough for any lifetime.

  Afterward, she felt a constant ache. She often looked at strangers who didn’t seem altogether terrific—a mother shouting at her son in front of school, a man spitting in the street—and she wondered why they should be able to live and not Nathaniel. Evelyn would stare, nearly believing that there was some way to exchange one of them for him.

  In bed at night, she lay awake and thought of the hour his car had been hit. He was all alone out on the highway. Nathaniel had wanted her along on that trip. She should have said yes, she should have been there when those foreign headlights came through the windshield. Then maybe she’d still be with him now, on one side or the other.

  1987

  James banged a u-ey out of the lot.

  They had clocked in only ten minutes earlier, and Maurice was already off and running with one of his stories. While James had done the usual check, making sure that the last guys had left the ambulance fully stocked and everything was working properly—defibrillator, EKG, suction, IV, burn kit, stretcher—Maurice had started in. Now he couldn’t stop.

  “So I say to the guy, there’s nothing wrong with your tire alignment. Your parking break is probably stuck,” Maurice said. “And big surprise, I was right. Now I just saved him ninety bucks and half a day at the mechanic’s. And that’s another thing. This mechanic he uses is crooked as hell. A Mexican.”

  Maurice didn’t trust Mexicans. James thought it was kind of funny, seeing as Maurice himself was black. When James told him this, Maurice had said, “What? You think black people aren’t allowed to be just as prejudiced as everyone else?”

  Now, he went on, “Cindy says I sounded like a know-it-all. Like he thought I was judging him for not knowing how to fix his own car. And I swear, at this neighborhood Christmas party, it was like he was looking right through me. So now I kinda want to confront him about it. I mean, we’re two grown-ass men. I’m not gonna be standing in my driveway waving at him across the street if meanwhile he’s thinking I disrespected him. I should have just let him go on making skid marks on the road and not knowing why.”

  James pulled up to the regular spot. Two other ambulances idled at the curb. “I hate to interrupt this riveting monologue, but—coffee?”

  Maurice nodded.

  “I’ll go,” James said. “You want anything to eat? An egg and cheese?”

  “I’ll have a sandwich,” Maurice said. “A Turkey Delight. Nah, make it a cheeseburger.”

  “You gotta be shitting me.”

  “What?”

  “Whaddaya mean, what? It’s eight in the morning.”

  “And?”

  “Never mind, you savage. Do the reports.”

  Maurice held up the binder. “I’m doing them. Wasn’t kidding about the burger.”

  “I know you weren’t. That’s what scares me.”

  James got out. It was freezing. He could smell snow in the air. He pulled his leather jacket tight across his chest.

  Inside Elsie’s, he saw the usual suspects sitting at the counter and waved.

  “Morning, gentlemen.”

  Ron Shanahan nodded his head. “Top of the morning, Mr. McKeen,” he said, the same thing he said every day.

  The job was equal parts adrenaline rush and routine. While on duty, they traveled the same streets over and over. The city of Cambridge was 6.25 square miles, and James knew every inch of it by heart. In a single hour, he was likely to pass through Harvard Square three or four times. He saw the same cops, nurses, and firefighters every day. He got along with most of them. The single people in the mix went out drinking most nights at the Ground Round or the Ding Ho in Inman Square, and were either in love or not speaking, depending on the day.

  The younger guys thought they were cowboys—they were only eighteen, nineteen years old. To initiate a rookie, they might handcuff him to a telephone pole and beat him to a pulp, or hold a loaded shotgun to his head in broad daylight, while onlookers screamed, knowing that when the cops arrived they would just laugh and keep driving. James stayed out of all the drama.

  The work itself was always different. There were slow days and crazy ones. On average, they probably went out on about a call an hour. Today it was supposed to snow. Snowstorms were usually quiet, but it just depended. You could be eating breakfast one minute and crawling through a flipped-over car on Memorial Drive the next.

  Cathy stood at the counter, pulling her hair up into a ponytail. Her Christmas ornament earrings bobbed up and down. She was in her mid-thirties, pretty, though she wore too much makeup. Her jeans always looked like they were painted straight onto her ass.

  “Hey James. Two coffees?”

  “Yeah, and a cheeseburger.”

  “This early?”

  He shrugged. “Talk to the guy with the tapeworm out in the truck. You closing up early today?”

  “Around four, so I can go over my aunt’s house for dinner and then take my mother to midnight Mass.”

  “Sounds nice.”

  “Clearly, you haven’t met my mother.”

  She turned away and called the order out to Phil, the owner, who manned the grill.

  James’s eyes were sore. He closed them tight, rubbed them with his fingers. He didn’t know how he was going to get through his shift. Hopefully they’d have some downtime so he cou
ld try to sleep. Caffeine wasn’t going to cut it today.

  It was typical for a medic to work two twenty-fours a week, but for the past six months, he had been working three. The economy was in the shitter, so he was banking time now, just in case.

  When the stock market had crashed a couple months back, James didn’t care at first, since he personally had no stake in the stock market. If anything, he was a little bit glad to see rich people feeling scared about money for once. His new favorite joke, which he’d heard from a patient and repeated back home a hundred times, was, “What’s the difference between a pigeon and an investment banker? The pigeon can still make a deposit on a Mercedes.”

  Maurice said he didn’t care about the stock market crash either, but he didn’t like how much of it had to do with computers. “Do you know they’re using them now to figure out trading?” he said to anyone who would listen. “It feels like we’re in the hands of a robot and nobody cares.”

  But now James was starting to worry some. Not about robots, but about money. Last month, the General Motors plant in Framingham shut down, and his buddy Big Boy was out of a job. What had seemed like just a rich person’s problem started to feel like more.

  His supervisor liked to tell new hires that their field was recession proof: “As long as there’s drugs, alcohol, old people, and cars, we’ll be busy.”

  It was true to a point—in hard economic times, they tended to be busier than ever. Unemployment made for more drug and alcohol abuse, depression, suicides, things like that. You’d see a lot of people down on their luck, people with chronic illnesses that they’d ignored for months because they lost their health insurance and couldn’t afford to go to the doctor.

  So yeah, there was more work, but less of it got paid. The companies would bill, but patients wouldn’t respond, and eventually that started to affect staffing.

  After he got fired in Lynn, it had taken him a year to find another job. James was lucky to be hired by anyone, given what had happened, and he was determined not to lose this gig.

  He felt glad that he’d be out with Maurice today, and not that dumb shit, Andrews. He and Maurice had worked two shifts a week together for the past year and a half. They got along; they had a nice rhythm down. A year and a half was longer than James had ever worked with anyone—the turnover rate was high, especially in a private company like theirs. Not many guys were willing to work such crazy shifts for ten bucks an hour for long. He knew Maurice would leave soon. This was just a stepping-stone for him. Most of the guys eventually became supervisors or operations directors or physician’s assistants. One had even quit to become a garbage man—a waste management specialist, he had called it—because the pay was better. A lot of them were waiting for something to open up with the fire department. Through it, a medic had better hours and a higher pay grade. He could retire at fifty-five with 80 percent of his pension.

  James was the only guy he knew who had already been with a fire department. He had blown his chances as far as that went, so it was hard to imagine how he could ever move up from here. He deeply regretted what happened, even now, after three years had passed.

  For a year, he had tried to get a job with another department, but his reputation preceded him everywhere he went. A buddy from his Lynn days had been the one to tell him that he should try to find work with a private company and never mention what had happened. So that’s what he did. He got hired on in Cambridge as an EMT, and went even further into debt to get his paramedic certificate at Northeastern last year. He knew this meant he was more valuable to the company than a basic EMT, and that was worth the money.

  Most of his classmates at Northeastern were former Army medics who knew a hell of a lot more about what they were doing than he did. The workload was intense, with time divided between the classroom, the ambulance, and the ER. The written tests reminded him too much of high school. His eyes would fog over when he tried to study. The first time he got a test back, his grade was so low that the instructor stapled a Burger King job application to the booklet. But in the truck, or at the hospital, James felt fired up.

  They were the first class of paramedics in the state, and there was a certain cachet to that—they could do more than anyone else. They called them the God Squad. If a patient was in diabetic shock, your basic EMT couldn’t do anything but shove sugar packets down his throat. But a paramedic could give a D50 injection and start an IV. A basic EMT would find a guy not breathing from a heroin overdose, and the only thing he could do would be to flop him onto a stretcher and drive to the hospital. James gave the same guy Narcan, and a minute later he’d be sitting up on the sidewalk saying, “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I’ve never touched drugs.”

  The paramedics wore a badge, and it really meant something. But even so, a few of the guys in the company somehow seemed to know about his past. It hung over him, no matter what he did. He could tell they thought he was a reject, a loser. It was damn near impossible to get fired from a civil service job, but leave it to him to find a way.

  One night, late, while their trucks were parked outside 7-Eleven and Maurice had gone inside for a Double Gulp and a hot dog off the roller, James stood out front with a prick named Tommy Benson. Tommy had actually had the balls to just say it: “I heard you got booted from the fire department in Lynn. So what is it with you, McKeen? Are you a druggie? An alkie? Or a thief? Or all three?”

  James had the urge to hit him, but he thought of Sheila and the boys and just got back in the ambulance.

  Maurice was the only one in the company who knew the truth. James feared what might happen if his boss ever found out. He would be fired in a second. The paramedic’s license might offer some protection, but not enough.

  The new guy, Andrews, who he had to work with one day a week, was ex-military. He had arrived in Boston five months back from somewhere out west. In July, when Andrews started, it was miserably hot inside the truck. They drove around all summer with the back doors flung open, taking turns standing on the back step, where you could breathe, and watch the girls go by in their miniskirts. On their first morning together, James found Andrews already positioned on the step, ready to go.

  “Hey kid,” James said, pointing his thumb toward the driver’s seat. “Screw.”

  But that didn’t last long, because whenever Andrews drove, James got nervous: the kid didn’t know his way around, and that was dangerous. He was forever turning the wrong way down one-way streets. Driving to the Beth Israel once, he said, “So just go toward that neon triangle thing, right?” He didn’t even recognize the CITGO sign. James had smacked him in the back of the head. “Are you an idiot? Have you never seen a Red Sox game on TV?”

  He could tell from experience that Andrews wouldn’t last long, maybe a couple months more. He prayed for the day when the kid just didn’t show up.

  Some guys couldn’t take the worst of it. Even if they’d spent time patching up soldiers on the battlefield, there was something different about going into people’s homes. In October, they had found a teenage punk, strangled to death and probably raped, her body shoved into a broom closet in some crummy apartment. James had seen her hanging around the Pit in the weeks before she died. She didn’t look like one of the true homeless kids, more like the suburban type who was just experimenting before going off to college and a lifetime of cashmere sweaters. She couldn’t have been older than seventeen. She had a tiny silver hoop through her nose and blue hair hanging down to her shoulders. Andrews wept when they left the scene. His legs gave out for a second.

  A month later, a woman called 911 complaining of back pain. When James and Maurice got to her apartment, she seemed all right, if slightly deranged—she was walking around the place, oozing a strange energy. James’s first thought was that she was addicted to pain meds and looking for a fix.

  “Did you really need an ambulance, ma’am?” Maurice asked.

  “Yes. My kids are going to ride along with me. Now where are their jackets?”


  “Sorry, ma’am, we can’t bring kids,” Maurice said. “Can you leave them with a neighbor?”

  “Oh no,” she said.

  James had a sickening feeling. The apartment was so still. “Where are your kids, ma’am?”

  “In the bathroom,” she said brightly, pointing at a cracked wooden door. He went toward it, bracing himself as he turned the knob. There were two small bodies floating in the tub. Water and blood all over the place. A struggle. She had slit their throats. When he went to touch them, their skin was cold.

  He and Maurice both knew those kids were already gone. But still, they rushed them to Children’s Hospital as if every second might mean a miracle.

  “OSDF! OSDF!” James was screaming from the back of the truck. Oh shit, drive fast.

  Afterward, he was covered in blood. Even after he washed his hands, it settled in the lines in his palms and the space beneath his fingernails. It clumped in his hair and seeped into the legs of his pants.

  James told the new guys at work to do what they could for the patient and then move on. You couldn’t let yourself get too caught up. But that one had just about done him in. At home the next morning, before he went inside, he kicked his car in the driveway. It felt good, a tiny release, so he kicked it again, and then again, and again, until there was a huge dent in the driver’s-side door and his big toe was broken. Inside the house, he woke Parker up, pressing his son against his chest until Parker whispered, “Daddy, I can’t breathe.”

  James had been raised Catholic, and if he had never exactly believed in God, he had never had a reason not to believe, either. He still remembered the Tuesday after JFK was killed. As the president’s funeral processed in D.C., Boston mourned. His mother in her veiled hat sat in a crowded pew at Sacred Heart, with James to her left and his brother to her right, squeezing both their hands. She kept a picture of JFK on her mantel, alongside her wedding portrait and her sons’ school photographs. Now she cried softly, as did all the parishioners around her. The place was packed to the gills. When the priest began to speak, James took note of the looks on people’s faces—they wanted so badly to be comforted, to have someone else make sense of the madness. The priest said that God had called the president to heaven, and though we might never know why, we must remember that it was part of His divine plan. All the heads bobbed up and down in agreement. James was only ten years old, and for some time he carried that memory with him, believing that faith was essential, that God brought solace to soothe unimaginable pain.