The Woman in the Gray Coat

It has been raining in Rivermouth since October, and it's the first week of November, so nobody bothers to mention it anymore.

The wipers on Medic 14 are losing. Trudie drives with her face six inches from the windshield, cherry lip balm and a vocabulary you could use to strip a boat.

"I want you to know," she says, "that if this bridge has another idiot on it tonight, I'm going to start charging admission."

"You say that every Monday."

"Every Monday is true."

Dispatch crackles. Two-car MVC, Wending Bridge, eastbound, possible entrapment. Trudie says a word your mother would leave the room for and flips the lights.

You've been awake for nineteen hours. Second shift of a double, because the night guy called out and nobody else would take it, and because the apartment over the laundromat is louder than an ambulance when you're alone in it. You eat half a granola bar and put the other half in your jacket for later. You won't eat it. You never do.

The bridge is a smear of red and blue. A sedan has kissed the guardrail and a pickup has kissed the sedan, and the driver of the sedan is a kid of maybe twenty-two with a nosebleed and a lot of opinions about the pickup.

"Sir, look at me. Follow my finger."

"He came out of nowhere!"

"He usually does. Follow my finger."

He's fine. Shaken, a broken nose, a story he'll tell for years. You pack the nose and check his pupils and that's when you see her.

She's standing on the pedestrian walkway on the far side of the bridge, under the one street lamp that works. Gray wool coat to the knee. No umbrella. Black hair in a loose braid over one shoulder, darker for the rain. She isn't looking at the wreck like the other gawkers, phones up, mouths open.

She's looking at you.

Not at the lights. Not at the crumpled sedan. At you, steadily, the way someone looks at a clock they're waiting on.

And she's beautiful. Not pretty. Not the kind of attractive you notice and forget. The cop directing traffic has stopped waving cars through to stare at her, and there's a horn behind him and he doesn't hear it.

"Earth to my partner," Trudie says.

You look down at the kid. When you look up again, the walkway is empty.

The second call is an overdose in a walk-up in the Flats. Fourth floor, no elevator, a man in his thirties going gray on a bathroom floor while his girlfriend screams into the phone. You get the naloxone in, bag him, wait. Trudie counts out loud because she knows you like it when someone counts out loud.

He comes back swinging and swearing, which is the best sound in the world.

On the stairs, going down with the stretcher, you pass the third-floor landing, and there's a woman standing at the window in a gray coat, looking out at the rain.

You stop so hard Trudie nearly takes the stretcher into your spine.

"What?"

The woman turns her head. Storm-gray eyes, the color of the sound before a squall, with a ring of something pale around the iris that catches the stairwell light like metal. A small dark freckle just above her lip. Her face is calm. Her face is sad, actually, in a way you can't account for, because the man on your stretcher is alive and swearing.

"Ma'am," you say. "Do you live here?"

"No," she says.

Her voice is low and quiet and completely sure of itself. She looks at the man on the stretcher, then back at you, and something that might be relief crosses her face.

"Not him," she says. "Good."

"Ethan," Trudie says, very patiently, "I am holding most of a grown man."

You go. At the bottom of the stairs you look back. There's nobody at the window.

The third call is the one you lose.

Cardiac arrest at the ferry terminal, a seventy-eight-year-old man who sat down on a bench to wait for the 3:40 to Larch Island and didn't get up. A deckhand started compressions. By the time you're on him he's been down eleven minutes, and you know what eleven minutes means, and you work him anyway.

Thirty compressions. Two breaths. Shock. Thirty. Two. Trudie pushes epi and calls the time. The terminal smells like diesel and wet coats and the coffee stand that's been closed for hours. A little crowd hangs back by the ticket windows.

She's in the crowd.

Of course she is. Gray coat. Rain still on her shoulders even though she's indoors. She steps out of the crowd and nobody stops her, and nobody seems to notice that they don't. She kneels beside the old man, across from you, on the other side of his body.

"Ma'am, you can't be here."

She doesn't answer. She looks at the man's face for a long moment, gently, the way you look at someone sleeping. Then she lays her hand on his shoulder.

You feel it before you understand it. A change in the room, like a pressure drop. Like the lights dimmed a fraction and came back. The monitor doesn't change; the monitor was already flat. But something that was in the room isn't anymore.

"His name is Barnabas," she says softly. "He was going to see his sister. He thought about her last. He wasn't afraid."

Then she looks at you, across Barnabas's body, and the look goes straight through your ribs.

"You did everything," she says. "You always do."

Trudie calls it at 4:02. When you look up from writing the time on your glove, the woman is gone.

"You saw her," you say in the rig. "Gray coat. Tell me you saw her."

Trudie chews her lip balm. "I saw a woman. At the terminal, yeah. Tall. Pretty." She frowns. "Weird. I can't remember her face."

"Pretty? She stopped traffic on the bridge."

"She was on the bridge?"

You don't answer. You stare at the rain.

At five in the morning you're standing in the ambulance bay at Rivermouth General with a cup of coffee you didn't pay for, waiting for Trudie to finish the paperwork. The sky is the color of dishwater. Somewhere upstairs a phone is ringing and ringing.

You're thinking about Barnabas and his sister on Larch Island when you hear the engine.

A delivery van, white, the kind with a roll-up door, is coming down the hospital access road too fast. Way too fast. The driver is slumped over the wheel. The van hops the curb at the end of the bay, takes out a trash can, and keeps coming, straight at the spot where you're standing, and your legs don't move because nineteen hours awake makes everything a half-second late.

A hand closes on the back of your collar and throws you.

There's no other word for it. You leave the ground. You land on your shoulder six feet to the left, coffee everywhere, and the van slams into the concrete pillar where you were standing hard enough to crumple its grille like paper.

You roll onto your back in a puddle.

She's standing over you. Gray coat. Hair coming loose from the braid. Her chest is heaving and her eyes are blazing, actually blazing, that silver ring around the gray gone bright as a struck match. She looks furious. She looks frightened. She looks more beautiful than anything has a right to look at five in the morning in a hospital ambulance bay.

"You," you manage. "You were at the..."

"Not Monday," she says, breathless, furious. "You're not Monday, Ethan. You're Friday."