Things Are Reaching for You

You sleep four hours and dream about a van with no driver.

At noon you're back at Rivermouth General, not on shift, in a hoodie, bribing Alphonse in security with a box of maple bars.

"Five a.m., ambulance bay camera two," you say. "I just want to see the van."

"Man, everybody wants to see the van." Alphonse scrubs the footage back. "That thing was wild. Look at you. You got launched."

On the grainy screen, at 5:03:16, a version of you stands under the bay lights holding a coffee. The van comes into frame. And at 5:03:18 you fly sideways six feet like someone hit you with an invisible car, and land in a puddle, and the van hits the pillar.

There's no one else in the frame.

You make him play it four times. You make him switch to camera three, the wide angle. Nothing. Just you, alone, leaving the ground on your own.

"Adrenaline, dude," Alphonse says, with deep respect. "You should do parkour."

"So she's a ghost," Trudie says.

You're in the rig at 4 p.m., parked behind Station 6 at the start of shift, eating gas-station burritos. Rain drums on the roof.

"I didn't say ghost."

"No pulse, not on camera, Connie says she's been coming in for forty years without aging. That's a ghost, babe. That's the first page of the ghost manual." She takes a huge bite. "Was she hot?"

"Trudie."

"It's relevant."

You think about the silver ring around her irises. The way she breathed in the smell of the pie.

"She's the most beautiful person I've ever seen," you say, and Trudie stops chewing.

"Oh no," she says. "Oh, no, no. You've got the face."

"There's no face."

"There's a face. It's the same face you had for that travel nurse in 2022, except worse." She points the burrito at you. "If a hot ghost tells you you're dying Friday, you take Friday off. You hear me? You take the day, you sit on your couch, you eat soup."

"I'm not taking Friday off."

"Ethan."

"People don't stop needing ambulances because a woman in a coat said something weird."

Trudie looks at you for a long moment and doesn't laugh.

"Okay," she says quietly. "Then I'm driving all week."

Your phone stays quiet all afternoon. You check it more than you'd admit. The blank sender line sits at the top of your messages like a door left open.

You type who are you really and delete it. You type how do you have a phone and delete that too. You type thanks for the van and leave it in the box, unsent, for three hours.

At 7:40 p.m. dispatch sends you to Tannery Row: gas odor reported, elderly resident unresponsive in a basement apartment. Fire's en route, six minutes out.

Six minutes is a long time to be unresponsive.

The building is a squat brick four-story by the old leather works. You smell it from the sidewalk, that rotten-egg tang the gas company adds so people know to run. The basement door is propped with a brick. Down the stairs, in a room full of boxes, an old woman is slumped in an armchair in front of a television playing a game show to nobody.

"Ma'am! Ma'am, can you hear me?"

She can't. Pulse slow, breathing shallow. You get your arms under hers. Trudie's on the stairs with the stair chair, swearing about the smell, telling you to move it, move it, move it.

You've got the woman halfway up when you see the water heater in the corner.

Old. Rusted. The pilot light flickering blue and yellow under a hiss you suddenly realize has been getting louder.

"Trudie, go. Go, go, go!"

Trudie goes. You're carrying a hundred and ten pounds of grandmother up a narrow stair, and your foot slips on the third step, wet from the rain off your boots, and you go down on one knee, and you think, very clearly: Oh. This is how.

A hand takes the old woman out of your arms like she weighs nothing.

Another hand closes around your wrist.

Then you're moving up the stairs faster than your feet can manage, and out the door, and across the sidewalk, and you're on the wet grass of the little park across the street with the old woman laid carefully on her side next to you, and Zephyrine Dray is kneeling between you with her braid half undone and her gray eyes blazing.

Thirty seconds later, the basement windows of the building on Tannery Row blow out into the street in a sheet of orange.

Car alarms. Glass raining down. Trudie screaming your name from the other side of the rig.

You can't breathe right. You put two fingers on the old woman's neck because your hands need something to do. Her pulse is stronger in the clean air.

"You were early," Zephyrine says. Her voice shakes. "You were early again."

Afterward, when the fire crew has the building and the old woman is on her way to Rivermouth General with oxygen and Trudie has hugged you so hard your ribs creak, you find Zephyrine on the roof of the building next door. You don't know how you know she'll be there. You just climb the fire escape.

She's sitting on the edge with her legs over the side and the rain coming down on her, looking at the smoke.

You sit beside her. Not too close.

"That's twice," you say.

"Three times. There was a loose cable on the bridge Monday. You didn't notice." She doesn't look at you. "I'm not supposed to do this."

"Save people?"

"Interfere. We don't move things. We don't pull people out of the way. We stand at the edge and wait, and when it's time, we're gentle." Her hands are clenched in her lap. "I've never moved anything. Not once in ninety years. And this week I've thrown you across a parking bay and carried you out of a fire."

"Why?"

"I don't know." It comes out of her almost angry, and then softer. "Your name is on my list for Friday. That's not a mistake; the list doesn't make mistakes. Everything in me says go to the edge and wait. And then something reaches for you early, and I move before I've decided to. It's as if my body has a different list than I do."

You sit with that. Down on the street, a firefighter laughs at something. The smoke is thinning.

"Zephyrine."

She turns her head. In the rain, with soot on her cheekbone, she is so beautiful it hurts to look straight at her.

"What happens on Friday," you ask, "if you just... don't?"

She's quiet for a long time.

"I've never been late," she says finally. "Not once." A pause. "I've also never stalled. And I'm stalling, Ethan. I know I am. I just don't know what I'm stalling for."

She stands, steps back from the edge, and is gone between one blink and the next, leaving two dry footprints on the wet roof.

At home you shower until the hot water runs out and still smell gas. You lie on top of the covers in the dark and listen to the dryers thumping downstairs in the laundromat.

At 1:12 a.m., your phone lights up the ceiling.

I have broken a rule. Two, actually. Are you awake.