Chapter 28: Paramedic Exams
Bianca Barone took flashcards more seriously than anyone Harper had ever met in an emergency.
"Airway," Bianca said, slapping a card onto the guest house kitchen table like a dealer.
"Assess, open, adjunct if indicated, reassess," Harper said. "Next."
"Shock, paediatric."
"Don't say it like a game-show category."
"Shock, paediatric," Bianca repeated, unmoved, "is a game-show category now. Answer, please."
For three weeks the kitchen had been a revision camp. Harper's textbooks lived in a stack weighted by a mug. Bianca, who was supposed to be revising for her own school exams and was revising for Harper's instead with total impunity, arrived after school with highlighters and opinions. Rosa sent soup in containers labelled in firm handwriting — Thursday, Enough for Two Days, Do Not Freeze — and occasionally came with it herself, sitting at the table shelling peas she did not need to shell, listening to her niece interrogate a future paramedic about burns protocols.
"You will be good at this," Rosa said one evening, not looking up from the peas. "You look under things. In my experience, most people die of nobody looking."
Harper's mother, on the phone and then in person on Sundays, provided the other kind of fuel. Pride, in her mother, was not loud. It arrived as practical questions — what time does it start, will you eat before, I'll make the sandwiches the night before so they're not soggy — and, once, quietly, as she folded Harper's good shirt for the exam morning: "Your dad sat his driving test four times. Four. He'd have loved this. One test, passed properly, by his girl who checks under tables." Then she ironed the shirt again so neither of them had to continue the conversation.
The night before, Harper laid everything out the way she laid out a station at work. ID. Pens, two. Water bottle. Timetable. Loan receipt, still in the wallet, not needed, staying anyway.
She slept badly and well by turns, dreaming once of Table Nine set for an examination, all the cutlery labelled in Latin. She woke before the alarm, made tea, and was on the bus with the early cleaners while the city was still deciding to be awake.
The exam hall was a school gymnasium converted for the purpose, rows of single desks under basketball hoops, invigilators with the kind, bored authority of people who have watched ten thousand panics. Harper found her seat, candidate number checked, and set her pens in a line.
Then, twenty minutes in, it came — the old panic, the one she had first met with her cheek nearly to a restaurant floor and a wire under her fingers. It did not arrive as memory; it arrived in her body. Heart too loud. Hands wanting to shake. The printed question swimming slightly, as if the paper were underwater. A part of her mind, very clear and very unkind, suggested that she was a waitress playing dress-up, that the examiners would know, that she should put her pen down and save everyone the trouble.
Harper put her pen down. Deliberately. The way you set down something hot.
She breathed as she had been taught to teach others to breathe. In for four. She looked at what was actually in front of her: a scenario, a collapsed man, a set of observations. Not a wire. A question. She had answered this question four hundred times at a kitchen table while a seventeen-year-old slammed cards and an old woman shelled peas.
Look, she thought. And live.
She picked the pen up. Her handwriting for the next paragraph was poor and then it was fine. The panic, denied a performance, retreated to a manageable hum at the edge of the room and stayed there, shrinking, while she worked through shock and airways and burns and the paediatric game-show category, all the way to the last page, with nine minutes to spare, which she used to check — under every section, methodically, for anything she had missed.
The practical assessments took the afternoon: a manikin, a simulated road traffic collision in a car park, an assessor with a clipboard who said " Talk me through it" in a tone that meant fail me at your peril. Harper talked. Her hands, in gloves, in the work, were entirely steady. It was the waiting that had always been the enemy. The doing was home ground.
She walked home the long way that day, past the river, rehearsing answers to questions no one had asked her. What if I have failed exactly one paper by exactly two marks. What if calm, thorough, checks everything is something they write on everybody's form. At the guest house, Rosa had left a note under a plate of cold chicken: Eat. Whatever the day says, eat first. Harper ate, standing at the counter, still in her exam clothes, and thought that whatever the result said, the day itself had been a piece of evidence she intended to keep — she had met the old panic in a public room, set her pen down like a hot thing, breathed, looked, and worked. That was not dress-up. That was, in fact, the job, performed on herself, at a single desk, under a basketball hoop.
Results came on a Tuesday, by email, while she was on shift at Casa Loma, because the rota does not care about anybody's life changing. She read it in the dry store between the flour and the tinned tomatoes, standing very still, with Ferrante's nephew pretending, loudly, to look for capers at the far end of the room.
Passed. Both papers. The practical, with a commendation the examiner had not been obliged to write: Calm, thorough, checks everything.
She came out holding her phone, and Ferrante — who had known from her face before she said a word, forty years of reading a dining room in that face — simply opened his arms. The kitchen made a noise like a goal had been scored somewhere. Coffee was produced, because it was a working restaurant and the middle of service and champagne at noon on a Tuesday was, Ferrante said, how standards die, but coffee in the good cups, and the whole brigade drank to her with it, scalding and sweet.
"To Harper," said the sous-chef. "Who looks."
"To Harper," they said, "who looks," and she stood in the steam and the noise with a good cup in her hand and cried without making a fuss about it, the way people do in kitchens.
That evening she gave Ferrante her notice — not from the family, never that, but from the rota, effective when her placement came through, a month, perhaps six weeks. He took the letter with both hands.
"I hired a waitress," he said, "and this house is returning a paramedic to the city. Casa Loma comes out ahead on the trade. You will always eat free here, and I will always pretend to argue about it."
"Deal," Harper said.