One case at a time. That was the whole method. It would be enough, years later, on a bright morning in her own front yard, when a man with a hose expected to meet a helpless woman and instead met the finished product of sixty years of practice.
Chapter Fifteen
A Son Who Learned to Drive Toward Trouble
Aaron Greer learned to drive toward trouble the way other men learn a trade, which is to say somebody taught him, and then practice made it a reflex, and then one morning the reflex pointed at his own mother.
The teaching began in an ambulance bay when he was twenty six and new enough that his boots still looked borrowed. His training officer was a woman named Delia who had carried stretchers through two decades of other people's worst days, and her doctrine fit on an index card. You will want to hurry and you will want to flinch, she told him. Do neither. Drive like the person in back is your own blood and think like they are a stranger. He wrote it down, which made her laugh, and then she saw him do it on his first bad call and never laughed about his notebook again.
He became the paramedic crews asked for when a scene had a crowd in it. He had his mother's gift, though he would have called it a habit instead. He asked names. He said them back. He narrated what he was doing in a level voice while he did it, because a voice at a constant temperature tells a frightened body that the world is still organized. More than once a patient who could not remember the accident remembered him, and found him later, and thanked him for the strangest thing. Not the splint. Not the oxygen. The calm. He kept a small notebook in his own pocket for the names of the dead whose families he had to call, because some things, he had learned at his father's table long before any academy, should never be trusted to memory alone.
The phone call came on a morning when he was between shifts, drinking coffee in his kitchen with the radio muttering the overnight tally. His mother's name lit the screen, and he answered with the ease of a man whose mother calls about groceries and garden pests and the occasional case she is allowed to describe, which is to say almost none of them.
What he heard did not match the number on the screen.
A man's voice first, raised, close to the phone in a way that meant close to her. A demand about identification, words like prove it, words like help, said the ugly way. Then his mother, and Aaron would replay this part in his head for months afterward, in the car, in the shower, at three in the morning. His mother was not frightened. He had known her voice for forty years and he knew its whole register, and what he heard was the courtroom, out on the front lawn, in the open air. Level as a tabletop. Asking a question.
What is your badge number, Officer.
And then the sound Aaron Greer would carry for the rest of his life, the sound that moved him off his kitchen chair before he had decided to stand. A man laughing. Not startled laughter, not nervous laughter. The laughter of a person enjoying the distance between his power and her question. Then water, a shocking amount of it, and the phone's small microphone drowning in the noise of it, and his mother saying his name once, Aaron, in a voice that meant stay where you are, and the line going to static and then to nothing.
He was already driving. He would not remember deciding. The training did what training does and put his body through its stations while his mind ran ahead of the car the whole way across Portland. He kept his speed at the edge of lawful, which for him was its own kind of shouting. He called dispatch with one hand and gave the address the way he gave scene reports, flat and complete. Four two two Ashbury Lane. Laurelhurst. Officer involved. The subject is my mother. He heard how that last sentence changed the dispatcher's breathing, and he understood that it had changed nothing about the drive still left to make.
He rehearsed arrivals the way he rehearsed trauma calls. If she is hurt. If she is down. If he is still there. Delia's voice rode with him, the old index card doctrine. Drive like she is your own blood. Think like she is a stranger.
She was, of course, his own blood, standing soaked and upright in her own front yard when his car turned onto Ashbury Lane, and the thinking and the blood arrived at the curb at exactly the same moment.