*
Six days later, Dolores sits in her usual chair outside the fire station, cleaning her fingernails with her pocketknife. The gate clanks open and she looks up. It’s her—the woman from one week earlier, wearing the same clothes.
“Can I help you?” Dolores says.
“Yes, please,” the woman says. “I need you to let me into that ambulance.”
Dolores stands up and looks her over. “Show me your hands,” she says, and the woman pulls two clenched fists out of the front pocket and unfurls them high in the air. Empty.
“I’m not here to make trouble,” the woman says.
Dolores, not quite sure why she’s doing what she’s doing, jerks her head toward the driveway and starts walking toward the ambulance. The woman trails a few steps behind. Their sneakers squeak in the grass, wet from an afternoon thunderstorm.
“So why do you need to look inside?” Dolores says. She reaches around her waist to unhook a carabiner full of keys jangling from her back belt loop.
“I just want to sit inside. Would that be okay? If I just sit inside?”
“You know, Miss, we’ve got a lot of junkies around here—”
“I’m not a junkie,” the woman says, her voice firm, her mouth the thin, rigid line of a cliff’s edge. Dolores opens up the back of the ambulance and says, “Can you tell me what’s going on?”
Pulling the handle on the door, the woman hoists herself up and into the vehicle before Dolores can stop her. She steps inside and looks around. Dolores scans to see if anybody from the fire station is watching, but everybody is indoors, probably watching TV.
“I just want to be inside here for a few minutes,” the woman says. She hugs herself, cradling her elbows in each hand. “Please, just a minute.”
Dolores pats the edge of the truck. “Come sit down,” she says.
“This is the last place he was alive,” the woman says, lowering her body to the ambulance floor. The truck bounces slightly as she releases her weight and plunks herself down. Suddenly she screams and bashes a closed fist on the floor. Dolores startles. As the woman raises her arm to strike the floor again, Dolores catches her wrist and firmly holds it.
“It’s not fair,” the woman screams. “It’s not fair, it’s not fair, it’s not fair.”
For a second, Dolores wants to die on her behalf. She’s been privy to severed fingers, broken bones, gunshot wounds, heart attacks, women in labor—but this is a different pain. She runs a hand in a circle over the woman’s shoulder blades as her heavy breathing subsides. She doesn’t cry, Dolores notes. Dolores never cries, either. That’s how you make it look like you’re not falling apart, even to yourself. Even if your heart is in smithereens.
Oh, Dolores thinks. I know why I know her face. This is the mother of the child who died in the accident. The really bad one. The day after the crash, Dolores saw her picture in the Buffalo News and studied it for a long time, a small black and white square that morphed into dots when Dolores lifted it close to her eyes.
Dolores doesn’t know if she should say something. That the baby died quickly. That he wouldn’t have suffered. She stays quiet, unwilling to gamble, not knowing if the woman’s vision of what happened in this ambulance is better or worse than the truth.
“I can’t tell you it will be okay,” Dolores says, and the woman nods, lifting her hair out of her face with her fingers. “It won’t be okay. Forever and ever—it will be fucked up.”