It felt like something had been missing.
“My mother sent you a plate,” Miguel went on. “And by plate I mean the twelve pounds of food she packed in a huge brown paper bag.”
“Your mother is sweet.” All of the Gonzaleses were. Sometimes Asa envied his partner. Miguel always had a big, warm family to go to after the end of a long, hard shift.
“My mother wants to hook you up with my little sister but—”
“You stay away from my little sister,” Asa finished for him, laughing. “I’m not going anywhere near Arianna, trust me.” Arianna was cute, but Asa had been working with Miguel since he joined the FDNY as a rescue paramedic. They were an elite squad of highly trained paramedics that worked alongside the firemen and administered medical care in dangerous, unstable conditions. The last thing he needed was Miguel pissed at him if things didn’t work out. Their job was too dangerous for personal feelings to get in the way of the work. “I think you tell everyone to stay away from your little sister. You won’t be happy unless she decides to join a convent.”
“She’ll be married to God. A man can’t ask for a better brother-in-law.”
“Mine is pretty cool,” Asa said as a call came in from dispatch. “I get box seats to any baseball game in the country.”
“If you were a legendary shortstop, I would let you date my sister.” Miguel picked up the radio. “We’re in the area, dispatch. We’ll respond.” He looked at Asa. “Slip and fall on some black ice. It shouldn’t take long.”
Asa hit the lights and they drove the two blocks to the scene. Eighty percent of their calls were typical paramedic calls that he rarely thought about when they were done. It was that other twenty percent that stayed with him. An innocent person getting struck by violence, a car accident that left the vehicle and the people inside of it unrecognizable. Last week Asa had gone through another one of those events that he just couldn’t get off his mind.
They had responded to a catastrophic crane collapse last week that had made New York City look like a war zone. Some people didn’t make it. Death was an unfortunate part of the job. He should be used to it by now but last week the loss had hit him harder than usual. Maybe it was the time of the year and knowing that a man wouldn’t be with his family during the holidays. Maybe it was the fact that he felt that his time with his family was growing shorter and shorter.
The longer he did this job, the more important his family became to him.
They pulled up at the scene in front of Wheatly Academy to see a horde of worried teenagers surrounding a woman on the ground.
“Clear a path, guys,” he ordered as they rolled the gurney toward her. “We’re here to help her.” He took in the woman’s appearance and noticed two things. The first was that she definitely wasn’t dressed for winter in her brown high-heeled boots and her thin trench coat. The second was that she looked incredibly familiar. But he couldn’t place her at the moment. “Does anyone know her name?” he asked the kids.
“She’s our English teacher, Miss Roberts,” a girl told him. “Hallie is her first name, I think.”
“Yeah, it is,” a boy confirmed. “We remember it because we say that she’s like Halle Berry, but sweeter. Is she going to be okay? She hit her head, really hard.”
Asa knelt down to the unconscious woman and touched her cold cheek with the back of his hand. Brain injury was a common effect of a slip and fall. “Hallie?” He called her name and she opened her eyes, looking up at him, and it kind of jolted him. He knew in his gut he had seen this woman before. Seen that beautiful shade of brown skin, seen those large, almond-shaped deep brown eyes with what seemed like a million lashes look up at him.
“Am I dead?” Her voice was soft; there was wonder in it. “Are you an angel? Am I dead?”
“No.” He smiled at her. He didn’t usually find injured people cute, but this one was exceedingly so. “You slipped on the ice and hit your head. We’re going to take you to the hospital to get you checked out.”
“Miss, are you okay?” One of the girls asked as she stepped forward.
“No. I’m not.” She shut her eyes again. “I remember walking toward you because you and Tiana looked like you were about to engage in World War Three and that’s when I slipped.” Her voice was much stronger this time. “I blame you two for this fall and that means thirty years of detention for both of you.”
“Thirty years!”
“Yup. That’s how long I’ll be embarrassed about this. I’m not sure I’ll survive it.”
“But, Miss Roberts! We were just talking about that poem you assigned us last night. I think it’s about a boy wanting his mother’s approval. Liza thinks it’s about romantic love, but clearly she’s wrong and takes everything literally because that’s how basic she is.”
The other girl turned around so quickly Asa was surprised that she didn’t have whiplash. “Who are you calling basic?”
“Girls!” Those pretty brown eyes flew open again. “If you don’t stop arguing you’re both going to be feeling basic when I keep you after school for the next two weeks alphabetizing my book collection by genre. And if you don’t think it’s that many books, I will gladly go out and get more to keep you busy until prom season.”
The girls clamped their mouths shut.
“Well, the good news is that your teacher is lucid, kids,” Miguel said stepping forward so that he could stabilize her neck. “The bad news is, she going to be on a war path if you don’t give her some space.”
“Get to class,” she said as her eyes drifted shut briefly, before she opened one of them to survey the crowd. “I’ll know if you didn’t show up. I’ll be checking in, and your papers are still due at the end of the week. You will email them to me.”
“Really?” one of the boys asked.
“If you don’t believe me, you’ll find out what happens if they are late.”
The kids scattered. Asa would have, too. Her tone told everyone she wasn’t playing. He was surprised that someone who looked so adorable, with her doe eyes and head full of springy black curls, could get a bunch of high schoolers to obey without talking back. His retired military father would have admired that.
“Are they gone?” she asked, looking to Asa again. “My head hurts so much I’m not sure I can see straight.”
He nodded. “Ran out of here like they were on fire. Can you tell me what else hurts? Your neck, or back?”
“Just my head.” She grabbed his hand and buried it in her hair. “It hurts here.”
“That’s because you have an epic knot.”
“Darn, and I was planning to shave my head this week.”
He smiled down at her. “It’ll have to wait till after Christmas.”
“I don’t want them to worry.” She looked truly distressed then, and he could see the pain etched into her face. “I have to be tough with them or they’ll worry.”
“Your
