Part 3 — The Initials
The investigator read the initials slowly. “B.L.F. Brooke Lynn Fenwick, Emergency Medical Technician, certificate number 40817.” It was not the first time I had heard that name that day, but it was the first time it had been read aloud in a voice that cannot be argued with. Brooke had stopped moving toward the parking lot. She stood in the middle of the sidewalk with her phone still face down where she had dropped it, and she looked, for the first time since I had known her, like a very young woman.
The rest came out over the following hour on the tailgate of Unit 2. Brooke ran the supply room and the billing of the company, and she worked the weekend calls when Mitchell was short a hand. Two years before June fell, she had begun to take real vials home and replace them with saline, to sell to a man in Little Rock who paid in envelopes. She had logged each dose under my paramedic number, because it was the only number that had never been questioned.
Mitchell tried once more to speak. “I did not know what she was doing with them.” “You knew the box was wrong,” the investigator said. “You told your father not to open it. You told everyone he was using. You borrowed his name and put it on the loan because you knew his name was safe.” Mitchell looked at the pavement and did not answer, and I have thought since that this was the most honest thing he ever did.
I asked the question that had been living in my chest for four years. “Did my wife die because of that shot?” The investigator looked at the medical examiner, who had come in the second car, a quiet woman with silver hair, and the examiner answered. “Mr. Fenwick, I reviewed the records of the hospital this morning. Your wife died of a blood clot that traveled to the lung after her surgery, a known danger of a broken hip. It would have occurred whether or not she had received that dose. The empty shot gave her pain. It did not take her life.”
I sat down on the curb of Bathhouse Row in my navy uniform shirt and I cried, in front of the fire truck the children had climbed on, and the KARK camera had the grace to look at the mountains. I cried for the pain on Albert Pike, and I cried because I had spent four years believing I had driven my wife to her death. A little boy gave me a hot dog. I took it. It was a very good hot dog.
The law moved with some speed after that. Brooke was charged with unlawful diversion of controlled substances, fraud, and forging the record of a medical run, and the prosecutor of Garland County, with the agreement of the DEA, offered her a plea if she would give the name of the man in Little Rock. She did, that night. He was arrested the next morning outside a car wash. She received a term in prison, followed by years of supervision, and she lost her certificate for good.
Mitchell pleaded guilty to filing false records and to misuse of my name on the loan. His sentence was probation, a heavy fine, and the loss of the license of his company, but the judge was generous in one respect. She ordered that the $96,000 loan be voided as having been procured by false pretenses, and the bank, which had been so sure of its paperwork, agreed. My name came off that debt, at long last, with a stroke of the pen of a clerk.
The unit itself was sold at auction by the court. I did not go. A man from the hospital district told me afterward that it went to a small company in Mena that needed a second ambulance, and that they planned to keep the lettering, which I took as a courtesy. The narcotics box was destroyed under supervision, with a little ceremony nobody attended, and Fenwick Medical Transport was closed.
The state board looked at my own license in October. A panel of five people read my record, forty years of it, and heard from the investigator and the examiner. The chairman said that my certification had never been in doubt, that my name had been used without my knowledge, and that Arkansas would be proud to have me teach. I was offered a position training new paramedics at the community college in Hot Springs, two evenings a week.
I took it. I teach a roomful of twenty-year-olds how to read a monitor, how to hold a hand, and how to keep a log that tells the truth. On the first night I told them about a lady named June who made the best pecan pie in Garland County, and about the shot she did not receive. I did not make it a sermon. I only said that the paper is the last thing standing when everybody else has gone home, and they wrote that down.
The run sheet in the recipe box was not only a clue, it was a small act of love, because I kept it for the wife who could no longer ask. Then I took the card with the pecan pie out of its place and read it, and I decided at last to bake.
I burned the first pie and the second. The third came out of the oven on a Sunday in December, golden at the edges, a little too sweet. My neighbor from across the street, Mrs. Agnew, came over and we ate it at the kitchen table without saying much. She closed her fork around the last crumb the way June always did. “Odell,” she said, “it is exactly right.” It was not. But I ate another slice, and I let her say it.