To Have and to Heist(2)
“What’s wrong?” Chloe’s soothing voice crackled over my phone speaker. I was due for a phone upgrade, but between rent, loan payments, therapy, and living expenses, even my entry-level office salary plus a side gig in a candy store didn’t pay enough to indulge.
“I think I killed someone.”
Chloe didn’t miss a beat. “I’ll grab some bleach and be right over.”
“You’ll be late for work.”
“It’s an IT help desk, babe. We spend most of the day telling people to turn the computer off and on again. I can easily get someone to cover for me.”
Chloe is my ride-or-die. No questions. No judgment. Everyone should have a friend whose first thought is to run for the bleach when you call to tell her you might have killed someone.
“Hurry. He’s barely breathing.” I cleaned the mirror and held it over his mouth again, making a mental note to thank my parents for sending me to a first aid course in twelfth grade. They thought they were paving my way to med school. Instead, the course just confirmed that no one should put their life in my hands.
“I’d better bring a tarp, too,” Chloe said.
“There’s no blood.”
“You might still need the tarp in case he loses control of his bowels.”
“Crap.”
“Exactly. I’ve been reading a lot of romantic suspense books,” she said. “I know everything about dead bodies.”
“I don’t think he’s that dead.” I held the dude’s wrist in my hand. “I feel a pulse. I’m not sure if it’s his or mine. My heart is pounding so hard, I can’t tell.”
“Is he only mostly dead? Like in The Princess Bride?”
Chloe loves romance. We watch The Princess Bride every year on her birthday and rom-coms when it’s her turn to choose on movie nights. Honestly, all that mushy stuff is like nails on a chalkboard to me, but this is Chloe. In seventh grade, she took the fall when I brought a set of steak knives to school for my Edward Scissorhands Halloween costume, and in eleventh grade she sneaked me in the classroom window when I overslept and almost missed our final calculus exam. There isn’t anything I wouldn’t do for her.
“Is there a degree of deadness that involves breathing?” I asked.
“You were the one who was supposed to become a doctor.”
I heard cupboards slam, keys rattle on the counter, the click of a lock. Chloe was on her way. She was nothing if not efficient.
“If I’d become a doctor, I wouldn’t be living in a low-rent basement suite and drowning in debt.” I pressed an ear to the dude’s chest, listening for a heartbeat.
“You would have had even more debt,” she said over the rapid thud of footsteps and the hum of traffic. A single mom working three jobs to make ends meet, Chloe couldn’t afford a car, so she took public transport to get around.
“Yes, but I would also have had the kind of job that would enable me to pay it off before I hit middle age.”
“Almost at the bus stop.” Chloe huffed into the phone.
I gave myself a mental pat on the back for choosing to stay in our hometown of Evanston, Illinois, when I finally moved out of my parents’ house. I had briefly considered finding a place in Downtown Chicago, but rents were high, and I spent most of my free time with Chloe and her daughter, Olivia, so putting almost fourteen miles between us didn’t make sense.
“The paramedics are here,” Rose called out from the hallway. She’d put on a robe after I called the ambulance, a small mercy for which I was undyingly grateful. I wasn’t judging her. I just didn’t need a visual of what the future held in store for me fifty years from now.
“Gotta go, babe,” I said to Chloe. “Rose needs me. I’ll see you soon.”
A gorgeous blond paramedic with green eyes and a face so chiseled it could cut glass gestured me to the side while his two equally hot companions crouched down to check out the almost naked dude on the floor—I’d thrown a tea towel over his hips for the sake of modesty.
“What happened?” he asked.
“My basement suite flooded this morning.” I smoothed down my hair, acutely conscious that I’d come upstairs with a bad case of bedhead and wearing only PJ shorts and a ratty Chicago Bears sweatshirt. “I woke up with my stuff floating past my bed, so I came upstairs to tell Rose. She gave me keys to her place when I moved in so I could check in on her from time to time.”
He smiled, which I took as a good sign. Maybe he liked curvy South Asian girls with long, matted dark brown hair and a little extra lip fuzz because they hadn’t had time for the morning groom. Or maybe he was just a Bears fan.
“Unfortunately, I walked in on her and her boyfriend doing it on the couch.” The visual had been bad enough, but the cost of the extra therapy I’d need to undo the trauma of what I’d seen was beyond imagining.
“Doing what?” he asked.
“You know . . .”
Respect was the guiding principle of my family. Respect for parents. Respect for aunties. Respect for elders. With respect drilled into me from birth, I couldn’t bring myself to use the S word when it came to describing the intimate relations of two seniors. But what word could I use? Why did the paramedic have to be so sexy? Did he wear contacts or were his eyes really that vivid green? Was that a medical device in his pocket? I quickly shut down the runaway train of random thought process that was the bane of my existence.