The paramedics came in eleven minutes. It felt like eleven hours.
She had fallen getting out of the bath on Tuesday night. She had broken her hip. She couldn’t get up. She couldn’t reach the phone, which was on the nightstand in the bedroom. She had been lying
on that cold tile floor for almost thirty-six hours.
“Another day,” the paramedic told me quietly as they carried her down the stairs on a stretcher, “and I don’t think she’d have made it. Dehydration. Hypothermia. At her age.” He shook his head.
“You found her just in time.”
I rode with her in the ambulance. Nobody told me I could. Nobody told me I couldn’t. I just climbed in, and the paramedic looked at me, and he didn’t say anything.
At the hospital, they asked me if I was family.
“No,” I said. “I’m her cleaner.”
The nurse gave me a strange look. “Is there family we should call?”
I called Susan in Oregon. I had her number because it was on a list taped inside the cabinet by the phone, in Mrs. Whitaker’s perfect cursive. In case of emergency.
Susan cried on the phone. She said she was getting on the first flight she could. She asked me to
