Good Neighbors

For a single moment, the man could’ve been sleeping. There was a strange second in the room where he had the slightest chance of being alive. That was before I saw him. Afterwards I would recognize some kind of foresight, that even as we called the ambulance and did CPR, even as my father in his grey windbreaker spoke very slowly to the crying woman, the man on the bed had no chance of being alive.

Our neighbors were religious, not enormously so, but quietly, respectfully. It was circumstance that we should come home from a weekend camping on a late Sunday evening and find Louisa, who was then seventy three, crying for help from the porch. I was unpacking an overnight duffle and trying to remember whether I usually put long socks in the drawer with underwear or in the drawer with pants. Our lives were stable, in upper-middle-class fashion, and we didn't worry too much about money and we were easily placated with a trip into the mountains every other month. There were always bills and most of the time there was money, but it worked. Enough so that the house on Woodward Avenue had a view of the mountains and the sun behind them. Enough so that we lived in a neighborhood close to downtown with its own fire station a block away and a homemade ice cream shop. Enough so that I had to sort long socks from short socks in the drawers.

My father barked up the stairs, “Boys, get down here. Get out here now.”

Something was wrong. We knew the difference between the annoyance that filled his voice when he called us to get groceries and the plain urgency that filled it when mom was sick or when the dog disappeared one night. Me and my younger brother Randy took the stairs two at a time and rushed onto the porch.

“It’s Jerry, he’s not moving. We’re going over.”

We crossed the yard and Louisa opened the screen door and led us in and we went in through her small, if forgiving, kitchenette and to the bedroom. Jerry was her husband at a decade older. He lay peacefully at rest with his hands clasped over his chest. He looked like a funeral mannequin and I knew that he was likely dead even as we entered. Foresight.

“Well he just fell asleep like that. He always sleeps in the afternoon but he won't wake up,” Louisa cried. I studied him. It was my first dead body. This interested me more than it should have but her crying was enough to startle me awake.

“Let’s get him on the floor,” my father started. We moved the blanket off of him while dad tried to talk to him, slapping his face occasionally, saying “Jerry, Jerry” like it was an order.

I got on his legs and Randy got on his shoulders and Louisa tried to stay out in the living room. We set Jerry down on the ground. It was then we called the ambulance.

“911 what is your emergency.”

My father started talking quickly and calmly to the operator and he shoved me over at Louisa and tried to get me to get her to call someone.

“Who can we call?”

“What—what?”

We called her kids and through the old dial-in phone I could hear nothing and she could say nothing so I spoke very quickly imitating my father.

“Jerry won't wake up. We believe he might be… have passed away.”

I could only hear garbled speech like radio static so I passed the phone to Louisa and went back to my father who had started CPR. I wanted to say he’s dead, save your strength. But the 911 operator was taking him through it over speaker phone.

“It’s alright if you crack a rib. Proper CPR will do this.”

Randy helped Louisa out of the room.

“Let me.”

I knelt down and took over for him. He was in his sixties himself and didn't know how to do it right.

“You want to penetrate two inches,” the operator said.

I started to do the compressions. One two three. One two three. Just like in PE.

“You’ve got it.” This was all my father said before he went out to find Louisa. Randy had gone home.

I was hand over hand pushing with all my weight. I heard a few ribs pop. The operator asked me questions and I nodded and gave one word answers. We heard sirens after several minutes—I found out later it was almost ten—and my dad took over the compressions as Randy and I led the paramedics and police and firefighters to the door and through the house to Jerry.

Dad said we should go home and stay out of their way. It was hard enough moving in the house with four of us. We all wandered over to the porch of our house and stood watching. There was no chance he was alive but we were still waiting to see what they said. Randy went up to his room at some point because he was tired and having trouble thinking about it. I sat on the porch and waited as a cop came over and asked to see my father.

“We’ll need a statement. From what I hear, you all did a good thing for that woman—everything you could.”

“I’ll go get my father.”

My father went out and explained everything, over gesturing and waving his arms like it had been some great ordeal. He was a fine storyteller and the cops listened with genuine interest.

When eventually the medics came back and we knew it was over, we sighed in relief and went back inside. There were more cops and ambulances on Woodward avenue that day than there had been in many years.

Jerry had been old, so I found myself unbothered for a while. I went back to sorting socks. My father came in later and said we were brave to go in there and since we were quick to action it was unlikely anything else could've been done. He seemed more broken up about it but he had known Jerry and Louisa for a bit of time.

I wasn't particularly disturbed by it. Being in a room with a dead person didn't seem too much different from being in a room with a live person. Maybe they looked a little smaller, but that’s all. I was sad for Louisa living on her own but her kids and grandkids were on their way. My father was proud of us and I was proud of him. He was always the first to action at times like these, and even when he and my mother fought I could see why it was she loved him. He was the first one up when someone needed help. He was someone you could count on.

Months go by. Now, leaning over my laptop, my father reads this story and shakes his head. He laughs. “We moved him onto the floor after calling the ambulance. They told us to lay him on a flat surface for CPR.”

He leaves the room but doesn't realize he’s changed the story entirely. He doesn't realize he’s shattered my recreation. Now it’s all wrong. Because now it means that emergency services took over fifteen minutes to get to the house when the fire station was a minute's worth of jogging down the hill. Now my brother and I carry him from the bed, not Jerry, me at his feet, Randy swaying slightly under the bulk of his shoulders and medical services are not going to make it in time. Maybe they already knew. Maybe we shared the same foresight.

Names have been changed for privacy.