Letters on the Testing Station

I wrote the first letter at two in the morning in the ambulance bay, sitting on the bumper of Rig Two with the bay doors open because the night was warm and I couldn't stand the break room anymore. We'd run a nothing call, a woman on Maple with chest pain that turned out to be heartburn, and I had forty minutes of downtime and a pen from the glove box.

I'm Calle Heller, thirty-one years old, paramedic for Seongnyeong Valley Fire-Rescue, and fourteen months earlier Diana Dobson told me she was done, because in eight months of dating I never once made her feel like she came before the job. She was right. That's the part I couldn't say to her face back then and the part I could finally say on paper at two in the morning.

The letter went like this.

Diana. I know this is out of nowhere. I responded to a call at the Co-op a few weeks ago, the heat exhaustion on the loading dock, and while I was waiting for the crew to finish cleanup I saw your shift calendar pinned up in the break room, the one with the little ferns drawn on the harvest days. I remembered you drawing those. I remembered everything, honestly, which is the problem, or was the problem, and maybe still is.

I'm not asking you to see me. I'm asking something smaller than that. I know you work the late shift on harvest afternoons, alone at the back of the building with that machine, and I know you finish after everyone's gone. I'd like to leave notes for you at the testing station. Just notes. You can read them or throw them in the dumpster behind the drying racks, whatever you want, and if the answer is no, leave a single word on a scrap of paper and I'll never write again. I don't expect anything. I just wanted to try being the man who shows up on paper before I ask to show up anywhere else. Calle.

I dropped it off two evenings later on my way home from shift, taped it to the clipboard that hangs on the nail by the rupture machine, and then I drove home and hated myself for about three hours and went to bed.

Her answer came back two days later, written on the back of a test report, in her square narrow handwriting that I would have known anywhere.

Calle. Since you clearly already know my schedule, I'll skip asking how. The machine I run is a modulus of rupture tester, bolted to the floor, thick-bellied, older than both of us, and it has a crack meter made in 1987 that I have to zero by hand every morning. There is a steel drawer under the tension gauge. Leave your letters there, not on the clipboard, because the clipboard goes home with the supervisor on Fridays and I don't feel like explaining you to Mr. Anand. If I stop answering, take the hint, and don't stand in the parking lot waiting for me like you did in October, because that was embarrassing for both of us. This is not an invitation. It's an address. Diana.

I laughed out loud alone in my apartment, which is maybe sad, but it felt good. She was funny when she was angry, she'd always been funny when she was angry, and I'd forgotten that or maybe I'd just stopped earning it.

So I wrote again that night.

Diana. Noted on the drawer and the parking lot, and I'm sorry about October, I didn't think of it that way but you're right. Here is something I should have told you fourteen months ago. I have your opera glasses. The mother-of-pearl ones, the little brass-barreled pair you used to bring out to the balcony of your old apartment on Elm Street to watch the night birds come into the cedar. You lent them to me for the meteor shower in August and I never gave them back, and when you packed my things I kept them, and I told myself I'd mail them and I never did. They sit on my windowsill and sometimes at night I pick them up and hold them and don't look through them, because looking through them felt like something I hadn't earned. This is the entire confession. I'll put them in the drawer with this letter, wrapped in a dish towel, and you can keep them or throw them in the dumpster with my pride. Calle.

I left them in the steel drawer under the tension gauge on Thursday, after a shift where we ran three calls and I got home smelling like somebody else's smoke, and then I waited six days, which was harder than any waiting I've done on a scene.

Her next letter came on the back of another report, and it was longer.

Calle. The glasses are on the shelf above the crack meter now, where I can see them when the machine is running, and I have decided not to be furious with you about them, which took some deciding. You asked once what I think about while I work the late shift, and I told you numbers, and you looked disappointed, and I never told you the rest. Here is the rest, since we are being honest on paper where it's apparently easier for both of us.

If the last harvest truck has left and the yard gate is locked and I know we will not be interrupted, here is what I would let you do. I would let you come up onto the testing platform, which is the raised concrete pad behind the machine, and stand behind me while I finish a sample, and put your hands on my hips, only after I say yes to that. I would let you turn me around and unbutton my work shirt, which is nothing special, it's a work shirt, and I would want you to take your time about it anyway, because you were never a take-your-time man and I'd like to see if paper changed that.

I would let you put your mouth on me up there, on the concrete where the frond samples sit all day, and I would let you keep going until I said stop, which would not be for a while. What happens after that depends on how the first parts go. This is not a promise, it's a description, the same way my test reports are descriptions. The fern either breaks at the right load or it doesn't. Diana.

I read it four times in the ambulance bay with my heart going, and I had to get up and walk around Rig Two twice before I could write back, and even then my handwriting came out worse than usual.

Diana. I read your letter four times. I want you to know the yes comes from me first, standing behind you on that platform, hands on your hips, would be yes, and I will wait for you to say it out loud anyway because that's what you should get, someone who waits. I can be slow. I can be slow at almost anything now, it turns out, when I know what I'm slow for. I missed you. I've written that sentence four times and deleted it and I'm leaving it this time. Tell me which harvest afternoon, and I'll be there when the last truck leaves, and if you change your mind between now and then, a single word in the drawer means I go home and that's the end of it. Calle.

The answer came two mornings later, one line on a strip of report paper, and I carried it in my shirt pocket through two calls before I let myself read it again.

Soon. The last truck of the season leaves at six on the final harvest day, and I'll tell you which. Bring a towel like that one, I liked the dish towel.

The letter I wrote next took me three tries, and the middle one is the one she got, because I was two sentences into my own fantasy when the tones went off and I stuffed the paper in my pocket and ran.

Diana. Since you described it, I've been doing something embarrassing on every downtime, which is writing down what I would do, and here it is, I would find the