She grabbed it, dumped it, went inside. "I need water," she said to the attendant, loud enough that he startled and looked up. "Bottle of water, fast. There's a man outside having a cardiac event. " The attendant blinked at her. "A what? " "Heart attack. " She was already at the refrigerator case.
She grabbed the water and a small bottle of aspirin. She knew about aspirin, she had read something aspirin was what you gave, and she brought them to the counter and the total came to $6.72. And she put her $8 on the counter without thinking about it, without doing the math, without asking herself whether this was the right decision. The right decision registered somewhere in her body before her brain caught up. She just did it.
She was already moving back outside before the change hit her palm. He was still conscious, barely, but still there. "Okay," she said, crouching beside him again, her voice steady and low, the way she talked to Maya when Maya was scared and Sienna needed her to stay calm. "I've got water and aspirin. Aspirin's good for heart attacks.
Okay, I need you to chew one. Can you do that for me? " She helped him get the tablet between his lips. She helped him drink. His hands were shaking badly and she cupped her hands around his to steady the water bottle. And she did not think about the money she just spent or the breakfast she just not bought.
She thought about keeping him conscious. She thought about the sound his breathing was making. She called 911. "I'm I'm the Mercer Street gas station, the one at the corner of Mercer and Hallowell. I have a man here, 50s.
I think he's having a cardiac episode. He's conscious, but barely. Please come fast. The dispatcher asked her standard questions, and she answered them all, her hand still resting on the man's arm, her voice not wavering. She had not known until that moment how good she was at staying calm in crises.
It was probably the exhaustion, she thought. When you were running on fumes, there simply wasn't the energy left for panic. While she waited for the ambulance, while she kept talking to him in that low, steady voice, she became aware of something. The gas station was not empty. There were two other cars at the pumps.
There was a man in a truck on the far side of the lot who had been there when she walked in. There was the attendant inside who was now watching through the window. Not one of them had come over. Not one of them had stopped. She absorbed this fact quietly, without making much of it, the way she absorbed a lot of facts about the world.
You learned it when you were Sienna's age and had lived Sienna's life that most people were not bad. They were afraid. They were tired. They told themselves someone else would handle it. They found reasons why stepping forward wasn't their responsibility.
And those reasons were usually convincing because the mind was very good at constructing convincing reasons when it wanted to protect itself. She had almost done the same thing. She had almost kept walking. She looked down at the man and watched his breathing slow and steady, slightly the aspirin doing something, the water helping. His eyes were still open.
He was watching her face. Help's coming, she told him. You're going to be okay. She didn't know if that was true, but she said it the way you say things when the saying itself has to carry weight, when the words are a form of something you can actually give a person. He said something.
She had to lean in close to hear it. "Alone," he said. "You're not alone," she said immediately. I'm right here. No, he exhaled slow and ragged.
I was alone for a long time. She didn't know what to say to that, so she just kept her hand on his arm and didn't say anything at all, and somehow that seemed to be the right answer. The ambulance took 11 minutes. 11 minutes that she sat on the concrete of a gas station lot in the middle of the night with a stranger who might be dying, and the world went on around her as if nothing unusual was happening. The truck on the far side of the lot pulled away while she was still on the phone with the dispatcher.
The attendant went back to his phone. A woman came to the pump closest to them, looked over and looked away quickly, and paid at the pump without going inside. 11 minutes, and then the lights were there and the paramedics were there and they were asking her questions, and she was answering them. And somewhere in the middle of all of it, the man's hand found hers and gripped it harder than she'd expected for a man who just looked about to lose consciousness. And then he was on the gurney, and they were asking her to step back.
She stepped back. She stood there in the lot with $1.42 in her hand, the change from the $8, and she watched the ambulance pull away with its lights going, and she was aware in a distant way that she had no idea who that man was, had never asked his name, didn't know if he would survive the night, and had just just spent the money that was supposed to feed her daughter breakfast tomorrow. She was also aware in that same distant way that she didn't regret it. She was not sure what that said about her. She was not sure what it said about the world that nobody else had stopped.