Bio: Lindsey M. Costley received her Bachelor of Arts in Literature and Creative Writing from Pacific University in 2009. She plans to release a self published collection of her nonfiction essays, titled Clean Freak and Other Stories in early June.

“THE TEST”
By Lindsey M. Costley

They probably thought they had just witnessed a murder.
They sat, stopped at the red light, as the garage door opened and a dark figure ran out into the dim lighting to start the silver Honda parked in the driveway. After starting the car the figure opened the back door before running back into the dark mouth of the garage. Two figures reappeared, dragging a large mass between them. In the dim light provided by the flood light atop the garage, they might have seen a dark stain forming along the floor of the garage—a trail of blood following the figures to the backseat of the Honda Accord.
The two figures took several attempts to lift the large mass into the backseat. Every time the light turned green, the audience quickly vanished. Not once did anyone stop and offer help. If they called the police, we were gone before they arrived.
It was late in the summer; the rain lasted longer. The nights were darker. My sister and I were each home from college—Leslie from her third year, me from my first. We dined alone in front of the television—Mom at work, Dad in various stages of completing various chores.
The news reported flash floods on the northeastern side of Colorado Springs. The sliding door opened; my father stumbled forward, both hands clasped tightly on his head as lightning cracked through the darkness behind him and thunder shook the house. Blood mixed with rain streamed down his forearms and off his elbows onto the cream-colored carpet. Without taking another step, my father fell, face first, onto the living room floor.
Our eyes met briefly as my sister and I looked up from where our father lay. Without saying a word, I got onto the floor, trying to roll him onto his back. Leslie ran to the kitchen to grab towels and ice. In the time it took me to roll him over, Leslie returned with her second trip of towels.
After searching through his bloody, black hair we found a large L-shaped gash about two inches above his hairline, the center of which was white. We took turns asking, “Dad, can you hear me?” as we pressed cold towels on his forehead and applied pressure to the wound. Leslie tried tapping his cheeks, shoulders, pressure points inside his arms, but received no response. “He has a pulse,” she stated as if we were EMTs, “but I don’t think he’s breathing.”
“We need to move now. Ambulance?”
“No, it takes them too damn long to get here. Lift on three.” On my sister’s count, we tried to lift the man I could barely roll over on my own. Two hundred and thirty pounds feels like a hell of a lot more when he isn’t moving and when he’s your father.
Dad used to be a firefighter in the Air Force, so Leslie and I have been First Aid Certified since we could sign our own names. This has been extremely beneficial living on the busiest corner in our neighborhood. Lately, emergency response teams don’t arrive fast enough. Even though the local fire department is only a few blocks away, they never arrive before the unit located halfway across town.
Accident after accident, my father is always the first one out the door. Leslie and I run out after him. Mom always calls for emergency units. The accidents test our education. Dad asks us what to do before we reach the edge of our front lawn. We learn in real time. We act quickly. We can’t risk being wrong.
I can only remember one accident when he yelled, “Stay inside,” before we had even reached the front door. We tried to watch from the bay window on the west side of the house, but all we could see was a practically flattened VW Bug and our father, covered in the blood of people he had never met. When he came inside hours later, his whole body trembled. I could hear his muffled cries through the heater vents while he showered. Leslie and I knew not to ask any questions.
This is not your father. This is different. He is everyone else.
Dad always told us that if he were ever the first to arrive on the scene of an accident in which he knew the victims, he wasn’t allowed to help them. He could administer care until another unit arrived, but he would have to step away once it did. I never understood why. I always assumed that I would be of more help if I had a personal connection to the people I helped. I thought I would want to help them more. I thought I would care more about the outcome.
I didn’t understand that I wouldn’t be thinking rationally through my emotions. I didn’t understand how dangerous a personal connection could be. We should have called for help, but we were afraid. We didn’t think anyone could help him better than we could. So we did it alone. We didn’t call for backup. We didn’t wait for another unit to arrive.
Out of the fear that we would drop him if we were actually able to lift him, we decided to drag our father by his armpits, keeping his head elevated. Once we made it down the step into the garage, Leslie ran to start her car—there was no way we could lift him high enough to get him into my Jeep or his Chevy truck.
It took three attempts before we could get his body into the backseat. We struggled to bend him in a way that he was both upright and inside both doors. Leslie held a towel on his head while I sped through the canyon to Memorial Hospital.
When it comes to medical emergencies, Dad is always calm under pressure. Of course it is his job to be calm. If he is ever worried or afraid, he never allows it to show.
He cut his hand open on the meat slicer at our family’s restaurant one morning. He was cleaning and in a moment of carelessness, ended up with the circular blade in the center or his hand. Before removing his hand from the machine, he reached over to grab a clean towel off of the shelf. He slowly removed his hand and then immediately wrapped it in the towel, using his teeth to tie a large knot on top of his hand. He clenched his left hand in his opposite armpit.
My grandfather, practically deaf at this point in his life, was reading the newspaper in the office. Papa frequently lost his glasses atop his head or in the front pocket of his shirts, but it’s not like he could see any better with them on. Knowing his chances of making it to the hospital were better if he drove himself, my father hollered over the kitchen noise and told Papa he had to run an errand. After hearing no response, he drove himself to the hospital and returned with a fistful of stitches. Papa never noticed he was gone.
“Are you going to have to shave a chunk of my hair?” my father asked the doctor.
“That shouldn’t be necessary with the staples, Mr. Costley.”
“No, but… even though it isn’t necessary, my daughters would really appreciate it if you shaved a chunk of my hair. I owe them something to laugh about.” Dad continued his effort to repay us with some humorous token for an evening we could never forget, but the doctor did not see things the way we did.
We left the hospital hours later. Dad’s hair was matted where the seven staples held his head together. He looked as though he were wearing barrettes, assembled in an L-shaped part in the center of his head. Even without a shaved chunk of hair, I laughed every time I caught a glimpse of him in the rearview mirror.
When we returned home, the rain had stopped. We walked onto the deck in the backyard where my father pointed to the metal water-meter box. There were thick black hairs on the corner of the box. “The rain was coming down so hard that I ran over here. I was trying to duck under the ledge to get out of the rain and I hit my head on the bottom edge of this meter. I must have hit it pretty damn hard, because I thought I could make it inside to clean up, but I passed out before I could even close the door behind me,” my father explained.
“We noticed,” I laughed.
“Look at this mess,” he gestured toward the bloodstained carpet, “Looks like it’s set pretty good. We may have to get new carpet.”
“Mom’s going to be so mad at you.”
“Yeah.”
“She’s going to laugh when she sees your head though,” I said.
“Who wouldn’t?” Leslie joked.
As terrified as we had been, we knew we could never tell him, but we also knew he understood. I could see it in his eyes when he looked at us. He was thankful. He was proud. We had passed the ultimate First Aid test. We were ready to leave his care and live in the world on our own. Our laughter broke through the silence of everything we would never say.