The next hour was a blur. I remember Dermott on his knees, crooning Gabby’s name. I was already dialing 911 when he hollered at me to call for help.
“She’s been shot, I’m sure of it,” I told the woman who answered the call. “No, no, there’s no one else here. The two of us, me and her husband. No, of course neither of us has a gun. Hurry, she’s bleeding a lot.”
“Baby, baby, it’s okay. I’m here,” Dermott kept saying, even though it was obvious she was unconscious. It felt like forever, but was only a minute or two before I heard the amplified chatter of two-way radios at the same time I heard someone banging on the door to the building.
“I’ll go,” I said, and ran down the stairs, hanging onto the banister so I wouldn’t fall headlong in my rush. I was shaking so much that moving fast was dangerous. The guy I’d seen on campus earlier, Macho Cop, was peering in the window, a gun in his hand. His partner was kicking at the door. The door opened from the inside when I yanked it and I pointed them up the stairs. “Outside,” the macho one shouted at me, giving me a push to emphasize his instructions. “Get outside now.” He slammed the door open so far it latched into a piece of hardware on the wall. The other uniformed policeman had already disappeared up the staircase. I stumbled out the door and leaned against a railing, my heart pounding and my stomach churning.
The police car, sitting at an odd angle to the sidewalk with its flashers on, was beginning to attract attention even before two more cop cars zoomed up. Two of the cops ran past me while two more fanned out along the building’s front. After a quick, barked conversation on his two-way radio, the male cop turned door duty over to a female in uniform and headed up the stairs at a trot. I heard a siren coming from the back of the building, so I guessed they were trying to cover the parking lot in case whoever shot her was still inside. I didn’t have time to be alarmed by the thought because Dermott was yelling as he was being almost dragged down the stairs.
He was begging the officer who held his arm to let him stay with her, pleading for them to stop the bleeding, and it broke my heart. A fire department ambulance pulled up and almost immediately a couple of guys in regulation gear and lugging large cases trotted up the sidewalk. The woman guarding the door spoke into her radio, then said, “Okay, all clear,” and waved the firemen into the building.
From then on, there was a steady stream of responders. A fire truck and its crew, an ambulance and two EMTs, a couple of people in street clothes but with IDs that got them right through, a pot-bellied Lynthorpe College security guard, and a few faculty and students drawn by the commotion hung around. Dermott, banished to the lawn like me, peppered me with questions. What did I see? Did she say anything to me? What did I hear? It wasn’t doing him much good since I hadn’t heard or seen anything useful. At other moments, he would insist that he be allowed to go back upstairs to be with his wife, but the cop on door duty wasn’t buying. Lynthorpe’s uniformed cop kept trying to get in too, blustering about his responsibilities.
“Look,” I heard the cop to him say at one point, “you’re an old hand. You know better. It’s a frigging crime scene. No one goes up except the investigators and the EMTs.” The EMTs came into view through the glass, moving carefully toward the front door with their burden, a bright yellow gurney onto which Gabby was strapped and partially covered with a blanket. A mask covered her nose and mouth, and a fireman was close to her, holding up a clear plastic bag of fluids. They hadn’t come down the stairs, because those were partially visible from where I stood, so they must have found the elevator I had heard.
Dermott leapt to the doorway as the EMTs reached it and bent over the free side of the gurney, saying her name over and over as the small band made its way to the ambulance. It drove off without him and he turned and saw me standing nearby on the grass, trying not to cry. I grabbed his hand to say something but he spoke first, panic in his eyes. “They won’t tell me how she is or what happened.”
It was heartbreaking to hear his pain and fear, and I couldn’t think of anything to say that would ease it.