Fernwood Hollow · Meet the driver

Rescue Rocket

At the wheel: Amara Keene

Mercedes-Benz Sprinter Ambulance

Her own turn at the gate

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Amara Keene's van has spent plenty of time beside a first-aid table. Now she gives the crew two locations when they ask where to find her: at the post or at the gate.

The wrong set of drawers

If you ask Amara for a pencil at the school office, she gives you a choice of two that write. The third kind of pencil in the building is the one where a person remembers returning it to a different drawer. The useful drawers have paper dividers cut from old rulers. Somebody has put a glove in with the erasers. She'll ask the next three people who come in about it before she puts it in the lost box.

Her son Tom used to wait in the office after school and tell her which drawers had been opened the most. She couldn't understand how he knew until she saw him drag one finger across the handles where different lengths of dust had been cleared. He had been watching her more carefully than she'd been watching the people giving her things. These days he is an apprentice baker and notices how far she has got from the post when she visits the track.

Folding table by the second door

Amara helps staff the volunteer first-aid post on track days. She checks the supplies before the first crew come through and leaves a spot at the table where anyone can ask a private question. At a repair day, she and Ellis from The Enforcer shifted the table to a conspicuous door because he couldn't see where he'd look for it after the other one shut. Under the table they moved there was a single unmatched glove. Ellis asked whether to put it by the door. Amara shook it out before she took it and found a dried leaf shaped remarkably like a second glove.

Wally Wrench and Amara have often worked the same track repair days. Wally passed her a spare folding brace once when a table foot wouldn't sit flat. She wrote his name in the Blue Ledger beside the loan and used the wrong part of a sentence to explain where it went. He asked whether the table had the brace or the brace had the table. They went out together to check which seemed more likely.

“If you have to remember which door shuts first, it isn't in the right place yet.”

Amara Keene · Looking for the first-aid table position with Ellis.

The van when it isn't parked

The Sprinter Ambulance had been useful to her parked with its back doors open. On a closed test the whole shape was suddenly part of what she had to understand. She learned how early to settle the tall van before a narrow corner, where the top feels as if it could take a different line than the wheels. She had gone out for an easy check. Turning through that bit made her want the full run immediately.

Amara stayed at the table through the first slot of the next private practice. No one had asked her to do anything new. They had asked where she would be. She told three people the same thing and watched each one tell somebody else. Tom came with a bread bag for her lunch. When she gave it to him to keep behind the table, he asked where she would be if everything worked out.

Handover in the margin

She wants to get through a whole sustained test with enough time afterward to tell what she'd change the second time. Ellis has a place in mind where the van can enter broad and finish close to one edge. At the post Amara has put the name of the person taking over where the supply list stays visible. She has asked Tom to park near the gate instead of helping to carry things down from the table.

She gives him the unmatched glove to put where people will see it. Tom stretches it over the top of a cone, fingers splayed. Somebody by the gate raises a hand back. Amara does not correct either of them.

“Tell him I'll be by the gate. He already knows where the table is.”

Amara Keene · Giving Tom directions for a practice morning.

Mic at the pits

Five fingers on a cone

Mack Who waved?

Amara Keene My son put that lost glove on a cone. Somebody by the gate waved back, and now we've both stopped trying to find its owner.

Mack Seems it's taken root.

Meet the voice behind the microphone