by Marie Marini
Copyright © 2019 by Marie T Marini
All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Published by www.bookbaby.com
Edited by Steve Parolini www.noveldoctor.com
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Print ISBN: 978-1-54399-031-7
eBook ISBN: 978-1-54399-032-4
“Contrary to the storybook image of cute bitsy baby fireflies nibbling on flowers, the underground-dwelling larvae of the lightning bug are carnivorous and feast on slimy slugs, worms and snails. Once they grow up, some move on to cannibalism and eat other fireflies…”
Mellissa Breyer. Fireflies! 12 things you didn’t know about lightning bugs.
Some would judge me for the things I did. I know I didn’t always do the right thing, but you have to understand it all started with an accident. My therapist thinks it would be good for me to write the whole story, but before you judge me, consider the circumstances, what would you have done?
I’ve had a few names in my life, it doesn’t matter what my name is now but then it was Kristen. I am sitting at a plain old wooden desk with a pen and composition notebook. No computer, internet access is closely monitored. My story begins with Darren. He was my first love. I think you always have a sweet spot for your first love. Darren was and always will be special to me, even after all that happened.
I was a 27-year-old Firefighter Paramedic for Deerfield Beach Fire Rescue when we met, and it was magical. I had been working there for about 7 years and had already made Lieutenant. I was also an instructor for the new recruits still on probation. I was only 20 years old when I got hired on, the youngest ever to make probation and one of only about eight women in the department. My adopted mother Tricia was so proud of that.
She was in a wheelchair the day of my swearing-in ceremony. As I got down on one knee in front of her in my sparkly new uniform she tutted me away and slowly stood up. She had a headscarf covering her patchy bald scalp—she refused to wear a wig. She was so stubborn and so proud and just so lovely in her own Captain uniform from Waleska Fire Rescue. Even as her jacket slid from her slight shoulders, her face shone with pride. We both shook as she struggled to pin the badge We were alone in a room full of strangers and we tried so hard to keep our eyes from leaking. Tricia fostered me when I was 13 and a year later she adopted me and we moved away from Roswell to Waleska. Tricia had been offered a promotion to Captain to make the move. She said it was a fresh start for all of us. Tricia was the only mother I had ever known.
That day as she hugged me fiercely, she whispered, “I love you so much it hurts. You have NO limitations my little hummingbird.” That’s what she used to call me when she first brought me home. I would flutter from room to room, never resting for more than a second. She could see my heart racing and I always seemed to be preparing for flight. When I was a teenager and she called me a hummingbird I would laugh and say, “I’m not that pretty, more like a firefly!”
That day at the swearing in ceremony, as I stood there with tears running freely down my face, I didn’t see the room full of emotion. There have been a lot of times I couldn’t see the forest for the trees. She had taken a little box from her purse and presented it to me. It was a little silver hummingbird on a simple silver chain. I haven’t taken it off since that day.
Tricia died five weeks later. I used to think that is what broke me but now I realize it was already too late, I was already broken.
Fire service is an old boys’ club and women have to work so much harder just to prove we’re as good as the men. We would never be accepted as better. To get respect, especially from the dinosaurs, you have to excel at everything but stop short of beating the big boys because that would hurt their pride. It’s a fine line to walk and after seven years I was tired of protecting their egos.
It was August. We had been training on extrication all week. I was in full bunker gear, helmet and gloves working on cutting cars open. The equipment is heavy and the smell of hot metal fills your mouth and nose. We were in an empty, overgrown lot behind the county salvage yard. The salvage owner would save cars for us to practice on. Sparks from the cutting equipment ignited some dry brush.
“Rookie! MOVE! Why are you even here?”
I could barely hear myself screaming at the probationary firefighter over the noise of the cutting equipment. The new recruit jumped and scampered around like a squirrel, grabbing the charged hose and extinguishing the embers. It hadn’t rained in a week and in that heat everything and everyone dries out fast. I called for break, shaking my head as I passed the rookie who was finishing tamping the brush. I was soaked through with sweat as I headed for the Rehab truck; it was the only air conditioning we had available. We had three teams and we rotated them to brush duty, cut team and cool down. Except for me, I was always on cut team taking just short breaks to hydrate and pee.
“Out! Now, kids! Let’s go!” I yelled as I ushered them out the back doors of the truck. They didn’t complain, didn’t grumble. I had a reputation as a hard ass, but I was also the best extrication trainer around. They signed up for this class, it wasn’t mandatory. They could quit and I reminded them of that frequently.
I let them back in to the AC when I finished peeing in a sharps hazard plastic bucket and somewhat successfully pulled my sodden underwear and pants back up. Out here I was the boss. As I jumped down from the truck the rookie stepped up in front of me.
“Lieutenant, I’m sorry about that back there. It won’t happen again. I just kind of zoned out for a minute.”
I looked at the name tag on his shirt. “Sanchez, a minute is all it takes for someone to get hurt. It happens again you are out of the class.” I pulled on my gloves and headed back to the cars.
Back at the station when the older guys were around, the power shifted. I could hear them in the kitchen talking about me. They didn’t know I was in the little computer room within earshot.
“Such a bitch!” That sounded like Mason. “She just needs to get laid, I’d do her. I would take one for the team.” Oh, that was definitely Sparks, what an ass. They all laughed at that. “You might have to gag her first. That mouth!” That was Rodriguez, unexpected from him. It was the environment though, if they didn’t join in, they weren’t part of the team. I should know. “Yeah she has a mouth on her but killer bod.” That was Sparks again, “She’s gay anyway, I mean who could resist my charms?” Sparks thought he was a gift from God. I had to let them know I had heard them but not let them see me shake.
I walked in, went to the fridge and grabbed an apple. “Hmm, could be used as a gag.” I bit down on the apple, stared down Rodriguez and left. Whispers and giggles like a middle school locker room followed my shaky knees to my bunk room.
I don’t shit where I eat. If I’m dating, I don’t talk about it at work and I NEVER date a firefighter. They gossip too much. They’re just too involved in each others’ lives. After Tricia died, I lost touch with my step dad, Keith. It was just too hard, all we ever talked about was Tricia. They knew about Tricia because she was at my swearing in. I didn’t want them knowing anything else. I didn’t need anyone feeling sorry for me.
I was raised inland north Georgia and didn’t see the ocean until I was 14. Tricia and Keith took me to Myrtle Beach in South Carolina on vacation. I had never had a vacation before so everything
was magical and fresh and new. Maybe it is like that for everyone on vacation, I wasn’t sure. The vastness of the ocean took my breath away. It didn’t seem real to me that water could go on that far. I learned to swim in three days in the hotel pool all the while staring out to the ocean just yearning to be a part of that. Tricia and Keith would come to the pool with me at night. They would have a glass of wine poolside while I practiced. I could hear little snippets of their conversations. “So brave…” “finally putting a little weight on…” ”looks healthier”… ” such a tough little thing”… I kept practicing until they finally said I was good enough to go in the ocean.
The first time I dove under the waves was like a dream. The constant cacophony—kids squealing and chasing each other, moms calling out to kids, airplanes flying by, cars honking at each other over a parking space, babies crying—faded away to nothing. Underwater, all I could hear was my own heartbeat. I found out later that it was the same being inside a fire with your SCBA mask, you can feel the heat, you hear your heartbeat and your own breathing. The whoosh of the flames as they dance across the ceiling over your head is more force than sound, you can feel it push against you. The whole world is right there, but for that moment you are in a bubble, a deliciously dangerous bubble that separates you from it all. Everything seems to happen in slow motion. At any second you could die. A shark. A roof collapse. That was all part of the rush, but the real attraction for me was the veiled quiet. The curtain that separates two worlds. That was what kept bringing me back.
The day I met Darren I was cranky and stressed. We met at the gym. I couldn’t find a kickboxing class in Deerfield so I was trying this new gym two towns north in Delray Beach. Darren was a distributor for Red Bull. They were doing an event at the gym so he was sitting at a table in the lobby giving away free samples and coupons. I saw him checking me out when I arrived for my class, but I was in no mood for some gym guy hitting on me. It had been a tough week. Dealing with the heat and the egos of firefighters who think they are hot shit is draining. Dealing with any people for extended amounts of time drains me. To top it off we had a really bad call the night before. A seventeen-year-old kid was hit by a truck crossing Federal Highway. The truck took off. The kid had been wearing jean shorts hanging off his ass with his underwear showing. When we got there his shorts had been ripped off by the impact and were wrapped around his lower legs, his left leg was twisted up under him. The bone from the open fracture of his forearm glinted in the rain-reflected street lights. He had no shirt. We didn’t know if he started with one. He was missing a sneaker.
As a medic, you’re trained to look at the whole scene and access in seconds. I was the lieutenant on the call so this one was on me. I couldn’t see his chest rise and fall and when I reached him and put my gloved fingers to his neck there was no pulse. My crew looked at me for direction.
“Okay guys, let’s do this. Mason on CPR, Sparks get an IV or an IO started and prep the Epi.” We all knew he was dead, but we have to work them anyway. People don’t want to see you just wrap him up and take him away or stand back and wait for the coroner.
There was one guy braving the rain to take video with his smart phone. It was 2 o’clock in the morning and pouring rain. We worked him hard and we got pulses back. I had to straighten out his leg to get him on the stretcher, I heard someone vomit when I did that. I hoped it was the guy with the cell phone. As we tried to load him on to the stretcher it was like trying to get a noodle to sit on a knife edge. Once we had him on the stretcher and in the truck, we hooked up to the monitor and put Thumper on. Thumper is a mechanical CPR machine that straps around the patient’s chest and does compressions for us, freeing us up to work on other things. I was struggling with the intubation. There was so much blood in his airway, some broken teeth, and I was dripping wet. Mason suctioned the airway and I got the tube. Sparks was heading up front to drive. We had been on scene for less than ten minutes. I handed the airway bag to Mason and I took over meds. He had a pulse but was brady at just 28 beats per minute. Mason was doing a good job breathing for him, but his chest expansion wasn’t what it should be. There could be so many reasons for that and it was my job to try to figure it out in the back of a moving truck. He could have a sucking chest wound, pneumothorax, a deflated lung, broken ribs, or the cartilage of the upper airway could be crushed. Sparks drove like a demon and we banged around in the back of the truck trying to do something for this kid.
The brain starts to die after five or six minutes without oxygen; we didn’t know how long he hadn’t been breathing before we got there. We were trying to keep his vital organs alive so that some good might come of this tragic night. His family would have to decide about organ donation. His soul was already free. His dead eyes stared into mine and I could see that milky film almost like cataracts. After you’ve seen death up close you know what it looks like. When we got back to the station, we were all devastated, lost in our own thoughts. The Captain called in the counselors and pulled us off duty for the rest of the shift. I didn’t want to talk to a counselor. There were no words. I didn’t have kids so everyone on the crew thought that makes the job easier. Maybe it does, maybe it doesn’t. They see their kids’ faces when they run a call like that.
I see my own face.
After my workout class and two sparring sessions in the ring I was dripping sweat. My arms ached from the week of training and the workout. Though the kid’s face was burnt into my brain I felt more centered and relaxed than I had all week,. He would be with me forever now. Another pebble in my pocket. They say that every death a first responder works puts a pebble in their pocket, as you go through your career your pocket gets heavier and heavier.
I headed for the showers. As I passed the Red Bull table, Darren held out a can and said, “Well you look like you’re in a better mood now, need to recharge?”
“I don’t do caffeine,” I said, maybe a bit too curtly. His face fell. He was cute. Tall, well maybe 5’11” isn’t that tall but I’m only 5’1”. He had blond hair really short on the sides with an undercut, and long straight bangs hanging into his eyes. His hair had some highlights that I hoped were natural from the sun. His shoulders were strong. Tight and toned but not overly muscled like some of the steroid guys I work with. Sparks, for example, although he denies it and somehow always passes the dope test.
Darren had well-defined calves. Some guys are all muscle in their chest and arms then they have these ridiculously skinny legs. He wasn’t super hairy but not shaved. That was my initial assessment, sometimes we can’t switch it off.
“I like to hit Jamba Juice after a workout to recharge.” I threw the comment over my shoulder as I sauntered off to the showers. I knew he was looking, and I was enjoying the game. When I got out of the shower and came back through the lobby the table was stripped down and Darren was outside shoving stuff into his truck. As I walked out the door, he closed the truck door and turned to me.
“Can I join you at Jamba Juice? To be honest, I’m not so keen on caffeine myself but don’t tell my boss.” He smiled a lopsided little grin. He had an accent I couldn’t place but it wasn’t the south.
“Sure,” I replied. “Let me just drop my bag..”
A smile exploded on his face.
“I’ll even let you buy!” I quipped, feeling cute and flirty. “I usually go to the one on Atlantic Ave, just a few blocks from here. We could just walk over. I tossed my gym bag into the back of my Honda Pilot beside my bunker gear and station bedding. We started talking as we walked to Jamba Juice.
“I’m Darren. You really kicked ass in there!” he said.
“Thanks, I’m Kris. Yeah, kickboxing is my drug of choice.” I smiled up at him with a goofy smile born of my enthusiasm, I had to work to dial it down a notch.
“Do you compete?” He stepped behind me to let a woman with a stroller pass, then jumped back up beside me. I waited to answer until he was next to me again.
“No, I just do it for fun,” I replied, “I’m not good enough to compete.” I was being honest, not modest.
“Really? Those two girls you smacked down might disagree with you.” As his eyebrows went up, they disappeared under his long bangs. He didn’t have those baby blues that are so popular with the blond hair. He had solid brown eyes you could sink into.
“I have a stressful job and I come here to blow off steam. Were you watching the whole time? You know that’s a little creepy right?” I was kind of half laughing but looking for warning signs. I have known some crazy people.
He got embarrassed and stammered, “I’m sorry, I didn’t watch the whole time…well, actually I kind of did but not in a creepy way. It was really impressive. It was getting near the end of my day when I saw you come in and you looked so….erm…F…”
“Furious?” I suggested.
“I was going to say focused but furious works.” He smiled a devastating sideways smile. “Were you really? Furious I mean?”
“A bit. It’s been a long week. I’ve been training in this heat which is so not fun. Add in a couple of bad calls and I needed a workout.”
By this time we were at Jamba Juice and standing in line. As expected he asked me what I do and I tried not to sigh as I prepared myself for ‘the look’ and the comments. Darren was different. He raised his eyebrows and said, “Well that makes sense.” It took the wind out of my sails. He made me laugh. I was expecting incredulous, surprised. There was definitely a spark. We sat and talked for an hour or so until he asked me to go out with him at the weekend for dinner and a movie. Typical date night. Traditional. Old fashioned. I liked that.
We dated a few times, dinner and a movie, bowling, kayaking at Jonathon Dickinson state park. It was fun and we were really getting along, but had never taken it home until after the kayaking trip. We had planned on a day at the State Park and then dinner after, so I left my car with a change of clothes at his apartment in Boynton Beach. There were four buildings and the last one was still under construction. It would be impressive when it was done. The views of the Intracoastal Waterway would be stunning. I wondered how a Red Bull rep could afford something like that but I wasn’t about to ask. I don’t like people snooping in my business and I wasn’t about to snoop in his. I had never been to his apartment before. It was pretty much understood that I would stay the night but neither of us had said it out loud. The nerves and anticipation are part of the game.
