She was about as close as a regular human could get to a superhero. And guess what? She really didn’t put up with nonsense.
I waited for her to light into me. I waited for her to tell me in unflinching detail how much I’d humiliated the department last night with my behavior. I waited for her to punish me somehow—a suspension or a demotion. Something.
She just kept her eyes on her paperwork and let me wait.
Finally, she looked up. “How long have you worked here, Hanwell?”
“Four years last month.”
She studied me a little. “You’re a good fit here, aren’t you?”
“I think so,” I said.
“The guys like you. Even after you raised Big Tom’s underwear up the flagpole.”
“I suspect they like me because I raised Big Tom’s underwear up the flagpole.”
“You seem to be very admired. For a woman.”
I blinked. “Thank you.”
“I called you in here for several reasons—not just your temporary insanity last night. But don’t worry, we’ll get to that.”
I waited.
“First, we need to discuss your performance on the Lieutenant’s Exam. The scores are in. This was your first time taking it, correct?”
I held very still. “That’s correct, Captain.”
“You realize most people don’t pass that exam the first time?”
“Yes, Captain.” Everybody knew that.
“Some of our best guys have tried three or four times before passing.”
My heart wilted a little, anticipating bad news. I’d studied for months for that test. “Yes, Captain.”
“It might surprise you to hear, then, that not only did you pass, you got the number one score in the entire city. You scored two points below me.”
I sat up.
She lifted her eyebrows, just a sliver, in admiration. “Strong work.”
I didn’t know what to say. “Thank you, Captain.”
“Ordinarily, of course, that would mean a promotion to lieutenant.”
I nodded.
“But your circumstances at the moment are not exactly ordinary.”
I glanced down at my hand, which was throbbing a little. I might need to splint a finger.
Worth it.
I lifted my eyes back to the captain.
“I need you to know that the chief and the mayor have had their eye on you for a while now.”
“They have?”
She nodded. “You’ve been on the city’s radar ever since that feature the Statesman did on you last summer, but that top test score clinched it.” Now she was looking me over. “Until last night, you were a perfect representative of the best of our department. You’re young, and fit, and wholesome. No visible tattoos.” She studied my face another second, then added, “Pretty, but not too pretty.”
I frowned. “Thank you.”
“Tell me this, Hanwell,” she said. “Why did we put the hoses on that warehouse fire last month when it was burning too hot for the water to do any good?”
We both knew that answer. A hundred-person crowd had been watching us, and then the news helicopters showed up. And even though the only way that fire was going to go out was to burn itself to the ground, we put water on it anyway. Because that’s what people wanted us to do.
“Hydraulic public relations, Captain,” I answered.
She nodded, like, Exactly. “Image matters. When they see us coming, they need to know we’re the good guys. They need to let us get in and get to work.”
I nodded.
“Do you know what the trouble with women is, Hanwell?”
I shook my head.
“Women don’t look like firefighters.”
No argument there.
“You know Austin is a very progressive department,” she said next.
I did know that, of course. Anyone who’d seen our rainbow flag flying, or shopped at one of our vegan/kosher bake sales, or seen our fire marshal tooling around in a Prius knew we were a progressive department.
“The city wants to update our image,” she said. “And—again, up until last night—I would have said you were a perfect candidate to lead the way. You’re smart as hell, and you’re strong as an ox, and you don’t seem to be scared of anything.”
“Thank you.”
“I’m not saying you’re reckless. I mean you have a steadiness about you that’s particularly well suited to the job.”
I nodded.
“You’re not just a token female, is what I’m saying. You’re actually good.”
I’d assumed that went without saying, but okay.
“After we announced you were getting the valor award, the mayor and the fire chief met and made it official,” the captain went on. “They wanted to enlist you as part of a PR campaign to redefine the look of the fire service. Billboards, TV interviews, bus ads. You and a few others. They put together a whole multicultural A Team.”
Whoa.
“But that”—she pulled her reading glasses down her nose—“was before yesterday.”
I nodded but didn’t say anything.
She studied me. “What the hell happened, Hanwell?”
What the hell did happen? How to even begin? I stared at my hands.
“I want to help you,” the captain said. “But I can’t help you if you won’t talk to me.”
It wasn’t that I wouldn’t talk to her. I wasn’t sure if I could.
I took a breath. “The councilman?” I began. “From last night? I knew him in high school. He was a senior when I was a sophomore.”
She waited, all impatient patience. “And?”
But I couldn’t seem to arrange my thoughts into words. Subject-verb-object. It shouldn’t be that hard. I opened my mouth, but no sounds came out.
She shook her head. “You’ve got to give me something.”
I nodded. Something. Okay. I leaned forward and looked right into her eyes. “He’s a bad person,” I said at last.
She waited for more, and when it didn’t come, she lifted her hands. That’s it?
I nodded. That pretty much summed it up. I leaned a little closer. “He’s a very, very bad person.”
Then her face shifted. She seemed to get it somehow. Not that she suddenly, telepathically knew the specifics of how he was a bad person, but she got that on some level the specifics didn’t matter. She knew me. She trusted me. I had proved myself over and over to be a moral person, and a brave one, and a selfless one. In that moment, based on my expression, she knew.
She knew in that way that other women just know.
I wasn’t joking around, and I wasn’t being flip, and I hadn’t lost my mind, and—most important—I had my reasons. She didn’t need more details, and she wasn’t going to push for them. If I said he was bad, then he was bad. Case closed.
She sighed and dropped her shoulders.
“They’re willing to overlook it.”
I blinked.
“They can’t put you on the PR team, of course, because it would be a media fiasco. But they’re still willing to promote you to lieutenant and chalk it up to an ‘interpersonal conflict.’ You’re certainly not the first firefighter to ever get in a fistfight.” I saw the corner of her mouth trying to avoid a smile. “Though you might be the first lady firefighter to ever pummel a smug politician to the ground.”
I looked down at my hand.
She said, “I hear he got a concussion.”
I gave a tiny shrug. “He deserved it.”
I wasn’t sure what to make of what she was saying. I had felt certain last night, back alone in my apartment, that I was facing a suspension, at the very least.
Not a promotion.
“We could,” she went on, “just let this all blow over, give it a year or so, and then quietly promote you. How does that sound?”
I met her eyes. Safe to say, this was not the conversation I’d expected. “It sounds too good to be true,” I said.
“The point
is not to let one bad night define the rest of your career,” she said, then added, “or your life.”
I nodded, noting the irony.
“They just need you to do one quick thing,” she said then, closing up her folder like we were almost done here.
“What’s that?”
“Apologize.”
I blinked at her. “To who? To the chief?”
She frowned, like, Hello? “To the city councilman.”
My head started shaking before my mind had formed the words. “I can’t do that.”
She gave a little sigh, like now I was being difficult. Which I suppose I was. “A formal apology. You don’t have to mean it. Just get it on the record.”
“I’m not going to apologize,” I said, just to be clear. Again.
“He and his friends on the council, they control our budget.” She gave a head shake. Then she added, “He could press charges for assault.”
But I didn’t think he would. We had too much history, and he had just as much to lose as I did. “He won’t press charges,” I said.
“You don’t know that,” she said. “And more importantly, the chief doesn’t know that. He wants full assurance that this is all over. That’s his deal: Apologize, and we all move on.”
“I can’t apologize,” I said. “And I won’t.”
She assessed me then. Was I really going to go there? Was I really going to dig in and not budge?
Apparently, yes.
“If you don’t apologize, I have to terminate your contract,” she said. “Chief’s orders.”
Terminate my contract. That was my choice. Apologize, and I got promoted; refuse to apologize, and I got fired.
“I won’t apologize.”
She leaned in a little closer and shook her head. “Just do it. Get it over with. Let’s move on. You’re a phenomenal firefighter. You deserve to do what you love. You need us and we need you. Don’t let this derail you.”
“I can’t,” I said. Anything else, but not that.
I held still.
She leaned back. Then she let out the long sigh of a woman who’d seen, and survived, far too much to mess around. She peered at me over her reading glasses, like, Fine. “You’re sure that’s what you want to do?”
I nodded.
She looked back down at her file and retreated into formalities. “Then as of this moment, you are terminated for gross insubordination and conduct unbecoming.”
Terminated.
Oh my God. Terminated.
A fog of panic rose up through my body. Who was I if I wasn’t a firefighter? What did I do if I didn’t do this? This was the life I’d worked for, trained for, dreamed about. This was the only thing I wanted. This was my reason for going to the gym, for eating broccoli, for living. This was my whole identity.
Terminated.
But even facing that, I still wasn’t apologizing.
There was no other choice I could make, and here was my consequence.
Then I suddenly remembered one other possibility—and no matter how out-of-the-question awful it had seemed yesterday, today it was suddenly looking better.
“What if there’s another option?” I asked.
“Like what?”
“What if I transferred? To another department?”
She frowned.
“My mother is ill,” I said. “She’s been asking me to move to Massachusetts and help her out as a caregiver. Maybe I could move away and work at a different fire station. Make myself disappear.”
Maybe this could work. Anything was better than terminated. Plus, something else struck me: This wouldn’t be the last time I ran into Heath Thompson. The man was everywhere in this town these days.
Maybe it was time, after all, to get the hell out of here.
The captain frowned. “If this comes out, if it leaks to the press or he presses charges, you’ll be terminated anyway.”
“He won’t press charges.”
She stared at me while she ran through my remaining options in her head. I could see her weighing everything. She liked me, that much I knew. I wasn’t just a good firefighter, I was great. She didn’t want to see me terminated either. She started nodding, like this could work. Finally, she said, “I didn’t even know you had a mother.”
“Sometimes I forget, myself.”
“Okay. We’ll try your plan B. The promotion’s out, though. You’ll have to start all over. Stay there a few years at least. Work your way back up.”
Starting over, I could handle. Terminated? Not so much. I closed my eyes. “Thank you.”
The captain opened my file back up to make some notes. “Where does she live? I know of some openings in Boston.”
“She lives in Rockport—about an hour north, on Cape Ann.”
“Maybe there’s something closer, then. I’ll ask around.”
She was going to ask around.
I wasn’t terminated.
For a second, I felt relief—then, right on its heels, a thickness in my throat that I realized, with horror, was the feeling you get before your eyes fill up with tears. I coughed to clear it, and then coughed again. I had not cried in years, and I sure as hell wasn’t about to start now. But these guys—this shift at this station—they were my family. The idea that I had to leave them all behind created a kind of weather system inside my rib cage.
A wet one.
Not good. I wasn’t really a fan of being overcome by emotion. In fact, I’d structured my life around lack of emotion. I’d built it around routine, and safety, and order. Feelings were a lot of trouble. I avoided them as much as possible.
I swallowed. I held very still. I ordered myself to be tough. I wanted to bolt for the door, but I was afraid that if I moved, I might lose it.
Was I seriously about to cry—in front of the captain—on top of everything else?
It wasn’t looking good.
Suddenly, all deus ex machina, the tones went off for a jackknifed eighteen-wheeler on Highway 71.
Work always saved me. I stood up, felt all those unruly emotions drain away, and shifted into all-business work mode.
“Hanwell?” the captain said, as I reached the door.
I turned back to her, my hand on the knob.
She looked at me over the top of her reading glasses. “You would’ve made a goddamned great lieutenant.”
Five
WITHIN A WEEK, the captain was able to find me a position in a small city called Lillian, about twenty minutes from my mom’s place in Rockport. A shift at Station Two had two positions open because a pair of brothers who’d worked together thirty years were retiring together—moving south to Florida to fish and drink beer for the rest of their lives. They’d found a rookie for one of the spots, but they wanted somebody with experience for the other.
Captain Harris called me in after a conference call with the battalion chief and the station captain, a guy named Murphy.
“I let them know that you’re a big deal,” Captain Harris said. “I talked you up for a long time. I told them about your test scores, and how much we don’t want to lose you. I gave them some of your best saves: the double cardiac arrest at that rib joint; the infant you pulled from that car fire when no one else heard the cries; what you did to those frat boys who set that swimming pool on fire. I told them about your being the youngest person ever to receive our valor award—though I conveniently left out how you clobbered the hell out of the presenter on the stage.”
“Thank you.”
“All to say, I made sure he was totally sold on you before I broke the bad news.”
“The bad news?”
I guessed that she was referring to my alarming capability for random violence, but instead she shrugged, like, Duh. “That you’re a female.”
“Oh.” I nodded. That. “What did he say?”
“Honestly,” she said, “that guy Murphy’s accent is so thick, I didn’t catch everything. But I’m pretty sure he told me that women are the worst, and they have no place i
n the fire service, and that in the hundred and twenty years of the Lillian FD, they’d never hired ‘a lady’ before. Then he added, ‘Not to fight fires, anyway.’”
“Did he really say, ‘Women are the worst’?”
She squinted. “He doesn’t seem to have much of a filter.”
“Did he realize that he was talking to a woman?”
“If he did, he didn’t care.”
“Did he realize he can’t discriminate?”
“If he did, he didn’t care.”
I took all that in. Then I let out a long sigh. My brain flipped through my options. I could sue the Lillian FD for discrimination, I supposed, but that wasn’t going to help me get to Rockport any faster. Plus, I’d never sued anybody in my life—and I was really rooting for fewer lawsuits these days, not more.
I didn’t want to fight for justice. I just wanted to fight fires.
I let out a breath. “Maybe I can look in Boston,” I said next, trying to stay productive. “An hour commute isn’t impossible.”
The captain looked up. “Oh, no. They want you in Lillian.”
I frowned. “They do?”
“Yes. Captain Murphy ended his lecture on how women in the fire service will be the downfall of human civilization by admitting that they actually do really need somebody, and beggars couldn’t be choosers, and at this point, they’d take, quote: ‘Anybody with experience and a pulse—even a lady.’”
I kind of hated that word, “lady.” Made me sound like I had ringlets and a petticoat.
“And the chief agreed,” she added. “So you’re in.”
“So,” I said, summing up, “they don’t want me, but they’re so desperate, they’ll take me anyway.”
“That’s about the size of it.”
I thought for a second. “Well, I’m desperate, too. So I guess we’re a good match.”
“You’re a terrible match,” the captain said. “But your only other option is Boston. And I can’t imagine they want a lady either.”
I nodded.
“So you’ll take the position?”
I nodded again. What choice did I have?
Things You Save in a Fire Page 4
