Things You Save in a Fire

by Katherine Center

  In my real life, I never let anybody touch me.

  But the station was different. I could—and would—withstand anything for the job. Even a beautiful man touching my body.

  It was torture, but not the kind I would have expected. In general, I didn’t let people touch me because it stressed me out to be touched. But, for some reason, the rookie had the opposite effect. The more he touched me—moving my hair back to check my C-spine, sliding the stethoscope over my chest and back, wrapping my arm with the BP cuff—the more I wanted him to touch me.

  Weird.

  Maybe it was the frequency of it. The captain really did make us practice a lot. Maybe we crossed some basic barrier of familiarity I’d never gotten to with anyone else, where I could relax into it.

  Because, relax I did. At a certain point, all he had to do was pull out the EKG kit and my body started tingling like I was sinking into a hot bath. Full-immersion anticipation.

  It was funny, because I’d done these things with other people in other trainings and it had never, not once, been so, um … evocative.

  I guess context really matters. My crazy crush tinged even the most pedestrian interaction—passing in the hallway, eating dinner, practicing a blood draw—with electricity. Plus, that was just an effect the rookie had on people: He put everyone at ease.

  It was so good, it was bad. It was so wonderful, it was terrifying. It was so delicious, it was awful.

  And it just kept getting better—and worse.

  It stirred up something ancient and powerful inside me—some unfamiliar longing I had no idea how to handle. And I hated things I didn’t know how to handle.

  But how I felt about any of it wasn’t relevant. The captain said to teach the rookie everything I knew? I taught him everything I knew. The captain said to spend hours letting the rookie put his hands all over me for the benefit of the fire service? I did it. Chain of command. No questions asked.

  Whether or not the rookie was turning my body into a symphony of emotion was not relevant.

  No matter what, I gave it my all. I showed him how to make an eye-wash out of a nasal cannula and an IV bag. I helped him practice his bowline knot and his clove hitch. I taught him to operate the handheld radio with his left hand so he could take notes at the same time. I taught him that if a patient’s wearing too much nail polish for the pulse oximeter, you can turn it sideways to get the read.

  I also taught him not to look into his critical patients’ eyes. Pro tip.

  “Why not?” he asked.

  “It haunts you,” I said, shaking my head a little. “It just haunts you.”

  “You mean, if they don’t survive.”

  “Once I’ve left the hospital,” I said then, dead serious, “I always tell myself they survive.”

  Other advice: Carry extra pens, because once a homeless guy covered in lice has used your pen to sign a waiver, you don’t exactly want it back. Never cut open a down coat with your trauma shears unless you want to be covered in feathers for the rest of the shift. And always cut pants off on the outside of the leg. A guy in Austin famously cut a patient’s pants off from the inside with a little too much enthusiasm—and he got called “the rabbi” for the rest of his career.

  The rookie paid attention.

  But not every part of the job came naturally to him.

  I’ll give him this: He was one of the fittest guys on the crew, and he could lift anything. He was endlessly good-natured and very well-intentioned. He was decisive, and physically strong, and mentally committed. He was up for anything. And okay, fine. He was handsome, at least to me—though maybe that’s not a job requirement.

  He also—with some frequency—fainted at the sight of blood.

  The first time it happened—though certainly not the last—was the first time he started an IV on me.

  The thing about blood is, you can’t overthink it. If you really focus on how odd it is to stick a metal tube into another human being’s vein, it will freak you out. The trick to doing anything well in medicine is to get so familiar with it that it doesn’t seem strange anymore.

  But we could all tell from the rookie’s face on pretty much every medical call that he was not there yet. He needed a lot more practice.

  His hands felt cold as he tied the tourniquet and felt for a vein in my arm.

  “Great veins,” he said, giving me that smile of his and a quick glance up at my eyes.

  “Sweet talker,” I said. Then, trying to get back to business: “They’re easy to find, but they roll.”

  He frowned a little. “Okay.” Then he felt my other arm.

  I could tell from his breathing he was nervous.

  “Don’t be nervous,” I said. “I’m tough.”

  “Maybe not as tough as you seem,” he said.

  If it had been any other guy in the crew, I’d have argued. The rookie was the one guy I didn’t feel like I had to prove myself to. Partly that was because he was so inexperienced—I clearly had authority over him—but it was also just something about him, the way he was. The expression on his face when he looked at me always seemed to be some version of admiration. The things I was good at—he saw them.

  He wasn’t competing with me, either. He didn’t mind when I was better than him, and he seemed to love it when I was better than the other guys.

  I just always had this feeling that he was rooting for me.

  But I still needed him to hurry up and jam that needle in my vein.

  “Just get it over with,” I said.

  “Sticks are not my strong suit,” he said.

  “Don’t overthink it,” I said.

  He looked up then, trying to read me. Then he unwrapped a needle, pressed it to the vein he’d chosen, pushed it in—and spurted blood all over both of us and the room.

  “Oh, shit,” he said, taking in the sight of all the blood—then he wavered in his chair for a second before he collapsed and hit the floor.

  “Rookie?” I said, peering down at him with the needle still in my arm.

  People often come to just after fainting, because with a simple vasovagal attack, all that’s wrong is not enough oxygen’s getting to the brain. This happens all the time at weddings, for some reason. There’s a whole subcategory of videos on YouTube with people melting to the floor at weddings. But as soon as you’re down flat, the blood equalizes, and you’re back up pretty fast.

  Sometimes, it takes a few minutes longer.

  I pulled out the needle and cleaned up the mess, and then, when he still wasn’t up yet, I knelt down beside him. I meant to rouse him right away, but the opportunity to just gaze at him for a second was too appealing to skip. What was it about that face of his? Why did it have such an effect on me? I’d spent so much time trying to figure that out, but I still didn’t know for sure.

  It had to be subjective. He wasn’t perfect. I tried to catalog his flaws. He had slight bags under his eyes—but of course it just gave him a sweet, puppy-dog look. He had an incisor that was darker than his other teeth. And he had funny earlobes, now that I thought about it. A little too plump for the rest of him. There. He wasn’t perfect. Just as flawed as the rest of us.

  He should be nothing special at all.

  But he just was.

  My best guess was something about his eyes—how smiley and kind looking they were. I remember reading an article years ago about a study done on the shape of people’s eyes that found people with smiley eyes wound up happier overall. Statistically.

  Maybe that was it.

  I could have stared at him all day. But of course I didn’t. He had a lot more needles to stick me with before we were done.

  I reached out to wake him. I meant to push on his shoulder, but my hand decided to cup his jaw instead. At the touch, his eyes blinked open and I yanked my hand away.

  “What happened?” he asked, frowning and starting to sit up.

  “You fainted. Take it slow.” I helped back him up to the chair.

  “That’s embarrassing.�
��

  I sat back in my chair. “I won’t tell anybody.”

  “Thank you.”

  “You should practice on an orange,” I said. “It’s about the same surface tension as skin.”

  “It’s not the skin I have trouble with,” he said.

  “Not a big fan of blood, huh?” I asked.

  “Not really.”

  “You’ll get used to it. After a year, blood will seem as harmless as fruit punch.”

  “That’s a disturbing thought.”

  “You’re just going to need to do a lot of blood draws. You need to do so many, it becomes like brushing your teeth.”

  “Hard to imagine, but okay.”

  “You can get your sea legs with me, and then we’ll sic you on the rest of the crew.”

  “Thanks, Cassie.”

  I think it was the first time I’d ever heard him—or anyone at the station—say my first name. I didn’t even realize he knew it. Everybody just called me Hanwell.

  I held my breath for a second, then forced myself to let it out. Then I held my arm out to him. “Okay,” I said, “let’s go again.”

  “Now?” he asked.

  “Right now,” I said, giving a don’t try to fight it nod. “Make it happen, buddy. That blood’s not going to draw itself.”

  Fifteen

  THE ROOKIE SAW some dark stuff with us that first month. We got a call for a grandpa who’d choked on a piece of steak (fatality), a tree fallen on a house (no one home), and a kid with his head stuck between the steps of a playground slide (close call). We got called to the scene of an abused woman who’d finally had enough and went after her husband with a shotgun (mutilation—not pretty).

  It wasn’t long before the rookie had acquired what we called “the stare of life,” that shell-shocked look new firefighters get before they’ve figured out how to manage, compartmentalize, and deal with all the horrific tragedy.

  Not that you ever entirely figure it out. It’s a learning curve.

  You eventually get to the point where it doesn’t bother you. As much. You put it on a different screen in your mind that’s separate from your real life somehow. But it takes a while, and in the meantime, all you can do is cope.

  The more stressed the rookie got, the more we joked around with him. For his own good.

  Case sent him looking for a left-handed screwdriver. Six-Pack filled his locker with packing peanuts. We hung his boxer briefs from the flagpole. One day, we set his bed on four empty soda cans and remade it so it would collapse when he got in that night. And nobody ever missed an opportunity to dump water on him.

  After he delivered his first baby on the box, the guys said, “How was it?”

  And the rookie, shaking his head in disbelief, said, “It was like watching an avocado getting squeezed through an apricot.”

  That night, the guys hung a bag in his locker with a snorkel, dive mask, and flippers, labeled OB/GYN DELIVERY KIT.

  To be fair, there were also some funny calls. The lady who called us for menstrual cramps and kept talking about her “groin-icologist.” The fierce little poodle that attacked the rookie’s bunker-pants leg and wouldn’t let go, even as he hopped around trying to fling it off.

  Just about the only thing the rookie didn’t see in those first weeks was a fire.

  Until the day of his—our—six-week-iversary at the station, when we got a call for a garage fire at an abandoned house at the edge of town.

  It was a perfect first fire. We ran lights-and-sirens, and we were the first on scene. We got to use the hoses and even worked in a lesson for the rookie about how to read the colors of the smoke.

  Afterward, doing demo in the smoldering remains, I heard the captain giving the rookie advice. “A fire’s like a living thing,” he explained. “You have to treat it like a worthy adversary. It eats and it moves, and it’s going to go on eating and moving until we stop it.”

  I looked at the rookie’s face. He looked flushed, and exhausted, and awash with adrenaline.

  I knew that feeling.

  “Pretty great, huh?” I said, as we walked back to the engine when it was all over.

  “What?”

  I elbowed him. “Fighting a fire.”

  We were passing a drain in the parking lot, and I hopped right over it before turning back and realizing that the rookie had stopped to bend over the drain and throw up.

  After a minute, he stood back up, wiped his mouth, and kept walking toward me. “Yeah,” he said then. “Really great.”

  * * *

  THAT NIGHT, I had a nightmare.

  Not uncommon. I had lots of nightmares. But I didn’t usually have them on shift.

  In this one, I dreamed I was suffocating. I must have stopped breathing during the worst of it, because when I woke up, there in my storage-closet bed at the station, I was gasping for air and nauseated—as if I really had been suffocating.

  As soon as I woke, I stood up. Then I staggered to the light switch, flipped it, and stood panting for a long while, right there by the door, blinking, repeating to myself, “Just a dream. Just a dream.”

  I didn’t want to go back to bed after that.

  I went to the kitchen to get a glass of water.

  And guess who was there? The rookie.

  I stopped in my tracks at the sight of him. He was cooking.

  I checked the wall clock. It was 2:00 A.M.

  I started to back out of the room, but he sensed me there and turned.

  He looked me over. Then he held a pan out in my direction. “Want an omelet?”

  “No thanks,” I said.

  I’d been spotted, so might as well get my water. I shuffled to the sink.

  He was chopping at a cutting board while butter melted in a pan, and I found myself watching him.

  That knife was like a blur. Tap-tap-tap! A shallot was diced. Tap-tap-tap! A tomato was in pieces. He swept them off the cutting board into a bowl and—Tap-tap-tap!—there went a mushroom. It was the speed, and the confidence of his movements. Mesmerizing. And a whole different side of the rookie. A side that was calm, and confident, and frankly, just from this quick glimpse, totally badass.

  “I can’t cook,” I said, watching. “I’m terrible.”

  “At least you’re not as bad as DeStasio,” he said.

  “I am worse. I can’t even toast a bagel.”

  That got his attention. He turned to squint at me. “How do you survive?”

  I gave him a little smile. “On the kindness of strangers.”

  He went back to work.

  After a bit, I asked, “Why are you cooking an omelet at two in the morning?”

  “Oh,” he said, waving the question off. “The usual. Just wakeful. What about you?”

  “Oh,” I said. “The usual.” Then I added, “Nightmares.”

  That got his attention. “Nightmares?”

  I shrugged. “Yeah. Just a thing with me. My dad says it’s stress relief.”

  “What are they about?” the rookie asked. He was sautéing now, flipping the contents with the whole pan, in a rhythm. It was kind of like watching a juggler.

  Maybe it was the late hour, or the smell of those sautéing vegetables, or just that it felt harder to not answer than to go ahead and answer—but to my own surprise, I heard myself say, “I’m always either being chased, being strangled, or suffocating. Sometimes all three.”

  “Holy shit,” he said, turning to face me.

  But I pointed at the veggies. “Don’t burn those.”

  He turned back. “How often?”

  “I don’t know,” I confessed. Had I ever told anyone about this? “It’s better not to keep count.”

  I was kind of enjoying the rookie’s sympathy. It made me feel tough and impressive.

  “For your whole life?” he asked then.

  I shook my head. “Just since I was sixteen.”

  “Why sixteen?”

  I could have shrugged, like I didn’t know. Instead, I said, “That was the yea
r my mother left.”

  It wasn’t the whole story, but it was more than I’d ever confessed to anybody else.

  We were quiet then while he tended to his cooking. In a few minutes, he slid a perfectly cooked, restaurant-worthy omelet onto a plate and handed it to me.

  “In case you change your mind,” he said.

  I wasn’t hungry, but I took a bite anyway—not expecting anything in particular, other than just a basic egg-dish kind of experience. That’s not what happened. I don’t know what kind of magic he used on those eggs, but the minute that bite of omelet arrived on my tongue, it absolutely overtook my mouth. It infused every taste bud I had with salty, buttery, garlicky, all-consuming pleasure.

  “Oh my God,” I said, mouth full, blinking at him in disbelief.

  The rookie’s whole face shifted into a smile. He watched me for a second, seeming to enjoy how much I was enjoying it.

  “You can cook,” I said, taking another bite.

  “Yeah,” he said.

  “Like, you can really cook.”

  “That’s what I did before I came here,” he said. “I’ve been a chef at a little place in the North End for six years.”

  “But, I mean…” I didn’t even know what I meant. I couldn’t think. I took another bite. “Oh my God. You should go on a cooking competition show and win a billion dollars.”

  “I’ll get right on that,” he said.

  Later, remembering this moment with the rookie, I would wonder what on earth he was doing fainting at the sight of blood in a firehouse when he could have been off absolutely writing poetry with food.

  That’s not the question that came out in the moment, though. The question that came out was “Why the hell is DeStasio cooking our meals?”

  The rookie smiled and looked down. “He likes to cook. I think he needs something to do.”

  “He’s going to kill us all.”

  “Did you hear that his wife left him?”

  I shook my head. “No.”

  The rookie nodded. “DeStasio was talking about it before bed the other night. She moved to Framingham last Friday to live with her sister. She couldn’t take the drinking anymore.”