“I get that,” I said, and I really did. I wasn’t sure I agreed with it, but I got it.
“I’ve never told anyone the whole story like that,” Owen said then. “I can’t tell you how strange it feels.” He let out a big breath.
“You were a kid, you know. Kids do stupid stuff all the time. It was an accident.”
“That may be true. But my uncle Ryan is still dead. My dad’s only brother. Because of me.”
I wondered if maybe he was emphasizing the wrong parts of the story. “That’s just such a burden for a kid to carry.”
“I’m not a kid anymore.”
“For anyone to carry.”
He nodded. “Anyway, that’s why I can’t quit the fire department. That’s why I have to win that spot—even though I know you deserve it more. If the captain gives it to me, I have to take it. This is my dad’s dream. And I have to make sure he gets it.”
“Maybe your dad’s dream is just for you to be happy.”
The rookie looked at me like I was so wrong it was almost cute. “Nope. Firefighter first, happy second.”
“You are talking to a person who has watched you turn pale, faint, or throw up on every medical call. Sometimes all three.”
He let out a long breath. “I don’t know what else to do.”
“Well, first of all, I’d find yourself a therapist.”
“Did that already,” he said, like he’d already checked it off the list. “Third grade. I didn’t speak at all for almost a year after the fire, and they made me see a grief expert twice a week.”
“Did you talk about what happened?”
“Parts of what happened.”
“The important parts?”
He shook his head.
“I think,” I said then, “you should start thinking about forgiveness.”
He raised his eyebrows like I was crazy. “Are you saying you think I need to tell my dad?”
“Have you thought about it?”
The rookie shook his head, like, Nuh-uh. Nope. No way.
I shrugged. “I don’t know that you need to tell him, necessarily.”
He frowned. “But you think I need him to forgive me?”
I shook my head. “No. I think you need to forgive yourself.”
He was quiet, as if that thought had never occurred to him. Then he said, “I wouldn’t even know where to start.”
“It just so happens I could help you with that. My mother has been educating me on the joys and challenges of forgiveness.”
He couldn’t tell if I was joking.
“It’s easier than it sounds,” I said. “It’s more a shift in thinking than anything else. You have to think about the person you’re angry at—in this case, your eight-year-old self—and try to be compassionate with him. Empathy soothes anger, you know,” I said, suddenly feeling very wise. “Then you have to work to find some good things that came out of what happened, even despite all the bad. And then you have to decide to let it go.”
“That’s good advice,” he said.
“I am full of good advice.”
“Doesn’t really change anything about our situation, though, does it?”
“Not at the moment,” I said. “No.”
“You still want this job, and I still need this job.”
I kept doing that: forgetting who he was. I nodded, like, That’s right. “We’re still enemies.”
He frowned at the word choice. “Friendly rivals,” he corrected.
“To-the-death combatants,” I said.
“Sparring partners.”
“Look,” I said, “no matter what we were before, now we’re enemies. We’re competing for the same position.”
“You really love that job, huh?”
“What’s not to love?”
“I don’t know,” he said, looking out the window. “The blood? The guts? The diarrhea?”
“The heroism? The camaraderie? The saving people’s lives?”
“Sure,” he said. “There’s that.”
I looked him over. “I’ve seen worse rookies,” I said.
He gave a nod, like, Maybe. “I’m throwing up less often now,” he said. “But you’re the one they’re going to keep.”
I honked out a laugh. “You’re the one they’re going to keep.”
He looked at me like I was crazy. “The captain’s not going to choose me.”
“I think he is.”
He shook his head. “Why would he do that?”
“Because.” I shrugged. “Because you come from a long line of brave heroes. Because the captain knows your dad. Because you are fun and friendly and easy to get along with. Because you look like a firefighter—like a Norman Rockwell painting of a firefighter, actually, crossed with a GQ cover. And because the captain doesn’t think women should be in the fire service.”
“He can’t think that.”
“He does. He told my old captain, back in Austin. They only took me because they were desperate.”
“That was before he’d seen you in action. There’s no way he still thinks that now.”
“Wanna bet?”
“He knows you’re good. He knows you’re better than half the guys in there.”
“Half of them?” I said. “All of them.”
“You could dead-lift Case under the table.”
“Anybody could dead-lift Case under the table.”
“You deserve that job,” Owen said.
“I do,” I agreed. “But you’re the one who’s going to get it.”
Twenty-one
A FEW DAYS later, just before dawn, the stalker threw a brick through my mother’s kitchen window.
That really happened.
It was a shift morning. Still dark out. My alarm hadn’t even gone off yet. The shattering sound woke me up, and I sprinted down two flights of stairs in my bare feet only to stop short at the kitchen threshold when I saw glass pieces glittering all over the counter and the floor.
Diana was right behind me.
The sound of it had been shockingly loud. So loud, in fact, that it woke Josie next door. She showed up in her robe not long after, after I’d found some flip-flops and started sweeping up the mess. Diana watched from the doorway, and Josie watched from the back door.
My mom’s kitchen window, in her historic little home, had not been safety glass. I found razor-sharp shards in every nook and cranny, even one impaled in a loaf of banana bread on the far counter. I swept three times, dry-mopped twice, and then wet-mopped, and I’m sure it took me a while, but I don’t remember time passing. Anger, I think, burned away all sense of time from that memory—and all details other than the way my hands started aching from their death-clamp on the broom handle.
Only when I’d gone over every surface did I let Diana and Josie step in.
“I don’t think it’s ever been this clean in here,” Diana said.
“It was my stalker,” I said, pointing at the brick on the counter.
Josie peered over. “At this hour?” She frowned.
Diana chimed in. “Who has that kind of energy?”
It was appalling. And incomprehensible.
Josie decided to make coffee—checking the inside of the pot for glass shards first. “How much anger does this guy have to get up before dawn to go terrorize somebody?”
“Nothing gets me up before eight,” Diana said, lifting up the brick to get a look. Then she added, “Other than terrorism.”
“Careful,” I said.
“There’s a note,” Diana said, turning it over. Sure enough, there was a note rubber-banded around it.
I just stood there, staring. Did I want to read it? I wasn’t sure. Of course, that’s what he wanted us to do—and part of me didn’t want to give him the satisfaction of scaring us more than he already had. What if we ignored him? What if we refused to be terrorized?
I wasn’t sure of the best course of action.
Finally, Diana made the decision for me. She pulled off the rubber band, unfolded
the note, and read it out loud. “It says, ‘Just quit you wore.’” She looked up, frowning. “You wore what? What did you wear?”
Josie leaned over to take a look. “I think he means ‘whore.’”
“Oh!” Diana said, checking the note again. “He forgot the H!”
“Not a great speller,” I said.
“Not great at punctuation, either,” Josie said, holding it up as evidence. “There should be a comma after ‘quit.’”
“And probably an exclamation point at the end,” Diana said. “For emphasis.”
Josie took another look at it. “Not going to win any prizes for penmanship, either. That T looks just like an X.”
And then Diana and Josie started laughing, that odd, minor-key laughing that you do sometimes when things are the opposite of funny. But laughing all the same.
“So,” Diana said, still laughing. “Not an English teacher.”
“Or a calligrapher,” Josie added.
“Or a preschool graduate.”
They were cracking themselves up. They had decided to think it was funny. Which I admired.
But I didn’t think anything about this was funny. And it was time for me to go. Past time. I was going to be late for work. For real this time.
* * *
“YOU’RE LATE, HANWELL,” Captain Murphy said, when I showed up in the kitchen. “Again.”
The guys were all there. DeStasio was already starting breakfast.
I didn’t respond to the captain. Instead, I held up the brick. Lifted it up high over my head until all the guys fell quiet and gave me their attention.
This was it. We were done here.
Ignoring it hadn’t worked. Waiting for it to blow over hadn’t worked. It was time for the nuclear option.
Though I wasn’t totally clear what that might be.
I’d figure it out as I went along.
What could I do? Demand that a whole room of dudes be nicer to me? Sit them all down and walk them through how strange and unsettled and fragile I’d been feeling ever since I left Texas? Talk to them about guilt and regret? About missed opportunities? Get vulnerable with them?
Firefighters didn’t do vulnerable.
Life in the fire service revolved around not being vulnerable. It was about being tough, and brave, and strong. Someone needed saving, so you saved them. Something was on fire, so you put it out. Were you scared? It didn’t matter. Did you have feelings about it? Irrelevant. You did your job, and you did it well, and that was all there was to it. People who wanted to wrestle with complicated emotions became therapists, or poets. People who wanted to keep things simple became firefighters.
I wanted to keep things simple. But life wasn’t letting me. Someone at the station, in particular, wasn’t letting me.
I walked up to the head of the table.
“At five o’clock this morning, someone threw a brick through my mother’s kitchen window. Someone from our shift. And I want to know who it was.”
I studied their faces. Everybody looked shocked—except for the rookie, who looked angry, and DeStasio, who looked bored. I’d hoped I might be able to spot the guilty one right away, but I should have known better than to think things could be that easy.
Captain Murphy stepped forward. “You think it was someone from our shift?” His voice made it clear that he thought I was completely bananas.
“I do,” I said.
The accusation offended them.
I let them be offended for a second, and then I said, “I wasn’t going to say anything. I was going to let it blow over. I’m not a complainer. I can take it, of course. I’m not here for myself. But I draw the line at throwing a brick through an old lady’s window. Mess with me all you want—but do not fuck with my mother.”
The guys blinked at me. Language!
“No one was hurt, if you’re wondering,” I said. “But glass went everywhere—and not safety glass, either. And a lovely historic window is destroyed.”
I checked all their faces, one by one. Sympathetic. Concerned. Shocked.
But somebody here was responsible.
“So who was it?” I demanded. “Who the hell thought terrorizing a sweet old lady was a good idea? Who in this crew wants to get rid of me so badly that they’re willing to do that?”
“It’s terrible,” the captain said. “But it wasn’t us.”
“I think it was.”
“Why would you think that?” Case said, sounding hurt.
I was pacing around now. “A few weeks ago, somebody broke into my locker here at the station, and scrawled the word ‘slut’ in Sharpie across the back wall.”
That got their attention.
“I ignored it. I tried to clean it off. I hung an old calendar from my station in Austin over the spot. I didn’t complain. But then, this week, somebody slashed all my tires—four hundred bucks’ worth of tires!—and left a note on my windshield that said, ‘Just quit you bitch.’”
The guys looked around at each other, like, What the hell?
“Fine,” I said. “I ignored it. It’s not the first time I’ve been called a bitch. Whatever.”
I looked around.
“But then, this morning—my mother. My mother, you guys.” I looked around. “This one had a note, too.”
“What did it say?” the captain asked.
I held up the note.
The captain leaned closer and peered at it, reading and frowning. “‘Just quit you wore’? What does that mean? What did you wear?”
“I think he means ‘whore,’ Captain,” Tiny said.
“Can’t spell for shit,” the captain said.
For a second, my throat felt like it was closing up. I held very still to let it pass. I would not cry, or let my voice break or even tremble. All emotions but anger right now were unacceptable. This moment had to be a show of strength and defiance and absolutely nothing else. But I would tell them about my mom. Maybe it would shame them into behaving better, or maybe it wouldn’t—but by the time I finished talking, they would know the truth.
“She’s sick,” I said, surprising even myself with the crackle of emotion in my voice. “That’s why I came here. She lost the sight in one eye after an operation, and her sight’s not great in the other one. She gets headaches. She wears an eye patch. Her depth perception’s all messed up, and she has trouble with the stairs, and she can’t drive at all. That’s why I’m here.”
The guys were dead silent.
I was not going to cry.
I went on. “And somebody threw a brick through her window. Somebody here. Somebody who has dedicated his life to helping others. Somebody who’s supposed to be a hero.”
I started pacing.
“It doesn’t matter that I’m not actually a whore—whatever that even means. It doesn’t matter that I’m not even remotely intimidated by this bozo. It doesn’t even matter that there’s no point in going after me like this. It’s—what?—weeks before the captain makes his decision between me and the rookie. We all know what he thinks about women. We all know what we all think about women. I’m out. I’ll be gone before you know it anyway. So whoever this asshole is, he’s going to a lot of trouble to accomplish something that’s already pretty much a done deal.
“Here’s what does matter: What this guy is doing is wrong. You can’t do what we do and see the kind of suffering we see every damn day and still want to create more of it in the world, can you? You can’t do what we do for a living and not know the simple difference between right and wrong. That’s what has me so, so pissed. We’re supposed to be the heroes. We’re supposed to be the helpers. The caretakers. The good in the world. What the hell can I believe in, if I can’t believe in you?”
Oh God. Now there were tears on my face. Humiliating.
It just made me angrier.
“I know we’re all just human. I don’t expect you to be perfect. But I expect you, at the very least, to be better than that.”
And that’s when I had an idea. Not a
perfect idea. Maybe not even a good one. But it was the best I could come up with in the moment.
“So I’m making everybody a deal,” I said, wiping my face again. “Pick your best guy, and let’s go outside right now to run the course. I will beat him. I’ll beat anybody here. I’ll prove myself to all of you—again, for the thousandth time. And if I don’t win, I’ll quit. I’ll quit right now, this morning, and you’ll never see me again, and all your lady problems will be over.”
The guys were all frowning at me.
“But I will win,” I went on. “And when I do, the asshole stalker in this room needs to make a choice to be a better human being—and cut it the hell out.”
The guys looked around at each other.
“And if he doesn’t—if he manages to run me out of here in the end? At least every single one of us will know that I deserved to be here.”
I was so angry, but the guys just looked sorry. They’d been standing at ease, but then, almost like a school of fish in unison, they all took a few steps closer. Then the captain, of all people, was holding his arms out to me. “You know what you need, Hanwell?”
“Group hug,” the guys all assented, lifting their arms, too.
Were they mocking me? Were they being sarcastic? They looked so earnest, but that couldn’t be right. I smeared the tears off my face with my impatient hands, then pointed at them all, like, Keep back. “Do not hug me. Nobody in this room hugs anybody.”
Then I took a few steps backwards, as if my pointing finger were a gun and I was the villain making my escape.
One by one, I made eye contact with every guy in the room.
That was my goal, I guess. To make sure that no matter what, everyone would know exactly what they’d lost.
The guys were all silent at the notion.
Then the captain said, “Is this really necessary?”
Case jumped in with, “You’re too short to beat anybody on that course, Hanwell.”
“Don’t do this,” Six-Pack said.
“There’s no way you can win,” DeStasio said.
That’s when the captain stepped forward. “Nobody wants you to quit, Hanwell. You don’t have to do this.”
Things You Save in a Fire Page 19
