Things You Save in a Fire

by Katherine Center

  The rookie weighed a thousand pounds, but I didn’t even feel it. I stayed low and leaned all my weight back in the direction I needed to go, dragging him after me in short yanks, using every fiber of strength in my thighs, butt, torso, and shoulders to push us backwards like a machine and pull his dead weight behind me.

  We made it to the exit just as DeStasio did, too.

  “I told you to stay put,” I said.

  “I don’t take orders from women,” DeStasio said.

  Guess how much time I had for that nonsense?

  The sliding doors were still pried open, and together we dragged Owen out into the open air.

  Backup had arrived, big-time. The scene outside was an absolute carnival of medics, pumpers, and rescue personnel. As soon as they saw us, they leapt into action. Some took DeStasio, and some came for me, but I deflected them.

  I was fine.

  A couple of medics grabbed Owen and hoisted him onto a rolling gurney.

  I barely had time to get a good look at him before medics started working him right there, but I will never forget what I saw. His helmet was melted, and so was his mask.

  His bunker gear was smoking, too.

  There must have been a flashover when the ceiling fell.

  The crew moved like lightning—ripping off his mask and helmet, pulling off his air tank, ripping open his gear, feeling for a pulse. I could see soot around Owen’s nose and mouth—and second-degree burns at the edges of where his mask had been.

  It’s true that firefighters never run, but I knew this crew didn’t have a cyanide kit on their box, because we were the only crew in Lillian that had one. Somebody needed to get it—stat—and that somebody was me.

  I took off sprinting, grabbed the kit, and then sprinted back, just as a medic jumped on the gurney, straddled Owen, and started pumping compressions for CPR. “No pulse,” he called out. “No respiration.”

  I glanced at Owen as I ripped open the kit box with my teeth, used the transfer spike to add sodium chloride, and rocked—but did not shake—the vial to mix the solution. Unconscious. Unresponsive. He was most likely in cardiac arrest.

  I heard somebody say Life Flight was inbound.

  Real CPR in a real emergency is nothing like anything you’ve done in a class on a dummy. It’s ugly—almost brutal—and this is especially true when firefighters are working on one of their own. They don’t hold back.

  Another medic checked the defib monitor to see if we could shock him with the paddles. Yes. The rhythm was right. Everybody stepped back. Three quick shocks, and then they were back to CPR.

  I grabbed Owen’s arm and found a vein. I got the IV started, a perfect stick. The antidote can’t be given in one injection. It has to enter the system slowly, over a period of ten minutes.

  But no way was I going to stand there and hold an IV bag, especially not when the medic next to me, trying to pump air into Owen’s lungs with a hand-squeezed bag, was having trouble. He listened to Owen’s lungs with a stethoscope.

  “Nothing’s going in,” he reported. “No movement.”

  “Tube him,” I ordered, and he turned to find an airway kit.

  But I stopped him. I handed him the antidote IV bag. “Hold this.”

  “I have to tube him!” he protested.

  “I’ve got it!”

  He stepped back, and I pulled out a pediatric airway kit. If the rookie’s airway was burned, it could be swollen, and it’s hard enough to intubate a normal airway.

  The medic on top of him was still working his chest.

  Others had removed Owen’s bunker pants and were wrapping his lower half in a cold gel blanket to try to bring down his body temperature.

  In my memory, this whole scene always replays itself in slow motion. I can see every detail, hear every word, stretched out and slowed down. In reality, it lasted barely a few minutes, and everything happened at once.

  I stepped in, tilted the rookie’s neck just right, started working the tube.

  I heard Life Flight arrive, but I stayed focused.

  The medic doing compressions kept his eye on me. “Come on, come on,” he whispered.

  It’s hard enough intubating people—without the added pressure of it being another firefighter, a guy with your same job. A guy you know.

  And if you happen to have slept with the person you’re trying to tube? Even harder.

  Anybody could find it freaky.

  Fortunately for the rookie, I’m not anybody.

  I eased the tube in like a pro. Three seconds flat.

  I told you. You just know when you’re good.

  Another medic was listening with a stethoscope. “We’ve got air,” he called out, just as Life Flight settled to the ground in the parking lot beside us.

  With the air came the heartbeat.

  “We’ve got a rhythm,” the medic with the stethoscope called next.

  It was only a short distance to the Trauma Hawk, and we all pushed the gurney toward the Life Flight crew. They took it like a baton in a relay, and we followed, shouting stats and information about his situation—explaining the cyanide poisoning and antidote protocol, handing off the IV bag, making sure they knew everything.

  As they loaded him up in the chopper, I took one second to find Owen’s hand and give it a squeeze.

  And then I had no choice but to let him go.

  Twenty-six

  LIFE FLIGHT TOOK Owen to Boston, and all I wanted to do was follow.

  But there was still a fire to put out.

  Our shift wasn’t over.

  The medics from Station Three treated DeStasio, who turned out to have a broken collarbone, and transported him to Fairmont Methodist. I was fine, and once they cleared me, I got back to work.

  We still had a job to do.

  No one else on our shift was injured. On the other side of the building, separated by that concrete wall and a faulty radio, the rest of our guys had followed the captain’s orders, which had never changed: No internal operations.

  It took four hours to put out the fire, even with crews from Gloucester and Essex pitching in. When it was out, there was still overhaul to do—making sure no pockets were still burning, and securing the site.

  We were still on shift, after all.

  Once word got out we had injured crew members, off-duty crews started showing up at the scene and then, later, at the station. That’s what firefighters do. They show up. They offer relief. They look after each other. They help.

  We got back to the station around four in the afternoon and found a makeup relief shift waiting for us. We couldn’t have left to go home, or check on Owen or DeStasio, if they hadn’t shown up.

  I’ve never been more grateful to see anyone in my life.

  Gray with soot, caked with salt and sweat, I knew that as soon as the adrenaline wore off, I’d collapse. There’s nothing on this earth more exhausting than a big fire. Every foot of hose weighs eight pounds when it’s full of water. We’d hauled 250 feet of hose that day, working the flames, feeding the line. No CrossFit regime or “fireman’s workout” can even compare to what you’re really doing when you work a fire. You come back blistered, chafed, and dehydrated from the inside out—with your shoulders, back, hands, and basically every cell in your body stinging and aching.

  At first you barely feel it. Adrenaline distracts you.

  Then it hits.

  Despite it all, after we got off shift, all the guys were heading to Boston to check on Owen. The chief and the captain were already there—had gone straight from the scene. I headed toward my truck a few steps ahead of the guys, but Tiny and Six-Pack followed me and climbed in the passenger side without even asking.

  We drove in silence. The sky drizzled rain the whole way, and I remember thinking how strangely loud the wipers sounded. I’d never noticed how loud they were before.

  The captain had sent group texts to our entire shift several times with updates, but they were vague: The rookie’s heart rate and breathing had stabi
lized, but he had a collapsed lung. They were keeping him in a medically induced coma for the foreseeable future. They were going to treat him in the hyperbaric chamber and then take him to the ICU.

  My brain jolted around from thought to thought. I’d see the rookie, sleeping safe and alive in my bed, and then the channel would skip to his melted mask and his smoking gear. I’d feel the memory of his mouth on mine, and then I’d flip to the moment when I tubed him. When panic threatened to freeze my chest, I’d focus on the good signs. “We’ve got air,” the medic had said.

  We had air. We had a pulse.

  As far as I knew, that was still true. Now I just needed to get to Boston.

  I held Owen in the front of my mind, as if that might help him somehow.

  But somewhere in the back of my mind, other questions waited to be answered.

  Why had we gone into that building at all? What could DeStasio have been thinking? What the hell just happened?

  There was no “little boy” in the fire. I’d dreaded finding a body all day, but there was never any sign of a child. Had DeStasio hallucinated it? Had he panicked? He’d fought way too many fires to be fooled by a shadow, and it left me with a question I couldn’t answer.

  What, exactly, had DeStasio seen in that window?

  * * *

  BY THE TIME we stepped off the elevator at Mass General in Boston, the waiting room was packed standing room only with Owen’s extended family, the entire guest list from his parents’ party—from sisters to cousins to friends called “uncle”—plus about fifty retired firefighters right out of Central Casting in their FD shirts and dad jeans.

  Friends of Big Robby’s, I supposed.

  I remember it now as a blur of navy-blue station shirts, overgrown mustaches, Dunkin’ Donuts cups, and cigarettes.

  Could you smoke in the hospital waiting room?

  No.

  Did those ornery old firefighters give a shit?

  Hell, no.

  The wives were all on one side of the room, sitting in chairs, leaning toward each other, talking and gabbing and worrying. The guys were all crammed in the hallway, standing close, faces somber.

  I was the last one off the elevator, and after the guys had melded themselves into the group, I looked up to see the whole crowd fall quiet to stare at me.

  Like, no talking, no coughing, no moving. Except the one person who half-whispered, “There she is.”

  She? Only one “she” had just stepped into the room.

  At first, I wondered if maybe they recognized me as the drunk girl from the party, and now my identity as a firefighter was being revealed.

  But then I remembered I was a smoke-stained mess.

  I hadn’t showered or changed. My skin was smeared gray with soot, and my shirt was stained and blotchy with salt. My hair was matted. I reeked of smoke and sweat and muck. My uniform was damp in some places and soaked in others from sweat and hose water.

  I looked nothing—at all—like the girl who had showed up with Owen that night.

  I felt nothing at all like her, either.

  My next thought, looking at all those stricken faces, was that Owen must have died.

  I held my breath.

  But then the captain pushed through the crowd, came up to me, clamped his arm around my shoulders, and steered me off in the other direction down the hall.

  “Let’s talk,” he said.

  “Is he okay?”

  The captain sensed my anxiety. “He’s fine,” he said, and I closed my eyes, and my whole body felt like it was full of water. “Well,” the captain corrected, “not fine. They’ve had him down in the hyperbaric chamber since he got here, but they just brought him up for the night. We’ll see how he does for a while. He’s got edema of the upper trachea and second-degree burns on the face, a couple of broken ribs, and a collapsed lung.”

  “So,” I said, “the opposite of fine.” More like fighting for his life in the ICU.

  “He’s a strong kid,” the captain said. “He’s got everything to live for.”

  I had a sinking feeling. “What’s the prognosis?”

  The captain let out a long sigh. “Maybe fifty-fifty. He needs to make it through the night.”

  I took a minute to concentrate on breathing. How did it work again? In, then out—or the other way around?

  The captain gave my shoulders a final, awkward squeeze and then released me. “Good thing DeStasio caught that cyanide situation, huh?”

  I looked up. “DeStasio?”

  “If he hadn’t caught it,” the captain went on, clearly trying to stay positive, “we’d be facing a whole different deal right now.”

  “DeStasio didn’t catch it,” I said. “I caught it.”

  The captain frowned at me, like I’d taken leave of my senses. “Hanwell,” the captain said, like I needed to stop playing around, “DeStasio already filed his report.”

  Was that supposed to explain anything? “Okay,” I said.

  “He emailed it to me from his hospital room. I read it on my phone.”

  “Why did DeStasio even fill out the report?” I asked. “He wasn’t the ranking medic on scene.”

  “He was the senior firefighter,” the captain said, as if that mattered.

  “What did his report say?”

  The captain studied my face. “It says that he identified symptoms of cyanide poisoning while still inside the structure, and he instructed you to administer the antidote as soon as possible.”

  I actually shook my head to try to clear it. “That’s not true. I’m the one who recognized the cyanide poisoning.”

  “That’s not what the report says.”

  “Then it’s incorrect.”

  “Are you saying DeStasio filed a false report?”

  That would’ve been a hell of an accusation. “I’d have to see it,” I said. “Maybe he was disoriented from his injury.”

  “He seemed pretty coherent to me,” the captain said.

  “Can I see the report?”

  The captain shook his head. Then he gave a quick glance down the hall at all the people milling around the waiting room.

  “That’s what I want to give you a heads-up about, Hanwell,” he said then. He took a step closer and lowered his voice. “It’s pretty damning.”

  I frowned. “Damning?”

  “You made a lot of mistakes today—rookie mistakes, really. I’m surprised at you. And though I’m sure you never meant to—”

  I broke in. “What mistakes? I didn’t make any mistakes!”

  The captain gave me an uncomfortable look that had a lot of pity in it.

  “What mistakes did DeStasio say I made?”

  The captain took a breath. Then he put on his reading glasses and lifted up his phone, presumably to read from DeStasio’s report. “Well, for starters, the way you insisted on entering the structure, even though—”

  “I didn’t insist on entering the structure! That was DeStasio! He said he saw a child inside.”

  “The report says you saw the child.”

  “It was him.”

  “Either way, you had standing orders not to go in.”

  “That’s what I told DeStasio!”

  “But you went in anyway.”

  “DeStasio wouldn’t wait. He was going in with or without me—and taking the rookie.”

  “You should have waited for orders.”

  “We were running out of time. I radioed you at each decision point.”

  The captain shook his head. “I had no radio communications from you.”

  “I tried. There was only static on our end.”

  “The report states that when DeStasio tried to stop you from entering the building—”

  This was insane. “I was trying to stop him from going in!”

  “You had no water, no backup, and insufficient equipment—and you recklessly endangered the lives of all three crew members.”

  What the hell was going on? “That was him!”

  “He had the
presence of mind to tie a guide rope to a pole before following you—”

  “I tied the guide line!”

  “—but when the rookie became disoriented and showed clear signs of cyanide poisoning, you still refused to exit the structure.”

  “What?”

  “Then DeStasio pulled the rookie to safety and ordered you to give the antidote—over your objections.”

  “He’s lying!” I shouted, and when the crowd down the hall turned to look our way, I lowered my voice. “He’s confused.”

  The captain looked offended for DeStasio’s sake. “What are you saying, Hanwell?”

  “I’m saying that’s not how it went down, sir.” I stood up a little taller. “I was the one who tried to protect the crew and not override your commands. DeStasio insisted he’d seen a boy’s face inside at the window, but I didn’t see anything. I tried to talk him into waiting for backup and a hose. I tried to radio you for orders. When it became clear that DeStasio was going in with or without me, and taking the rookie in with him, I made the call to go in as well, for crew integrity. I’m the one who tied the guide line. I’m the one who recognized the rookie’s cyanide poisoning. I dragged the rookie to safety, by myself, after the roof collapse. DeStasio did nothing today but lie, disobey orders, and put us all in danger.”

  The captain looked concerned. “That’s exactly what his report says about you.”

  “Fuck the report!”

  The crowd gasped. Language!

  Apparently, they were listening.

  That’s when I got it. They knew about the report. They’d known when I walked in. The captain must have told Big Robby, and then things must have spread, like they do.

  That’s what the silence was about. They thought Owen was in here because of me.

  The captain already knew all that. He went on. “You expect me to believe you dragged the rookie out of a collapsed building by yourself? He must weigh two hundred pounds, and you’re one-thirty dripping wet.”

  “You think DeStasio did it? A sad old man with a broken collarbone?”

  “He claims his injury occurred after he got the rookie to safety.”