Things You Save in a Fire

by Katherine Center

  “Can you imagine what it feels like for your mother to leave you at all, much less on your birthday? Can you even conceive of the abandonment that girl must have felt as she watched her mother drive away?”

  Of all the people to share the memory of that moment with … DeStasio. But I needed to make him understand.

  I went on. “But then imagine this. Later that day, she gets a text from a boy she’s had a crush on for months—stealing glances at him and doodling his name in notebooks. He’s older. A handsome alpha male, a senior. Totally out of her league. But he tells her he’s noticed her watching him in the hallways, and then he invites her to a party at his house that night. And she wonders if maybe the universe is apologizing somehow. And she puts ice packs on her puffy eyes and she takes a shower and flosses and blow-dries her hair. He says to meet him there, so she walks to his house. It’s at least twenty blocks away—but she doesn’t have a ride. His parents are out of town, and the whole high school has converged on his house, like something from the movies, but far louder and more terrifying. And then when he sees her, he drapes his heavy arm around her shoulders and stays like that for the rest of the night, talking to his guy friends and handing her cups of spiked punch, as if she’s something that belongs to him.

  “And the whole thing is so weird and foreign and not quite what she wanted, but she’s so lost and heartbroken and it feels so nice to belong to someone—she stays.

  “You know it’s not going to end well, right? No love story starts out like this. You’ve been on enough calls to know exactly where this night is headed. But she doesn’t know. She’s never even been kissed, not really. She thinks she’s on a date. She thinks she’s had a stroke of good luck. I want to march right in there and grab her stupid, naïve hand and drag her outside to safety. Dumb girl. I’d slap her right now, if I could. I’d shout some sense into her.

  “But then, when she’s good and dizzy, he says he’s going to take her home. She’s thinking he’s going to drive her. She’s hoping to get a good-night kiss—her first, by the way, besides a few party games. But instead, he steers her out behind his garage. She giggles at first, like he’s made a funny mistake. But then he pushes her down into the mud next to a dead rosebush, and when she tries to get away, he grabs her hair in his fist and tilts her head back so far, she thinks he might break her neck.

  “That’s what she’s thinking, on her sixteenth birthday, in the mud: This is how I’m going to die.

  “Do I have to tell you what he does next? He pushes her face down so it’s half buried in the mud. Mud fills her nose and her mouth and her eyes as he stops laughing and gets to work. She could have suffocated in that mud, for all he noticed or cared. But she didn’t.

  “She won’t remember how she got home. That part goes black. But when she finds herself outside her living room window, her dad is in there watching TV, waiting for her to get home. She waits, crouched down by the back steps, until he gives up, turns off the lights, and goes to bed.

  “She thinks she might have to go to the hospital, or the school nurse, if she doesn’t stop bleeding—but it stops eventually. She won’t get sick, or pregnant. But she will never go on another date—or even want to—again. And she will never, ever tell anybody what happened to her. Not until right now. This moment. Right here. To a bitter, vicious old man.

  “But you can bet the boy told people what happened. Lots of people. Except he makes up a story that ‘she begged for it.’ Guess what word he uses? Slut. Guess how many people he tells? Everybody. Anybody. And guess what the mean girls decide to scratch into the metal door of the girl’s locker with a set of keys?”

  I waited then, as if DeStasio might actually take a guess.

  Which he didn’t.

  But I gave him a minute.

  I gave us both a minute.

  Then I said, “Yeah. Slut. Very cliché for high school terrorism. Been done to death.”

  I kept my eyes on the distant shape of a tree out the window. Of all the people in the world to finally, finally share that buried secret with, why the hell had I chosen DeStasio?

  I waited to regret it. I expected it to hit me like a head-on collision.

  DeStasio was quiet a long time—so quiet, I started to wonder if he’d dozed off or something.

  Finally, in a scratchy whisper, he said, “I am sorry.”

  “What?” I said.

  “I didn’t realize.”

  I nodded.

  Then DeStasio said, so softly I could barely hear him, “It was Tony I saw in that fire—my boy. It was Tony when he was about ten or eleven—the year he got a buzz cut. He was wearing his Little League cap. And the shark’s tooth necklace we got at the shore that summer. I saw him. He was right there, just on the other side of the glass. I saw him. My little boy. He was calling to me for help.”

  I turned from the window to look at DeStasio. He looked frail.

  He went on. “When your child calls you for help, you go. Even if you know you can’t help, you go. Even if you know he’s not really there, you go. You go, no matter what the cost.” There were tears on DeStasio’s cheeks now. “My life got away from me somehow. I lost hold of it. I lost everybody. Everything that mattered.” He closed his eyes. “Then, there he was. I couldn’t leave him there. I couldn’t let him die.”

  He wasn’t looking at me, but he didn’t have to. Something about that idea—of DeStasio so desperate to save a child who was already lost—made me feel his sorrow as clearly as my own.

  It’s a big deal to share your grief with other people—to give them a glimpse of the pain you carry. It connects you in a profound way. That’s why you usually only do it with friends. DeStasio and I were not friends. Mostly, we were the opposite.

  But part of what made us enemies to start with was this pain he was describing now. It wasn’t just this conversation that would connect us; it was everything that had come before it. Our lives were already tangled up. But what I’d just told him, and what he was telling me in this moment—these were bedrock truths about our lives. The kind of truths that could force us to understand each other better. The kind with the raw power to change how we saw each other, and even transform all that anger into something different—something more like understanding.

  Could that happen? Could DeStasio and I become friends? Could I even consider not hating someone who’d treated me so viciously?

  I wasn’t sure. But I felt too much empathy for him right now to say never.

  “You couldn’t leave him there,” I said, my voice as soothing as I could make it—validating his choice to put us all in danger in a way I wasn’t even really sure I agreed with. Maybe he just needed someone to understand him. “I get it,” I said.

  Maybe we could both overcome all our bitterness.

  Then, after a good pause, DeStasio said, “Piss off. I don’t need your approval.”

  Maybe not.

  Now I could see what a friendship between us would look like. Equal parts hostility and grudging acceptance. Equal parts deep understanding and pure misunderstanding. Equal knowledge that I’d saved his life, and that he’d borne witness to the worst moment of mine, and no matter what else happened, that connected us.

  Of course. One conversation might have bonded us, but it sure as hell wasn’t going to shift his entire personality from crabby-old-troll to sensitive-New-Age-guy-friend.

  “It’s fine. Be your bitter self,” I said. “I didn’t even come here for that, anyway.”

  “What did you come here for?” he asked.

  “To bring you soup,” I said with a shrug. “To find out how your collarbone was healing. To be a frigging human being.” I met his eyes. “Also, because it suddenly occurred to me that you have a painkiller addiction.”

  DeStasio let that land. Then he said, “Fuck off.”

  “You fuck off.”

  He closed his eyes.

  “It’s so obvious now that I see it,” I went on. “The lying, the aggression, the secretiveness, the ha
llucinations … How did it take me so long to catch on?”

  DeStasio just glared at me.

  “I don’t need you to admit it,” I said. “It’s plain to see.”

  “I’m not going to come clean to the captain, if that’s what you’re thinking,” DeStasio said. “I’m two years from retirement. You think I’d give up my pension?”

  “I never expected you to come clean.”

  He’d as much as admitted it. If this were some other version of my life, I’d be wearing a wire, and I’d now have his confession on tape. I’d take it to the captain, exonerate myself, get my old job back, triumph, and roll credits.

  But life’s not the movies. And that wasn’t why I’d come here.

  What I was trying to do was bigger than that.

  DeStasio tried to pretend I was only there for self-interest. “A thermos of soup’s not going to get me on your side.”

  But I wasn’t having it. “You’re already on my side,” I said. “You just don’t know it yet.”

  I thought I saw the tiniest flicker of a smile. Though maybe it was a wince. Always a fine line with him.

  “On that note,” I said, “I have some good news. I forgive you.”

  He gave a tiny snort, like an eye-roll. “For what?”

  “For all of it. For disliking me. For being so small hearted and mean. For stalking me, and scaring me, and making me the target of all your misdirected rage. For blaming me for your grief. For taking the one thing in my life that made me feel strong and safe and happy and trying to rip it apart. I forgive you for all of it. I forgive you.”

  He studied me for a long time. At last, he said, “Why the hell would you do that?”

  “Because that’s who I want to be,” I said.

  And it was.

  “Guess what else?” I said, on a roll now. “I don’t just forgive you. I forgive myself.”

  For a second, he looked almost grateful before he turned away. “You can’t forgive me,” he said. “I won’t let you.”

  “It’s not up to you.”

  “I forbid it,” he said.

  “I’m not doing it for you,” I said then. “I’m doing it for me.”

  “Get out of here,” he said. “And take your damned soup.”

  “I’m not taking the soup,” I said.

  “Well, I’m not frigging eating it.”

  “Fine,” I said. “Pour it out! It’s homemade by my dying mother, you bitter old pain in the ass, but pour it out.”

  “Get out of my house!”

  “I’m going,” I said, packing up my bag.

  “And take your forgiveness with you!”

  “No way in hell. The forgiveness stays!”

  “Leave. Right now.”

  “I am,” I said. But instead of moving away, I stepped closer. “I’m leaving. But I’m taking you with me.”

  DeStasio checked my expression to see if I meant it.

  I did.

  I expected him to fight me, but as I reached out my hand, all the fight just seemed to drain out of him. Like he’d been fighting way too hard for way too long, and right at that moment, he decided to surrender.

  Was it okay, what he’d done to me? Or to Owen? Or to himself? Did an addiction excuse everything? Did losing his son, and then his wife, give him the right to violate all standards of human decency? Of course not.

  But did I suddenly want to do everything in my power to make sure that I never let my own grief and rage and disappointment do the very same thing to me?

  You bet.

  “Come on,” I said, helping him up.

  He didn’t resist. “Where are we going?”

  “I think you know where we’re going,” I said.

  He took a second to get steady on his feet. “You’re taking me to the captain, is that it? Or to the police?”

  “Neither, old man,” I said, shaking my head. “I am taking you to rehab.”

  Twenty-nine

  I FINISHED THAT day feeling strong.

  True, DeStasio wasn’t going to confess anything. True, I wasn’t getting my job back. Technically, other than the fact that DeStasio wasn’t dead, I hadn’t accomplished all that much by confronting him.

  It didn’t matter. I was proud of myself. I was proud of how I’d handled it all. I’d brought him soup, and gone to check on him, and chosen, over and over, to be compassionate, and to be human, and to do the right thing—no matter if he deserved it or not.

  I’d risen above my anger. It wasn’t all gone yet, but it didn’t have to be.

  I’d forgiven him. Or tried, at least.

  When I’d spoken the words, honestly, I’d been faking. I’d said them on principle, not expecting to feel them. I’d expected the feeling would only follow later. Possibly years later. If at all.

  But saying the words had somehow sparked the feeling, too.

  Words were powerful, I realized in a new way.

  No denying it now.

  I had told my story. I had put it into words, at last. For DeStasio, of all people—but you can’t have everything. He wasn’t the only person to witness that moment, anyway.

  I was there.

  Telling the story changed the story for me. Not what had happened—that, I could never change—but how I responded to it.

  It was like I’d been averting my eyes from that memory for ten solid years, but I’d finally forced myself to look again. And what I saw, at twenty-six, was so different from what I remembered from when I was sixteen.

  Even though nothing about the story had changed, I had changed.

  I’d begun telling that story to DeStasio because of how I wanted him to feel. I wanted to force him to recognize how hurtful his actions had been. Maybe he did, and maybe he didn’t. What I know for sure is that I felt something, hearing the story—something I never would have expected to feel for that stupid, naïve girl I had been: compassion.

  Looking back, I saw her—that teenage me—with different eyes. I saw her in the story as young, and trusting, and inexperienced—but not stupid. Not contemptible. Now, all these years later, she was someone I could root for, and understand, and hurt for. And in this crazy way, the fact that I could look, and listen, and care about her, and ache for her, and defend her—even if I couldn’t change anything at all—the fact that someone heard her, could stay in that moment with her and bear witness, meant that she wasn’t alone.

  She wasn’t alone anymore.

  She’d been so alone all these years, endlessly facing the worst moment of her life and completely abandoned by everyone. Even me.

  All that changed when I told her story.

  Now, she had me on her side—too little and too late, but right there at last, all the same.

  Putting that long-unspoken night into words changed the memory. It was no longer some kind of poison gas that snaked around my consciousness, formless and uncontainable and lethal. Now it had words. Now it had a shape.

  A beginning, a middle—and, most important, an end.

  * * *

  IT TAKES A lot out of you, confessing your darkest secret. I went home and slept like the dead.

  And when morning came, something about me was reborn.

  I lay in bed under a pattern of sunshine from my window and marveled at my capacity to do the impossible. I’d told the story of Heath Thompson. I’d told the whole soul-destroying story, and I’d lived to see the dawn. Of all the brave things I’d done in my life, that one was the bravest.

  If I could do that, I could truly do anything.

  And now I was going to the hospital to see the rookie, no matter what anybody said.

  Just try to stop me.

  But when I headed downstairs, I found that my mother’s house was full of firefighters.

  Not just any firefighters, either. Station Two, C-shift. My crew.

  They were doing chores.

  Six-Pack and Case were in the kitchen, repairing my mother’s broken window. Tiny was on a ladder in the living room, replacing the lightbulb
s in a ceiling fixture. And the captain was sipping coffee at the kitchen table with my mom, in her bathrobe.

  “Oh, honey,” my mom said when she saw me. “You’re up.”

  The captain turned, saw me, too, and stood up. “Morning, Hanwell.”

  As soon as the guys heard him, they all called out, “Morning, Hanwell!”

  I wasn’t sure what to make of them all. “What are you doing here?”

  “It’s a long story,” the captain said.

  “They showed up here at seven forty-five and started fixing my broken window,” my mom said. “Then they asked me to make a list of every single honey-do I could think of for them, and they’ve been hard at work ever since.”

  I looked at the captain like, What the hell?

  “These guys,” my mom went on, chirpily, gesturing at Six-Pack and Case, “are going to repaint my garden fence. And this one”—she gestured at Tiny—“adjusted that broken gate latch out front, tightened the loose cabinet door, and fixed the leak behind the toilet.”

  She looked pleased.

  I frowned at the captain. “Why?”

  He looked right at me. “By way of apology.”

  “What are you apologizing for?” There were so many possibilities.

  “DeStasio throwing a brick through that window, for starters,” the captain said, nodding at it.

  I blinked. “You knew it was him?”

  “I do now.”

  “How?”

  “The rookie and I kind of pieced it together.”

  I walked closer. “He’s awake? He’s okay? You saw him?”

  He nodded. “Last night. They just moved him from the ICU.”

  A funny little sob of relief passed through me, and then my eyes filled with tears—but I squeezed a tight blink to push them back. “How is he?”

  “He’s on the mend,” the captain said. He shook his head at Diana. “Youth.”

  I smiled and wrapped my arms around my waist. “You talked to him?”

  “Yep. He asked after you.”

  “He did?”