Things You Save in a Fire

by Katherine Center

  “He wanted to know if you’d been to see him.”

  I felt my expression harden. “Did you tell him why I had not been to see him?”

  “I did.”

  “And what did he say?”

  “He said DeStasio’s account of what happened at the fire was—his words here: ‘an utterly false pack of bitter-old-man lies.’ Then the rookie ranted and raved on your behalf and accused DeStasio of lying and being a sleazebag reptile. He got so agitated he gave himself a coughing fit.”

  I smiled a little. “He called DeStasio a sleazebag reptile?”

  The captain smiled a little, too. “He’s on a lot of medication.”

  “Sounds like he’s feeling better.”

  The captain went on. “When he’d settled down, I told him the department was handling it, that there would be a full investigation, and that we’d get to the bottom of everything, for sure. I meant to reassure him, but he kept pushing for information, and when it came out you’d been suspended, he quit.”

  “He quit?”

  The captain nodded, impressed with the gesture. “In protest.”

  Good thing the captain didn’t know he’d been about to quit anyway.

  “Anyway, I thought you were nuts when you confessed”—he cleared his throat—“your, uh, special feelings for the rookie. But now I’d say, just based on our conversation and, uh, his body language, it seems pretty mutual.”

  That was it. Time to go. I needed to get dressed.

  I turned toward the stairs.

  “Wait!” the captain said.

  I kept walking. “I’m going to Boston,” I said. “I’ve waited more than long enough.”

  “But that’s why we’re here,” the captain said.

  I stopped and turned around. “Why?”

  “To take you to Boston.”

  I angled back toward him. “Wait—why are you here?”

  “To apologize to you,” the captain said, “and to your mother. And to try to make things right.”

  “What are you apologizing to me for?”

  “Suspending you, for one. You’re unsuspended, by the way.”

  “What does that mean, ‘unsuspended’?”

  He gave a little shrug. “You’ve got your job back, if you want it.”

  That didn’t feel like a question I could answer just yet. I looked around at the guys. They’d all stopped working, and they were watching us.

  The captain continued. “I also apologize for doubting you when you were telling the truth.”

  I stared at him. How did he know I was telling the truth?

  “The rookie confirmed every detail of your story,” the captain said. “Every detail he was conscious for, anyway. But then, on top of it, I got a phone call from DeStasio last night. From rehab.”

  DeStasio had called the captain from rehab? Were phone calls even allowed?

  “He confessed everything. The false report. The locker, the tires, the brick. His OD, and the painkillers. He’s been stealing painkillers from our supplies for months.”

  “Wow,” I said. “He did confess everything.”

  “He also told me that you saved his life.”

  That was unexpected. “Twice,” I confirmed. If you counted not letting him roast alone inside a burning grocery store.

  The captain went on. “He’s withdrawn his initial report about what happened at the fire and will submit a new one.”

  I lifted my eyebrows.

  He nodded. “It will corroborate yours and make it clear that you put your own safety at risk for others that day, acting with extreme courage and pretty much saving his life and the rookie’s.”

  “So he’s admitted everything he did wrong?”

  “I think so,” the captain said, “unless he’s leaving something out.”

  “He swore he was never going to confess,” I said.

  “I guess he changed his mind.”

  “But—will he be suspended?”

  “He will.”

  “Will he lose his pension?”

  The captain nodded. “Probably.”

  “Why would he give all that up? He was getting away with it.”

  “He said he owed you big-time,” the captain said. Then he added, “He said he didn’t want to be a villain.”

  I didn’t quite know how to feel.

  “I was a stupid idiot,” the captain said then. “We were all idiots. We underestimated you and didn’t trust you. And now we’re going to put things right.”

  I wasn’t sure things could ever be put right. It made me feel worse, almost, to hear him admit it. But only almost. “How exactly are you going to do that?” I asked.

  “I’m not entirely sure,” the captain said. “But I know we’re going to start by driving you down to Boston. With lights and sirens.”

  * * *

  ON THE ROAD, we hashed it all out. We all piled into the captain’s Suburban—the captain and Tiny up front, and me squeezed between Six-Pack and Case in the back. I talked them through exactly how I’d figured out what was going on with DeStasio, describing all the clues and how they all just fell into place.

  “He would have died if you hadn’t showed up,” the captain said.

  “Probably.”

  “He would have died if he’d gone into that building alone,” Six-Pack said.

  “Definitely.”

  On the drive down, the guys acted like things were totally normal—like I’d never been under suspicion, never been shunned or doubted. In fact, things were better than normal. Something about the whole ordeal seemed to have broken some final, unseen barrier that I hadn’t even realized was there. The guys joked around, and teased me, and thanked me, and apologized, and called themselves idiots over and over.

  They mostly teased me about the rookie.

  Yeah, no way was I getting out of that one unteased.

  “We need to combine your names,” Six-Pack said.

  “‘Cassie’ plus ‘rookie,’” Case said. “‘Cookie.’”

  “I called it from the beginning,” Six-Pack said.

  “You never saw it coming,” Case said, reaching around me to punch him.

  “Shut your yaps,” Tiny said. “It was an epic secret love. Nobody called it.”

  “Mentally,” Case said. “To myself. I said, ‘Those two will be in the sack before you know it.’”

  “Nobody’s in the sack,” I said, my ears getting a little hot.

  “Not at the moment, anyway,” Six-Pack said.

  “Not for a couple of weeks,” the captain advised from the front seat. “Give the poor guy a little time to recover.”

  “Poor Loverboy,” the guys all chimed in.

  “Oh God. Please tell me you’re not going to start calling him Loverboy.”

  “Too late,” the guys said, and roughed each other up some more.

  * * *

  OWEN’S SMALL HOSPITAL room was so full—his parents, his sisters, their husbands, at least a few cousins, and a handful of retired firefighters—it was like stepping into a crowded elevator.

  Captain Murphy and the guys hustled me in. “We brought you a present,” the captain said, as the guys from my crew cheered, and the crowd parted, and I found myself standing beside Owen’s bed.

  He was alive. He was awake. He was okay.

  He was the most beautiful sight in the world.

  I caught my breath, and then I held it.

  He looked up and met my eyes.

  “Hey, rookie,” I said.

  “Hey, Cassie.”

  His voice was hoarse from the tube. His face was still burned, a little red in places, but not bad. His hair was adorably mussed.

  He reached out his hand over the bedrail, and I took it.

  But then I heard Colleen. “What’s she doing here? I told you I don’t want that girl in here.”

  I looked up and saw her face, and I knew the captain had been right. She had not been coping well. Her eyes were bloodshot, and her hair was limp. She clearly hadn’t s
lept in a week.

  “It’s okay,” the captain said. “We brought her.”

  Colleen glared at him. “Why would you do that?”

  “We were wrong, Colleen,” the captain said. “DeStasio filed a false report. She’s not the reason your son got hurt. She’s actually the reason he survived.”

  Colleen looked me over, suspicious.

  “You remember when DeStasio hurt his back in that roof collapse?” the captain asked.

  Nods and murmurs all around.

  “Looks like he got hooked on some of the painkillers they gave him. Then, after Tony died, it got worse. And then Annette left him, and it got even worse. Bad enough that his judgment was off. Bad enough that he started lying. Bad enough that he hallucinated the boy in the fire. He dragged the rookie into that structure, and she”—the captain gestured at me—“dragged him back out. She recognized the cyanide poisoning. She put her own life at risk to find the rookie—unconscious, with his PASS device sounding—under the rubble. She administered the antidote, and she tubed him on scene when he was unconscious and unresponsive with no air and no pulse.”

  He made me sound pretty great.

  “I’m telling you, Colleen,” the captain went on, “if this girl hadn’t been watching out for him, we wouldn’t be at a hospital right now, we’d be at a funeral.”

  Colleen stared at me for a second.

  Then she made her way around the end of the rookie’s bed, pushing through the crowd. When she got to me, her face was covered with tears. She pulled me into a full-body hug and didn’t let go. I could feel her trembling. She held on and whispered, “Thank you,” in my ear.

  I hugged her back with one arm, but I kept hold of the rookie’s hand with the other.

  “Wait a second,” one of the rookie’s sisters said, watching the scene. “Isn’t that Christabel?”

  Colleen let me go to get a look.

  The captain shook his head. “She’s Cassie.”

  “She’s both,” the rookie said, his voice raspy, and everybody turned to stare at him. “She is both the best firefighter on our shift”—he met the captain’s eyes, and then looked over at his folks—“and my date to the anniversary party.”

  “It wasn’t a date,” I said to him, giving him an eyes-only smile.

  “It didn’t start out as a date,” he said, a little flirty, “but it sure wound up that way in the end.”

  The guys on the crew started whooping and cheering.

  I looked down.

  “We thought the coast was clear,” the rookie said to the room, “but then the captain showed up.”

  The captain stared at me. “Hanwell was the drunk girl?”

  Owen nodded. “Yep. Except not drunk. Just pretending so you wouldn’t recognize her.”

  “It worked,” the captain said, impressed.

  “We gave her a false name so word wouldn’t get back to the station.”

  Everybody in the room got that. Every single person there knew what a scandal that would have been. Firefighters didn’t date.

  “But why would you even have brought her, son? Why take the risk?”

  The rookie looked around at everybody, like, Duh. And if it embarrassed him to say this, to admit it out loud for everybody to hear, he sure didn’t show it: “Because I’m crazy in love with her,” he said with a shrug. “I have been since the first day.”

  The room went quiet.

  Then everybody at once seemed to look down at us holding hands.

  Then the guys all burst out cheering, slapping each other on the back like we’d all just won the lottery.

  “It was all those blood draws,” Six-Pack called out.

  “It was when we duct-taped them to the pole!”

  “Or when we trapped ’em on the roof.”

  Here’s what surprised me: how cheerful the guys were about it. They seemed so pleased at the idea of Owen and me—and so eager to take the credit. All this time, I’d expected to be reprimanded, at the minimum, and probably more like shunned, if we were found out. But the guys were all for it. They seemed not just okay with it but delighted—a whole crew of firefighter yentas.

  Maybe they were just glad the rookie wasn’t dead.

  Or maybe I’d misjudged them, too, in my way.

  We really do see what we expect to see.

  The rookie tugged me a little closer. “Come here.”

  The room quieted as I stepped closer.

  “I’ve got something for you,” the rookie said. Then he reached toward the tray where his breakfast still sat and he picked up a little silver ring.

  Made of tinfoil.

  I stared at it.

  “I made it from the applesauce top,” he said, meeting my eyes. “It might be a little sticky.”

  I held very still. “What’s this for?”

  He held it up. “I promised myself that if I lived, the very first thing I’d do was ask you to marry me.”

  “Guess he likes you back, Hanwell,” someone shouted.

  “Will you marry me?” the rookie asked, holding up the tinfoil ring, his gaze pinned on mine.

  I nodded before I could find the words. “I will.”

  And then he was tugging me closer, and then sliding that homemade ring on my finger, and then he kissed my hand in a way that inspired the captain to start hustling everybody out of the room.

  “All right, all right,” the captain said. “Let’s give these two kids a moment of privacy.” The rubberneckers weren’t easy to herd. “You!” The captain pointed at the closest guy to the door. “Let’s move!” Then, to another guy, “You! Out! Let’s go!”

  Once the crowd cleared out, the captain put his arms around the final two stragglers, Big Robby and Colleen. “Let’s give Loverboy a minute and take you two for some coffee.”

  The door closed behind them, and we were alone.

  The rookie tugged at me to sit beside him. “Get down here.”

  I let his bedrail down and sat. “They wouldn’t let me in to see you,” I said. “But I snuck in anyway.”

  “I thought I dreamed that,” he said.

  “No. It was real.”

  I didn’t even realize my face was covered in tears until the rookie reached up to brush them off.

  “I’m so glad you’re okay,” I said, and my voice was so shaky, the words trembled, too.

  “Thank you for not letting me die,” Owen said.

  “Thank you for not dying.”

  “Thank you for agreeing to marry me.”

  “Thank you for asking.”

  “If I could lean forward and kiss you some more right now, I would.”

  I smiled. “I’d kiss you back.”

  He nodded. “But I can’t. You know—because of the ribs.”

  “I get it,” I said.

  “So if you want to get kissed,” he went on, eyeing me, “you have to do all the work yourself.”

  I leaned in. “I don’t want to hurt you,” I said.

  “But you do want to kiss me.”

  “I really, truly do.”

  “Be careful, then,” he said.

  So I kissed him. Carefully. Supporting my weight on one arm, and resting the palm of my other hand against the contour of his unshaven neck. I could feel his pulse, simple and steady, and I let myself feel so grateful—so unabashedly grateful—that it was there.

  When I pulled back to take in the sight of him, he said, “Don’t stop.”

  “The captain says I have to go easy on you.”

  “Don’t go easy on me.”

  “I should probably let you rest.”

  “Don’t let me rest.”

  “I should probably go.”

  “Definitely don’t go,” he said.

  He looked tired, as if even just a little bit of flirting and kissing was enough to knock him out. But I didn’t want to go. Instead, I shifted to lie beside him in that skinny little bed, slow and careful not to hurt him anywhere, nestled between him and the railing.

  When I fi
nally got settled, my head against his shoulder, as if it were the most natural possible next step in the conversation, Owen said, “We should do it today.”

  I lifted up my elbow. “Do what?”

  He smiled and met my eyes. “Get married.”

  “Here? In the hospital?”

  “I’m sure they’ve got a chaplain or something.”

  “No,” I said.

  He met my eyes. “No, you won’t marry me?”

  “No, I won’t marry you today. In a hospital.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because it’s too many good things at once. I want to keep something to look forward to.”

  He smiled, lay back against the pillow, and closed his eyes. I laid my head beside him. I thought he was almost asleep when he said, “Trust me. You have so much to look forward to.”

  “I agree,” I said.

  But anything could happen. I knew that, too.

  I knew too much about life to pretend that it wasn’t half tragedy. We lose the people we love. We disappoint each other. We misunderstand. We get lost and lonely and angry.

  But right now, in this moment, we were okay.

  Better than okay.

  My mom was in her garden with plans to see Josie for lunch and a newly repaired kitchen window. The guys from the firehouse were out in the waiting room telling bawdy jokes. DeStasio was getting a second chance to pull himself together. Big Robby and Colleen were sipping a couple of hard-earned coffees. I had my job back—if I chose to take it.

  And the rookie was alive. And I was next to him, holding his hand, feeling his chest rise and fall like the most amazing miracle in all of time. I’d take it. I wouldn’t complain.

  I’d forgiven us all, and I’d do it again.

  Maybe everybody was just foolish and doomed. Maybe nobody got a happy ending in the end. Maybe all happiness could ever hope to be was a tiny interruption from sorrow.

  But there was no denying what this was. A genuine, blissful moment of joy.

  It couldn’t last, but that’s what made it matter.

  And that just had to be enough.

  Epilogue

  I NEVER MADE it back to Texas.

  But I did see my crew from Austin again, a year later, when the rookie and I got married in Rockport on a warm summer evening at sunset. The whole gang drove up from Texas in a caravan of pickup trucks after agreeing to be my bridesmaids. Hernandez vied for position as maid of honor, but Josie beat him out.