It may have seemed cold and callous, but I was already moving on from the injured girl, working the checklist, doing all the dispassionate things I was supposed to do. Around the car, looking at the way the frame was set down tight into the gravel and sand, trying to decide if there could be someone trapped underneath the chassis, trying to decide if there was any risk the car might start to move. The driver was still following me around like a gnat, still chirping that he was the driver.
I cut him off. “How many people in the car?”
He didn’t answer.
“How. Many. People,” I said, holding him by the shoulders until he finally told me there had been four.
I counted him, the girl in the ditch and another teenager in the front seat, both hands on the dashboard.
I almost stepped on the fourth person, mostly because he was in tight against the side of the car, lying in the gravel, feet down in the ditch, and I was looking back into the headlights of my truck. The odd thing is that my training may well have saved his life. I ended up treating him as if he was the most seriously injured of the four, even though the signs of that were pretty sparse, only because the book would have said to do just that. The training said he should be treated as if he had a skull fracture, which seemed absolutely ridiculous. As it turned out, it was exactly what was wrong with him. He had what looked like fluid in one ear, and he was disoriented, lying prone in the gravel and unable to explain who he was or just what had happened. His back was bent over the edge of the embankment, his feet lower than his head, his body in a long curve.
I heard the rescue truck cut its siren and make the corner at the bottom of the hill, grinding down into the lower gears to make the steep grade. When I heard the air brakes lock on, I went back to the truck, where Bob was climbing down from behind the wheel.
“Three injured, two serious,” I remember saying. “Girl is a bleeder, head injury on the other side. We’ll need another ambulance.”
One ambulance had already been on the way—standard for a car accident with injuries; the dispatcher would have rolled one right away at the same time he paged us out. But it had to come from St. John’s, ten or fifteen minutes away, less maybe if they knew the accident was a serious one and pulled out all the stops, stomping the pedal enough to feel the heavy ambulance lift as it swept over bumps in the road.
The bleeding girl in the ditch, spectacularly cut as she was, would wind up needing only stitches—many, many stitches. The guy in the gravel would end up in surgery and with a plate in the front of his head, and he left me with the lingering fear that doing the right thing somehow wasn’t enough. I had acted the way I had been trained, but without ever believing his skull could actually be fractured.
I’d been to dozens of accidents where someone had simply mentioned that their neck hurt, so we had put a neck collar on them, strapped them to a backboard and sent them uncomfortably off to the hospital—because that was the protocol.
Either way, the accident marked me up—not because I made the right choice about who was injured, but because it just felt wrong to leave the bleeding girl alone and terrified while I searched for someone who might need my care more. I left her because I had to, but not with any sort of comfort.
Mr. Skull-fracture, he doesn’t come back in my dreams—I can barely conjure up more than the shape of him in the dark, lying in the gravel next to the wrecked car. But her . . . if she’s been in my dreams once, she’s been there a hundred times, and I swear she sometimes whispers to me when I’m actually awake.
“Am I cut bad?”
Cold chills run right down my back if I’m awake, and if I’m asleep I sit up, bolt upright and rigid, taking the sheets and blankets with me, looking around the room to see if I can get a mere glimpse of her.
She’s probably long over the crash by now.
I heard afterwards that she was all right, that the cuts didn’t even really scar unless you knew exactly where to look. A friend of someone’s mother told us that, although no one ever got around to telling us officially.
The pager called us out for a house fire in Windsor Heights in the middle of the workday, and I knew they were going to be short of firefighters, so I headed across town with the siren on. It took ages to get across the city, even with the siren, and for an ordinary pageout I probably wouldn’t have bothered—the trucks would be packed up and gone, no sign of the firefighters at all, by the time I got there. But this was different: a house fire means hours of work, and many of the firefighters who worked in the city wouldn’t even get the page. Through the sheer luck of geography, I could pick up the pages in my newsroom.
They were so short of firefighters when I got there that I was put into breathing gear right away. The front windows were already out of the living room, flames washing up over the front of the house and back into the second floor, and there was heavy smoke all over the upstairs.
Mike Reid and I punched a hole up through the ceiling in a back bedroom, checking for fire extension, and at about the same time the second floor let go over the living room, so that the floor just disappeared on the other side of the door, leaving a parlour trick where a door opens onto a sheer drop-off.
Other firefighters tried to save the family dog, a golden Lab, from the garage, but it was too late—the dog was already dead, smoke all over the place like the tide had come in and submerged the house completely. Later, a family member wrote a letter to the editor, thanking us for trying to save the dog, and saying we were to be congratulated for trying. We were thanked for another small act of compassion as well: on our way into the attic, one of the firefighters had taken a wedding dress out of the closet above the fire, a family heirloom still safely sleeved in its dry-cleaning bag, and had carefully laid it across the bed in a closed bedroom well away from the fire.
Not one of the firefighters would admit to having done it. They just shrugged when I asked and looked down carefully at their hands.
I still figure it was Mike.
NINETEEN
I think part of my problem was that there was a period when fires and accidents just piled up as if they’d never stop. If I’d had just the end-over-end Rabbit’s crash in my sleep and the mewling man with the two broken legs, that would have been enough. I think I would have been able to deal with that—at least, that’s what I keep telling myself. I keep telling myself that it was because there was so much, that it was because the images just kept piling onto each other.
If I’d had just one—just the man in the ditch or the firefighter’s wife or the girl who was cut bad—if I’d had just one out of the whole bunch of them, I might have been able to reason my way through it in a rational and even-handed way. I might have been able to just box it all up and put it aside. But I never knew who it would be, who would surface in my nights and my days, and which way they were going to come at me.
I wanted to think it was over when the call was done and I slammed the truck door behind me, making my way up the gravel to the back door of my house. But that was just a hope, never even close to reality.
Instead, I’d get to spend hours awake in the dead of night, the television flickering blue around the walls, while I wondered what was happening to me and if it was ever going to stop. Afraid to close my eyes because I’d had plenty of nightmares that were just waiting for me to sleep so that they could pick up exactly where they had left off when I woke up.
Sometimes, Barby would make her way halfway down the stairs and ask if I was all right. I’d lie—“Fine, just can’t sleep”—even though my face might still be wet with tears. I couldn’t imagine that anyone else was going through anything like it, or that I would be anything but the subject of ridicule if I admitted what was going on.
It began to give me a certain coldness, too, a kind of brittle, put-on practicality. I began to believe that I wouldn’t get hurt—at least I wouldn’t get hurt as badly—if I managed to keep everyone just a little farther away. If I could make enough distance that I could live safely in t
he protective bubble.
I wouldn’t argue, wouldn’t engage; I was practising holding my face still so that it betrayed nothing. I tried to imagine that my face looked calm or nonplussed—like the nictitating membrane in a shark’s eyes just before it bites. Lower the shades on your eyes and don’t let anybody know that you’re home in there. Not your boss— not your spouse. Not anyone.
Other firefighters seemed to be able to handle things. Even after bad scenes, it was hard to get any of them to acknowledge they were upset or disturbed by anything. Part of my job as deputy chief was to look for people who needed help, because we had assistance programs for them and I was supposed to nudge them along the way. But no one admitted anything, so there was no one to nudge.
None of those other firefighters looked as if they were living on a ragged edge between asleep and awake, night after night. They all seemed able to hang things up as easily as they packed away their fire gear after a call. And if they could do it, then I could too. I tried to convince myself that the night terrors were something that could simply be subdued by sheer will, that I could force myself to be more practical, less edgy—that I could successfully push away from everything, put some distance between myself and any sort of emotion. I didn’t know it at the time, but I think now that I was doing the equivalent of packing a container tight with explosives, like mixing air and gasoline, just looking for the right spark.
I suppose it would have been sensible to get professional help then. I would get help later, but only when I was coming close to not being able to function at all. The problem was that there was no sharp, clear defining point, no line that I could say I had clearly crossed between being all right and not being all right at all.
It’s like staying at a party too late during an unexpected snowstorm. You’re talking away, and outside you can see the snowflakes battering down through the porch light. Sometimes the snow is heavy and sometimes it’s just fine, threadlike flakes, catching and turning in the light so that every now and then they flash miraculous silver. Maybe you hear the snowplow a few times, the metal-on-pavement screech of the bottom of its blade, and maybe you even see the blue strobe light on its roof as the heavy truck trundles by. But it’s not until you finally say your goodbyes and venture out into the night that you realize the snow is up to your knees—and by then, struck by the surprise of it, you find it hard to do anything except stare out at the smoothed-over hummocks and humps that were originally cars and wonder how you let it get to this point.
By the time I got there, I knew all the infomercials only too well—the amazing Flowbee (“the vacuum cleaner that cuts hair”), the miracle knives sold by men in chef’s hats that could cut through a pop can and still cut perfectly thin slices of tomato. I knew about scores of exercise machines and programs that promised perfect abdominal muscles.
I knew movies in French, and art films with subtitles, and I knew that the images could wash over you like water, the colours of the television on your skin like moving tattoos.
And I knew that not one of those images would stick for even one moment the way dealing with a crying relative could—the way someone else’s tears on your face burn, like they were leaving marks that won’t ever come off. I would have loved to be tormented by dreams about the Craftmatic bed, or to have mysterious, heavy-lower-lipped Frenchwomen sneer and stalk away from me in my sleep. Instead, I got a man who had mowed his toes off with a lawn mower and a woman who couldn’t speak, her throat swelling shut hopelessly fast from an allergic reaction.
I didn’t even have the option of telling myself that the dreams weren’t real, because there were enough elements that were real that my waking brain would snap back immediately to whatever their genesis had been. The dream might start like a real memory: reaching across the front seat of a crashed car to get a woman’s purse, spilled open on the remains of the passenger seat, gathering up the absolutely expected contents—wallet, glasses case, makeup, balled Kleenex—and taking the purse back to the ambulance because she had to have it with her. The spilled purse looked so normal—no warnings inside, no suggestions of anything but the unfolding of an absolutely average day.
I’d examined the woman when she was pinned like a butterfly behind the steering wheel. I could feel the clear breaks in a line of ribs, the fine, regular barrel staves of her rib cage now all sheared along a new straight and geometric plane. The rising knot over her right eye where her face had turned just as she went into the exploding airbag.
I know I could have just dismissed individual nightmares out of hand and gotten on with my day if they’d included something unbelievable, like a snake coming out of her open mouth. Instead, I walk back to the ambulance through the rain, hearing the hiss of car tires fading as drivers slow down to look at the wrecked car, and when I hand the woman her purse, she opens her mouth to thank me and I can see she’s completely bitten off her tongue, that her mouth is full of black blood clots and she’s trying desperately to say something, straining forward against the chest straps on the gurney, but the words are just a mess of bubbled air and gurgling sounds.
It may be a dream, but it’s been built with too much fact for me to dismiss it all as fiction. The analytical part of my mind screams that this could actually happen, that I wouldn’t even find it strange to drive up to a scene and find that it had happened—and what’s the difference between a dream and reality if all of it could happen exactly that way?
At the same time, I wonder if there isn’t a reason my brain selects some elements and not others, and whether there’s some secret in the combination that professionals would be able to unwrap in me if I could ever let anyone sort my dreams out properly.
There’s no sorting things out alone at three in the morning. I used to tell myself that over and over again, used to tell myself that a trip into the dark of the kitchen to find a slumbering bottle of Scotch wouldn’t really help anything either, even if I could picture every single thing about the kitchen in my head—the warm yellow triangle of the light from the back porch cast in across the pine boards, the reassuring hum of the refrigerator, the familiar hulking layout of cabinets and countertops.
There is some small relief in that—walking exactly the same number of steps I always do to reach the counter, running my fingertip along the turned-down curve of its edge. The cupboard doors are so familiar, the knobs just at the height where my hands remember them, as smooth and round as they should be, friendly to my touch. Silent hinges. Really only the whoosh of the door moving through the air, the swing of it that pushes against you as if it almost has its own shape.
Sometimes I even wound up with a glass in my hand, feeling the smooth belly of it against my palm, or else the long cool bottle itself, imagining the smell and taste and smoky bite of the alcohol. The idea that I could just settle down next to the front window with two kinds of cold glass: one, with Scotch, in the palm of my hand, the other, the front window, that I could rest my forehead on and watch the world cycle silently by.
But the truth is that eventually there wasn’t even any relief in simple things like the outdoors anymore, glass or no glass: the night stopped distracting me because it just sat there, holding dark blue. The stars turned slowly, but they didn’t talk about anything but the blessed far away. Even when cars passed, they didn’t wind up being the right kind of distraction, because I would see the yellow cone of their headlights just long enough to imagine that there were other sorts of lives going by, self-contained and complete. I would try to count the heads as the car passed under the street light, try to imagine better lives for all of them.
I tried to imagine that they were happy and laughing and oblivious, that they didn’t have to spend their nights awake and alone, that they didn’t ever worry about whether the great clock of the world might tick an awkward tock and have them meet a stranger head-on in the other direction, travelling fast and laughing and just as happily oblivious as they were.
That they didn’t ever have to worry about finding an a
irway in the screaming bright mayhem of the crash, when my gloves are all covered with slippery blood and things keep squirting out of my hands, and there’s so much sharp metal that I’m cutting my bunker gear and maybe my arms as well. And the night is as still as ever except someone nearby is moaning deep in their throat like a stray cat outside the door, only this is no cat and I’m in the car beside the people who are moaning, and it won’t ever goddamn stop.
The people driving by don’t ever have to worry about that.
But I do.
And I couldn’t stop.
Even on those nights, I would eventually climb back into the warmth of bed, wait for the cold pain in my feet to stop, and stare up through the darkness at the ceiling. Sometimes I would sleep. Often, though, it was a long and lonely wait, complicated by the fact that I was also waiting for the possibility that my pager might provide its own deliverance.
I was like an addict shaking in the agony of withdrawal and at the same time desperate for another fix. Terrified by it, but waiting eagerly for the pageout. It’s hard to fathom, but it’s absolutely true. If I could have been on back-to-back-to-back runs every night of the week, I would have preferred that to any other option.
Even if it was tearing me to pieces.
If you’re on a fire call, you know the wildness you can expect, and you know the feeling of it tight inside you—that building feeling, the excitement, even the dread. It builds like a storm while you’re on the road, one that you can’t help but anticipate with both foreboding and overwhelming wonder. It’s doing, and the thinking stops.
Burning Down the House Page 16
