by Kim Baldwin
“Yeah?”
“I had a good time tonight. I have more fun with you than anyone.”
“Me too. Thanks for coming over.”
*
Gable finally did doze off, but slept fitfully, awakening at every tiny sound, imagining it was Erin. Around three a.m. when she awoke, she realized it really was Erin this time; the water was running in the bathroom between the two bedrooms. Gable couldn’t help herself. She slipped out of bed and went to the door and opened it an inch, as quietly as she could.
She had put a nightlight in the guest room to ease Erin’s fear of the dark, and plugged another into an outlet in the hall so Erin could find her way to the bathroom. The latter gave Gable enough light to get a real good look at Erin’s incredible body as she stumbled back to bed.
There would be no more sleeping after that.
*
Gable got up at six, threw on a robe, and made a pot of coffee to wake herself up. She was channel surfing with the volume turned down when her emergency radio blared the signal for a callout. She was on the first-response team.
Gable jotted down the address and hustled to her bedroom, running headlong into Erin in the hallway.
“Was that your radio?” Erin had dressed hurriedly; her blouse wasn’t buttoned right.
“Yeah, a house fire. Not far from here.” Gable continued to her bedroom without further elaboration, threw on her clothes, and was back in the living room in seconds.
Erin had her shoes on and was waiting by the door. “I’m coming with you. I may not be able to help much yet, but I want to go.”
“Okay.” There was no time for discussion.
They got in Gable’s Jeep and Gable turned on the emergency flasher as she hit the gas and sped toward the fire.
“I wish I had my gear.” Erin looked enviously at Gable’s fire coat, turnout pants, helmet, and boots, piled in the back of the Jeep.
The smoke was visible from a couple of miles away—a dark column billowing upward into a clear, cloudless sky. They were first to arrive. The top floor of the two-story home was nearly fully involved. Flames leapt from the south side windows and curled upward, charring a wide black swath to the roof.
As the Jeep screeched to a stop on the gravel drive, a middle-aged woman came running out from behind the house. The turquoise housedress she was wearing was half burned off her, and much of her frizzy blond hair was gone on one side, the charred ends black.
“Help!” she screamed. “My son Peter is up there! I couldn’t get to him!” She ran up to Gable as she got out of the Jeep and grabbed at her arm. “Help him! He’s only seven!”
“Where is he? Where did you last see him?” Gable scrambled into her gear. She cursed the fact she did not have her SCBA. The air packs stayed with the trucks.
“He’s in his bedroom.” The woman pointed at the only corner of the second floor that was not engulfed in flames. “I couldn’t get to him. The stairs were on fire. Hurry! Please! ”
“Do you have a ladder?” Gable asked.
“Behind the house.” The woman broke down crying.
With no time to comfort her, Gable and Erin darted around the house, found a tall aluminum ladder, and hurriedly set it under the bedroom window. “I’m going up for the boy,” Gable told Erin as she pulled her gloves out of her pocket and put them on. “You wait for the pumper and tell them where I am.”
“Please be careful,” Erin urged, positioning herself to steady the ladder.
Gable raced up the rungs, mentally going through the checklist that had been drilled into her during her training. Stay low and go. The temperature of a burning room was three hundred degrees just a foot off the floor, five hundred degrees five feet up, and twelve or thirteen hundred degrees at the ceiling.
The window wasn’t locked. She opened it but kept her face turned away as thick black smoke billowed out and up. She hyperventilated, holding her last big deep breath as she crawled inside and dropped to the floor. She kept one hand on the wall to orient herself.
The smoke was thick but she caught a glimpse of the door to the hallway across from her—it was closed but on fire, fed into a hot sheet of flame by the rush of air from the open window. You don’t have much time.
“Peter!” she hollered. She inhaled a lungful of the thick acrid smoke and immediately began coughing.
“Peter! Where are you?” she managed between coughs. The smoke stung her eyes, causing them to water profusely. She had to keep them closed much of the time, taking quick, squinting glances to try to see. “Peter! Answer me if you can!”
There was no response, so she began to search. Crawling along the floor, one hand on the wall, the other extended in front of her. Children are most often found in or under the bed or in closets. She came to a dresser and skirted around it. Came to a corner of the room. Beyond it, a nightstand. The bed! She searched it quickly but thoroughly, then sprawled flat to grope beneath it, both hands outstretched. Nothing but boxes. Comic books. Toys.
Her eyes were burning and her lungs ached. She sucked in more smoke. Taking too long, her mind thought fuzzily as she went into another coughing spasm. But she forged ahead, around the bed. Another nightstand.
She was so close to the fire now she could feel the heat of it and hear the roaring, crackling sound as it consumed the door and spread up into the ceiling above her. You have to hurry. Not much time.
She left the safety of the wall to scramble around the door, keeping her face averted from the flames. She groped her way to the opposite wall, her hands finding shoes and toys and discarded clothes…and then, another door. Closet!
Please, God, she prayed as she turned the knob. She could not longer see; her eyes raw and burning from the smoke. Her heart fell as she groped her way through the deep closet, finding only clothes, a hockey stick, roller skates. She had almost given up hope when she finally came upon the boy, curled into a fetal position in the back corner.
He wasn’t moving.
She grabbed him and backed out of the closet.
The fire was spreading rapidly now, closing in on them—one wall and half the ceiling were aflame. The heat was intense, searing her face and neck. She tried to shield the child as she dragged him across the floor in the direction of the window.
“Gable! Answer me, damn it! Gable!” Erin was at the window, standing on top of the ladder.
Her voice helped direct Gable where to go, and in another moment, she was there. She handed the boy over the sill to Erin and groped her way down the ladder after them. She collapsed at the bottom, struggling to breathe, unable to see.
Gable recognized the sound of tires skidding on gravel as more firefighters arrived, then the wail of the fire engine, growing steadily louder.
“I’m going to move you, Gable. Try to relax.” Carl’s voice, just above her. He reached beneath her shoulders and dragged her several feet, then slid off her helmet. “You all right?”
“Okay,” she managed to rasp out between coughs. “The boy?”
“He’s alive. Erin and Tim are working on him. You done good, Gable.” Carl had to shout to be heard over the siren on the pumper as it pulled up near them. “Oxygen’s here.”
The siren died, and a minute later someone set an oxygen mask on her face. Gable still couldn’t open her eyes, but it was a bit easier to breathe. All was controlled chaos around her. She could hear Chief Thornton shouting instructions, and recognized the clang of the ladders coming off the truck. Another siren. The ambulance, she guessed. The other sounds around her began to fade as it wailed louder and louder, stopping very near where she lay. The siren died, car doors slammed. She could hear the voices of the paramedics as they tended to the boy a short distance away.
“Gable, are you all right?” Erin’s voice, nearby. Kneeling over her.
Gable pulled the oxygen mask away from her mouth. “Yeah. Peter?”
“He’ll be okay, they think. They’re getting him in the ambulance now. Then they’ll bring the other gurney over f
or you.”
Gable shook her head. “Hate hospitals,” she rasped.
“It’ll be all right. I’ll be right there with you. But I’m going to have to drive your Jeep and meet you there. They won’t let me ride along, there’s not enough room.”
“No,” Gable protested. She started coughing again, and Erin replaced the oxygen mask.
“Leave that alone, and stop talking! Damn it! Don’t be so stubborn!”
“Don’t need…” Gable tried to talk through the mask, but it muffled her words.
Erin took her hand and leaned down to whisper in her ear. “Please, Gable. Please don’t fight this. Okay? For me?”
Gable absolutely loathed hospitals. Her mother had died in one, three days after her car went off an icy road and struck a tree. But Gable could see it was pointless to try to argue with Erin. She nodded her head reluctantly, and Erin squeezed her hand. “Good. Thanks.”
*
The paramedics flushed out her eyes with saline at the fire scene, and they repeated the procedure at the hospital, so Gable was able to get a good look at the cluster of familiar faces crowded outside the emergency ward as they wheeled her to a semiprivate room. Erin, Tim, Carl, and a half dozen more of her firefighter friends, some still in their turnout gear.
Two nurses fussed over her, getting her an extra blanket, fluffing up her pillows. The other bed in her room was vacant. She was still on oxygen and they’d hooked her up to an IV. She had to move the mask to be understood.
“What’s Peter’s condition?” Her voice was still raspy, and it hurt to talk.
“Put that back,” said the matronly nurse whose nametag read Amy. But she smiled at Gable as she said it. “He’s going to be fine. We’re keeping him overnight too. Just for observation. You’re the one who got him out, right?”
Gable nodded.
“Nice work.” Amy smiled at Gable as she loaded a syringe from a small bottle. “I’m going to give you something to help you sleep.” She injected the syringe into Gable’s IV.
“Can I talk to her a minute?” A voice from the doorway that Gable didn’t recognize. She turned her head to see the woman from the fire, still in her charred housedress, but with bandages and ointment covering the burns on her face, neck and hands.
“Sure,” Amy told the woman. “But I don’t want her to talk.” She looked directly at Gable. “You just listen. All right?”
Gable nodded as the woman approached the bedside.
“I’ll never be able to thank you enough.” The woman had tears in her eyes. “Risking your life that way to save my son. I don’t know how to thank you. I would’ve died if anything had happened to him.”
Gable reached out her hand. The woman took it, and squeezed hard.
“You’ve got a lot of other people out there who want to see you too,” Amy said. “But you can only have two at a time.”
“I’ll leave. So your friends can come in,” Peter’s mother said. She leaned down to kiss Gable on the cheek. “God bless you,” she whispered before retreating.
Gable risked incurring Amy’s wrath by removing the oxygen mask. “I'll see Erin and Carl,” she requested, before dutifully replacing it.
“You got it.” Amy signaled the other nurse. “But I’m going to stay right here so you don’t try to talk.”
Carl and Erin came in, both their faces etched with worry until Gable waved at them with both hands to assure them she was all right. Erin pulled a chair near the bedside and took Gable’s hand. Carl stood behind the chair.
“Hey there. How you feeling?” Erin asked.
“She’s not supposed to talk,” Amy said from the other side of the bed.
“Oh, right.” Erin winced.
Gable gave Erin’s hand a squeeze and winked at her, and that brought a relieved smile to her face.
“Since they won’t let everyone in, I’m supposed to tell you that everybody sends their love and prayers," Carl said. “We’re all real proud of you, Gable. That was a gutsy thing, going in there alone without your mask.”
She shrugged. It had all happened so fast she really didn’t have time to be afraid.
“I felt so helpless,” Erin said. “You were in there so long.”
Gable reached up for her oxygen mask, but Amy cut her off at the pass, grabbing at her arm to stop her. “Don’t you dare,” she admonished.
Gable let her hand drop back to her side. “Your voice saved me,” she rasped through the mask to Erin, drawing a frown from the nurse.
“If you’re going to talk," Amy said. "I’m going to ask them to leave.”
“No! She’s not going to talk anymore, are you, Gable?” Erin's expression beseeched Gable to agree.
Gable flashed Amy an okay sign.
“All right.” Amy turned to Carl and Erin. “Make sure she doesn't. I’m going to check on a couple of other patients, but I’ll be right back. She’s had a sedative, so she’ll be dozing off on us pretty quick.”
As soon as she was out the door, Gable pulled the mask off. “Go home,” she told them.
Erin slapped gently at her hand and replaced the mask. “Stop that. And I’m not going anywhere.”
Gable reached for the mask again, but Erin held her arm down.
“I mean it,” Erin said more sternly. “Don’t make me get tough with you.”
Gable rolled her eyes, and Carl chuckled.
“I’m going to go tell everybody you’re okay, and send them home,” Carl said. He patted her arm. “You did us all proud, Gable. Let me know if you need anything.”
She gave him a thumbs-up sign and the room fell quiet for a moment after he’d gone. Gable could feel the sedative taking effect. Erin took her hand again.
“Go home,” she repeated through the mask, although she rather liked Erin sitting there, holding her hand.
“Not a chance. Nowhere else I’d rather be.”
Gable yawned. “Stubborn,” she said drowsily.
“That makes two of us.”
“Not going to sleep until you leave,” Gable vowed. She was fighting to keep her eyes open.
“Wanna bet?” Erin smiled as she said it, but then her expression grew serious. “You had me scared me for a minute there, Gable.” A tremor shook her voice.
“I’m fine. Go home. Stop worrying.” Gable needed to close her eyes. But just for a minute.
“Stop talking! I can’t help worrying, Gable. You’re important to me. I don’t want anything to happen to you.”
“Important to me too,” Gable mumbled, fading fast. So very important.
Chapter Nine
When Gable next opened her eyes, sunlight was streaming in through the window of the hospital room and Carl was seated where Erin had been, engrossed in the sports pages of the Charlevoix Courier.
Gable felt a small pang of disappointment.
Her oxygen mask was gone, replaced by a nasal cannula that wrapped around her ears and supplied a gentle air flow into her nose. She had a headache, and her throat felt like she had swallowed sandpaper. Sooty, ashy, nasty sandpaper. Yuck.
“Hey, Carl. What time is it?”
“You’re awake!” Carl grinned, set the paper aside, and looked at his watch. “A few minutes before eight.”
“What are you doing here?” she asked.
“Thought I’d stop by and see how you were feeling.”
“Thirsty.”
“I can fix that.” Carl poured a cup of water from a pitcher on the bedside table and handed it to her. “How’s your head?”
“Hurts.”
“Carbon monoxide,” he said. “You might feel it a couple of days. Aspirin will help. Any nausea?”
“Yeah.”
“Want me to get the nurse?”
“In a minute. When they gonna let me out of here? Do you know?”
“Erin said the doctor was supposed to see you at eight thirty and decide then.”
“Erin? Erin was here?” Her pulse quickened. Only then did Gable realize she was hooked to a monito
r that was beeping out her heartbeats.
Carl had heard the change too. He glanced at the digital read-out on the monitor. It read 79. 80. 81. An odd smile came over his face. He studied Gable intently for a moment, then said, “Erin is still here. I made her go and get coffee. I think she bribed the nurses to let her stay overnight since they kicked me out at ten.”
He was smiling at her like the Cheshire cat in Alice in Wonderland and Gable didn’t like it one bit. “Well, you can both go home. I’m fine,” she said. She could feel her embarrassment beginning to color her cheeks. She looked over at the monitor. Beepbeepbeepbeep. 83. 84. 85.
“Oh, I doubt you can get her to leave.” Carl smirked.
“There’s no reason either of you need to stay.”
There was a long silence.
“She doesn’t know, does she?” he asked gently.
Gable froze. “Doesn’t know what?” She tried to inject innocent conviction into her tone, but he wasn't fooled. They both knew he had it figured.
“You can talk to me, you know," he said. "I understand better than you think I do.”
She looked at him then.
“My niece Ruthie is a lesbian. She’s twenty-one and goes to Juilliard. Brilliant girl. Gifted. She’s educated me, you might say.”
“I see,” was all Gable could manage.
“Ruthie didn’t tell anybody in the family until she turned eighteen, though she knew long before that. She said she was worried about how everyone would react, but at the same time, she hated keeping it from all of us. Felt like she was living a lie—not telling the people closest to her." He paused, a trace of hurt evident in his eyes. "She said it was like they couldn’t really know who she was.”
“Carl, I’m kind of a private person," Gable said. "I don’t feel the need to share that information with a lot of people.”
“I understand that. But I think there’s a difference between telling the squad you’re gay and telling your best friend, who seems to be open-minded enough to understand.”
“You don’t know that about her.”
