3000 Degrees

by Sean Flynn

  That seemed to satisfy Emily. Linda leaned over and kissed her again, smiled at her. “Go to sleep,” she said. Then she got up and left the room, pulling the door almost closed behind her.

  She'd managed to mask her own fear, hide it from Emily. Linda knew Joe would be all right. She'd seen Sully, watched him walk across her television screen. For all Joe's complaining, Sully was a good lieutenant, cautious, by the book. That's who Joe needed looking after him, especially on a night like this.

  Truth of it was, Joe liked Sully, off-duty anyway. He'd just ripped out his kitchen for him, was getting ready to put in a new one. And Joe had noticed something else Sully and Jay had in common, besides their smarts. Both of them had a hard time with some of the other guys, Sully because of his officer's swagger, Jay because of his history. Joe was just coming on the department when Jay was reappointed, and he heard the grousing around the station. Firefighting jobs were hard to come by, and a lot of guys thought a disgraced cop and ex-con didn't deserve the privilege. Jay could handle himself all right, though. “Hey, you don't fucking like it?” he'd snap if someone said anything to his face. “Tough shit. I'm here. Deal with it.” But Sully and Jay, in their own ways, were both underdogs. Joe liked underdogs. He'd spent seventeen years trying to get on a fire truck. Joe could empathize with underdogs.

  But Linda couldn't shake a bad feeling. She thought about putting her pajamas on, curling up in front of the television. A rogue hunch told her not to, that she should stay dressed, just in case she had to go somewhere in a hurry. There were other men to worry about, Joe's friends. The brotherhood. And a relative, Joe's nephew Jimmy. He was on the job. She hoped someone was looking after him.

  The phone rang again a few minutes after nine. It had been ringing all night, friends and relatives and people she barely knew, like Joe's high school classmates she'd just met a week ago at his twentieth reunion. She'd bought a new suit for the occasion, dark blue and neatly tailored; two decades and two children hadn't done any damage to her figure. Everyone who called asked the same questions, wanted to know if Joe was on duty, if he was all right, if she'd heard anything. They all had the same tone, cushioned their words with the same sympathetic inflection, as if they were offering condolences, just in case. All that comforting made her uneasy, put her on edge. She gritted her teeth on the third ring. “Stop calling,” she said out loud. “Stop calling, because it you keep calling, it's going to be true. You're going to make it true.”

  A neighbor dropped by, a woman who lived up the street. Her son was a volunteer fireman. She thought she knew what Linda would be going through, wanted to sit with her, keep her company. Her friend Nancy and her sister-in-law Joan both called to say they were on their way. If I ever need friends in a crisis, Linda thought, I'll be all set. But there's not going to be a crisis.

  Linda monitored the newscasts. The toll had climbed, six men were missing. Linda felt a chill. The reporters didn't give any names. Department officials were still notifying relatives.

  She looked at the clock. It was almost ten. The evacuation signal had been sounded two hours earlier. She calculated the driving time from downtown Worcester to Rochdale, adding thirty minutes for confusion and traffic. If Joe was missing, there should have been a knock on her door at about 9:10. She added again, trying to account for six families. Another forty minutes. Someone would have been there by now.

  The doorbell rang. She froze, afraid to move. Her insides felt as if they'd collapsed again, shattered into fragments that lay in her belly. She went to the door. The knob was slippery in her palm. She pulled it open and saw a local police officer, a friend of the family. He was tipping backward, losing his footing, as if he might tumble off the stoop.

  The officer balanced himself, shuffled forward. He was crying.

  Linda put a hand to her mouth. “Oh, no,” she whimpered. “No …”

  The cop stepped past her. Emily had gotten out of bed and was standing in the front hall. He swept her up in his arms and cradled her, his own tears moistening the little girl's nightgown.

  Mike McNamee saw Tommy Spencer's face again. He concentrated, studied his features, the triangular jaw line, the aquiline nose. He looked into Tom's eyes, only this time in memory. They were clear, irritated by the smoke but focused, set with determination, almost stern. Maybe there was a trace of fear, and there should have been because Tom Spencer knew two men were dying in the boiling fog above him. But there was no hesitation, no reluctance.

  Mike replayed the last frames in his head. I need you to go to the fifth floor. Tom nodding, strapping his mask in place, then disappearing into the blackness. Patrick. Daniel. Casey. I know his kids.

  What was he going to tell them now?

  He'd left Joanne with Joan Lyons, put them both in a police cruiser to pick up Kathy Lyons and ferry the three of them to St. Stephen's. Then he'd gotten back into the chaplain's car for the ride across the city to Tom Spencer's house. Mike's stomach felt like lead. He was still shaken from telling Joan Lyons that her only son was missing. A man couldn't train for such a moment, couldn't practice how to crush someone softly, how to make two words—“Jay's missing”—any less terrible, less lethal. And he never would have practiced anyway because it never occurred to him that he would have to say something so awful.

  He got out of the car slowly, his body aching and exhausted and stiff. He was still wearing his bunker pants and boots, but he'd taken off his coat, stripped down to a dark blue sweatshirt, but he was still perspiring in the forty-degree air. He'd sketched out only the roughest plan. He would go to the door. Kathy, who would have heard him pull up, would be waiting, frightened. And he would say … well, he didn't know exactly.

  The front door banged open, startled Mike, jerked his attention toward the house. Patrick, Tom and Kathy's oldest, charged out, sprinted down the walk in his stocking feet. “Mike, where's my dad? Where's my dad, Mike, where's my dad?”

  Mike held his hands out, slowed Patrick by putting one on each shoulder, held him in position. “Patrick …” He took another deep breath, started again. “Patrick, you're dad's missing,” he said. “And five other men.”

  He stared at Patrick, reading his eyes. They were blank, disbelieving. “Patrick,” he repeated, softer this time, “your dad's missing.”

  Patrick collapsed, every muscle liquefying, his body pouring onto Mike's shoulders. Mike grabbed him, felt the boy's chest heave once, then erupt into violent, sobbing spasms. Mike had to take a step back, spread his feet, regain his balance. He held on to Patrick, gripped him until he could breathe again, until the spasms gave way to trembling. Over Patrick's shoulder, on the front stoop, Mike saw Casey standing alone, her arms wrapped tightly to her sides, as if she was trying to hold herself together, keep her body from physically splitting. She was shrieking. It sounded like No! No!, but primal, a deep, wounded wail.

  A man couldn't practice for that. Mike couldn't even cry, he was so numbed with grief.

  It took a few minutes to calm the kids and find out that neither Kathy nor Daniel was home. He would have to be picked up from the party he was at.

  “Patrick,” Mike said, “do you want me to tell Daniel?”

  Patrick shook his head. “No,” he said. “I'll tell him. It's something I have to do.”

  Mike put a hand on his shoulder. Tom would be proud, he thought, his boy stepping up, already trying to be the man of family. “You're sure?” Mike said.

  “Yeah,” Patrick said. “I'm sure.”

  Mike pulled the cop aside. “Listen,” he said. “Don't let them see the warehouse. I don't care what you have to do, if you've got to go ten miles out of the way. Do not let them see that building.”

  Denise Brotherton was still wearing her nurse's scrubs, pacing the kitchen. A dozen people hovered around her, neighbors and friends and relatives, keeping vigil. Denise's best friend, Kim, had been there for an hour. Kim suspected the worst. She had happened to be on the phone at about nine o'clock with Paul LaRochelle's wife, who'
d told her, “Kim, hang up the phone right now and get over to Denise's house.”

  “What are you saying?” Kim asked.

  “Listen to me: hang up the phone and get over to Denise's. Now.”

  Every few minutes, someone would ask Denise if she wanted to go into town, to the warehouse or St. Stephen's. Each time, she said no, repeated what she'd told Paul's cousin. “Paul always told me, ‘If anything happens the fire department will come to the house.’This is where I need to be.”

  She thought about the other Kim, her sister-in-law, eight months pregnant. Kim was at a wedding in Spencer. She probably had no idea about the fire, no frantic fear that her brother, the man who raised her and walked her down the aisle and wanted to coach her through delivery, might be missing or wounded or dead. Which was a good and merciful thing, because all the dread and worry would come to nothing. Paul was alive. Denise believed that, repeated it to herself, over and over, like a mantra or a prayer, clung to it with the same fierce faith she'd always had in Paul, in the two of them. It had been there in the beginning, that night at Tammany Hall, a faith that was blind and irrational and magnificent.

  They hadn't been on a date. Denise just felt sorry for him. Paul was an orderly at Worcester City Hospital where she was a nurse, and he'd watched his father die from a cancer that ate away his esophagus, a slow and miserable wasting that finally ended in the spring of 1983. Taking him out for a night on the town was only meant to cheer him up, take his mind off his grief, and it was supposed to be a group endeavour, fourteen other nurses and orderlies tagging along. But everyone else had canceled, leaving just the two of them to drink beer around a sticky table in a smoky nightclub.

  She remembered only fragments, disconnected details. Walking through the carved wooden door to Tammany Hall. Sitting in the shadows of a corner. Her voice hoarse from talking over the blues band on the stage in the back. Paul telling her how smart he thought she was, how he'd always been attracted to intelligent women. Toying with the engagement ring on her finger. Her fiancé's voice whispering through her memory, telling her to quit her job before she met another man and fell in love. Wondering how mad her father would be if she asked him to eat the deposit he'd put down on the reception hall for her wedding.

  Everything had happened so quickly after that. A week later, Paul and Denise both broke off their engagements. They were on separate phones at opposite ends of the nursing station on the fourth floor of Worcester City, their fiancés on the line, both of them taking grief about some such thing or another. Paul had caught Denise's attention, rolled his eyes, then held up his index finger and mouthed a silent syllable. One.

  Denise held up the first two fingers on her left hand. Two.

  They each raised a third finger. Three. On cue, in perfect synchronicity, they hung up the phones.

  Three weeks after that night at Tammany Hall, Paul had proposed in a roadside restaurant. The other diners clapped and the manager sent over a bottle of champagne. Then Paul's mother died and Kim was orphaned and life was suddenly enormously complicated and grave and no one would have blamed her if she'd simply walked away but she didn't because she believed in Paul and believed in the two of them together. It had always troubled her that Helen Brotherton had died so abruptly, before Denise knew if her mother-in-law would like her. “She did,” Paul would tell her. “I know she did. Because if she didn't, she would have stuck around longer. But she knew her little girl would be in good hands.”

  Paul believed, too. He accepted the responsibilities that had been thrust upon him. There were times when Denise had been awed by Paul's devotion. When her father was dying in the autumn of 1988, Paul bathed him and shaved him and emptied his catheter. “You shouldn't have to go through that,” he told Denise. “There's no reason for you to see your father like that.” And he looked after her grandfather, gambled with him at a casino in Connecticut, told him to keep it a secret when they snuck off to a strip-joint called the Lamplighter for lunch. Grandpa was ninety-six years old. Paul thought he should enjoy the time he had left.

  Denise grabbed a beer from the refrigerator, popped it open, took a long pull. Something to calm her nerves. She knew everyone who came to wait with her meant well, but the crowd was making her uneasy, as if they had preassembled for the mourning.

  She walked from the kitchen, paused at the glass doors that opened onto the deck. Paul had built the deck for her. She'd decided one summer Tuesday that she'd like to have some friends over for a barbecue the following Saturday and, by the way, wouldn't it be nice if they had a deck on which to entertain? Paul dug the holes for the posts that afternoon, cemented them in place on Wednesday, hammered together the frame on Thursday, laid the deck boards on Friday and Saturday. Paul would do anything for Denise.

  The family room was opposite the kitchen. Paul's room, big and airy, with skylights cut through a vaulted ceiling to let in the sun. Paul did all the interior work, the wiring, sheetrocking, and finish. A professional carpenter had framed it, a man named Bill Riggieri. They'd gotten to be friends, Bill and Paul, and Bill hired him whenever he needed an extra set of hands. That's where Paul had been that morning, working for Bill out in Shrewsbury.

  Denise took another sip from her beer. She was dying for a cigarette. She slipped out the door to the garage, lit one up. Paul and Denise always snuck their smokes in the garage, out of sight of the boys. They called it the GiGi Lounge, which was the name of a bar on the cruise ship that floated them around the Caribbean the year before, their first vacation in years. She didn't know when they would be able to afford another one. Until then, they could pretend in the garage.

  It was ten o'clock. The news was on the television in the corner of the family room, where Paul had rebuilt his mangled thumb playing video games with his sons. Worcester Cold Storage roared on the screen, flames shooting up from the roof, engines and aerials spraying impotent streams into the heat. The anchor announced the official toll, six men missing. “All the families,” she said, “have been notified.”

  Denise exhaled, a deep sigh, all of her muscles uncoiling at once. There had been no knock at her door, no chief's car in her driveway. Paul was okay. He'd gotten out. She closed her eyes, leaned her head back, let a wave of relief wash over her.

  She heard the purr of engines in front of the house, the soft squeak of brakes, then a car door slam. She snapped her head forward, eyes wide now. She sucked in a short breath, her chest and stomach clenching. She looked at her friend Kim. “Well,” she said, “I guess I'm the sixth.”

  Actually, Mary Jackson ended up being the sixth. At ten o'clock, she didn't know anything was burning, that anyone was lost. Hopedale was twenty-five miles south of Worcester, too far away to be able to see the rusty glow of the flames reflecting off the winter sky or smell the bitter smoke drifting on the wind. And she'd been out all evening, so she hadn't been near a television or a radio, either. She was happy, even smiling when she made the turn off Mendon Street at her yellow bungalow, Tim's blue spruces standing in the front yard like sentries.

  She'd had a fine day. She spent the afternoon Christmas shopping with Tim at a mall near the Rhode Island line. They stayed longer than they'd meant to, running far enough behind schedule that they wouldn't have time to brew their regular four o'clock pot of coffee before Tim would have to leave for the station. They stopped at a Dunkin’ Donuts instead, got two cups to go, and sat in the car, talking and sipping through plastic lids.

  They drove home and Tim hurried to get ready. He told Mary, “I'll see you in the morning,” gave her a quick hug and a kiss, and went out the back door. Tim always kissed her goodbye and hello. He expected it and went into a playful pout if he didn't get it right away. In the morning, she knew, he'd come through the back door, kick off his shoes and put on the slippers he kept in the foyer. “Honey, I'm home,” he'd say, only exaggerated and goofy, like it was a line from a sitcom. And then he'd linger near the door, waiting for his kiss.

  After Tim left, Mary went back out t
o pick up some small gifts for him. She'd already bought him six videotapes of a public-television series on gardens. She could imagine him sitting in the family room, birch logs burning in the fieldstone fireplace while, outside, snow drifted against the pergola where the yellow roses would bud in the spring, watching hollyhocks and hibiscus bloom across the television screen. Six tapes would carry him through the worst of the winter. She also decided that Tim needed a second pair of slippers, one that he could wear in the house and another for when he wandered his greening yard. After all, it defeated the point of wearing slippers in the house if he was tromping through the mud in the same pair.

  She got home at quarter past ten. There were several messages on her answering machine, all of them asking if Tim was working, all of them sounding worried. That struck her as odd. Mary never worried about Tim when he went to work, if only because she had no idea what, precisely, he did. She knew the general outlines, that he'd been on the job for twenty-seven years, that he used to work Rescue 1 before he transferred to Ladder 2, where the pace was slightly slower. But he never gave her any details. He gave her a hint once, pointing up to the roof of a burned-out triple-decker, showing her where he'd chopped a hole through the shingles. “All the way up there?”Mary had said. “And you think this is easier than rescue?” Other than that, though, he sheltered her from the dodgier realities of firefighting, and even the stylized Hollywood version, like Backdraft. “You don't need to see that,” he'd told her more than once. When he worked nights, he always had the same report for Mary the next morning when she asked how his shift went. “Long and hard,” he'd say with staged weariness.

  “Tell me about it.”

  “I don't even want to talk about it,” he'd say.