Finding Nick

by Janis Reams Hudson

  Shannon’s eyes stung. She studied her notes. When she felt more composed, she looked at him again. “Okay, we’ve talked about everything in your life since 9/11, except the day itself. Are you willing to take me through that day with you?”

  Nick exhaled sharply. Here it was, then. He was either going to talk, or call himself a coward for the rest of his life. Those other men she had interviewed had spoken openly. Nick could do no less. But first he had to let the ache in his throat die down.

  “Okay.” He took another deep breath, then turned sideways in his chair so that he wasn’t facing her directly. He couldn’t look directly at her and say the things he needed to say. “Okay. It was my day off, but Dad and Vinnie were on. I was sleeping in. The woman next door, Mrs. Bonetti, came banging on the door, telling me to look at the smoke and turn on the TV. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing—it was like something out of a movie. It couldn’t be real. But it was.”

  He told her about worrying about his dad and brother. About racing to get to the station house in time to learn of the first building’s collapse. Panic had seized him. The station was empty but for the two probies who had signed on the week before. It was their day off, too. They’d come in and not known what to do. Nick ordered them into their turnout gear. Screw the phones. Every man would be needed down there.

  All he was able to think was the buildings, the buildings fell. Disaster. Dad. Vinnie.

  Everyone was in a daze, trying to orient themselves.

  “And somehow, when the cloud dissipated enough so that you could see where you were going, I found myself on top of this huge pile of rubble. I mean, huge. The dust that settled out of the air piled up so deep, I sank to my ankles in the damn stuff. I still have nightmares about that dust now and then.”

  “I remember the dust,” Shannon murmured.

  “And it was so quiet—it was weird. It was like funeral-home quiet, except for the pass alarms. Hundreds of them.” He took a deep breath. “I told myself that if we could dig to just the right spot, we’d find a pocket, and people.

  “But we didn’t. Are you sure you want to hear this?” he asked her.

  Shannon gave him a tired smile. “I’ve heard it all a dozen times, and I was there myself later that day. Don’t pretty it up for me, just tell it as you experienced it.”

  Nick took another deep breath. This talking business wasn’t too bad. He figured he was doing okay. He told her in frank terms about the nightmarish search.

  Nobody knew where his dad and Vinnie were, but their company had been there since right after the first plane hit. Nick knew his guys, he knew his father and brother. They would have been inside the building, climbing the stairs to get to the people trapped by the fire.

  “I was frantic, wanting to find someone. We all were. Then, by some miracle, sometime that afternoon I stepped on a piece of concrete that shifted, and I thought I heard something. I couldn’t see anything, but I started shifting this piece and that one, and found a man.”

  “Oh,” Shannon breathed. “Oh, Nick.”

  “Wait.” Nick shook his head. “I got him out and I could tell he’d been crushed pretty badly. I could tell by his uniform he was a Port Authority officer. His badge had been torn off, along with half his shirt.”

  Shannon sucked in a sharp breath.

  “Shannon?”

  She shook her head. “Sorry. Go on.”

  “I’m sorry.” He took her hand. “Your dad was a Port Authority cop, wasn’t he? I shouldn’t be telling you this.”

  “Yes, you should. Go on. Please.”

  “All right, if you’re sure.”

  “I’m sure.”

  He studied her face for a moment. She met his gaze squarely and seemed to be fine. “Okay. I tried to give him my mask so he could breath something besides dust, but he waved it away. I’ve always regretted not knowing his name. He died in my arms.”

  “Oh, Nick, that must have been devastating.”

  “Even worse,” he told her. “Because I never knew his name, I never got to tell his family that right before he died, he said to tell his girls that he died with the sun on his face. He made me promise. It seemed important that they know. Shannon?”

  Shannon stared at Nick in shock. Chills raced up and down her spine. Her hands shook so hard, she couldn’t hold her pen. It clattered onto the table.

  “Shannon, what’s wrong?”

  “Describe him.”

  “Who, the cop?”

  Her ears were buzzing. She shook her head to make them stop. She did not want to miss a word of this. “What did he look like? Tall? Short? Dark hair? Light? Bald? What did he look like?”

  “He was tall, a little overweight. Thick dark hair. At least I think it was dark underneath all that dust and ash.”

  Shannon’s heart beat faster with every word.

  “He had a tattoo. I just remembered that.”

  She straightened away from the back of her chair and stared at him so hard it was a wonder the air between them didn’t crack. “What kind of tattoo?”

  “A rose. No, a shamrock. I remember now. With the word blarney beneath it.”

  A sharp cry escaped her throat. She reached across the table and clamped on to Nick’s hand, squeezing so tight she was probably bruising herself. “Nick—you found my father.”

  Chapter Eleven

  In a heartbeat, Shannon was around the tiny table and in Nick’s lap. They held on to each other like the last two people to make it onto the life raft before the ship sank. And they cried.

  Never in a million years would Nick have thought to find himself weeping in a woman’s arms. It wasn’t manly. It wasn’t macho Italiano, as his father would have said. Only a sissy would cry.

  Well, this sissy cried his eyes out—after all, he’d been holding it in for five years—and in the process, he felt a new lightening inside himself.

  Now that his tears were dried, he noticed that Shannon was quieting in his arms. He stood and carried her to the bed and lay down beside her.

  “You will never know,” she said, her voice unsteady, “what this means to me. What it will mean to my mother after all these years.” With her arms around his neck, she squeezed him tight.

  “His face still haunts my dreams.” He was rambling, but couldn’t seem to help it. “I wanted more than anything to be able to find someone, to help someone. When I finally found him, I was too late. Too damn late.”

  She pushed him away and sat up, glaring at him. “That’s nothing to do with you,” she said fiercely. “If he died that fast, then it had been too late the minute it happened. Is this what’s been eating at you all these years? That you didn’t save my father?”

  “You don’t understand.”

  “I think I do. Get this straight, Nick. You are not responsible for my father’s death.”

  “I told you, in my head, I know I’m not responsible. But my head’s got no control over the guilt I feel, or the uselessness.”

  “How can that be? How can you feel useless when you did save people? You saved seven men, specifically, one of whom is your current fire chief’s cousin. Or is that part of the problem? When you finally are able to save someone, it nearly kills you, and robs you of the way of life you loved. It would be perfectly natural for you to resent saving those men.”

  “I don’t resent them. Good God, no,” he cried, sitting up. “It never even occurred to me to wish I hadn’t done what I did. Maybe it should have. Maybe that kind of resentment would have been easier to live with than feeling useless. Or, maybe then I would have been resentful and useless.”

  “Maybe you just like carrying the weight of the world on your shoulders.”

  “Not anymore,” he claimed. “I can’t get farther than a couple of steps carrying any weight at all these days. Which takes me right back to Tribute, Texas.”

  “It could take you right back to the FDNY if you’d let it.”

  “We’ve already had that discussion.”

  “With
your background there are a number of jobs you could do. You could be an instructor, dispatcher, administrator.”

  He shook his head no while she rattle on. He’d thought of those things himself, but a desk job? It would kill him.

  “You could go into arson investigation,” she added.

  “I’m not qualified.”

  “Then get qualified. Unless you truly love the position of high-school custodian, do something besides hide out here in Tribute. That’s what you’re doing, you know.”

  “Shannon—”

  “What about your father, your brother?” she cried. “Do you think they’d be pleased to see you shut yourself off from the life you loved? And what about us?”

  “We had the us discussion. There is no us. What we’ve had is something I’ll always remember, and it’s been terrific, but when you leave for New York, it ends.”

  Shannon reeled. He might as well have slapped her in the face. Earlier he’d said he wouldn’t go to New York and wouldn’t ask her to stay here with him. But he hadn’t said it was over. Hadn’t said they were through. Now he wasn’t just closing the door on them, he was slamming it shut.

  Her eyes were barely dry from her previous crying jag, and now they filled again. “No,” she said, fighting the tears down while she rose from the bed. “It ends now. Right now.”

  “Shannon, I—”

  “Don’t, Nick.” She forced herself to look him in the eye. “It’s better this way, don’t you think? A clean break?”

  “You call this clean? Look, I’m sorry, Shannon. I’ve hurt you, and that was never my intention.” A few minutes later, when he had put on his shoes, gathered his wallet and keys, he headed toward the door.

  Shannon held her breath, hoping her control would last long enough. She was doing fine. She was going to make it.

  Then he stopped. Right in front of her, he stopped, turned, and placed a soft, heartbreaking kiss on her cheek. A tear trickled down, and he sipped it from her skin. “Don’t cry because of me. I’m not worth it.” He walked to the door, then paused again. “Have a nice life, Shannon Malloy. You are one special lady.”

  When the door closed behind him, she carefully lowered herself to the bed, where she quietly cried herself to sleep.

  The only way Nick was going to sleep that night was if someone whacked him over the head with something hard and heavy. That was his determination when he looked at his bedside clock again for the third time in twenty minutes. It still wasn’t dawn. It wasn’t even 4:00 a.m. yet.

  He might have been able to nod off but for seeing the tears in Shannon’s eyes every time he closed his own.

  She just didn’t understand what it meant to him to be able to do something. To make a difference.

  Yeah, okay, he could pep talk himself until he was blue in the face about the importance of a good school custodian in the lives of the students, but it wasn’t the FDNY. It wasn’t the life he’d grown up reaching for, knowing it was his for the taking.

  To hell with this. He threw the covers aside and got out of bed. It was time to walk off the ache in his hip. A little fresh air might also help him sleep. It was Sunday. He didn’t need to be anywhere. He could sleep as late as he wanted.

  Except he didn’t want to sleep late. He wanted to see Shannon tomorrow. He shouldn’t. He should simply let her go. She would go, in any case, so why complicate it any more than it already was?

  But at least he could sit in the café and watch for her rental car to drive by on its way out of town. That way he would at least know when his heart was completely out of reach.

  He grabbed an old pair of jeans that didn’t smell too bad from the floor of his closet, put on socks and walking shoes, and a sweatshirt. It had been dipping down toward forty degrees when he’d come home.

  He tiptoed through the house so as not to wake Bev, then struck out through his neighborhood, setting every dog in the area to barking. Can’t pull anything over on these guys. Now, if he’d been a burglar, they wouldn’t have made a sound, he was sure.

  As much as he loved New York, Nick had come to love this small Texas town, and he’d come to love the quiet peacefulness of night. He would like it even better, he thought, if it weren’t for the faint whiff of smoke on the breeze. The remains of the bonfire were still in the air.

  At the end of his neighborhood he turned toward Main, intending to cross and amble over toward the school. Might as well do a walk-by while he was out.

  Sure enough, the smell of smoke grew stronger the closer he got to the school and the field behind it where the giant pile of dried brush had met its fiery end.

  But wait a minute. He was still too far away for the smell to be so strong. That fire had been nothing but cold ashes since Thursday night, and this was Sunday morning.

  Maybe some kids had decided to revive the fire after the dance. Great, just what they needed. Teenagers, fire and, most certainly, alcohol. Never a good mix, no matter how you looked at it.

  As he crossed Main, something in his gut tightened. He stopped and stood there, in the middle of the street, waiting. He didn’t know what the question was, but an answer was trying to form. Something was wrong. The smoke was wrong. The wind had shifted and was coming out of the north tonight. If the bonfire had been relit with thirty-foot flames, he wouldn’t be able to smell it from here because the wind would carry the smoke and odor south. What he smelled was from right there in town. To his right. Toward—

  “Sweet heaven.” Smoke was boiling from the vicinity of the Tribute Inn. “Shannon.”

  He started jogging as fast as he could, but he didn’t want to risk his leg going out from under him until he knew Shannon was all right. Dammit, he was going to have to start carrying his cell phone on these middle-of-the-night walks. But in all the time he’d lived there, he’d had no need for it.

  He pushed himself faster, his heart starting to pound. Not from exertion, but from fear. The closer he got to the motel, the more pronounced his limp, and the more certain he became that the motel was on fire. When he passed the grocery store, the motel came into view. He couldn’t see flames, but there was smoke. Lots of smoke.

  Where was a phone? He had to call 911.

  As he thought it, he heard the alarm go off at the fire station. He was amazed that he heard anything over the roaring in his ears, much less an alarm from half a mile away. But he was positive that was what he heard. A firefighter knew the sound.

  He didn’t know how long it would take them to get here. He knew that no one slept over at the station. They were all volunteers and were seldom needed. They all had pagers. When a call came in to 911, those whose names were on the duty roster for that time were automatically paged.

  He couldn’t wait. When he reached the motel, flames shot out of the second-floor roof way too close to Shannon’s room for comfort. It looked as if it may have started in the office, at the far end of that wing. He ran up to the first door and banged on it, shouting, “Fire! Everybody out! The motel is on fire!”

  He didn’t know how many rooms were occupied, but there were seven cars in the parking lot. All the rooms were dark at this time of night. No way to tell which were occupied, which weren’t. So he limped down the row of first-floor rooms as fast as he could, pounding on each door and shouting.

  When he reached the fourth door, someone came out from the first door he’d pounded on.

  “Oh, my God,” the man cried.

  “Get everybody out. Pound on the doors, yell, wake them up. I’ll get the upstairs.”

  Nick didn’t wait to see if the man followed through.

  He pounded on one door after another, then stopped cold in his tracks. A wall of fire blocked him from reaching Shannon’s room.

  The fire was noisy now, all furious roaring, crashing, popping, exploding. All around him people screamed and yelled and cried. And from down the street came the beautiful roar of the fire engine. Praise God.

  But he couldn’t wait. Shannon was in there.

  Jus
t as the fire engine pulled up, Nick leaped through the wall of flames. For one heart-stopping instant, he was engulfed. No air, only searing heat and flame.

  Then, poof, he was out the other side. He made it to Shannon’s door without anything important getting burned off, but his leg was screaming at him.

  He pounded on Shannon’s door and yelled her name. “Fire! Shannon, fire!”

  He got no response. The smoke was thick here, the flames getting closer. They completely blocked his view of the parking lot. No help from that area yet. He pounded harder, wishing frantically that he knew how to pick a lock.

  The surface of the door wasn’t hotter than it should be, so that was something. There was no fire on the other side.

  He threw himself at the door, to no avail. With his weight on his good leg, he kicked out with his bad one but couldn’t get any real force behind it. The jogging had taken its toll. If he switched legs and stood on his bad one, he feared he’d fall. The bad one wouldn’t support him. He didn’t mind falling, but if he couldn’t get up and move, he couldn’t help Shannon. He was going to have to break the window beside the door.

  After three awkward tries, he ended up using his elbow, somewhat protected by the sleeve of his sweatshirt.

  He didn’t have the time or the patience to make sure every shard was out of his way. He climbed through, tearing flesh and fabric as he went.

  He needn’t have worried about letting in smoke. The room was filled with it.

  “Shannon!”

  She was on the bed, curled up in a tight ball, unconscious. Nick’s heart stopped. He called her name again and felt for a pulse. He couldn’t tell if he found one or not; his had started up again and was hammering too hard.

  Then, suddenly, she coughed.

  “Shannon, baby, come on now, we have to go. There’s a fire and we have to get out, but you have to get up and walk.”

  She coughed so hard she passed out again.

  The situation, as Nick saw it, was dangerous, bordering on grim. He couldn’t carry her out. His leg wasn’t taking any weight at all now, after the jogging and the kicking. If he carried her to the door it would be a miracle, and after that were the flames. If she didn’t come to, they were screwed.