23. Miles
CHAPTER 23
MILES
A month into my new job, I’d settled in. I’d found a rhythm with Magda that wasn’t so bad, underpinned mostly with a system of grunts. We got through entire shifts without two words exchanged, other than what we needed to do our jobs. I didn’t want to admit it, but we were the same, both with our walls up, both slow to trust.
I’d come off a shift with her, stop by the gym, then grab a pizza on my way home. It’d been a while since I’d wanted to cook. Since I’d wanted to do much, really, beyond the basics. I’d go home, watch TV, fall asleep on the couch. Wake up to my phone alarm and do it all again.
I came off a rainy shift too late for the gym. Tonight, I decided, I’d cook. I’d clean up. But by the time I got home, I was dead on my feet, the whole week’s exhaustion catching up at once. I dug through my freezer and found some egg rolls, a year past their expiry date, but they’d be fine. I was shaking them out when someone knocked on my door.
I clenched my jaw. Go away .
The knock came again.
I stood perfectly still, listening. Waiting. If I ignored them long enough, the knocker would leave.
“I know you’re in there. I can see your shadow.”
Brian. Damn it. I hadn’t talked to him since our skipped bowling date. He’d given up on me, like I knew he would. Now, he’d dropped by, no doubt, to leave my spare ball.
“C’mon, man, it’s raining. Open the door!”
“Just leave it,” I called.
“What?”
“My spare ball.”
He banged on the door again, louder this time. “Dude, I’m not kidding. Open this door.”
I shook out the last egg roll. Set it on my plate. Dusted the ice chips off, and that’s when I heard it, the sound of a key turning in the front door. Next thing I knew, Brian barged in.
“What the hell? Get out!”
He shut the door behind him and took off his coat. Water dripped down and pooled on the floor.
“What are you doing?”
“What do you think?” He kicked his boots off and strode down the hall, and stood hands on hips, taking stock of my kitchen.
“You need to get out of here,” I growled.
“Nope. No can do. This is an intervention, so sit your ass down.”
I laughed. “Are you kidding me? I’m not on drugs.”
“No, but you’re… look at you. Look at this place.” He sniffed the stale air and wrinkled his nose. I moved in front of the sink to hide the stacked dishes, but that just revealed a flotilla of takeout bags. A few days ago, I’d set out to clean, but been interrupted by a summons to work. Now two sacks of trash sat on the floor, half-filled and stinking.
“It’s not what you think.”
Brian scowled at his hand, where he’d touched my counter. He wiped it on his pants, then with my dishtowel.
“I’ve been busy,” I said.
“Too busy to call?”
“Would you have picked up?”
“Maybe not right away. You were a dick. But we’ve been friends how long now?” Brian pulled out a chair. I’d left a bag on the seat, and he pushed it off. “Come and sit down. We need to talk.”
I could’ve kept fighting. Thrown him out. But pissed as I was, I was glad to see him. I’d been sure he was done with me, and that had hurt, the space in my Sundays where bowling belonged. Long nights at home, instead of the bar. I went to the fridge and grabbed my last two beers, and plunked one in front of him. The other, I took.
“I know it looks bad,” I said.
“No. I’ll go first.” Brian cracked his beer open and took a long swig. “I was going to say to you, this isn’t you.” He waved his beer at the counters, the trash stacked up high. “But I’ve seen this before. This is what you do. It’s just like five years ago, you know, after?—”
“Stop.”
“I don’t have to say it, but you know what I mean. You did the same thing five years ago, cut yourself off. You stopped answering phone calls. Stopped coming out. You ditched the gym and got skinny, and stopped eating right.” He picked up a bag that had once contained pork rinds. “These are pure sodium. Pure salt and fat.”
I looked down at myself. “I’m still working out.” But I’d slacked on my workouts. I was losing weight. Soon, I would feel it out in the field, a twinge in my back on a heavy lift. Fatigue setting in as my coffee wore off.
“It’s not like back then,” I said. “I still have my job.”
“But you don’t have Sophie. I heard you broke up.”
My head snapped up. “Where’d you hear that?”
Brian laughed. “Where didn’t I hear it? Clive, Jones, your crew, everyone’s worried. They said you dropped off the face of the earth.”
“They knew we were dating?”
He rolled his eyes. “Oh, please .”
I guessed we hadn’t been as discreet as I’d thought. Someone must have spotted us leaving together, or maybe they’d noticed her wearing my shirts.
“So, why’d she break up with you?”
“I broke up with her.” I winced at the way my retort came out, harsh and defensive. Like it mattered who left. What mattered was, I’d been happy with her. She’d been happy as well, as far as I could see. I could’ve gone a whole lifetime waking up to her smile, even as it puckered and crinkled with age. If only things had worked out that way. If only they could.
Brian set down his beer. “This is like back then.”
I stood up, not wanting to hear what came next. Brian stood with me and blocked my escape.
“No, listen,” he said. “You need to hear this.”
“I don’t. I don’t want?—”
“Five years ago, you went out on a call. A house fire, a bad one, and you got there first. You saw someone in there, so what did you do? You went running in over your partner’s objections. You ran in with no gear, no gas mask. No blanket. You?—”
I shoved Brian aside. “I know what I did.”
He grabbed me and shoved me into the wall. “You had to be rescued. You and your partner both. He ran in to get you when you didn’t come out.”
“I know! Then he quit. What’s your damn point?” I threw Brian off me and stormed back down the hall. “I fucked up. I know that. I took my suspension. I worked through retraining. My hearing. Probation. It’s over, so?—”
“You always do this.” Brian quit chasing me, now we’d run out of hall. He stood looking tired, his hair in a mess. “You treat every bump like it’s the end of the world, and you’re this lone hero, this… I don’t know. Like every problem you have, you need to solve it alone, and if you can’t, that’s it. You’re done.”
“What? I don’t?—”
“You walked out on our friendship over one little fight. Ran into a fire when FD was coming. Two minutes out, and you couldn’t wait? You gave up on them too. On all you worked for. And I’m betting with Sophie, it’s exactly the same. You hit some damn roadblock, some stupid hitch, and rather than talk to her, you called it quits.”
I opened my mouth, then closed it again. When he put it that way, it was hard to refute. But the thing was, with Sophie?—
“You’re a good guy,” said Brian. “You’ve been a good friend. But sometimes I ask myself, am I a pain in his ass? Are we friends like I think we are, or is it all in my head? I can’t keep reaching out, and you slap me away. So answer me. Tell me. Do you want me around?”
I swallowed hard. “Yeah. Of course.”
“And Sophie? You want her?”
I laughed, a crude bark. Did I want Sophie? More than anything, anyone, I wanted Sophie. “You think she’d still want me if she saw all this?”
Brian glanced at the trash bags. “That’s not what I asked.”
“Well, yeah. Obviously. Of course I want Sophie. She’s all I ever dreamed of, my fairytale ending. But even if I married her. Even if we were happy…”
“Even if, what? What’s wrong with that?”
I picked up a chip bag and tossed it in the trash. “One day she’d leave me. Or I’d leave her. She’d get in an accident or I’d get sick, or something would happen, and it’d be gone. Everything we lived for, all that we’d built, all up in smoke like it’d never been.”
Brian took the trash bag from me and set it aside. “Do you actually hear yourself? What you just said?”
“It’s true, isn’t it? Nothing’s forever.”
“So, you dumped Sophie because one day she’ll die? ” He laughed like he couldn’t believe his own ears. “If you lived till eighty, that’s fifty more years. Fifty good years you two could have. You’d give all that up because it can’t last forever? That’s the dumbest-ass thing I’ve ever heard.”
“Would you want to lose someone you’d loved fifty years?”
“No, but it’s better than no years at all. Losing love, yeah, it hurts, but at least you once had it. Don’t you think you deserve that, for however long it lasts?”
I took a good look at Brian, at his broad, earnest face. Did I deserve his friendship? His kindness, his care? He had plenty of places he could be tonight, fresh-smelling places, not choked with trash. I tried to think when I’d last rescued him. When I’d been the kind of friend he’d been to me.
“I guess maybe I don’t,” I said.
“Bullshit, you don’t.”
I gripped the counter. “I’m selfish.”
“You’re a good listener.”
“I stood you up for our bowling date.”
“You got me through my divorce.” Brian came up beside me so his elbow jogged mine. “You deserve to be happy.”
Something welled up in me at his gentle tone, heat in my face and behind my eyes. I felt like I was choking. Drowning, maybe.
“Don’t you think you deserve a good life?”
My chest had gone tight, my throat all closed up. I tried to swallow and half-gagged instead. Deserve a good life? A happy life? Me?
“It wouldn’t be right,” I said, when I felt I could speak.
Brian shifted to look at me. “You being happy?”
“It wouldn’t be fair, with what happened to Nick.”
“Your brother, Nick? What were you, twelve?”
I coughed. “I was ten. And it was my fault.”
“How was it your fault? Didn’t he choke to death?”
I pushed away from the counter and turned my back, not wanting to watch Brian’s face when he heard the truth. “On a pizza crust,” I said. “We were up in our room. We weren’t allowed to eat up there because of the mess, but I’d steal us stuff sometimes out of the fridge.”
“And you blame yourself because you stole some snacks?”
“No, because… Shit.” I rubbed my dry eyes. “I screwed it all up, right from the start. I thought he was kidding, then I tried to help. I wasted, I don’t know, three or four minutes. Three or four minutes before I called Mom. Then it took her a minute to get upstairs, then she had to run back again and call 911. And I don’t know — did I wait because I thought I could help? Or because I thought if I yelled, we’d get in trouble?”
Brian took my elbow. “Come on. Sit down.”
I shook him off. “I was there in the hall when they took him away. One of the medics said to the other, shame we couldn’t have got to him quicker. If I’d yelled right away…”
“How long did it take for them to arrive?”
“Who, the paramedics? Five minutes, maybe.”
Brian moved closer. “So, they were five minutes out. You’re a medic yourself. You know what that means.”
I made a hoarse sound. My throat had gone dry. Brian kept talking, his voice low and calm.
“Three minutes without oxygen, you’re looking at brain damage. Five minutes down, you’re on the threshold of death. Let’s say you’d shouted the second he choked, that’s still a minute for your mom to come running. A couple of minutes to call 911. You’re three minutes in, add five for the medics, and they’re still rolling up on the edge of too late. Eight minutes down. You know what that means. If, by some miracle, he’d woken up, there’s almost no chance he’d have been the Nick you knew.”
I knew it was true, at least in my head. I’d known for years, but I didn’t believe it. In my heart, I believed I’d let Nick die.
“It wasn’t in your control.”
“What if it was?”
“That’s the thing with the past: there is no ‘what if.’ There’s only what happened, and that can’t be changed. It wasn’t your fault, no ‘what ifs’ about it. It was a horrible accident, and now it’s done. And you have a choice to make: are you going to accept that? Or are you going to punish yourself for the rest of your life?”
Was that what I’d been doing, punishing myself? For Nick, for my parents, for every patient I’d lost? I’d been over our hell day a million times, me and Sophie, the fire. The victims who’d trusted us and died all the same. I’d been over all of it, trying to find our mistakes, but we’d done what we should’ve done. The best we could.
“You can’t save every patient, or every relationship.” Brian patted my shoulder. “Sometimes people die, or things don’t work out. But that doesn’t mean you don’t try your best. Would you dump a patient because he’s circling the drain?”
Had I jumped on that day as an excuse to leave Sophie? To deny myself happiness because I’d failed Nick?
“You love her, don’t you?”
I closed my eyes. I did. Of course I loved Sophie, so much it hurt.
“I’ll help you clean up.” Brian reached for a trash bag. “But after that, the rest is on you. You need to decide if you want to live, or if you want to stay stagnant, stuck in the past.”
I grabbed a sack of my own. Brian was right. I had a choice to make, one I’d pretended I didn’t. If I wanted to call Sophie, I could do that. I could be happy, or at least try. Maybe I deserved it and maybe I didn’t. Maybe I could earn it, starting with Sophie’s forgiveness. Forgive myself, maybe. I could start there.
“Thanks,” I said.
“Mm?”
“For not giving up on me.”
“You’re worth it.” Brian jostled me. “Pray Sophie agrees.”