Chapter 4
Tone-Out
Dom didn't mention the step, and Jonah figured out fast that mentioning it would be a mistake, because the man had rebuilt every wall he owned and added a couple new ones for good measure.
Their next shift, Dom was ice. Not mean-ice.
Efficient-ice. He drilled Jonah the same as before, corrected nothing out loud the same as before, drove the same unhurried way — but there was a quality to it now, a deliberate flatness, like a man who'd left a window open in a storm and had gone around the whole house checking the rest of them twice.
Every time Jonah got within arm's reach of the thing that had happened on the concrete at three in the morning, Dom found a reason to be looking at the tablet, or the road, or a drug that needed counting.
Okay, Jonah thought, on hour four, watching Dom pretend to be fascinated by a call sheet. Okay. We're doing that. We're pretending a whole human being didn't happen. Cool. Great. Love that for us.
The stung part he'd expected. What he hadn't expected was that he understood it.
That was the annoying thing about seeing a man clearly — you lost the right to be simply mad at him.
Jonah had watched Dom Cassar crack open one inch on a back step and then spend two days visibly horrified at himself for it, and Jonah knew that horror, he owned stock in that horror, he had spent a good chunk of his own life letting exactly one person too close and then treating it like he'd left the stove on.
You didn't rebuild walls that fast unless you'd learned, somewhere, in your body, that walls were the only thing that had ever kept you alive.
So Jonah didn't push. He matched him. Gave the flatness back, ran the calls, drank the garbage coffee, and did not say hey, remember when you told me about Ray and I thought maybe we were becoming people to each other.
He conserved. Dom had wanted him to learn to sit in the quiet, and here Jonah was, sitting in it, and it turned out the quiet was full of the exact thing they were both refusing to look at, which was maybe the most Dom Cassar lesson of all.
It should've made it easier. It made it worse.
Because now Jonah knew what was under there, and you can't un-know the warm thing under the cold thing, and he spent the whole shift aware of the man beside him in a way he had absolutely not signed up for — the size of him, the steady hands, the exact rasp of his voice when he said clear over the radio.
Jonah kept catching himself watching Dom's hands on the wheel and having to relocate his eyes somewhere legal.
And then, worse than the ice: the slips.
Because Dom couldn't hold it perfectly. Nobody could.
They caught a call around midnight, a kid — eight, maybe nine, asthma, wheezing so bad the mom was gray with it — and somewhere in the work of it, in the neb and the coaching and getting the kid to blow out birthday candles that weren't there, Dom forgot to be a wall.
Just for a few minutes. He got down on the floor of the kid's bedroom with the glow-in-the-dark stars on the ceiling and he was funny, actually funny, telling the kid his lungs were being dramatic, real diva lungs, Broadway lungs, and the kid laughed mid-wheeze and that broke the spasm better than anything in the drug box, and Dom looked up at Jonah across the kid's bed and there it was — the before-man, right there in his face, unguarded, sharing the small triumph of it.
For a second they were just two medics who'd pulled a scared kid out of the bad place together, grinning at each other over a bedspread with cartoon trucks on it.
Then Dom saw himself doing it. Jonah watched it happen — watched the man catch his own reflection in the moment and hate it — and by the time they were back in the rig the temperature had dropped ten degrees below where it had even started, because now Dom had something to punish himself for, and the thing Dom punished with was distance.
"You bagged that neb setup fine," Dom said, flat, staring at the road. Which was a compliment. Which was also the last full sentence he said for an hour.
Nope, Jonah told his brain, around hour nine. We're not doing that. Whatever that was, watching him be a whole person over a kid with Broadway lungs. Pick a different hobby.
His brain, historically an unreliable employee, did not respond.
***
He took a patient to Sacred Heart the next night and found Marisol on a rare lull, parked at the nurses' station with a burrito she was eating in the furious three-bite way of a person who might get pulled away mid-chew, and she took one look at Jonah's face and set the burrito down like it had personally disappointed her.
"Oh, no," she said.
"Oh no what. I didn't say anything."
"You walked over here with a face. Sit down.
Not that chair, that chair's broken, the other one.
" She pointed with her chin. Marisol pointed at everything with her chin; her hands were always full.
"Talk. You've got the look my sister gets right before she does something that ends up on a group text. "
Jonah sat in the not-broken chair. He'd meant to keep it light.
He'd meant to say something dry and deflect and let her laugh at him.
Instead what came out, quiet, to a nurse he'd known for four days, was: "Is Cassar okay?
Like — actually. Somebody keeps almost telling me something about him and then not. "
Marisol's face did a slow careful thing. She glanced down the hall, the reflex of a person who worked somewhere without doors, and lowered her voice.
"That's not my thing to tell you," she said.
"And I mean that. If he wants you to know, he'll — well.
He won't. But it's his." She studied him.
"But I'll tell you the shape of it, because you're new and nobody else is gonna, and you're gonna get hurt on that rig if you don't have the shape of it.
He lost his partner. Year and a half back.
It was bad, and it was the kind of bad that doesn't have a casserole for it, the kind people don't know how to stand next to, so they mostly stopped standing next to him, and he let them, because that was easier for everybody including him.
" She picked a piece of foil off the burrito.
"He was different before. I only got the tail end of the before.
But the guys who've been here — yeah. Different guy. "
"Yeah," Jonah said. "I got that."
"How'd you get that." Her eyes sharpened. "He doesn't hand that out. Cassar wouldn't give you the time off a broken clock."
And Jonah, who was an idiot, who had exactly one job in this conversation which was to not have a face, felt his own traitor face do something, and Marisol read it the way she read a monitor, at a glance, all the numbers at once.
"Jonah." She set the whole burrito down. This was serious now; the burrito was down. "No."
"I didn't—"
"I know that face. I've made that face. Everybody who's ever worked a code with a beautiful sad man has made that face." She leaned in, and her voice dropped further, and it wasn't unkind, which was somehow worse. "Baby. Listen to me. He's your FTO."
"I know what he—"
"He signs your probation. He writes the evaluations that decide if you have a career or if you're back applying to drive a forklift in eight weeks.
" She ticked it off, chin, chin, chin. "There is a literal power differential with a name and a policy number.
If anything happened — anything, a rumor of anything — it's not a scandal, it's a termination.
Both of you. His pension, twenty years in.
Your license before the ink's dry. That's not me being dramatic, that's the actual math, I've watched it happen to people over a lot less.
" She sat back. "And that's if it goes well.
If it goes bad, if he's a mess — and honey, that man is a beautifully organized mess — you're the rookie who got wrecked by his training officer, and that's the whole story anybody tells about you for the rest of your time in this city. "
Jonah looked at his own hands.
The thing was, she was right. Every word. He'd known it in the abstract the way you know a stove is hot — a general fact about stoves. What Marisol had just done was put his hand near it, close enough to feel the heat come off, close enough to understand that the abstract fact had a temperature.
"Nothing happened," he said, and it was true, and it sounded, even to him, like a man reporting the exact number of seconds left on a fuse.
"Good." Marisol picked the burrito back up.
"Keep it nothing. I like you, new guy. I don't want to be the one who sees your name in an incident report.
" She took a furious bite, and around it, gentler: "He's not a bad man.
That's the trap of it. If he was a bad man this'd be easy.
Go home. Sleep. It reads different when you've slept. "
Jonah went home. He did not sleep.
***
At two in the morning he gave up on it and drove to the all-night laundromat on Delancey because he was out of anything clean to wear on shift and because the alternative was lying in the dark being aware of his own pulse, and the laundromat, at least, had a task in it.
The place was empty and over-lit, the specific fluorescent hum of somewhere that never closed, a wall of dryers thumping like a slow heartbeat and a claw machine in the corner that had probably not surrendered a prize since the Obama administration.
Jonah loaded two machines, fed them quarters, and sat down on the folding counter with his back against the wall to wait out the wash, and he was most of the way into a scroll-coma when the door chimed and cold air came in and he looked up and it was Dom.