CHAPTER TWO
I could hear it.
The woman who answered was calm. Not bored. Calm, and there was a professional hardness in her voice that I wanted to grab with both hands.
“Address.”
“How many people are with you?”
“Three. Me and two kids.”
“Is your exit blocked?”
“Yes. The door’s hot.”
“Okay. Listen to me. Do not open that door. Not for any reason. Are the gaps sealed?”
“Yes.”
“With something wet?”
“Yes.”
“Good. Get all three of you on the floor. Breathe through the wet cloth. We have units on the way.”
“My son can’t breathe right. He’s seven.”
“Is he conscious?”
“Yes.”
“Is he talking?”
“Yes. Not well.”
“Keep his head low. As close to the floor as you can get it. Talk to him. Don’t let him close his eyes. I’m staying on with you.”
I said thank you. I actually said thank you, out loud, in my burning apartment, like she had brought me a coffee.
“Ma’am, what’s your name?”
“Erin.”
“Erin, what’s your son’s name?”
“Danny.”
“Okay. Say his name out loud every thirty seconds or so and make him answer you. Not a nod. Out loud. Can you do that for me?”
I said I could.
That was the entire kindness available to me for the next twenty minutes, a stranger in a room somewhere across town telling me to say my child’s name at regular intervals, and I have thought about her more than I have thought about most people I know.
Danny was on his side with the wet shirt over his mouth, and every time he pulled at it something small and thin whistled somewhere under his ribs.
I put the phone down on the floor by his head with the speaker on so the dispatcher could keep talking, and then I picked it up again, because I had to try him one more time.
Nothing.
The same woman with the ground beef voice.
I hung up and hit his name again and it was the same, and again and it was the same, and I sat back on my heels and looked at the screen.
The picture on his contact is from Door County. Four summers ago. He’s in a soaked T-shirt with Ivy on his shoulders and she has both hands in his hair and she is screaming with laughter, and behind them the water is the color of a nickel.
I looked at that picture and what I saw was his hand.
He always put his phone face down. At the table, on the nightstand, on the windowsill.
Screen to the wood, every time. I decided years ago that it was a work habit, that he did it so he wouldn’t get pulled out of a conversation by the department’s group chat, and I told people that.
I said it at a barbecue once like it was something to be proud of. Mike won’t even look at it at dinner.
Four hours before this he sat at that kitchen table eating a bowl of chili with the phone propped against the napkin holder, and when I sat down across from him he turned it away from me.
Not fast. Not guiltily. The way you move a salt shaker.
“Mom,” Ivy said from the bed. “Is he coming?”
“In a minute.”
“You said that.”
“I know what I said.”
Downstairs, under the floor, a window went. Then two more, fast, one after another, with a bright cheerful crack, like somebody in the basement was breaking Christmas ornaments.
And a woman started screaming.
Somewhere below us and to the left, on one note, no words in it, going on and on. Then it stopped.
I would rather it hadn’t stopped.
Ivy crawled over the mattress and put her face next to her brother’s and started counting for him, out loud, because he likes it when somebody counts. One. Two. Three. Four. In on four, out on six. She had heard me say it and she took it over without being asked.
I went back to the phone.
Here is a thing about a fifteen-year marriage that nobody warns you about. You learn a man the way you learn the drive to work. After a while you’re not looking anymore. Your hands do it.
So while I was pressing his name over and over on a cracked screen with fingers that had gone gray to the second knuckle, my hands were doing something else. They were going back through the last few months and pulling things off the shelf and turning them over.
May. He came off a twenty-four and went straight into the shower before he’d even eaten, and I stood in the kitchen thinking, look at him, still particular about himself after all these years.
August. New cologne on the dresser, something green and expensive. I was so pleased. I told Jess about it on the phone. He bought himself cologne, Jess. He hasn’t done that since we got married.
September, October, three department things I didn’t go to. Ren, it’s boring, it’s a room full of guys, you’ll sit there and yawn. And I said okay. I said okay three separate times, cheerfully, out of respect for how tired he was.
And one more.
Two weeks ago. Wednesday. He came out of the bathroom before his shift, clean, with his hair still wet, smelling like something sharp and cold, and I came up behind him in the hallway and put my arms around his middle.
That’s all. I did it because he was leaving for twenty-four hours and I had done it every time for fifteen years.
He took my hands off his stomach.
Carefully. With two fingers. The way you take a hair off a sleeve.
“Ren. Don’t cling.”
“I just hugged you.”
He let out a breath, the kind you let out over a chore you keep not doing.
“That’s the thing. Even at home with you it’s like being on a second shift. You always need something. Talk to me, hold me, feel sorry for me.”
He looked at his watch.
“I’m late.”
Ivy was standing in the kitchen doorway with a glass of milk. I remember that because I remember thinking, well, at least she didn’t hear the first part.
Then he left, and I went back to the sink.
There’s a little mirror over my sink. A cheap one, six inches across, with a crack running up through one corner. I hung it there so I could put my face on before work, because between the two of them the bathroom is never free for more than ninety seconds.
I looked in it.
A woman of thirty-five. Ponytail coming apart. Concealer that hadn’t quite covered anything.
You always need something.
I stood over his bowl with the water running and I made myself a plan. I decided I would need less. I would not go and put my arms around him tomorrow, and I would not do it the day after, and then he would notice, and he would be the one to come to me.
I rinsed the bowl and I went to bed pleased with myself.
Men shower after a shift.
Not before.
I was lying on my kitchen floor before I understood that. Fifteen years, and it took smoke to teach me the difference.
“Twenty-six,” Ivy said.
“What?”
“You’ve called him twenty-six times. I’m counting.”
She said it evenly, the way you read off a column of numbers. There was no accusation in it at all. She was keeping count because she was completely certain that one of those calls was going to go through, and she wanted to be able to tell him afterward how many it took.
I looked at her sharp little gray face and I didn’t say anything.
“Mom.” Danny’s voice had gone down to paper. “Is Dad coming with them?”
Ivy answered before I could.
“Of course he is,” she said, with that mean bright certainty kids get when they are defending the one thing that holds their world up. “It’s his district. It’s his house. Twenty-four.”
She looked over at me, and in the smoke I could see her eyes, and there was no fear in them.
There was pride.
“He’s the officer,” she told her brother. “He goes in first. Always.”
Danny tried to nod and went into the cough again, and I got up off my knees to try the phone one more time.
Number thirty-one.
The party you are trying to reach.
And then the lot outside started to howl.
The siren came in through the gap in the buildings and slid up the wall, and everything on our side of the room went red and then white and then red again, and I heard air brakes, and men shouting short flat words at each other.
I got to my knees. Then to my feet. I stayed bent over and I went to the window with my hand along the wall, and I got hold of the sill, and I looked down.
They were in the lot.
Two rigs, huge, red, backing over our curb and our stupid landscaping stones and the flowerbed the building argued about for two summers.
And on the door of the first one, the number.
Twenty-four.
His.
I knew that rig. I have brought a pan of bars out to it on Christmas Eve. I knew about the ding in the front quarter panel under the headlight, because they told the story about that ding at my own table with their mouths full, and he laughed louder than any of them.
“Ivy,” I said. “It’s Dad’s crew.”
My daughter started to cry, the first time all night, out of pure relief. She grabbed her brother’s hand and kept saying it into his ear.
“See? See. I told you.”
I put both hands on the glass and I waited for the driver’s door to open.