CHAPTER THREE
The lot below us was already full of people.
I saw all of it from above, from my own window, the way you see things from the edge of a bluff.
I got my fingers into the frame and tried to run the window up.
It didn’t move.
We replaced these windows two summers ago. Vinyl, double hung, energy rated, twenty-two hundred dollars we didn’t have, and this one has never gone up right since the day the guy installed it. Mike used to say he’d get to it. It was on the list under the closet door that stuck and the shower head.
I hit the frame with the heel of my hand twice and gave up and put both palms flat on the glass instead.
The doors on the first rig came open.
The officer’s door swung out on the right side, and a man came down off the step, and for about half a second my whole body went somewhere very bright and very quiet.
Because that’s his door.
He always came down out of that door. And the first thing he always did, every single time, before the gear, before the radio, before anything, was tip his head back and look up.
He read buildings the way I read a bank statement.
I have watched him do it in parking lots and on the news and once in our own lot when the dumpster fire went up, and I would have known that motion at four hundred yards.
The man who came down out of that door tipped his head back and looked up.
It was Wes Nowak.
I knew him by his height. Wes is a head taller than any of them and he has a way of pulling his gloves on while he’s already moving, one and then the other, without breaking stride.
He came off the step and started shouting.
Then the rest of them.
Gus Kraus, round and quick, going straight for the compartment on the side. Ray Duarte, who is twenty-seven and who once kissed my hand at a Christmas party on a dare. Two more I knew by shape and not by name in that light.
They ran. They pulled a line off the bed and the gray hose came uncoiling across the asphalt, fat and jerking and getting fatter, alive.
Two of them went at the lobby door and got it open, and what came out of that black rectangle was so thick and so greasy that the whole crowd stepped backward at once, and a woman in a parka over a nightgown started screaming that there was an old man on three, that he doesn’t hear anything, that he can’t walk.
Otto.
Otto Renner, 3B, who is eighty and feeds the pigeons in that exact spot in the mornings and says morning, kiddo to me every day of my life.
I put my forehead against the glass.
Then I did something I have never told anybody.
I hit the window. Both hands, flat, hard enough that the pane flexed. I hit it and I waved my arms over my head like a woman on a beach, and I yelled through the glass, and the glass took all of it and gave back nothing.
Not one person in that lot looked up.
They were all looking at the front door of the building, because that is where the smoke was, and that is where the men were, and that is where the story was. Nobody looks at the fourth floor. There is nothing to see on the fourth floor. It’s just windows.
Two of them came out of the lobby with Otto between them.
They had him under the arms and he was in his pajama pants and one shoe, and his head was down, and they got him to the curb and sat him on the bumper of the second rig and put a mask on him, and somebody threw a blanket over his shoulders. He was alive. I could see him moving his hands.
I remember being glad. I want that on the record, because of everything that came later. I stood at my window with my son turning gray behind me and I was glad about Otto Renner.
Somewhere down there was the man who would come and get us.
I was as sure of that as I have ever been sure of anything.
That is not a figure of speech. My body had already stopped being afraid.
I remember it very clearly, that flatness, that certainty, the way you feel when the plane bumps and you look at the flight attendant and she isn’t worried.
I stood at my window and I watched for him.
I had it all laid out, and I could see it so exactly that I nearly did see it.
He tips his head back. He finds our window, the fourth one over, because he knows which one it is, he has stood in that lot and looked up at it ten thousand times.
His face changes. He grabs somebody by the shoulder and points and starts yelling into the radio, and then he goes up himself, because there is nothing on this earth that is going to make that man wait his turn when it is his own.
I opened my mouth to call down to him.
Behind me, Danny said, “Mom. I can’t see.”
I turned around.
He was still on his side where I had put him. His eyes were open. They were open and they were pointed at the ceiling and they were not looking at anything, and Ivy had both hands on his face and was saying his name.
“Danny. Danny. Look at me.”
“Say his name,” I said. “Out loud. Make him answer.”
“Danny. Danny.”
“Here,” he said. It came out of him thin and flat.
“Good. Again.”
I turned back to the window because I had to, because I couldn’t do anything else, because down in that lot there were men with tools and air and a ladder truck and my son was drowning three feet from me on a mattress.
They had a second line going now. Somebody had gotten the standpipe. There was a man on the sidewalk with a spotlight walking it up the face of the building, and when the light came across our floor the smoke going out from under the eaves lit up white and I could see how much of it there was.
I counted them.
I don’t know why I did it. I’ve thought about that too. Maybe because counting is what my hands do when the rest of me won’t work. Twelve years of somebody else’s payroll and my mind will make a column out of anything.
Wes. Gus. Ray. The man on the standpipe. The man on the spotlight.
Five.
I counted twice.
I did not know how many there were supposed to be. I had spent fifteen years being careful to stay out of the way of his job, because that was how he wanted it, because at home I’m not on duty, Ren. I couldn’t have told you what a crew is or how many men ride an engine.
But I knew something simpler, the way any woman standing over a short table knows it before anybody says a word.
There weren’t enough of them.
There weren’t nearly enough of them, and they knew it, and I could hear it in the way Wes was giving orders, too loud, with a hole in the middle of his voice, the way a man sounds when he is doing somebody else’s job on top of his own and hasn’t decided yet who to be angry at.
The officer’s door was still standing open.
That’s the thing I kept coming back to, that whole night and for a long time afterward. The door was open. It had swung out and nobody had shut it. The dome light was on inside the cab and it made a little warm yellow square in all that red, and there was nobody in it.
I stared at the empty space beside that rig, at the trampled light on the asphalt, and I could not work out where the air had gone.
I got my phone out of my waistband and hit his name again without looking down at it, the way you scratch something.
The party you are trying to reach.
I let her finish. The whole sentence, all the way to the end, standing at my own window with my kitchen burning somewhere behind the wall. I don’t know what I thought was going to be at the end of it.
Ivy crawled over the mattress and got up next to me at the sill.
She got up on her knees and put her hands on the glass the way I had, next to mine, two sets of black handprints, hers small.
She looked down at the lot for a while.
She found the number on the door of the rig. I watched her find it. I watched her read it and check it and be satisfied.
Then she went along them, one by one, the way she had been taught to count a room.
She was quiet for a long time.
“Mom,” she said. “Where’s Dad?”