CHAPTER FOUR
“Where’s Dad?”
I didn’t answer her, because I was busy.
I want to be honest about what I was doing in those minutes, because it does not make me look good.
I was not thinking about my son. I was not thinking about the stairs or the door or the air.
I was standing at a window in a burning apartment with my daughter’s hands next to mine on the glass, and I was negotiating.
The human brain is a coward. It protects whatever you have the most invested in, right up until the last possible second, and it does not give it up for free.
It bargains. It lays out explanations one after another, fast, helpful, obliging, the way a guy at a folding table on a sidewalk lays out phone cases.
Here’s one. Here’s another one. How about this one, this one’s very good.
He’s on the second rig.
He’s on the truck, they’re setting up the aerial, that takes two men.
He stayed at the station because somebody has to run the desk.
He’s at the command post. He’s an officer. He’d be standing back with a radio and a clipboard, that’s the whole job, you’ve heard him say it, my job is to not go in.
He’ll pull up any minute in his own car.
I stood there and I traded with myself while four floors below me the thing I had watched on television a hundred times was happening in my own parking lot for the first time.
And then I heard him.
Not Mike. Wes.
“Second team. Where is my second team. I’m asking a question.”
His voice came up off the asphalt and hit the wall of the building and came in through the gaps around that window that never shut right, and it was wrong.
I have known these men for ten years. I know how they sound at work, because I have heard them tell each other about it at my table.
They don’t talk on a fire. They bark half a word and the other man already has it. Calm, mean, efficient.
Wes was not calm.
Wes had a hole in the middle of his voice, and he was turning his head, looking for somebody in the lot and not finding him, and he was giving orders about twice as loud as he needed to.
“Wes, we’re five.”
“I can count.”
Five.
I put my hand on the glass and I stopped bargaining.
I didn’t know the rules. I didn’t know how many men are supposed to ride an engine, or what a second team is, or why there had to be one before they could send anybody up a stairwell.
Fifteen years and I had never once asked, because that was the arrangement.
Ren, there’s nothing interesting about it. It’s just work.
But I could hear what they were doing with that number. They had said it twice now, and both times it had the same weight in it that money has when there isn’t any.
There weren’t enough of them.
My building was on fire on the third floor. My children were on the fourth floor. And down in that lot five men were cutting themselves into pieces to cover the work of six.
The sixth one was supposed to be my husband.
And underneath Wes, thin and flat and coming out of somebody’s radio, a woman’s voice was saying a name. She said it twice, unhurried, the way they say things, and the second time she added that she was repeating.
I didn’t catch the whole thing. I caught the shape of it.
It sounded like ours.
“Mom!”
I turned around.
The smoke had come down while I was standing there. It wasn’t gray anymore. It had gone brown and heavy, and it had a shine on it in the lamplight, and it had taken the ceiling and then the tops of the walls, and what was left of my bedroom was a band of clear air along the floor about a foot deep.
Ivy was flat on her stomach.
My son was on his side next to her, and he had stopped coughing the way he had been coughing twenty minutes before.
That cough had been loud and furious and alive. This was two short pulls in and one long slack breath out, like he’d lost interest in the third one.
That is what got me. Not the color of him. Not the sound. The slackness. Something about a seven-year-old getting lazy about breathing went up my back from the base of my spine to the base of my skull on small cold feet.
I went down on my knees, and then onto my elbows, and I crawled.
Past the laundry basket. Past his sneakers with the heels stamped flat because he never unties them. Past the charging cable I had been telling somebody to move for a month.
“Danny. Danny. Look at Mom.”
He opened his eyes partway. The whites had gone pink. He wasn’t looking straight at me. He was looking a little past my ear, the way people look on a bus.
“Mom,” he said. It came out of him at about the volume of a piece of paper moving. “Why’s it taking so long?”
There are questions that empty a woman’s mouth in one second. I opened it to answer him and found out my tongue was a strip of cardboard lying in there, and that there was not one usable molecule left in all that air to make a word out of.
Ivy answered for me. Again.
“Because they’re getting the old people out downstairs,” she said, straight into his ear, hard and certain, in the grown up voice she’d started using in the last month when she talked to the woman at the pharmacy. “And then they’ll come for us. We’re not old. We can wait.”
My daughter. Ten years old. Lying on her stomach in smoke, explaining triage to her brother.
I reached over and put my hand on her hair and it was wet, and it did not smell like her strawberry shampoo anymore. It smelled the way everything that burns smells. Plastic and rags and somebody else’s whole life.
“Ivy. Listen to me now.”
“Okay.”
“Hold the wet shirt on his face. Don’t take it away. Count for him out loud, he likes it when somebody counts.”
“Okay.”
“If he closes his eyes, pinch him.”
She looked at me.
“Hard?”
“Hard, Ivy.”
Never. Not one time in my life did I think I would say those three words to my daughter, in that order, about her brother.
And she nodded, one quick nod, chin down and up, the way men nod at each other on a job, and then she reached over and pinched Danny on the arm right in front of me, to check that she could do it.
He twitched.
Alive.
“Good,” I said. “That’s good.”
“It didn’t feel bad,” she said. “I want it to hurt him.”
“It has to.”
She nodded again and turned back to him.
The towel under my elbow had gone from cold to lukewarm.
I noticed it the way you notice the milk is off, a half second before you understand what it means, and then I put my palm flat on the floor next to it and held it there.
The floor was warm.
Not hot. Warm, evenly, all the way across, like a driveway in August. It was coming up through the boards from underneath in a slow patient way that had nothing hurried about it at all, and I understood that the building was not going to come at us through the door. It was going to come up.
“Ivy. Go wet these again.”
“The water went warm,” she said.
“I don’t care. Go.”
She went, on her hands and knees, backward out of the room the way she’d been taught to back down a ladder at day camp, and she came back with the towels dripping and heavy and her hair hanging in points, and she was right, the water had gone warm.
Everything in that apartment was running out. The water. The cloth. The air. My phone was at nineteen percent and I remember thinking, with total seriousness, that I ought to close some apps.
I lay on my elbows in twelve inches of air next to my two children and I made myself go through it like a column, because that is the only way I know how to hold anything.
The stairs were on fire. The door could not be opened. The window would not go up. There were five men in the lot and they needed six. My son had gone from a cough to whatever this was in twenty minutes.
And the one thing in that entire column that could still be changed was in my hand.
I hit his name.
The party you are trying to reach is unavailable.
I lay there and listened to her all the way through, every word, the little pause, the beep. I was not calling him anymore. I don’t know what I was doing. Pressing on something to see whether it still hurt, probably.
Then, out on the landing, on the other side of my own front door, I heard boots.
Heavy ones. A lot of them at once, coming up fast, metal banging on the railing, somebody’s tank knocking the wall on the turn.
My whole body came up off the floor.
They were here.
They were on my landing.