CHAPTER TWELVE
I didn’t answer him.
“He’s in there.” He said it to me first, and then he turned around and said it to the lot. “Mike’s in there. Course he is. That’s his house.”
And it went out across that parking lot like something poured.
I watched it move. I saw a woman turn to another woman and say it. I saw somebody down by the wall look up at the building differently than they had been looking at it a second before. Somebody said oh, God bless him, out loud, in the dark, with real feeling in it.
Forty seconds. It took about forty seconds.
I did that.
Not on purpose, and not with a word, and I have gone around and around it and it comes out the same every time. I could have said four words. I could have said he isn’t here. True, short, and nobody’s business but mine. I did not say them.
I stood on that asphalt in a borrowed blanket and let a whole neighborhood decide that my husband was upstairs in the smoke being a hero.
I want to be careful here, because this is the first one.
Over the next four months I would watch my daughter do the same thing at school and I would have to sit on her bed and explain to her why she couldn’t. I earned the right to have that conversation with her, eventually. I did not have it that night.
“Ma’am. Ma’am, we’re going.”
They had Danny in.
The gurney went up and the legs came under it with a bang and they got it in the back and locked it down, and a medic put a hand out to me and I got my good foot on the step and went up after him.
The inside of that ambulance was the warmest, brightest, most crowded place I have ever been in my life.
Everything in it was clean and white and had a label on it.
There was a shelf of little plastic drawers with words printed under them.
There was a radio going, quietly, with somebody in another part of the city saying numbers.
Danny was flat on his back under a strap with the mask on him.
Ivy climbed in behind me and sat on the bench without being told and put her hands in her lap.
“Sweetheart, I need one on you too,” the medic said, and put a mask on her without waiting for an answer, and she took it and held it against her own face and looked at him over the top of it.
“Am I sick?”
“No. You’re getting the good stuff. Same as your brother. It’s free.”
“Okay,” she said, and held it there, and did not put it down for the entire ride, which took twelve minutes.
There was a clip on Danny’s finger with a wire running off it, and a little screen on the wall, and on the screen there was a number, and the number was ninety-eight.
I know what that number means. Everybody knows what that number means. You see it in every hospital scene ever filmed.
“That’s good,” I said. “That’s a good number.”
The medic didn’t look up from what he was doing.
“Don’t look at that one,” he said. “With this, that number lies.”
“What?”
“Carbon monoxide reads the same as oxygen on that clip. It’ll sit there at ninety-eight all the way to the hospital.
” He got a mask onto his own patient’s face and adjusted the strap behind his ear with two fingers, gently, the way you’d fix a kid’s hat.
“That’s why we run him on high flow anyway.
We treat what happened, not what the screen says. ”
I sat down on the bench next to my daughter.
A perfect number, sitting there glowing on the wall, meaning nothing at all.
I have thought about that machine more than is reasonable.
Everything in my house looked like ninety-eight for about two years.
Ninety-eight is a man who is tired from his shifts.
Ninety-eight is a man who is quiet at dinner because of the things he sees.
Ninety-eight is new cologne and showers in the evening and a wife standing in her kitchen telling her friend on the phone how good he still smells.
You have to know what happened to read the screen.
Somebody was at the open doors.
He had his helmet off and his hood down around his neck and his mask hanging off the strap on his chest, and his face was black except for a clean band across the eyes and a clean ring around his mouth, and the black was running where it was wet.
Wes Nowak.
He stood there holding the door frame with one glove off, and he did not get in, and he did not say anything, and he looked at my son on that gurney for maybe three seconds.
Then he looked at me.
I have known that man for ten years. He has eaten at my table probably a hundred times. He fixed my disposal on a Sunday. He is the least complicated person I have ever met and his face has never once done anything I couldn’t read from across a room.
I could not read it.
“Was he here?” I said.
“No.”
“Was he here at any point tonight?”
“No.”
The medic looked up. Ivy didn’t. Ivy was watching Wes with her chin down.
“Wes.”
“Yeah.”
“Is he all right?”
And that is where he stopped.
He stood in the doors of that ambulance for what felt like a very long time and I watched a man look for something to say that was not a lie and was not the truth, and there is nothing in that space.
There is nothing in there at all. I could see him going through it like a man going through his pockets on a sidewalk.
“He’s careful,” Wes said.
Then he took his hand off the door frame.
I sat on that bench and I turned it over once and it came apart in my hands, both halves at the same time, and both halves were bad.
He wasn’t in the building, he’s fine, he’s careful, nothing happens to careful men.
And.
He’s careful about it. He’s been careful about it for a while. That’s how none of you ever had to know anything for certain.
Two meanings, one word, and the man who said it knew both of them. I could see that he knew. He heard it come out of his own mouth and I watched it land on him.
“Erin,” he said.
“Don’t.”
“I’m sorry.”
I thought he meant the fire.
That is the honest truth and I will put it down plainly. I sat there with my son strapped down beside me and I thought that a fireman was telling me he was sorry about my apartment, and I thought it was decent of him, and I very nearly said thank you.
It took me ten days to find out what he was apologizing for.
He stepped back and the medic reached past him and pulled both doors shut, and the last thing I saw of that parking lot was a strip of white light and Wes Nowak standing in it with his glove in his hand.
Somebody banged twice on the wall.
We started to move.
Ivy put her hand on the bench between us, palm up, not looking at me.
I put mine in it.
We went out of the lot slow, over the curb they had backed across, and then the driver got out onto the street and the siren came on over our heads, and the little window in the back door filled up with the front of my building, lit white, running with water, with a ladder standing in the black hole where my bedroom used to be.
It got smaller and then it went around a corner and it was gone.
Twelve fifty-one in the morning.
One hour, exactly, since I had woken up in that apartment to a sound like somebody trying to tear a piece of cardboard.
I sat in a warm bright box with my daughter’s hand in mine and my son breathing through a mask beside me and a screen on the wall telling me everything was fine, and I did not know yet about the seven minutes, or the log book, or the bay camera, or the woman in the slippers, or how much a month of CObrA costs, or what my daughter would say to me one night in January at eleven o’clock.
I knew one thing.
I knew where my husband was.
Not the address. I would not have that for another three weeks. But I knew what room he was in, and I knew what was on the nightstand in it, screen down, dark, four seconds from being useful.