CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
On the eleventh day, in a regular room on six, my son asked for his helmet.
He had been out of the PICU for a day. He was sitting up eating red Jell-O and watching a show about people building tree houses, and he said it without looking away from the screen, the way kids ask for things.
“Mom. Where’s my helmet.”
I did not have to ask which one.
Gus Kraus gave him that helmet for his fourth birthday.
Not a costume one. An actual junior one out of the department’s supply, black plastic with a real chin strap and a shield on the front, and Danny wore it to the grocery store for a month and slept in it twice and I found it under his bed about nine times a year for three years.
“Bud, it was in the apartment.”
He thought about that.
“The whole apartment?”
“Most of it.”
“Okay,” he said, and went back to the tree houses, and did not mention it again.
I called the station at eleven the next morning. A young voice answered and said hang on, and I sat on hold for four minutes, and then the same young voice came back and said sorry, could I call back later.
I got in the car and drove over.
Station 24 has three orange overhead doors and a concrete apron with a hose reel on the wall and a stripe of black rubber worn into the concrete where the rigs come in. There is a picnic table on the side under a tree, and in November it had two inches of wet leaves on it.
I parked on the street, because I have never once parked on that apron in ten years. Wives don’t park on the apron.
The middle door was up.
The engine was in it, backed in, with two compartment doors standing open and a man’s legs sticking out from underneath the far side of it.
There was a radio playing somewhere. It smelled the way it has always smelled, diesel and wet canvas and rubber and boot polish, and underneath it all somebody’s crockpot, which in that building has smelled like the same thing since two thousand and fifteen.
It was so ordinary that I stopped on the sidewalk.
That is a thing nobody warns you about either. You expect the building to have changed. You expect a hush. There was a guy under a truck and a radio on and a crockpot going and it was a Tuesday.
I went in the side door, into the lobby.
It is not much of a lobby. Eight feet by ten. A bench, a rack of pamphlets about smoke alarms and car seats, a water fountain, a window into the watch office with nobody behind it, and on the long wall, in a wood-framed case behind plexiglass, the photographs.
Medal recipients. Going back to the sixties. Black and white at the top, color further down, and at the bottom the recent ones in eight-by-tens, laminated, held on with squares of double-sided tape.
He is on the bottom row, second from the left.
It is the ceremony photograph. Dress uniform, hat under his arm, the medal on his chest, and he is looking just off camera at somebody who has said something to him, and he is not quite smiling, and it is a very good picture of a man.
I stood in front of it in a coat out of a garbage bag.
The top left corner was up.
About an inch and a half of it, curled away from the backing, so that the plexiglass had a little wedge of shadow behind it.
I looked at that corner for a long time.
Here is the thing about it. I could not tell.
Old tape does that. It gives up in the corners, especially in a building where a hundred and something degrees of temperature swing goes through that lobby every time the bay doors open in July and January.
Three of the photographs on that wall have a corner up.
I checked. I stood there and checked all of them like a woman counting a till.
Or somebody had gotten a thumbnail under it on a night shift, and started, and then stopped.
Because you cannot take a man’s picture off a wall of honor while there is an open investigation.
Because the medal is real and the basement on Fenwick is real and the man and the boy he carried out of it are alive and one of them is in middle school now.
Because a photograph like that is a decision, and nobody in that building had made it yet.
So he hung there, second from the left, with a corner up, for six more weeks.
I have never asked which it was. I do not want to know. There is a version where somebody started and lost his nerve and I would have to think about which man it was, and there is a version where it was just tape, and I have decided to keep both.
“Ma’am?”
He was about twenty-three and he had come out of the bay door wiping his hands on a rag.
“Hi. Sorry. Nobody’s on the desk, everybody’s out back.”
“That’s all right.”
“Can I help you with something? If it’s a car seat check we do those Saturdays.”
“It’s not a car seat.”
He waited, friendly, and I could see him running down the list of things a woman in her thirties comes into a firehouse lobby for.
“My son had a junior helmet,” I said. “One of yours. It got burned. I wanted to ask if there’s any way to get another one.”
“Oh, sure. Yeah. We’ve got a whole box of those, we hand them out at the open house.” He was already turning. “How old is he?”
“Seven.”
“Easy. Hang on.”
Then he stopped.
I watched it happen. He had taken one step toward the bay and something caught up with him, and he turned back around and looked at me properly for the first time, at my face, and then, very fast, at the case on the wall, and then at me again.
That is how I found out that a twenty-three-year-old who has been on the job for ten months knew my face from a photograph in a lobby.
“You’re,” he said.
“Yes.”
“Ma’am, I’m—” He stopped. His ears had gone red. “I’ll get somebody.”
“You don’t need to get anybody. I just want a helmet.”
“I’ll get somebody,” he said, and went.
He was gone six minutes.
I stood in that lobby the entire time, because I was not going to sit down on the bench, and I did not look at the case again, and I read every single pamphlet in that rack.
Cooking fires. Space heaters. How to make a home escape plan and pick a meeting place outside.
There is a line in that one about practicing it twice a year with your children.
There was a duty roster taped to the inside of the watch office window.
I could read it through the glass, upside down and backward, and I read it anyway, because there is a version of me that cannot leave a piece of paper alone.
Six names for C shift.
His was one of them, in the officer’s line at the top, and beside it somebody had written three letters in ballpoint: ADM.
Administrative. Riding a desk downtown, pending.
Six names. Six lines on a piece of paper taped inside a window, printed by somebody at the beginning of the month, and every one of them accounted for and assigned, and on the night of the twelfth of November there had been five men on that apron.
Out in the bay somebody dropped something metal and somebody else laughed.
Then the inside door opened.
It was not the kid.
Gus Kraus stood in the doorway with a dish towel over one shoulder and his mouth already open to say something, and then he saw me, and it shut.