CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
“Erin.”
“Hi, Gus.”
He came all the way into the lobby and let the door shut behind him, and then he stood there with a dish towel over his shoulder and his hands at his sides.
He is a round man. Forty-four, going bald from the front, red in the face in any weather. He has a laugh you can hear from the parking lot and he has used it in my kitchen probably two hundred times.
He did not know what to do with his own arms.
“They said. Uh.” He cleared his throat. “The kid said there was a lady out here about a helmet.”
“That’s me.”
“Right.” He nodded about four times. “Right, right. Okay. Yeah, we got a whole case of them in the back.”
“Thank you.”
“How’s—” He stopped. Started again. “How’s Danny.”
“He’s out of intensive care. He’s on six. They’re saying maybe another week.”
“Okay.” More nodding. “Okay, that’s. That’s good. That’s good news.”
“It is.”
“And your girl?”
“She’s fine.”
“Okay.”
We stood there in a lobby that is eight feet by ten.
“Come on back,” he said. “It’s cold in here.”
The bay was warmer.
He took me through it and I have walked through that bay a hundred times and I have never once walked through it like that, with a man half a step ahead of me not saying anything, past a rig with its compartments open.
The ding is under the left headlight. It is about the size of a dinner plate and it is eight years old and Wes Nowak did it backing into a light pole in an alley off Becher, and I have heard that story told at my own table by four different men who each had a different version of where Wes was looking at the time.
Along the back wall are the racks.
Turnout coats hanging by the shoulders, one set per man, boots underneath with the pants dropped down over them in a ring so you can step into them and pull. Names on tape above each one.
The fourth one down said HALLORAN.
His coat was on the hook. His boots were under it with the pants dropped around them exactly the way you leave them.
Set up. Ready. The way he left them on the afternoon of the twelfth of November when he walked out of that building at twenty to midnight and told a man he was going downtown.
Nobody had touched them.
Twelve days. Twelve days of that gear hanging there in a warm room with men walking past it four times an hour, and not one person in that building had been willing to be the one who took it down.
I stopped walking.
Gus got three steps ahead before he noticed, and then he came back and stood next to me, and we both looked at a coat.
“They can’t move it,” he said. “Till the thing’s done. It’s a whole—”
“I know.”
“Yeah.”
“It’s fine, Gus.”
“Yeah,” he said.
There was a man on the far side of the bay coiling a length of small line on the floor.
Ray Duarte.
He was on one knee with his back mostly to us, and he had heard us come through, because everybody hears everything in a room like that, and he did not turn around. He finished the coil. He set it down on the concrete. He got up.
Then he picked up a mop bucket that was sitting four feet away, an empty one, with nothing in it at all, and he carried it out the side door into the November afternoon in his shirtsleeves.
That man carried my son down a ladder.
He came through a window into a room with no air in it and got his arms under a seven-year-old and put a hand behind his head and took him out, and then he went back and did it twice more for a girl and a woman he has known for a decade, and he cannot stand in a room with me.
I have never once been angry at Ray Duarte.
I have been a lot of things at a lot of people this year and that particular one has never come. I stood in that bay and watched a twenty-seven-year-old walk out into the cold with an empty bucket and what I felt was something so close to tenderness that I had to look at the floor.
Gus took me through into the back hallway.
“Lockers are through there. Supply closet’s off it. Just give me a second.”
He went. I did not follow him, exactly. I stood in the doorway of the locker room the way you stand in the doorway of a room you have never been in.
It is a long green room with two rows of tall metal lockers and a wooden bench bolted down the middle and a smell of soap and feet.
The third locker from the end on the left was standing open about a foot.
I know that locker. Not from having seen it. From having packed the contents of it, over and over, for fifteen years. The gym shorts. The spare boots. The good pair of socks he kept in there because he swore the ones at home were thinner.
His name is on a strip of label tape on the front, and the tape is old and has gone the color of weak tea.
I did not go over to it.
I stood in the doorway, about nine feet away, and from nine feet away I could see the inside of the door, and there were three photographs taped to it.
Ivy at about six, on a beach in Door County, holding up something she had found.
Danny at four, in the helmet. The black one with the chin strap. Taken in our kitchen with the flash on, so his eyes are red and half the picture is the refrigerator.
And under those, on the bottom, a four-by-six.
Two people in front of a flag. A man in dress uniform with his hat under his arm and a medal on his chest, and a woman in a blue dress standing next to him with his arm around her shoulders, and her hand is not quite down from her hair, and she is laughing.
She had gotten there half an hour early. She had ironed the dress the night before.
That photograph was taken by Tessa Vail.
She counted us down. She said you look nice together. And I said, oh, I’m not exactly a model, and she took it, and somebody printed a four-by-six of it and my husband taped it to the inside of his locker door and it has been there for two years.
I stood in the doorway of that locker room and did the only thing I could think of, which was to go back over the dates.
November, two years ago. The ceremony. That is sixteen months before March.
Sixteen months.
She took our picture, and it went up on a metal door, and for sixteen months that was just a photograph of a man and his wife, and then at some point in March it turned into something else without moving one inch or being touched by anybody.
That is what nobody tells you either. It is not only that things stop. Things you already have get reassigned, retroactively, without your knowledge, and you go on dusting them.
“Here we go.”
Gus came back down the hallway with a helmet in each hand.
“Got him two. In case.” He held them out. “The strap’s adjustable, there’s a—”
“Gus.”
“Yeah.”
“Did you leave an envelope at the hospital?”
He stood in a green hallway holding two plastic fire helmets, and his face came apart very slowly, from the mouth up, the way a wall comes down.
“Come sit down a minute,” he said.