CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
I read it three times.
The first time I read it the way you read anything, front to back, and it went past me like weather.
Paragraph three hands you a number.
Paragraph four takes it away from you.
“Can I ask you about 7.4.4,” I said.
“I figured.”
“You wrote 7.4.3.”
“I did.”
“And then you wrote 7.4.4.”
Ostrander laid his pen across the folder.
“I’m going to tell you exactly how that works and then you can be as angry at me as you want,” he said.
“I can establish where a fire started and how it moved and how long it took people to get where they were going. Those are physical facts and I can defend every one of them in a room full of lawyers.”
“And causation.”
“Causation in a case like this is a medical question and it isn’t answerable.
Nobody can tell you what would have happened to a specific child in a specific room seven minutes earlier.
Not me, not a doctor, not anybody. So I won’t write it.
If I write something I can’t hold up, the whole report gets a hole in it and everything else in here goes down with it. ”
“Including 7.4.3.”
“Including 7.4.3,” he said. “Yes.”
I sat there.
“Let me ask you a different one, then.”
“Go ahead.”
“Can anybody establish the opposite?”
He was quiet.
“Can anybody establish that those seven minutes made no difference?” I said. “Is somebody going to be able to write a paragraph that says it didn’t matter?”
“No,” Ostrander said.
“No?”
“No. That’s not provable either.” He took his glasses off.
“And that’s the whole of what I can give you, Mrs. Halloran, and I know it isn’t much.
Nobody will ever be able to tell you what those seven minutes did.
But it’s in the file now. It’s numbered and it’s dated and it goes everywhere this report goes, and every single person who reads this thing from here on out has to walk past paragraph three to get to paragraph four. ”
I looked at the page.
“That’s not nothing,” he said.
“No,” I said. “It isn’t.”
I did the other thing in my car in the parking lot with the engine running.
I had the folder open on the passenger seat and my phone in my hand, and I put the report’s timeline next to my own call log, and I did what I do.
Ladder 9 arrived at 0025. Second search team committed after that. Seven minutes earlier is 0018.
At 0018 I was on my elbows in the hallway listening to five men fail to open my front door.
At 0022 I told my daughter that her brother was going out that window first.
At 0026 I typed an address and a floor and a count of occupants to a man whose phone was off.
Somewhere in there, in a two or three minute band that nobody will ever pin down and that I could not pin down myself even standing over him, my son stopped breathing.
I sat in a car with the heater blowing on my hands and looked at those two columns of times and it was the clearest thing I have ever seen in my life.
The seven minutes are not somewhere else.
They are not before it or after it. They sit down on top of it.
Every one of them lands inside the window where a seven-year-old went from coughing to not coughing, and if you slide that team up the timeline by seven minutes they are standing in my hallway with a light on before it happens instead of after.
That is the arithmetic. That is all of it. It took me about ninety seconds in a parked car and I have never once been able to unsee it and I will never be able to prove it.
Both of those are true and they will both be true for the rest of my life.
I asked a doctor about it in January.
It was at the pulmonology follow-up. Danny’s lungs were fine. That is the thing, and I will say it here so nobody has to worry: his lungs came all the way back and by March they were clean and they are clean now.
Dr. Ansari was writing something and I said, in the flattest voice I could produce, that I wanted to ask a question that was probably not answerable.
“Go ahead.”
“His level was thirty-four percent. Is there a way to tell what any given minute did? Like, is there a number where you can say, at this point, this much was done?”
He put the pen down.
“No,” he said.
“None at all.”
“None at all, and I want to explain why rather than just say no.” He turned in the chair to face me, which doctors do not do enough.
“Smoke isn’t uniform. It’s not a bath. It’s layered and it moves and a child on the floor of a room is in a completely different environment than a child standing up in the same room.
His breathing rate changed. His position changed.
There’s no equation that turns minutes into percentages for a specific person in a specific room. ”
“So nobody can tell me what he would have been.”
“Nobody can tell you what he would have been,” he said. “I’m sorry. Anybody who tells you otherwise is guessing at you.”
“Okay.”
He let a second go by.
“I’ll tell you the one thing I can say, and it isn’t a number.” He picked the pen back up. “While a child is in smoke, every minute is risk. It doesn’t level off and it doesn’t have a safe stretch in the middle. Longer is worse. That’s the whole of it.”
“Longer is worse.”
“Longer is worse.”
I have made my peace with a lot of things this year. I have made no peace at all with that one and I have stopped trying, and I have come to think that trying was the mistake.
Seven minutes never turned into a number.
It also never turned into nothing.
It is four hundred and twenty seconds, and I did that in the car at a red light on the way home, out loud, because I could not help it.
Ostrander walked me down to the lobby.
At the door he said, “There’ll be a notice coming to you from the department. Separate track, like I said. They’ll want your statement signed, and that’s downtown at headquarters, not here.”
“When?”
“Week of the fifteenth, probably. They’ll call you.”
They called me on the sixteenth.