18. What I Was Reading At One in the Morning
Chapter eighteen
What I Was Reading At One in the Morning
Mandy
There are forty-one browser tabs open on my laptop and not one of them is work.
Firefighter PTSD. Secondary trauma responses.
Hypervigilance in first responder populations, which is a phrase I did not know four days ago and now cannot stop reading.
A forum where the wives of paramedics talk to each other at two in the morning in a shorthand so specific it makes my throat close, he came home Tuesday and didn’t take his boots off for an hour, does anyone else’s do that.
He does that. I have watched him do that.
I have walked past him standing in the middle of his own kitchen still in his boots at eleven at night after working extra shifts.
I said something funny about it, because that is what we do, and he laughed, because that is what he does, and I went to bed thinking nothing of it at all.
I close the tab. I open it again ninety seconds later.
The loft is doing its nighttime thing, the radiator ticking and the refrigerator cycling and the streetlights coming through the industrial windows in long amber bars across the concrete.
Bowie is asleep on my feet with the total confidence of an animal who has never once in his life worried about anything.
It is a quarter to one. Sterling has been on shift since six yesterday morning and the group text from Kayla two hours ago said there is something bad in the West Loop, a partial collapse, it’s on the news, is he on that.
He is on that.
I have not moved from this couch in three hours.
The stupid part, the part I would not admit to Kayla and would rather die than admit to my mother, is that I am not doing this because of tonight. I started four nights ago, in the dark, on a couch, with a candle between us and the power out across four city blocks.
I asked him why there had been nobody serious since Priya. The one he told me he could see himself marrying one day. I asked it like a game, because it was a game, but he did not answer it like one.
He said the job takes something out of you.
He said Priya did not love him, she loved that he was a hero, like it was a conversation piece, and she did not like the reality of what being with him actually meant.
And then he said a thing about being adopted that I have been carrying around in my chest ever since, about how you make yourself worth keeping by being indispensable, how you be the one who shows up and does not crack, and how a fire always goes out eventually and he genuinely does not know whether anyone would want the version of him underneath.
A guy in the dark with nothing to save. That is what he called himself. To me. Out loud.
And then the candle burned down and we stopped talking, then everything that happened after that, and in the days since we have not said one word about any of it. Not the confession. Not the rest of it.
Here is what I have actually been researching, if I am being honest, which at a quarter to one on a Tuesday I apparently have to be.
It’s not how to help him.
It’s whether I am the second one.
Whether I am another woman who liked the shape of him, the hero, the safe harbor, the man who shows up with a spare room when your apartment burns down and would fold the first time she was asked to hold something heavy.
Because his ex is a doctor. She is a doctor and she still could not do it, and I am a woman who chose an ivory over an ecru for a boutique last month and considered it a hard week.
Kayla would say I am spiraling.
Kayla would be correct.
I get up, put the laptop on the coffee table, and stand at the window with my arms crossed, looking down at a street where nothing is happening.
And I think about the bar.
I have not told anybody about the bar. Not Kayla. Certainly not Sterling.
Saturday night at the Steiner, after I stood in front of a painting about the silence of the universe and told the person who matters most to me that we were better as a lie, I gave it eleven minutes and then I went to find him.
I do not know what I was going to say. I had nothing.
I just could not stand in that corner one second longer with the thing I had said still hanging in the air where I had left it.
He was at the far end of the gallery with his back to me.
My father was on the stool beside him. And I stopped about fifteen feet short, behind a pillar and a woman in sequins, because my father had just said her mother and I worry that it isn’t stable, and Sterling said, Neither is running into buildings.
I stood there and listened to a man I had just turned down explain and defend my career to my father.
I didn’t go over. I stood behind that pillar with a glass of wine going warm in my hand and I let a man defend me to my own father twenty minutes after I told him we could not be real, and then I walked back to the corner and looked at the indigo painting until my mother came to find me.
That is what I have been researching. That is what all forty-one tabs are actually about.
The industrial door groans on its hinges.
I turn, and Bowie lifts his head as Sterling comes in.
He does not turn on the lights. He gets three steps onto the concrete and stops, and even in the dark I can see it, the way he is standing, the specific shape of a man carrying something in his shoulders.
He is filthy. Grey to the elbows, soot in his hairline, station blues stiff with dust, and the smell comes across the room ahead of him, thick and acrid, dust that used to be a ceiling.
“Mandy?” His voice is a wreck. Sandpaper and gravel. It does not sound like him.
“I’m here.”
He crosses the kitchen and I see his eyes go to the coffee table, to the laptop I did not close, to the screen still glowing with its bolded headers in twenty-point type. Firefighter PTSD. Secondary trauma responses.
I watch him read it.
I have never wanted to be able to fold time backward as badly as I do in that second. I reach for the lid but he is already looking away, and the not-saying-anything is worse than anything he could have said.
“You’re home,” I say. It comes out at a whisper.
He drops his gear bag. The thud goes through the whole floor. He walks to the island, puts both hands on the marble, and leans there like the counter is the only thing holding him at that height.
“Partial collapse,” he says, to the countertop. “Old warehouse in the West Loop. Squatters. Ten hours.” A pause with something in it. “Two didn’t make it. One was a kid. Maybe thirteen.”
I set the laptop aside and stand up.
Every single thing I have read in four days evacuates my head at once. All of it. The forum posts, the clinical language, the list I actually wrote in my Notes app of things not to say. Gone, instantly and completely, because there is a person in my kitchen and he is shaking.
I can see it from here. His hands on the marble are vibrating, a fine fast tremor that makes the soot on his knuckles look alive.
I cross the floor and stop just outside the radius of him, close enough to smell the fire.
“Sterling. You need to sit down.”
“I’m fine,” he says, and the word breaks in half on the way out.
He slides down the side of the island, back scraping the cabinet, until he is sitting on the concrete with his forearms on his knees, and then he puts his face in his hands and does not care that he is grinding soot into his own eyes.
I do not go get a blanket. I do not offer him water or suggest a shower or do any of the useful competent things I am extremely good at doing. I sit down on the cold floor beside him with my back against the same cabinet, close enough that our shoulders are almost touching, and I stay there.
“You don’t have to be fine,” I say.
I put my hand on his forearm. His skin is freezing. He flinches, a full-body startle, like I have set something off, and I do not take my hand away, and after a second he leans into it.
“In the Army it was different,” he says into his palms. “You expect the world to come apart. You’re geared for it.
But here? Middle of the city, on a weekday.
You’re supposed to go to work and come home.
You’re not supposed to have to decide who gets air, because you can only reach one of them through the rebar. ”
He pulls his hands down and stares at the far wall. There is a clean track through the soot under each eye and he has no idea it is there.
“I couldn’t get to him,” he says. “The kid. He was looking right at me. He was screaming for his mother and I was three feet away and the slab was too heavy. I’m a paramedic. That’s the deal. I do the work and they live. The math didn’t work today.”
I do not tell him it was not his fault. I have read enough forum posts to know that is the thing people say when they want the conversation to be over. I slide my hand down to his wrist and put my thumb on the pulse point, and I hold on, and I let the silence be as long as it needs to be.
The refrigerator cycles. Bowie pads over, sniffs one filthy boot, delivers a small skeptical noise, and settles against Sterling’s hip like a warm patchwork judgment.
“I read what was on your computer,” he says. He turns his head. He looks like hell, grit in his hair, soot mapped across his face, eyes red-rimmed. “You were looking for a way to fix me. Or checking whether I was going to come apart in the middle of your performance.”
It is a jab, but there is no weight behind it. It is just a man with nothing left for tact.
“No,” I say.
“Mandy, ”
“I wasn’t looking for a way to fix you.” My voice is not steady and I let it not be.
“I was looking for a way to understand. You spend all of your time being the thing everyone else stands on. Becca. The crew. Me. Especially me. And I sat here and let you tell me you don’t know if anyone would want the version of you underneath all that. ”
He does not say anything.