23. Incident Report
Chapter twenty-three
Incident Report
Sterling
There is a form the department makes you fill out after a shift like this one, and I have been staring at the same field on it for twenty minutes.
Narrative. That is what the box is called.
You put the facts in the boxes above it, times and addresses and vitals, and then at the bottom there is a rectangle the size of a postcard where you explain what happened in plain language.
I am good at this part. I have written hundreds of them.
You keep it short and you keep the adjectives out and you write it like somebody’s lawyer is going to read it in three years, because somebody’s lawyer probably is.
Patient presented with acute anaphylaxis.
Patient self-administered epinephrine prior to arrival.
Patient was Cassandra Reyes, with whom I spent three weeks last autumn, and when she put her hand on my forearm in that penthouse and asked me to stop by after shift I felt nothing at all, a flat dead space where a spark used to be, and it frightened me more than the call did.
I cannot put that in the box.
I put the tablet down on the small stand beside my bed and stare at the ceiling.
It is 1:14 a.m. The bunk room is dark and smells like laundry soap and three sleeping men, and I have been lying here for an hour with my phone face down on my chest running the same loop, and eventually I do the thing I have been not doing since ten o’clock.
Becca picks up on the fourth ring.
“Somebody’s dead,” she says.
“Nobody’s dead.”
“Sterling. It’s two-fourteen here.”
“I know what time it is there.”
“Then you understand why my first guess was that somebody’s dead.” I hear her sit up, the rustle of a comforter, the small put-upon grunt she has made getting out of bed since she was nine years old. “Okay. Nobody’s dead. Go.”
“You were on shift today.”
“I was on shift for fourteen hours and I’m back at six, so please understand that I love you and I’m also going to fall asleep on you if you take the scenic route.” A pause. “Which you’re going to. I can hear you taking it.”
I sit up and put my feet on the linoleum. The exit sign over the door throws everything in the room a dim red.
“It stopped being fake,” I say.
The silence on the other end goes on long enough that I check the screen to see whether the call dropped.
“Okay,” Becca says carefully. “I want to be sure I’m hearing you correctly.
Because I already knew it was fake. You told me that in a bathroom while you were buttoning a shirt you bought because of something she said once about thunderclouds.
I warned you about this exact outcome and you told me it was a tactical maneuver. ”
“I remember.”
“You said you were mitigating the vibration.”
“Becca.”
“I’m establishing the record. You said, and I want to be precise, that you were holding the line so her life didn’t go up in insurance claims and disappointment.”
“Are you finished.”
“Not remotely. Go ahead.”
I rub a hand down my face and sigh.
“We slept together,” I say.
Becca does not say anything at all.
“A few nights ago,” I say, because the silence is worse than the saying.
“And last night. And I don’t mean it was a mistake, or her parents were down the hall and we got carried away, or any of the six explanations you’re currently lining up.
It wasn’t that. She’d had a bad day, I’d had a worse one, and I came home wearing the whole call and she took me into the shower and washed it off me. ”
“Sterling.”
“She was searching up PTSD stuff before I got home, Bec.” My voice does something I did not authorize. “The she stood there and got the grit out from under my fingernails one hand at a time and she didn’t stop until the water ran clear, and I have not been able to think in a straight line since.”
“Okay,” she says, and everything sharp has gone out of her voice. “Okay. I’m awake now.”
I wait.
“Are you going to say something?”
“I’m choosing,” she says. “There are about four things I could say and three of them are for my benefit rather than yours, so give me a second.”
“Take your time. It’s only the middle of the night.”
“You called me.”
“I’m aware.”
She takes a breath. “Does she know how you feel?”
“No.”
“Does she know you’ve felt it for six years?”
“No.”
“Do you know you’ve felt it for six years?”
Delivered flat, at two in the morning, by a twenty-six-year-old who has been performing this exact procedure on me since she was old enough to notice I needed it.
“I had a call today,” I say instead.
“That isn’t an answer.”
“It’s adjacent to one. Anaphylaxis, high-rise, forty-first floor. Patient turns out to be a woman I saw for a few weeks last fall. Cassandra. And once she’s stable and pink again she puts her hand on my arm and asks me to come by after shift.”
“Charming.”
“And I felt nothing. Not guilt, not temptation, not the polite version where you’re flattered and you decline. Nothing. Like somebody had pulled a wire out of the back of me.”
“And that frightened you.”
“More than the call did, and the call had a closed airway in it.”
“Why?”
“Because that was the entire system,” I say. “That was the arrangement I have run my adult life on. Three weeks, a decent dinner, a clean exit, nobody’s feelings get stepped on, everybody goes home intact. I was good at it. Jake made me a certificate.”
“Jake made you a what.”
“There’s a crown involved. It isn’t important.”
“It sounds extremely important, but continue.”
“The point is that the system is gone. And I didn’t decommission it. It stopped working sometime in the last three weeks and I didn’t notice until a woman put her hand on my arm and I stood there wondering whether Mandy had eaten anything today.”
Becca lets out a long breath. I hear her moving, the click of a lamp.
“Can I say the thing now,” she says.
“Is it going to be unpleasant.”
“Moderately.”
“Go ahead.”
“You did this with Priya,” she says. “Except backwards.”
The name lands in the dark bunk room like a dropped tool.
“That’s a hell of an opening,” I say.
“You wanted the thing.”
“I wanted a thing. I didn’t specify which.”
“Then I’m picking this one.” She is fully awake now, and a fully awake Becca is a scalpel.
“You were with Priya for two years and you never once called me at one in the morning about her. Not once. In two years. You called me when you made lieutenant and you called me when the headstone came back with the wrong dates on it, and you never called me about her.”
I look at the ceiling. There is a water stain up there shaped roughly like Lake Michigan that I have been looking at for six years.
“I was going to marry her,” I say.
“I know.”
“No. I mean I had worked it out. I had a number in my head for the ring and a rough idea of the month. I’d thought about where. I never told anybody that.”
“Sterling, I knew.”
“How.”
“Because you started saying we about the apartment,” she says. “You’d say we’re thinking about the West Loop. You never said that about anything before or since.” A beat. “You have never once said we about the loft, and Mandy has been living in it for a month.”
That one goes in under the ribs and stays there.
“You never liked her,” I say.
“No.”
“You were like twenty-one.”
“I was twenty-three and I was right.” A pause. “Do you want the reason, or do you want me to be diplomatic.”
“When have you ever been diplomatic.”
“Thanksgiving, twenty nineteen. I was a saint.” I hear her shift.
“Fine. I didn’t like the way she introduced you.
She’d say, this is Sterling, he’s a firefighter.
Every single time. Not this is Sterling.
Never just your name. The job first, before anyone had asked, and then she’d stand back half a step and wait for the face people make. ”
“That’s a small thing.”
“It’s a small thing I watched happen forty times, so I stopped filing it as small.” Her voice gentles. “She liked being with a man who ran into buildings. She did not like a man who came home smelling like one. Those aren’t the same person, Sterling, and she only ever wanted the first.”
“She told me that at the end. More or less.”
“I know she did. And then you took it and filed it and decided the lesson was that you’re a bad bet. When the actual lesson was that she was.”
I don’t say anything. Out in the bay somebody’s radio crackles and goes quiet.
“Ask me what the difference is,” Becca says.
“What’s the difference.”
“Priya never saw the job. She saw the parts of the uniform that photograph well.” A beat.
“You just told me Mandy put her hands under the water and got the grit out from under your fingernails. Do you understand that you led with that? Out of everything that has happened in the last two days, that’s the part you called me about at one in the morning. ”
I sit there in the red light with my elbows on my knees.
“There was a kid on Tuesday,” I say. “Thirteen. We worked him for forty minutes.”
“Sterling.”
“I’m not telling you for the reason you think. I’m telling you because I came home with him still on me and she didn’t ask me one question. She got me in the water. And when I couldn’t stand up in it she took the soap out of my hand.”
“And Priya,” Becca says quietly, “would have asked whether you’d be all right for a dinner on Saturday.”
“That’s unkind.”
“Is it wrong?”
The honest answer is that it is not wrong, and she knows it is not wrong, which is why she asked it in that particular shape.
“So what am I supposed to do with this,” I say.
“You know what you’re supposed to do with it.”
“She has a job offer in New York, Bec. There’s a deadline on it.
Her parents are asleep in my guest room believing a thing that isn’t true, her father has started using the word intentions out loud, and in four days this is supposed to be over and she goes back to some other unit the landlord has scraped together for her and we go back to Thursday movies. ”
“And you think saying it out loud makes that worse.”
“I think saying it out loud hands her one more thing to manage,” I say.
“She has a mother picking venues and an ex who treated her like a renovation project and a career she’s been apologizing for since she was twenty-two.
If I put this on the pile she’ll do what she always does, which is put everybody else in front of herself and then wonder in six months why she feels like a stranger in her own life.
I’m not going to be one more person she has to accommodate. ”
Becca is quiet a moment.
“That is the most generous-sounding cowardice I have ever heard,” she says.
“What the fuck, Becca.”
“I’m serious. It was beautiful. You should write it down.
” Her voice sharpens. “You’ve dressed it up as protecting her.
But listen to what you actually said. You decided on her behalf, without asking, what she is capable of carrying.
You made a call about her interior life from the outside, the way you’d size up a structure from the sidewalk.
And the reason you get to do that is that if you never ask, you never have to hear no. ”
I don’t answer.
“You’re not protecting the friendship,” she says. “You’re choosing a slower kind of loss because it’s quieter, and because you can tell yourself it’s noble.”
The ventilation cycles. Somebody two bunks over turns onto his side and mutters something into his pillow. But none of it can distract me from the truth of this conversation, no matter how badly I want it to.
“Say it,” Becca says.
“I’ve said it. I’ve said it to you in a hundred shapes in the last twenty minutes.”
“You’ve said things adjacent to it. Say the actual sentence. Once, out loud, to me, at two in the morning, where it costs you nothing.”
I close my eyes.
“I’m in love with her,” I say.
It comes out flat and quiet, and afterward my ears ring the way they do walking out of a loud room.
“Okay,” Becca says. She sounds like she has been holding her breath. “Okay. Good.”
“It doesn’t fix anything.”
“It wasn’t meant to fix anything. It was meant to be true.” A pause. “How does it feel.”
“Terrible.”
“Yeah,” she says, and I can hear her smiling. “That’s how you know.”
We stay on a few more minutes. She tells me about a resident who made her cry in a supply closet on Tuesday and how she intends to outlive him. I tell her about the Saint Sterling crown Jake made for me. She makes me describe it twice.
“Sterling,” she says, right when I think we’re done. “One more and then I’m going to sleep for three hours and die.”
“Go.”
“You called me tonight and not Jake.”
“Jake would have made it a bit.”
“Jake would have made it a bit,” she agrees.
“But that isn’t why. You called me because I’m the only one left who knew you before you built the thing you’re standing inside.
” Her voice goes soft in a way that is much harder to take than the scalpel was.
“I have watched you keep a professional distance from your own life since I was fourteen years old. I would like very much to see what you look like when you stop.”
“That’s a hell of a note to go out on.”
“I’m extremely tired and I’ve stopped editing. Go to sleep.”
“You go to sleep.”
“I love you, you enormous idiot.”
“Yeah,” I say. “I love you too.”
The screen goes dark and the bunk room is just the exit sign and the ventilation and three men breathing.
I lie back down. Sleep isn’t coming and I know it the way I know when a roof isn’t going to hold, so I don’t waste effort fighting it.
Somewhere across the city there is a woman asleep in my bed with a cat on her feet and her parents down the hall, and in four days she is supposed to pack a suitcase and walk back tout of my life and back into her own, and I am supposed to carry the boxes down to the truck for her.
I stare at the water stain shaped like Lake Michigan.
Near three I get up and finish the report, because it has to be filed before shift change. I fill in the narrative box the way I always do. Times, vitals, interventions, disposition. Plain language, no adjectives, nothing a lawyer could use.
Patient stabilized. Transported without incident.
It is accurate. It is also the smallest possible quantity of the truth, which appears to be the thing I am best at in the world, and for the first time in six years of writing these I sit with my thumb over the submit key and understand exactly what I have been doing.