2. Cole
COLE
After my physio appointment, I head straight over to the Children's Ward.
The chair outside Danny's room is the wrong height.
It's too low, so my knees come up, and the armrests are too far apart to be any use, and I've been sitting in it for forty minutes and I'm not going to move.
Through the window I can see him.
A small shape under a blue blanket. One arm thrown up over his head the way kids sleep, like sleep is something that happens to them rather than something they do.
The machines next to him tick along. Green lines. Numbers I've learned to read without anyone teaching me.
His mom is in the next bed.
She doesn't move at all.
She hasn't moved in eleven days.
There's a different set of machines for her, and I've learned to read those too, and I don't like what they say.
A nurse comes down the hall with a cart and slows when she sees me.
They all do that now.
The slow, the glance, the little recalibration.
He's here again.
She doesn't say it. She gives me the look that's halfway between sympathy and a question, and then she goes into the room and checks the boy's line and comes back out.
"You can wait in the family room," she says. "It's more comfortable."
"I'm fine."
She nods like she expected that, because she did.
I've said it every day for eleven days.
I should care that they've all clocked me.
The badge, the name, the firefighter who sits in the bad chair.
Word gets around a hospital faster than it gets around a firehouse, and that's saying something.
But, I don't care.
It's been hard to care about much recently.
Eleven days I've been coming here.
Sitting in the same chair. By the same window. Same green lines on the machines.
If they want to talk about me in the break room they can talk about me in the break room.
I lean my head back against the wall and close my eyes for a second, and that's a mistake, because the second I do, she's there.
Maya.
The physical therapist with the steady hands and the mouth that doesn't quit.
You don't get to keep being the thing you are.
She said that to me an hour ago like she had any idea what I am. And the worst part is, I've been carrying the sentence around ever since.
Turning it over.
Examining it.
Like a stone I picked up and can't put down.
She's beautiful. That's the thing I keep snagging on.
Dark eyes that don't look away when you want them to, and a way of standing her ground that I'd have admired in anyone else.
And I was a jerk to her.
I know I was a jerk to her. But I couldn't help it.
All I could think about was Danny in his bed with his mom in a coma laying next to him.
A better man would go back and apologize.
I open my eyes and look at the boy through the glass.
I wait for the guilt to show up. The ordinary kind. The kind a decent man feels when he's rude to a woman who was only trying to help him.
But, it doesn't come.
There's no room.
Every part of me that's built to care about things is already in that room. On that small shape under the blue blanket. On the woman in the next bed who hasn't opened her eyes in eleven days.
Wake up, I think at her.
Not for me, but for him.
Because if she doesn’t…
I don't finish it. I've started that sentence a hundred times and I've never once let myself get to the end of it.
It comes out shaped like a prayer, or at least it tries to.
Please. Let her wake up.
I've sent that one up a thousand times since the fire.
More.
And I send it again now, eyes open, looking through the glass at a woman I've never heard speak.
The trouble is I can't make myself mean it the way you're supposed to mean it.
I've been a churchgoing man my whole life. You don't do this job without it, or you don't do it long.
You carry something with you into a burning house. Some deal you've struck with whoever's up there. And most days the deal holds.
You go in, you come out, you say thank you.
I never thought hard about it. It was just there, the way the floor is there.
So I say the words as I watch over the boy.
But under the words there's the other thing now. The thing that's been sitting in my chest for eleven days, ugly and quiet.
What kind of God lets a thing like that happen.
I don't have an answer.
I used to think a man who asked that question was a man who'd stopped paying attention. Now I'm the one asking it, and the paying attention is the whole problem.
Because I was there. I saw exactly how it happened.
I close my eyes again and I'm right back in it.
The heat first.
You forget the heat between fires. Your body won't hold the memory of it, and then you're in it again and it's like walking into a wall that's alive.
Smoke down to my knees.
The boy where his mother said he'd be, top of the stairs, curled up small the way he's curled up now under that blue blanket.
I got him out.
That part I did right.
I carried him down and out and put him in clean air and he was breathing.
He was breathing, and someone took him from my arms.
But he wasn't the only one in that house.
Danny used to have a little sister.
She was at the other end of the hall, up where the heat was worst, and I could hear her.
Not screaming.
Worse than screaming.
That thin, high calling a kid does when they still believe somebody's coming.
Mommy. Mommy.
Over and over, smaller each time.
The house was going.
Anybody who's done this long enough can read a building the way you read a sky before a storm, and this one was telling me.
The groan in the joists.
The way the smoke was rolling instead of rising.
It was at that point a fire gets to. The point where the right call and the only call stop being the same thing, and every man on that lawn knew it.
Brooks had a hand on my arm.
“Cole,” he said. “It's coming down. You don't go back in there.”
But, I went back in.
He didn't try to stop me twice.
He's been doing this longer than I have, and he knows what a man's face looks like when there's no talking him out of it.
I think about that too, now.
That he let me go.
The stairs were worse going up than they'd been coming down. I found her at the end of the hall, crouched low the way they teach you. Knees to her chest, hands over her ears like she could keep the noise out. Eyes huge in all that black.
I scooped her up.
She weighed nothing.
That's the thing my arms won't forget. You brace for a child and there's just nothing there.
A bird. A bundle of sticks.
She grabbed two fistfuls of my collar and held on.
"I've got you," I told her. "You hold on tight to me. Your mom's right outside waiting on you, okay? We're gonna go see her right now."
And she put her mouth right up by my ear, and over all of it, the roar and the crack of it, she said, "I knew you'd come."
I knew you'd come.
I started moving.
I got maybe three steps before a chunk of the ceiling came down across the hall in front of us. A beam and a hiss of sparks, close enough that I felt it on my face.
I turned my shoulder to it and kept her tucked away from the worst of it and then kept going.
She was coughing now.
Bad.
Deep in her chest. The kind you don't want to hear.
And when that section let go behind us the whole hall lit orange. A wall of it standing straight up where the floor used to be quiet.
And then I put my foot down.
I knew before it gave that I'd messed up.
That horrible feeling you get the moment you realize you've made a mistake that goes past fixing.
The cold drop behind your ribs. The bottom falling out of your stomach.
Your whole body understands it a half second before your mind catches up.
No time to step back.
No time to shift my weight. Just the knowing, and then the floor giving way beneath my feet.
I tried to grab ahold for something.
Reflex.
But there was nothing there to grab ahold of. Just smoke and the empty place where the hall had been, and my hand closing on air.
So I did the only thing left to do.
I pulled the little girl to me. I wrapped both arms around her body and turned myself so I'd take the brunt of it.
I brought my shoulder down the way they drill into you a thousand times so you'll do it without thinking when thinking's gone.
Making sure she was on top as we fell down through the burning timber.
My back hitting the ground hard.
Like being run over by a truck.
The air going out of me in one piece. My head cracking off something so hard the world went white at the edges and a loud ringing sound started blaring inside my head.
Like church bells.
And then the orange.
So much orange as the flames coming in low around us. Roaring like they'd been waiting down here the whole time.
Somewhere above me, far away, men were shouting my name.
Cole. Cole.
Like it was coming through water.
And in my mouth, that familiar taste.
Copper and heat.
The taste you learn early in this job and never once get used to. My own blood, warm at the back of my throat.
And, I held on to her.
That much I remember.
Whatever else gave out, my arms didn't.
I held on to her and I tried to will myself to stand up and carry her out of the building and take her to her mother and her brother waiting outside.
I tried to move my legs and lift myself up. But I couldn't.
There was something trapping me.
Something stopping me from moving.
And then a hand on my knee.
Not in the fire, but in the hospital.
A woman's voice says, "are you alright?"
It pulls me up out of all that black so fast the hallway swings, and for a second I don't know where I am.
And then I do.
The bad chair. The window. The green lines.
There's a nurse crouched in front of me.
My hands are fists. Both of them, knuckles white, pressed down hard against my thighs. My jaw aches the way it aches when I've been grinding my teeth without knowing I'm doing it.
My shirt's stuck to my back. And when I blink, my eyes aren't dry.
I don't know how long I've been sitting here like this.
"Are you alright?" she says again. Gentle, like you'd say it to one of the kids. "Can I get you anything?"
I open my mouth. But nothing comes.
Because no.
No, I am not alright.
And there's nothing in this building or any other she can get me that would make me alright.
So I stand up.
I do it slow and careful, because she's right there and the last thing on this earth I want is to knock into her or make her flinch.
I'm not going to be that too.
I just need the door. I need fresh air and sunlight and I need to be somewhere that isn't this hospital outside this room.
"Sorry," I say. "I'm so sorry."
I walk past her.
Not fast enough to scare anyone, but fast enough to get out of there as soon as I possibly can.
I walk straight down the hall toward the doors without looking at anyone in the face. My chest pulling tight and my breathing not coming right.
Like I was back in that damn fire.
I push through the doors and then through another set of doors, and down the hall and through another set of doors until I'm outside in the cold.
The sunlight shines in my eyes and makes me wince and the pain in my shoulder burns something fierce.
But at least I can feel pain. Unlike Danny's little sister.
At least I have that.