Chapter 3 #2
I run through what I have done the way a climber runs a route after the fall.
I set a fire. I walked back into the fire I set.
I carried a target across a lawn she was supposed to die on.
I did not call dispatch. I did not log the rescue.
I did not wait for the engines. I am taking a woman Val ordered dead to a cabin Val does not know about.
Every one of these things is a crime. One stacked on top of the other is something bigger than a crime.
It's a new arrangement with Val that Val has not agreed to yet.
I think about turning around.
The thought is there and I sit with it honestly the way I was taught to sit with bad thoughts on ladder work.
I could drive back to the hospital in Redwater.
I could walk her into the ER and say I saw a fire and pulled her out and my radio was down.
Kessler would carry that story for me. Val would be furious but Val would forgive what could be framed as a firefighter reflex.
That is the version that keeps me in my rank.
That is the version that keeps me breathing past tomorrow.
I do not turn around.
I do not turn around and I do not let myself list why because the why is not something I can hold yet.
It's the photo and it's her face against my coat and it's the word mine I thought in a burning house, and none of those are things I am going to think about tonight.
Tonight I drive. Tonight I get her out of the city, into a bed, warm, alive. Tomorrow is another country.
The cabin comes up on the left. Single story.
Cedar siding. Woodstove chimney. A porch I built myself the summer after the warehouse collapse, when my arm was still learning the new shape of itself.
I laid every board of that porch with one working hand and one hand I was retraining.
I know every knothole. I know which board sings when you step on it wrong and which board holds when the frost heaves.
It's the only thing I own that Val has never set foot on.
No outside light. No neighbors. The county plow doesn't come this far.
I pull up to the porch. I kill the engine.
I sit with my hands on the wheel.
In the passenger seat a woman I have known the name of for five hours is breathing steady against the wool throw.
Her eyelashes are dark against her cheek.
The cut on her palm has clotted. The silk of her nightgown has a smear of ash at the hem.
She is the most expensive thing I have ever had in this truck and I don't know how I'm going to carry her into my house without my hands knowing they're touching her.
I carry her.
I unlock the front door with my elbow and I kick it open and I cross the living room to the bedroom and I lay her down on my bed.
I straighten the wool throw. I push her hair back off her face with the back of my glove because my hand is still shaking and I do not trust my hand.
I check her pulse again. Sixty-eight. Breathing even.
I pull the quilt up over her. I turn on the lamp on the side table, low, so she doesn't wake into full dark.
I stand at the foot of the bed.
I stand there longer than I mean to.
Then I go. I build a fire in the stove. I boil water.
I wash the blood off my hands in the kitchen sink, scrub the skin raw, find a clean henley in the dresser in the mudroom, peel the smoke-soaked one off my back and hang it on the porch.
I take the turnout gear into the shed and I hose it down and I pack it into a bag and I tell myself I'll deal with it in the morning.
I come back in and I stand at the kitchen sink with both hands braced on the counter and I let my arms shake.
They want to shake. They have wanted to shake since I was on the stairs going up.
I let them. I keep my head down over the sink and I let my shoulders drop and I let my jaw unclench the way I used to let it unclench in the shower after a bad pull, and after about a minute my hands go still again.
That's discipline. I've had that discipline for twenty years.
It used to work faster.
I come back inside.
Evangeline.
She hasn't moved. She's warmer now. Her breathing is a sleep breathing. The color in her cheeks is almost right.
I sit down in the chair across from the bed.
I watch her sleep the way I used to watch patients in the ambulance bay my first year on the job. With the quiet intentness of somebody who is responsible for a life they did not ask to be responsible for. The light from the stove makes the room orange. Her hair fans out on my pillow.
Somewhere in the city Val is in her office looking at a closed folder. Somewhere a body is being pulled out of the east wing. Somewhere my phone is dark on the seat of my truck, off, off, off. Somewhere tomorrow is coming.
I sit in the chair and I watch a woman I have just committed my life to and I do not know her middle name.
I do not go to sleep.
My phone buzzes on the kitchen counter where I plugged it in to charge. I cross the room. I pick it up. Val. Done? again, second time, an hour later than the first.
I type back, one letter at a time, with a hand that is steadier than it has any right to be.
Done.
I set the phone face down on the counter. I go back to the chair. I watch Evangeline Clark sleep under my quilt in the orange light of the woodstove, and I call it my first honest lie.