Chapter Eleven
Zoe
One week left.
Last day. Last chance to make an impression. I bring cookies and flowers this time because I’ve run out of ideas and because the bodega on the corner had sunflowers and Grandma Eloise always said you should bring flowers to places you love.
The station is different today. I can feel it before I see it. The bay doors are open but there’s a tension in the air, a readiness, the quiet of a crew between calls and waiting for the next one. I remember this from the academy. Controlled stillness. The body at rest while the mind stays lit.
Torres is inside. She comes out when she sees me, takes the Tupperware without a word, and looks at the sunflowers.
“Those for Cap?”
“Those are for the station.”
“Cap doesn’t do flowers.”
“Then they’re for the kitchen table.”
Torres almost smiles. She takes the flowers too. “Wait here.”
I wait. The folding chair is becoming mine in a way that probably isn’t healthy.
I’ve sat in it multiple times now and I’ve memorized the angle of it, the wobble in the left front leg, the view it gives me of the bay and the engine and the street beyond.
From this chair I can see the intersection where the sirens turn, and if I close my eyes I can hear the ghost of every engine that’s ever passed this spot.
Cap comes out. She’s got a cookie in her hand.
“Kimball.”
“Captain.”
“When do you report to Medina?”
“Monday.”
She nods. Takes a bite of the cookie. Doesn’t react to it, which is a reaction in itself because Grandma Eloise’s cookies demand a reaction and Cap is working very hard to have none.
“You’ve been here every week.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“You washed the engine. You brought flowers. You’ve made my crew a series of baked goods that Torres has started referring to as ‘critical supplies.’”
“I just want a chance.”
“I know what you want.” Cap finishes the cookie.
Wipes her hands on her pants, a gesture so human and unguarded that it startles me.
“The answer is the same, Kimball. I don’t have a spot.
I can’t create one. And even if I could, I don’t know you.
I don’t know how you work. I don’t know what you’re like on a call or under pressure or at three in the morning when everyone’s tired and the tones drop.
Cookies and enthusiasm are not qualifications. ”
“Then let me show you. One shift. One ride-along. Let me prove—”
The tones drop.
The sound is instant and everywhere. A sharp electronic pulse that cuts through the air and changes every body in the station in a single second.
I hear movement inside, fast, coordinated.
Boots on concrete. Locker doors. The engine turning over, that deep rumble I’ve heard from my bedroom a thousand times, and now I’m ten feet from it and it fills my whole body.
Torres is in the driver’s seat. Hayes is behind her. Rivera, Walsh, two others I recognize. They move like water finding its course, no wasted motion, every person flowing to their position as if the positions were carved into them.
Cap is already gone. She was standing in front of me eating a cookie and now she’s climbing into the engine, headset on, and she doesn’t look at me. She doesn’t look at anything except the job.
The bay doors are already open. The engine rolls.
Lights first, then the siren, that sound, that exact sound I’ve been hearing from my bed for twenty-two years.
Except now I’m standing in the bay where it starts.
I’m at the origin point. The sound begins here, in this concrete room, and it travels out through the neighborhood and past the park and down Haverford and through my bedroom window, and right now some kid might be lying in bed counting it.
The engine turns onto the street and accelerates and the siren builds and I track it. South, then east, toward the commercial district. The sound stretches and thins and then it’s gone and the bay is empty and I’m standing in it alone.
Completely alone. In Station 11. The kitchen light is on. The dispatch radio is still murmuring, low, and I can hear the call playing out in broken transmissions. Structure fire, two-alarm, commercial address. Real.
I should leave. There’s no one here and I don’t belong here and I’m standing in an empty fire station that isn’t mine, listening to a call I can’t answer.
I don’t leave.
I sit in the folding chair and I listen.
The radio crackles. I hear Cap’s voice, calm and precise, directing the approach.
I hear Torres confirming the engine’s position.
I hear someone call for a second line and someone else confirm ventilation and the whole conversation is in a language I studied for sixteen weeks and can speak but have never heard performed at this level.
They’re good. They’re so good. The communication is tight, every transmission necessary, no chatter, no hesitation.
Cap gives an order and it happens. Torres calls a position and it holds.
This is what Station 11 sounds like on a call, and it sounds like music, like the thing Teague talks about when she describes punk, like people who care so much about something that they’ve turned caring into precision.
I sit in the folding chair for thirty-seven minutes.
I don’t move. I listen to the entire call from dispatch to all-clear, and when Cap’s voice comes through with “Station 11, returning to quarters,” I stand up and walk out of the bay and down the sidewalk and I don’t look back because if I look back I’ll see the empty station waiting for a crew that isn’t mine and I’ll cry on Haverford again and I promised myself I wouldn’t.
* * *
Mom and Dad are on the porch when I get home. Dad’s reading the paper on his phone, which he does on the porch because the light is better, he says, even though the light inside is perfectly fine. Mom’s drinking iced tea and talking to Mrs. Henderson from next door about the church fundraiser.
“Hey baby,” Mom says. “Good workout?”
“Yeah.”
“You look tired.” She pats the chair next to her. “Sit with us.”
I sit. Mrs. Henderson waves at me and tells me congratulations again for the hundredth time and asks if I’m excited about starting at my new station and I say yes and she says her nephew was a firefighter in Baltimore and he loved it, just loved it, best job in the world.
“Station 24, right?” Mrs. Henderson says. “Your mama’s told everyone at church.”
“That’s my girl.” Mom beams. “Starting Monday.”
Dad looks at me. Just a glance, quick, but he sees what Mom doesn’t because Dad is quiet and quiet people see things that loud people miss.
He sees that I’m tired in a way that a workout doesn’t explain.
He sees that my sneakers are wet, again, even though the gym doesn’t have puddles.
He sees that I’m holding my phone in my lap with both hands, gripping it, like I need something to hold onto.
He doesn’t say anything. He goes back to his phone. But when Mrs. Henderson leaves and Mom goes inside to start dinner, he stays on the porch.
“You okay, baby girl?”
“I’m fine.”
“You don’t seem fine.”
“I’m adjusting.”
“To what?”
I look at him. My dad. Martin Kimball. The man who worked at the post office for twenty-two years because the benefits were good and the pension was reliable and his family would never wonder.
The man who went to protests in college and came home and got a government job because rage doesn’t pay the mortgage but showing up does.
The man who pins badges on his daughter’s chest with shaking hands and cries in auditoriums and reads the newspaper on the porch because the light is better.
“To the idea that sometimes you don’t get what you want even when you’ve done everything right,” I say.
He looks at me for a long time. Then he nods.
“That’s a hard lesson.”
“It’s a stupid lesson.”
“Those are usually the same thing.” He goes back to his phone. “Dinner’s at seven.”
That’s Dad. He doesn’t push. He doesn’t solve. He just sits next to you and lets you know he heard you and then he gives you the schedule because the Kimballs run on a schedule and dinner is at seven.
* * *
I text Teague at eight.
bad day. need music. what’s the prescription?
She responds in a minute.
how bad?
pretty bad
the replacements. “unsatisfied.” play it in the dark and don’t think about anything.
I lie on my bed. Earbuds in. Lights off. Stars on the ceiling. I pull up the Replacements and find “Unsatisfied” and press play.
It’s raw. Stripped. A voice that sounds like it’s been awake for three days asking a question it knows doesn’t have an answer.
Look me in the eye, then tell me that I’m satisfied.
The guitar is messy and the drums are simple and the whole thing sounds like it’s about to fall apart but it holds together through sheer stubbornness, and I lie in the dark and listen to it three times in a row.
I text her.
that song understands me.
it understands everybody. that’s why it works.
can I come to the bar?
I’m here. It's literally a business. You don't need my permission.
I get out of bed. Change out of my sweats. Tell Mom I’m going out. She gives me the look but she doesn’t stop me because I’m twenty-two and legally allowed to leave my own house, even if the look suggests she has opinions about the legality of her child being out past nine on a weeknight.
Anthem is warm and dim and half-full, the weeknight crowd, quieter than Saturday. Teague is behind the bar in a faded band shirt and her rings and her hair freshly touched up, the pink brighter than last week, almost magenta in the neon light.
She sees me come in and starts making a Moscow mule before I sit down.
“That bad?” she says, setting it in front of me.
“I sat in an empty fire station today and listened to a crew I can’t join run a call I can’t answer.”
“That’s bad.”
“I have five days.”
“Until what?”
“Until I report to the wrong station and this is over.”
Teague leans on the bar. She’s close. Closer than usual. I can see the detail work on the koi tattoo on her forearm, scales in red and orange, fresh, still healing under a thin layer of lotion.
“New ink?” I ask.
“Vanessa finished a section.” She turns her arm so I can see it better. The koi is mid-swim, tail curving, mouth open. It’s beautiful and fierce and alive on her skin.
“It’s gorgeous.”
“Vanessa doesn’t do anything that isn’t gorgeous.” Teague turns her arm back. “So what’s the plan? Five days.”
“There is no plan. I’ve tried everything. Cookies. Flowers. I washed her rig. I sat in her bay. She keeps saying no.”
“So what are you going to do?”
“I don’t know.”
Teague nods. She doesn’t offer solutions. She doesn’t tell me it’ll work out or to be positive or to try harder. She just nods and leans on the bar and lets me sit with it.
The playlist is playing something slow. Tom Waits, maybe. Gravel and piano.
“You know what I like about punk?” Teague says after a while.
“What?”
“It doesn’t guarantee you anything. It just says you have the right to try. To show up and be loud and take up space and demand what you want, even if the answer is no.” She picks up a glass and starts polishing. “Punk never promised a happy ending. It just promised you the stage.”
“That’s depressing.”
“That’s honest.” She sets the glass down. “You’ve been showing up. You’ve been loud. You took the stage. That matters regardless of what the captain decides.”
“It doesn’t feel like it matters.”
“It matters to me.” She says it quiet and quick, like she didn’t plan to, and then she picks up another glass and starts polishing and doesn’t look at me.
I sit there with my Moscow mule and my five days and the sound of Tom Waits and the thing Teague just said that she’s pretending she didn’t say, and I don’t push it.
I’ve learned not to push with her. She gives things when she’s ready and trying to take more would break whatever this is, this thing between us that I don’t have a word for yet.
I stay until closing. Teague counts the register and I sit at the bar and we don’t talk much and the silence is better than most conversations I’ve ever had. When she’s done, she turns off the overheads and the neon stays on and the bar goes blue and pink.
“Go home, Zoe.”
“I know.” I stand up. “Teague?”
“Yeah.”
“Thanks for the prescription. The Replacements. It helped.”
“That’s what music’s for.” She’s wiping down the bar, not looking at me. “Get some sleep.”
I walk to the door. Stop. Turn around.
“It matters to me too,” I say. “This. Whatever this is.”
She looks up. The neon makes her face half-blue, half-pink, and her eyes are steady and her mouth doesn’t move and she doesn’t say anything.
I leave before she has to.