Chapter Eleven Brielle
Jase said to stay off my feet.
He was very clear about it. Partial Ivy League and everything. And I did stay off them, for a while, sitting in the kitchen after the alarm took them out and finishing my coffee in the sudden quiet of a station that had gone from populated to empty in under two minutes.
I hadn't gone to the railing to watch them go.
I don't know why. I heard it all from the kitchen — Zack already in his gear before the third tone had finished, Rory's voice calling something to Carmen, the dispatch coming back through the front in that flat, steady relay that means here is the situation, here is where you are needed. The engine rolling out.
Then silence. I sat there for a good twenty minutes after that, maybe longer, listening to the building settle around me and watching the light move across the kitchen floor.
Then I found the painkillers Jase had left on the counter with a Post-it note that said DON’T BE A HERO, which I took as both a medical instruction and a personal challenge, swallowed two of them with the last of my coffee, and decided that staying in this chair for the rest of the day was simply not something I was capable of.
My feet hurt. They do. The left one is more than the right, a deep, persistent ache that sharpens when I put my full weight on it. But the painkillers take the edge off enough that I can move, one hand trailing along the wall in the hallway, and it’s fine.
It’s fine.
I tell myself this several times as I make my way out of the kitchen.
The station is a different place when it’s empty.
Not empty exactly, because there are people here. A man named Rory, who waved at me from the bay earlier when I peered over the railing, was busy with something involving the engine that required a great deal of focused frowning.
A woman named Carmen sitting at a desk near the front, headphones in, eyes on a monitor.
When I drift into her peripheral vision she pulls one earbud out, looks me over with an expression that communicates both that she is fully aware of my situation and that she does not intend to make anything of it, and puts the earbud back in.
The low sounds of a building that is always, on some level, waiting.
But the particular energy of Max, Jase, and Evan is absent, and without it, the station feels both larger and quieter than it did before.
I take my time.
I move down the main hallway on the ground floor, trailing my fingers along the painted cinderblock wall, stopping to look at the framed photographs hung at intervals.
Station photos going back decades, crews standing in front of engines with the formal stiffness of people who have been told to hold still.
A few commendations in plain frames. A hand-lettered sign above a doorway that reads LEAVE IT BETTER THAN YOU FOUND IT, which strikes me as advice that applies to considerably more than fire stations.
From somewhere deeper in the building, two voices.
"—I'm saying it's been a structural problem with the Thursday rotation since March—"
"The Thursday rotation is fine."
"Zack. Look me in the eye and tell me you have never once done double equipment checks because of the Thursday rotation."
A pause.
"That situation was different."
"You just said the rotation is fine. So how was that situation different if the rotation is fine?"
The voices recede around a corner somewhere and take the argument with them.
I stand still in the hallway for a moment, listening to the silence they leave behind.
There's something I can't quite name, hearing that.
Two people having an argument so well-worn it's stopped being an argument and started being a ritual.
A thing you do because you've always done it and the other person always answers the same way and after enough repetitions an argument can become a kind of comfort.
I think about all the arguments in my life that never became comfortable. The ones that stayed jagged and unresolved and pointed.
I'd like to be somewhere long enough for that to happen.
I stop in front of one of the older crew photos and try to find Max in it, then realize it predates him by at least a decade.
The men in it have the look of another era, mustaches and a different cut of uniform, standing in front of an engine that is somehow both identical to and completely different from the one in the bay now.
I wonder how long it takes to become part of a place like this. To be in the photograph.
My left foot gives a pointed throb, and I shift my weight, leaning against the wall for a second.
I’ve never really had a place that was mine.
Richard’s apartment was Richard’s apartment with my things in it.
My parents’ house was my parents’ house, decorated entirely to my mother’s taste, down to the bedroom I grew up in, which looked like a showroom and felt like one too.
Even my year abroad in Europe, which was the closest I’ve ever come to a life that felt genuinely chosen, was still technically a requirement of the degree my mother decided I should pursue.
I push off the wall and keep moving.
There’s a door at the end of the hallway that’s half open, warm light spilling out from inside. I can hear a voice, low and measured, and I’m about to turn back the way I came when I catch a fragment of it.
“—can’t keep operating like this. Either we get the allocation, or we start talking about restructuring, and I’m not having that conversation again with—”
I freeze.
The voice has the quality of someone who is accustomed to being listened to but is currently doing the listening, except not happily.
I take one step back.
My foot catches on absolutely nothing, which is the specific and humiliating talent I apparently have, and I stumble sideways into the wall with a sound that is not subtle.
The voice stops.
A beat of silence.
Then the door swings fully open.
The man in the hallway is not tall, but he doesn’t look like he needs height before he fills up a room.
He’s somewhere in his early fifties, with a gray mustache and the kind of face that has been weathered into something that reads as permanently unimpressed.
He’s holding a phone to his chest, which means I interrupted something, and he’s looking at me with an expression that I cannot immediately read.
“Miss Hayes,” he says. “I’m Captain Daniel Weston.”
I straighten up, which costs me something in the left foot. “Captain Weston. I’m sorry, I was just—”
“Wandering,” he says.
It’s not quite an accusation.
“Yes,” I say, because there’s no reasonable alternative explanation for why I’m standing in his hallway having walked into his wall.
He looks at me for a beat. Then he lifts the phone back to his ear. “I’ll call you back,” he says, ends the call, and steps back from the doorway. “Come in.”
It’s phrased like an invitation and structured like an order. I come in.
His office is small and organized in the way of someone who thinks clearly in a tidy space.
There’s a desk with two monitors, a shelf of binders that look actually used rather than decorative, and a framed photograph on the wall behind him that shows a younger Weston in full gear standing in front of what appears to be a much larger station than this one.
A Jets mug sits on the corner of his desk next to a folded newspaper.
He settles into his chair and looks at me across the desk with the frank, measuring attention of a man who has spent thirty years making quick assessments of situations and people.
“How are the feet?” he asks.
“Better,” I say. “Jase re-dressed them this morning.”
He nods. “Concussion symptoms?”
“Headache. Manageable.”
Another nod. He folds his hands on the desk. “Max tells me you have nowhere to go.”
“That’s accurate,” I say.
“He also tells me you’d like to stay here for a few days while you figure out your situation.”
“Also accurate.”
Weston looks at me steadily. “You understand that a fire station is not a hotel.”
“I do.”
“And that having a civilian living on the premises creates complications that I’m going to have to account for.”
“I understand that too.” I hold his gaze because I have spent enough of my life looking away from authority figures, and I am finished with it.
“I want to be useful. I’m not interested in being a burden or a complication.
If there’s something I can do to earn my place here, even temporarily, I’d like to do it. ”
Something shifts in his expression, subtle enough that I almost miss it.
“You’d like to earn it,” he says.
“Yes.”
“What can you do?”
And here is where I have to be honest, because this man looks like someone who can tell the difference between honesty and performance at a considerable distance.
“Not much,” I say. “Practically speaking. I have a degree in Art History that has never been useful to anyone, including me. I can speak passable French and excellent Italian. I know more about mid-century furniture than any reasonable person should.” I pause.
“I can learn things quickly. I’m organized when I’m given a framework to work within.
And I’m told I’m good at managing difficult personalities, which, given that I grew up with my mother, is either a skill or a survival mechanism, but either way it counts. ”
Weston looks at me for a long moment.
“The admin office needs organizing. It's been a mess for longer than I'd like to admit and nobody here has had the time or the inclination to deal with it.”
I nod for more.
“Paperwork. Scheduling. Incident reports, supply orders, correspondence. It’s not glamorous.”
“I don’t need glamorous,” I say, and mean it with a sincerity that surprises even me.
He studies me for another moment with that weathered, unreadable face.
“You'd be here on a trial basis,” he says finally. “Unpaid for now, given the circumstances. If you're more trouble than you're worth, we won't continue.”
“That’s fair,” I say.