Chapter 21 #2
The paramedic checking Nova looked up. "Lungs sound clear on the initial listen. She's upset, not distressed." He shifted to me. "Ma'am, I need to check you, too."
He checked my oxygen. Blood pressure cuff on one arm while I kept the other hand on Nova's back, where she lay on the stretcher.
Pulse ox on my finger. I answered his questions on autopilot—no, I didn't inhale smoke directly, yes, I'd opened the window, yes, the baby was with me the whole time.
The nurse giving a clinical history while her hand shook against her daughter's back.
A shock blanket over my shoulders. Nova back in my arms, still crying, her fist clenched in the collar of my robe. I sat on the bumper of the medic unit and kissed the top of her head, and the tears I'd been holding since the smoke alarm finally came, quiet, running down my face into her blanket.
I looked at my building.
The third floor. My bedroom window, broken from the outside, had smoke pouring through it.
The corridor visible through the front windows, fully lit, the orange glow steady behind the glass.
The crew working the hoses. Duke somewhere in that line, doing his job.
The other tenants gathered at the far end of the block in coats over pajamas, watching.
Everything I built.
The kitchen where Duke ate cereal standing up this morning.
The string lights still looped across the ceiling.
The plants I stole from Astrid. The rug with the tent-stake holes.
The nursery I put together at eight months pregnant, standing on a step stool to hang the stars.
The rocking chair from his mother. The drawer by the stove with the takeout menus and the manila envelope.
The form.
The amendment form with my signature on the line and Duke's name in my handwriting in the father's field.
The form I filled out at the kitchen island with Nova in the bouncer beside me, the form I'd been carrying for weeks, the form that was supposed to become a conversation, then a notary appointment, and then a new birth certificate with his name on it.
It was in that drawer. In that kitchen. In that building.
The paramedic came back. "We're going to take you and the baby to Hartsdale General. Precautionary. The pediatrician on call needs to check her lungs again with a proper monitor."
I nodded. I knew the protocol. I'd been on the receiving end of these handoffs a hundred times on my own floor—the fire crew bringing patients through the ER doors, the stretcher, the sheet, the clipboard. I'd never been the clipboard.
Hartsdale General at three in the morning was the building I knew better than my own apartment.
The ER lights. The linoleum. The smell of disinfectant and burned coffee from the nurses' station.
I'd walked this corridor a thousand times in scrubs with a chart in my hand.
I was walking it now in a robe and bare feet with soot in my hair and my daughter in my arms.
They took Nova first. The pediatrician on call, Dr. Sato, whom I knew from the NICU consults, reached for her, and I handed her over.
My arms felt wrong the second she left them.
Dr. Sato carried her to the exam table across the room, and a nurse moved in beside her—stethoscope, pulse ox, the infant smoke-exposure protocol running in the steady sequence I recognized from the other side.
Nova screamed. She screamed through the stethoscope. She screamed through the pulse ox clip on her toe. I could see her from the bed—her fists up, her face red, furious at every hand that wasn't mine.
I sat on the exam bed with my arms empty and the shock blanket still over my shoulders and waited.
The fluorescent hummed. The monitor beeped.
I could hear Dr. Sato's voice across the room, calm, giving instructions to the nurse, and I trusted her because I'd worked beside her for years, and trusting her was the only thing I could do with my hands right now.
The exam room door opened.
Duke. He must have decontaminated at the scene, because the turnout gear was gone.
He was in the Hartsdale Fire T-shirt and duty pants he'd put on in our kitchen that morning, his hair damp, pushed back from his forehead.
His hands were the tell. The knuckles raw, the palms blistered. No gloves. He'd gone up without them.
Hank must have sent him. Or he'd finished his piece of the fire and come straight here, because that was what he did. He came.
He crossed the room to me. His arms went around me, his face against the side of my head, and I felt the full weight of what the last hour had cost him come through his hands on my back.
He held on. I held on. His breathing was still hard from the work, and the smell of smoke was in his hair, and I pressed my face into his shoulder and let him be the only thing in the room for a few seconds.
He pulled back. Looked at my face. Looked across the room at Nova on the exam table, screaming.
"She okay?"
"Dr. Sato's checking her lungs."
He nodded. He sat in the chair beside my bed. A nurse came to his hands with gauze, antiseptic, and the careful wrapping of burns that needed to be assessed by the burn unit in the morning. He let the nurse work without looking. He watched the exam table.
I leaned into him. My shoulder against his, my arms empty, the weight of my daughter's absence a physical thing across my chest. His wrapped hand came up to the back of my head, clumsy with the gauze, and rested there.
The door opened.
My mother was in the doorway of the exam room.
A wool coat thrown over a nightgown. Her hair was down around her shoulders—I couldn't remember the last time I'd seen her hair down.
She must have seen the address on the scanner app or the neighborhood page, because nobody had called her.
She'd driven herself to Hartsdale General in the middle of the night because she saw her daughter's building on a screen and knew where they'd bring her.
She stopped in the doorway. Her eyes moved across the room.
Dr. Sato was at the exam table with Nova, the stethoscope on her small back.
Across the room, me—in a robe with soot on my face, bare feet on the linoleum, leaning into the man beside me.
Duke in the same Hartsdale Fire T-shirt he'd left our kitchen in that morning, one bandaged hand on the back of my head.
My mother's hand went to her mouth.
Her eyes filled. I watched it happen from across the room—the composure that held through eleven weeks of measuring, breaking open under fluorescent lights in the middle of the night.
My mother crossed the room.