Chapter 22 #2
I followed them inside. The apartment was warm in the way places got when someone was actually trying to make them a home.
A kid's drawings taped to the refrigerator, visible through the doorway to the kitchen.
A throw blanket folded over the arm of the couch.
A stack of mail on a side table that she hadn't gotten around to yet.
"How's Rosie?" Jenna asked.
"She's good. She still wakes up once in a while from the nightmares. But she's good."
"Quinn too. It comes and goes." Jenna shook her head. "Some nights are just harder. You learn to ride them out."
"Yeah." Jamie's voice was small. "You do."
A boy appeared in the hallway behind Jenna.
Tall. Sixteen, maybe seventeen. Dark hair that fell into his eyes. He moved quietly, like he was used to not taking up space.
"You remember Cole," Jenna said. "He's staying with me for a bit."
"Miss Donovan." The boy nodded at Jamie. Then at me. "Mr. Reeves."
"Jamie's fine."
"Sam," I said.
Cole's mouth twitched, not quite a smile. He had a book at his side, one finger tucked inside to mark his place. The cover was worn at the corners. I couldn't read the title from where I stood, but it didn't look like something a teacher had handed him.
"Cole, honey, can you put the kettle on?"
He disappeared into the kitchen without a word.
Jenna led us to the small table by the window. "How's the apartment working out?"
"It's been a lifesaver." Jamie sat down. I took the chair beside her. "Close to Rosie's preschool, which helps. How about you two? Are you settled?"
"As settled as we're going to get. Quinn likes the playground. That's what matters." Jenna sat across from us. "It's a landing place. It'll do."
Cole came back with three mugs balanced on a tray. He set them down in front of each of us, careful not to spill, then stay back out in the living room. I watched him fold himself into the corner of the couch. He opened the book.
I had the sense he wasn't reading.
Something in me caught on him. I didn't know why at first.
Then I did.
I knew that stillness. I'd worn it at his age. Sitting at other people's kitchen tables, listening to other people's conversations, being careful not to take up any more room than I'd been given. Hoping someone would keep letting me stay.
I pulled my eyes back to the table.
Jenna wrapped her hands around her mug. Looked at Jamie. "So. You mentioned on the phone you've been working on something."
Jamie nodded. "A reform proposal. For the fire department."
"Tell me about it."
Jamie walked her through it. The staffing.
The protocols. The way crews from different stations couldn't coordinate because their radios didn't talk to each other.
The dispatchers who could hear a call going wrong and couldn't send help unless the captain asked for it.
The signatures they'd been collecting. The voices still missing.
Jenna listened without interrupting. When Jamie finished, she didn't answer right away.
She set her mug down. Ran a finger along the rim. Then she looked up.
"I've been an ER nurse for eleven years." Her voice was steady. "You know how many patients I've watched die who shouldn't have? People who were alive when the call went out. Alive when the neighbors dialed 911. Gone by the time they got to us."
Jamie didn't answer.
"Sometimes it's a heart attack and the ambulance is twenty minutes out because the nearest station is running short.
Sometimes it's a car accident and the closest engine is on another call and the next closest can't come because nobody asked them to.
Sometimes it's a house fire and the crew that gets there can't call for backup because their radios won't punch through the walls.
" Jenna shook her head. "I've sat with a lot of families in waiting rooms. I've heard a lot of people ask me why nobody came faster. "
She looked at her hands.
"I can't fix any of that from where I stand. I patch them up when they come in. I write the charts. I go home. I come back the next day and I do it again. I've been watching it happen for a long time. I didn't have anywhere to put it."
She met Jamie's eyes.
"I'll sign. Whatever you need from me, you've got it."
Jamie exhaled. "Thank you."
"You don't have to thank me, Jamie. This is the right thing to do." She was quiet for a moment. "And I owe your brother more than a signature."
The room went still.
Jenna looked at her hands. "That night has played and replayed in my head ever since. I don't know if I've told you. I don't think I told you at the funeral. I couldn't get the words out."
"You don't have to," Jamie said.
"I want to." Jenna looked up. "I want you to know what he did."
I reached under the table and found Jamie's hand. Laced my fingers through hers.
"I didn't think we were going to make it out alive."
Jenna's voice was quiet.
"The house was already in flames when I woke up.
I don't know what pulled me out of sleep—the smoke, maybe, or the heat.
I called 911. I was trying to get to Quinn's room, but the hallway was on fire.
I couldn't get through. I couldn't get to her.
The dispatcher told me to stay where I was.
I kept telling her my daughter was on the other side of the hall.
She kept telling me to stay put, kept reassuring me that help was coming. "
She shook her head slowly.
"Your brother got to me first."
Jamie's hand tightened around mine.
I watched Jamie's face. She wasn't moving. She was holding herself still the way she did when she was trying not to fall apart in front of someone. I kept my hand on hers under the table.
I'd read the report. I'd listened to the recordings. But hearing it this way was different.
"He found me in my room. Picked me up. Carried me down the stairs and out the front door. The whole way out I was hoping another firefighter had gotten to Quinn. I was hoping somebody was carrying her out behind us. But when I looked around she wasn't there."
She swallowed.
"I started screaming. I don't even remember what I said. Your brother—he didn't wait. He turned around and ran for the house. His captain caught him by the arm and told him he couldn't go back in. The house was about to collapse but Jack pushed past him anyway."
Her eyes filled.
"He brought her out through the window before the floor under him gave way and he fell. I was so scared—If he'd been a few seconds later— "
She stopped. Took a breath.
If he'd been a few seconds later.
I'd been in enough buildings to know exactly what that meant.
I'd watched structures come down. I'd done the math in my own head a hundred times on a hundred calls—how long I had, where the give was, how many seconds separated walking out from not.
Jack had done the same math that night. He'd taken the gamble. It had come in.
Barely.
"He got her to me. Put her in my arms. And then he went down. Right there on the grass."
Her voice caught.
"Everything happened so fast. The paramedics were on us before I could think—checking Quinn, checking me. By the time I looked back, they'd already carried him to another ambulance. And then they were loading us into ours."
She shook her head slowly.
"That was the last I saw of him that night. For a few days I didn't know if he'd made it. I kept asking about him. Nobody could tell me anything because I wasn't family."
Jenna took a breath. I couldn't look at her. She looked at her hands.
"One of the doctors I know came by Quinn's room the next morning. Told me the firefighter who brought her out was upstairs. I went up as soon as Quinn was asleep."
She looked at Jamie.
"I told him I didn't know how to thank him. He told me not to because he was just doing his job." Jenna's voice caught. "He said if his little girl had been in there, he'd have wanted someone to go back for her."
Jack had thought about Rosie.
He'd thought about her that night and he'd gone back into a building that killed him because the thought of another parent losing her daughter was more than he could carry. That was who Jack was. That was what it cost him.
I sat there with Jamie's hand warm in mine. The same hand I'd held through every good moment of the last month. The same hand that would be in someone else's if Jack were alive. In New York. In another life.
All of this was mine because Jack wasn't here to have it.
All of this wouldn't have been here if it weren't for me.
And I didn't know how to tell her.