Chapter 25 - Sam
Sam
Two more days.
Forty-eight hours, give or take, and Jamie and Rosie would walk through the jet bridge at Havensworth International and my life would start feeling like my life again. The days since they'd left had been emptier. I'd filled the space with work to keep myself occupied.
Cap had given me the probies the morning after their flight.
Four of them, fresh out of the academy, still excited enough to show up fifteen minutes early.
I'd been running them through drills from sunup to sundown, catching the mistakes before they became habits.
It was good work. It filled the hours. When I wasn't on shift I was picking up buddy shifts for guys who needed an hour at a doctor's office or an afternoon at a school recital.
I said yes before I checked my schedule.
The captain of B-shift had started joking that I was auditioning for his rig.
Jamie had her hands full up in New York. The packing, the office, the walk-throughs. I didn't want to be one more thing on her list. So I'd kept it to texts, mostly, sent in the breaks between drills. Rosie okay? Probies still alive. Missing you.
"Sam!"
Jenna was coming across the bay with Cole a step behind her.
"Hey, Jenna!"
Jenna had been coming to the meetings at Megan and Danny's before Jamie left for New York.
A few weeks ago she'd mentioned that Cole had been asking about what firefighters actually did.
I'd told her the station ran ride-alongs.
I could show him around the station and if he was lucky, he might even see us in action.
He was tall for sixteen. Hair in his eyes. His backpack was still slung over one shoulder. He'd come straight from school.
"Glad you could make it, Cole."
Jenna squeezed his shoulder. "I'll be back at 6:00 p.m."
He nodded. She gave me a small wave on the way out.
I'd watched him in the corner of Megan and Danny's living room enough times to know the shape of him. He was quiet and careful. There was always a book in his lap. He wasn't a kid who settled easy into a new room, and the bay of a firehouse was a lot of room.
I figured I'd warm him up before I walked him through the rig.
"How's school?"
He shrugged. "Fine."
"You play anything?"
"Not really."
"Got a girlfriend?"
He winced before he caught himself.
"No."
It came out a beat too fast.
I kept my face neutral and gestured him toward the rig. There was always somebody when a sixteen-year-old winced like that. It was the kind of thing you didn't call out loud unless you wanted to lose him for the rest of the afternoon.
I gave him the tour. The rig. The gear. Where the turnouts hung and how we got into them when the tones dropped. He watched everything. He didn't touch what he hadn't been told he could touch. His questions came one at a time after he'd thought about them.
How did the water pressure work on a hydrant? How long did a tank of air last on the pack? What was the weight of the full turnout when you had it all on?
Then the ones every kid asked when they got near a fire truck.
What did a structure fire look like from inside? How did you know when a floor was about to give out?
"Most of what we do isn't fire," I said.
He looked up.
"That part surprises people. The truck's got fire on the side and that's the picture everyone carries around, but fires are maybe one in ten calls, some weeks less.
The rest is medical. Car accidents. Heart attacks.
A kid having a seizure. Somebody who fell and can't get up.
We show up before the paramedics on most of it.
Our job's to keep someone alive until the ambulance rolls in behind us. "
I opened the side compartment and pulled out the medical bag so he could see it.
"This is the bag we grab first, nine times out of ten. More than the hose. Most of what a firefighter does is show up to the worst moment somebody's ever had and try to make it less bad."
Cole looked at the bag for a long beat.
"Oh."
"Yeah."
I put the bag back.
He was fiddling with the strap of his backpack and not meeting my eyes.
"What do you do when you show up somewhere and something's wrong, but it isn't the thing you got called for?"
I looked at him.
"Like what?"
"I don't know. A house that doesn't feel right. Someone who says they're fine and you can tell they aren't."
I thought about it for a second.
"You note it. You mention it to your officer. There are people whose job is to follow up on things like that. Firefighters aren't those people, mostly. But we see a lot. Sometimes the thing we see is the thing someone else has been missing."
Cole nodded. He kept working the strap.
"You don't look the other way," I said.
He glanced up then. He held my eyes a second longer than a teenager usually would.
"Okay."
The kid thought about things. That was clear enough after an hour with him. A sixteen-year-old asking a real question deserved a real answer, and I'd given him the one I had.
The tones dropped before I could ask him anything else.
"MVA with entrapment. Child in the vehicle. Coleman area."
I was already moving.
"Stay with the rig. You don't leave it unless I tell you."
Cole nodded. His face had gone pale.
We were rolling inside of ninety seconds.
Sean drove. I rode up front with Cap. Tyler was in the back with the medical bag between his boots. Single-vehicle. Residential street. Child in the back seat.
The scene was on a side street four blocks off Coleman.
A sedan had gone off the road into a utility pole.
The front end was folded back on itself.
A man was on his feet next to the car, bleeding from a gash above his eyebrow, his right arm hanging at an angle it wasn't meant to.
He was pulling at the rear door handle with his left hand but the door wasn't moving.
"Help her. Help her, please."
Cap was off the truck first. He had his hand on the father's shoulder before the man could lunge at the door again.
"Sir. Step back. Let us work."
I was already at the rear window.
A four-year-old girl was in a car seat behind the driver. Strapped in. Conscious. Her face was wet, her mouth hung open but no sound came out.
Four years old.
The thought landed before I could stop it, and with it came Rosie.
Her hair still damp from the bath the last time I'd seen her.
Her small weight against my chest when I'd carried her to bed.
The way she said my name from the hallway in the morning before she was fully awake, already assuming I'd be there.
I knew what the calls had been before. I knew what they were now.
If that was my kid in this car seat.
I set my hand flat against the glass.
"Hey. Sweetheart. Hey. Look at me."
Her eyes found mine.
"I'm Sam. I'm a firefighter. I'm going to get you out of there, okay? I just need you to keep looking at me. Can you do that?"
A small nod.
"Good girl. What's your name?"
I read her moving lips, “Melissa.”
Her head moved when I said Melissa after a beat. I told her she was being brave. I told her I had a little girl her age who was going to want to hear all about her. I kept my hand on the glass and I kept her eyes on mine.
Tyler brought the spreaders. Sean ran a line on the engine compartment. Behind me the father was arguing with the medics about letting them treat him, and Cap was telling him, steady, that the best thing he could do for his daughter right now was sit down.
I pulled the punch from my pocket. “Turn away and close your eyes, Melissa.” She did. I hit the rear glass. The window dropped. I cleared it with my gloves.
I covered Melissa with a blanket, up over her head, and told her it was going to get loud and to keep her eyes closed until I said. Tyler worked the door and it came off in two bites. I leaned in and cut the harness and got my arms under her and lifted.
She put her face in my neck the moment I cleared her from the seat.
Her arms came up and locked around me like she'd done it a hundred times. Solid and warm. The exact size and weight of a four-year-old. My body remembered another four-year-old against my chest, and for a second I couldn't say whose kid I was carrying.
I carried her to her father.
They'd gotten him onto the stretcher. His right arm was in a sling and his forehead was bandaged and he was reaching for her with his good arm before I was halfway there.
I set her down against his chest, careful of the bad arm. She wrapped around him the way she'd clung to me.
"She's all I have," he said. He wasn't looking at me. He was looking at the top of his daughter's head. "She's all I have. Thank you. Thank you."
"She's okay. You're both okay. They're going to take you together."
He reached for my hand with the hand that was on his daughter's back. His fingers closed around mine. He held on.
I let him.
After a moment one of the medics touched my shoulder. I squeezed the father's hand once and stepped back.
They rolled the stretcher to the ambulance. Melissa stayed against her father's chest the whole way. The doors closed, the rig pulled away down the residential street, and the sound of the siren came on about a block out.
I stood on the road and watched it go.
Cole was at the rig. He hadn't moved. He was watching the corner where the ambulance had turned, the way someone watches a thing they've just learned they can't unlearn.
Sean and Tyler wanted to go out for drinks the next evening.
I'd come off shift that morning and slept through most of the afternoon. My phone had three texts on it when I reached for it.
Sean
bar tonight. You don't get a veto. Sutton's coming.
Tyler
please come. I need a buffer.
Sean
wear something that doesn't smell like a firehouse.
Me
I'll be there.
I called Jamie before I got in the shower.