Chapter 6
Ty
She's still in the parking lot of my head when the tones drop for a working fire at the end of Maple, two kids reported inside, mom in the yard.
I'm already in the apparatus bay pulling my boots on when Cal flies past me, bed hair, jacket over a hoodie. "Kids."
"I heard."
"Go," Rivera says.
We go.
I don't think about the bathroom hallway at the Watershed for the entire length of the ride, which is three minutes and forty seconds.
I think about the house on Maple. I think about the layout of those houses — bungalows from 1955, front door in the middle, living room left, kitchen and bedrooms right, two up, two down, detached garage.
I think about the roof pitch. I think about the wind.
I think about the call, and I let everything else drain out of the front of my head, because that's what you're trained to do, and that's what I do, and nothing else is going to exist until this fire it is out and those kids are safe.
Hanna's rig is behind us. I see it in the side mirror. It isn't a thought. It's information.
We pull up. Mom's in the yard. She's in a bathrobe and bare feet and she's screaming toward the house.
The house is smoking. Gray smoke, lazy, not yet hot.
Attic. Top of the roof is blackened. The fire is on the second floor, possibly in the walls, and we have minutes, because it hasn't broken out of the walls yet.
"TWO KIDS!" the mom screams. "MY TWO KIDS INSIDE — they were in the bed, they were — "
"Ma'am, how old — "
"Five and seven — "
"Bedroom where — "
"Back left, back left — "
Cal and I are going before she finishes the sentence. Aiden's on the truck, orders coming over the radio. Harrison is running the pump. Deluca is on the door with an axe, because Deluca gets the door on residential and he's earned it and I trust him to get the door.
The door goes down and we're in.
Smoke to the knee. Visibility five feet.
Heat on our faces, not yet unbearable. Cal left hand, me right.
We call out for the kids. I hear Cal calling.
I hear my own voice calling. I don't hear anybody answer.
I don't expect to. Kids hide when they're scared.
They hide under beds. They hide in closets.
They don't answer strangers yelling their names.
Back left. Back left.
We find them in the bedroom closet. Both of them.
Five-year-old boy, seven-year-old girl, in pajamas, curled around each other in the back of their own closet behind a laundry basket, because the laundry basket was tall and it was a barrier and they thought it would help.
They're terrified. They're breathing but alive.
Cal takes the boy. I take the girl. We're out of the house in under ninety seconds from the door going down. On the front lawn, I hand off the girl directly into Hanna's waiting arms.
Hanna takes her.
That's the first thing.
The second thing is: Hanna's face does a thing.
It's a work thing, a paramedic thing — it's the face of a woman who's now in charge of a child and going to get that child to the ambulance and get her on oxygen and get her checked — and underneath the work face, there's a half second of naked relief.
Not for herself. For me. For the fact that I came out of that house with the kid.
And it's a half second so fast that nobody else is going to catch it, and she closes it down before her arms have even settled around the girl, but I catch it, because I was looking.
"I got her," Hanna says.
"Got her."
"Go."
I go. I don't go back inside, because the house isn't going to kill anybody today, and Aiden is putting water on it, Rivera is running pressure, and there's nothing left for me to do in this house. I go to the mom in the yard who’s on her knees.
Cal has handed her the little boy and she's holding him like she's going to absorb him through her own ribs.
She sees the girl in Hanna's arms on the way to the ambulance, and the wailing shifts into the specific, ragged crying of a mother who's just found out her children are alive when she thought they might not be.
I crouch down to her level. "They're okay. They're scared. They're going to need the hospital to check them for smoke inhalation. Your daughter's with our medic. We're going to take care of her. She's going to be right over here, okay, you can see her, look — "
The mom nods.
"We're going to transport both kids and you — "
"I'm going with them — "
"Yes, ma'am. You'll go in the rig with your kids — "
"My husband — I have to call — "
"An officer will help you call your husband, okay, just focus on the kids, they need you to be calm — "
I hand her off to the officer who's just pulled up. The officer is in uniform and is, with a small jolt of recognition, Riley — because Riley is an arson investigator and has to showed up at the scene. Riley nods at me and takes the mom.
I go to the engine, pull off my helmet, and wipe my face. My face is hot. My hand is shaking a little. Not visibly. Privately.
Cal is ten feet away, breathing hard, bent at the waist, helmet off, hands on his knees.
"Ty — "
"I know — "
"Those kids — " He can't finish it.
"I know." I mean it.
He straightens up. He comes over and claps me on the shoulder — the slightly harder clap, the I-need-this-to-be-physical clap, because Cal is shaking too, a little, because it was two kids in a closet.
"We got them."
"We got them."
"That was close."
"It was close."
"Roof's going," Cal says.
"Yeah."
"Twenty minutes, roof's going."
"Aiden's going to pull the attack, I think."
"Yeah."
We stand there together. We breathe.
Over at the ambulance, Hanna has the little girl on the gurney and on oxygen.
Hanna is talking to her and the girl is nodding.
She isn't crying. Kids sometimes don't cry after.
Kids freeze. Hanna is talking to her anyway, in the voice that every good paramedic has — the voice that says I'm not scared, and therefore you don't have to be scared either — and the girl is buying it.
The girl's shoulders are coming down, and her breathing is getting better.
I watch her work.
I don't make the mistake of watching too long. I have a minute, at most. I use the minute.
Gemma is on the boy. He’s small and has a little bit of a burn on his forearm, not bad, already blistered along the outside.
Gemma is doing what Gemma does. I have learned, over the course of the last six months, that Gemma Lockhart is one of the warmest human beings I've ever worked alongside.
She and Hanna are going to be a devastating medic team, and right now she's making the five-year-old boy laugh by doing something with her gloves that I can't see, and the boy is laughing, which is a medical event.
Beck comes over and puts a hand on my shoulder — a quiet hand; Beck isn't a clapper.
"Nice work, Brennan."
"Yes, sir. Larsen ready to transport?"
"She's got them stable." He tilts his chin toward the rig. "Tell her she can roll when she's ready. I want both kids and the mom at Copper Ridge Regional. I'll call it in."
"Yes, sir." I walk to Hanna.
"Ready to roll?"
"Ready to roll," Hanna says.
Her eyes meet mine for the second time that morning.
Her eyes are steady. Her eyes have done the thing they always did at the academy after a hard call, which is to come up just a little extra bright, like there's a current running behind them, and it used to scare the hell out of me at twenty-three because I didn't know what to do with a woman whose adrenaline went to her face, and at thirty-three I know what to do with it, which is file it, permanently, for later, because there's no other option right now.
"Hey."
"Yeah."
"You good."
"I'm good."
"Those kids — "
"Yeah."
"Yeah." She holds my gaze for one beat. "Take them in. I'll see you back at the station."
"Okay."
She closes the ambulance door. Gemma climbs in the back with her. The rig rolls out. The sirens start. I stand there for half a second longer than I need to.
"Brennan." Rivera, at my shoulder, because Rivera always materializes exactly when I need to be moved from a sight line. "Roll up. We gotta pull line."
"Yep."
"Brennan."
"I said yep."
I spend the next two hours in overhaul, pulling ceiling, looking for hot spots.
Cal works beside me, hands me things, periodically says "Hell of a thing," and I say "Yeah.
" Aiden comes by: "Nice entry, gentlemen.
" Cal says Brennan was right hand; Aiden says he saw, he was on the radio, he knows — Cal says he's sharing credit, Aiden says no he's not but it's sweet he's trying, and we all laugh, the post-call laugh, the bad laugh that's your body letting go of the adrenaline by noise.
We get back to the station.
Hanna's rig is in the bay. She's on the rig floor with a rag and a bucket, because Beck, bless him, has seen the look on her face and on Gemma's face and has assigned both of them decon duty, which is the mindless, meditative physical work of getting smoke and child vomit off the interior of an ambulance, and he's done it because Beck understands that sometimes, after a call, your body needs to wash something with its hands for forty minutes so your brain can stop seeing two kids in a closet.
I walk past the bay. I don't go in. I go to the kitchen. I pour three cups of coffee — black, black, and black — and carry them to the bay. Gemma is up at the passenger door with a bottle of spray. Hanna is in the jump seat wiping the seat divider. She looks up when she hears the boots.
"I didn't ask," I say.
"I know." She takes the cup.
Gemma glances over and reaches for one of the other cups. She looks at me with those bright, shrewd eyes of hers. "Thanks, Brennan."
"Welcome."
Gemma goes back to her spray bottle and doesn't say anything else.
"Those kids," I say. "They're okay?"
"They're fine. Both of them. The girl had some mild smoke inhalation, I got her oxygenated, she was alert and oriented the whole way. Little boy's burn was superficial. Mom's going to need a therapist. They're all going home tomorrow."
"Good."
"Yeah."
"Good call, Larsen."
"Good entry, Brennan." The corner of her mouth lifts, just barely.
We look at each other. A half second is all we have before Cal comes clanking through the bay door with his own coffee and his own face. "I got two bags of Cheetos for the decon — you two want any?"
"Cal — "
"They're hot Cheetos."
"Cal, we don't — "
"I already opened the bag."
"Cal."
Hanna holds out her hand. "I'll take a few."
Cal squats down next to his sister on the floor of the ambulance and dumps Cheetos into her hand. "You did good today."
"I did okay. Brennan got there first."
"Brennan always gets there first," Gemma says, appearing from the passenger side.
Cal crams a handful of Cheetos into his mouth. He chews. He looks at his sister. He looks at me. "You two work pretty well together," he says, mouth full.
Her coffee cup is halfway to her mouth. "Muscle memory," Hanna says, casually. "You work a scene the same way I was trained to work it."
"Yeah. Yeah, that tracks." Cal nods. "Portland was, what, pretty similar system to us?"
"Basically the same."
"Yeah. Makes sense."
He goes back to his Cheetos. He doesn't pursue it. He doesn't see it. He's, as he's always been, the single most oblivious man I've ever known, and today, for a single unearned moment, the obliviousness is the thing that saves us.
Or maybe he sees it. Maybe Cal Larsen sees it the way Cal Larsen sees the things he doesn't want to be seeing.
There's a half-second, between the Cheetos and the swallow, where his eyes go to my coffee cup, and then to the way Hanna is sitting on the floor of the rig with her knee an inch from my boot, and then to the door of the rig, and then back to the floor.
He doesn't ask any of the questions a man might ask in that half-second. He swallows.
I've known Cal Larsen for thirty years. Cal Larsen isn't oblivious.
Cal Larsen is, on a tactical level, the most observant man at this firehouse — he saw a hairline crack in the rim of a fire hydrant in 2019 from ten feet away and called the city about it on his lunch break.
What Cal Larsen is, when it comes to me and his sister, is a man who has decided that the easiest version of his life is the version where he doesn't look.
So he doesn't. He looks at the floor. He looks at the Cheetos. He looks at the door.
He keeps looking at the floor, looking at the Cheetos, and somewhere underneath all that floor and Cheetos he is, I think, holding his breath, because if he ever does look up, the version of his life he's been protecting is going to end.
I look at Gemma over Cal's head.
Gemma is polishing the interior side mirror. Gemma isn't looking at us. Gemma has a very small smile on her mouth that I don't think is about the mirror.
I finish my coffee. I put the cup in the sink in the kitchen and go to the locker room.
I sit on the bench. I close my eyes for three minutes.
I do the thing I've been doing for ten years, which is the counting thing, which is counting backwards from a hundred in three-second intervals, because it occupies the part of my brain that would otherwise be doing something I can't afford.
At count twenty-two, a shadow falls in the doorway.
I don't open my eyes. "Don't."
"Didn't say anything," Cal says.
"You were going to."
"I was going to." A pause. He comes in anyway, towel around his neck, Gatorade in his hand. The bench creaks when he sits. He doesn't crowd me. He just sits.
"You okay?"
"I'm okay."
"You sure? It was kids. That's — "
"I know what it was, Cal."
"Yeah." He lets it sit there a second. "I'm proud of you. I don't say that enough."
"Stop."
"I'm saying it anyway. I'm just — I'm glad we were both in there today. I'm glad it was you and me."
I open my eyes. I look at his stupid earnest face, the Cheetos dust still in the corner of his mouth, hair sticking up where the helmet pressed it.
My best friend. The man whose sister I'm in love with.
There's a ledger somewhere with my name on it, adding up numbers I'm going to owe, eventually, to someone.
"Yeah," I say. "Me too."
"You want a Gatorade?" He holds up the one in his hand.
"Sure, Cal."
"Red or blue?"
"Surprise me."
"Red." He sets it on the bench beside me and gets up.
He claps me on the shoulder. He walks out of the locker room, and I hear him in the hall, whistling, because my best friend whistles after hard calls, because Cal's whole coping strategy is noise.
I sit on the bench for another minute.
Then I get up, and I don't let myself count anymore.