Chapter 11
Hanna
Night One: I draw inventory duty with Ty, alone, in the briefing room, at midnight.
It's a paperwork shift. Two clipboards, two cups of coffee, three boxes of EMT supplies to be counted into a spreadsheet.
We do it without talking for the first forty minutes.
I keep my eyes on the box. He keeps his eyes on the spreadsheet.
Neither of us looks up. We are, in the way only firefighters in a quiet station at midnight know how to be, fully professional.
At forty-three minutes, we reach for the same pen on the table at the same moment. Our hands don't touch. They come close enough that I can feel the warmth at the back of his knuckles in the air around mine. I take the pen. He takes the other pen. We go back to our clipboards.
At forty-five minutes, he looks up. I'm already looking up — have been for thirty seconds, without moving my head. His eyes find mine across the briefing-room table. Neither of us breathes for what I'd like to call a beat and what is, by my count, four full seconds.
Beck walks past the doorway at forty-eight. He looks in, nods, moves on. For one one-second visual sample, Beck has seen two firefighters doing inventory at midnight. Nothing else, because there is nothing else to see, because we are professionals.
I finish the inventory at twelve fifty-two. I lie in my bunk for two hours not thinking about the four seconds, but thinking about the four seconds the entire time.
Night Two: a transport call to the urgent care on Spring Street, ten thirty-three a.m., an older man with chest pain that's, on the monitor, a benign rhythm change, and on his wife's face, the worst thing that's ever happened.
I'm in the back of the rig with my hand on the man's wrist, my voice in my paramedic register, calm and warm, and at minute six I look up at Ty in the review mirror — he's driving — and I lose three seconds.
I lose them counting his pulse instead of the patient's.
The patient's pulse is sixty-eight. I write seventy-one on the run sheet because I'm not reading the patient.
I catch it before we hand off the patient to the ER nurse.
Nobody dies. The patient is fine. I'm not.
In the bay after, Chief Rodriguez is at the engine bay door.
She isn't waiting for me. She watches me hop out of the rig, watches Ty hop out of the rig and makes a note on the clipboard she's holding for entirely unrelated reasons — without looking down, without looking at us.
Then she walks back into the office without saying anything to anyone.
In the locker room I sit on the bench with my hand pressed flat against the metal of my locker and think about how I have, for the first time in ten years on the job, written the wrong number on a run sheet because Ty Brennan was driving.
The patient is fine, Chief Rodriguez wrote a note about us, I'm twenty-nine years old, and I have, exactly today, run out of room.
Three nights later, in the linen closet of Station 7, I have Ty Brennan pressed against the shelving unit full of laundered pillowcases, the light is off, the door is closed and we’re almost quiet. This is, I'll concede, not a sustainable long-term strategy.
"Hanna — "
"Shh." I pull him back.
"Your hand is on my — "
"Yes, I know, shh — "
"Cal is in the kitchen — "
"He's making pasta. He's going to be making pasta for another twenty minutes. He doesn't know how to make pasta in under twenty minutes. Shh."
"The door doesn't lock from inside — "
"I'm aware."
"Hanna."
"Shut up."
I kiss him. I kiss him like a teenager. I'm not a teenager. I’m a twenty-nine-year-old paramedic kissing a thirty-three-year-old firefighter against a shelf of pillowcases at Station 7 on a Tuesday night while my brother boils pasta sixty feet down the hall, and the part of me that should absolutely be in charge of my body right now has filed for an unscheduled personal day and isn't responding to any of my internal attempts to reach her.
Ty lets me kiss him for only a few seconds. Then he puts both hands on my shoulders and holds me back at arm's length with the firm patience of a man with responsibilities.
"Out," he whispers.
"No."
"Out, Hanna."
"I haven't — "
"Hanna, we're going to — "
"One minute, Ty — "
"No." He holds the arm's length steady. "I'm trying to save both our jobs. Out. You first."
I let him go, smooth my hair and my uniform in one sweep, take one steadying breath that isn't steady at all, and look at him in the half-darkness. He looks back with that face — the one he makes when he's trying to be serious and can't quite manage it all the way.
"Tomorrow," I say. "After shift. Your place. Three p.m."
"I'll be there."
"Tell Cal you have a dentist appointment."
"Cal has a sixth sense about my appointments. I swear to God, he's caught me three times in ten years — "
"We need a code."
"A what."
"A code. A signal. For going forward. Our infrastructure."
"Our — " He tips his head.
"I'm running an operation. We need signals."
"You've gone insane."
"I'm being thorough. If you're going to be a criminal, Ty, you should at least be a well-organized one."
"We aren't — "
"A knock pattern. Three plus two plus one."
"I can't keep track of that."
"Fine. One knock means clear. Two means wait."
"Okay."
"Done. Memorize it."
"I will. Out."
"I'm going."
"Hanna."
"What."
He kisses me — quick, entirely out of proportion with a pitch-black closet at Station 7, the kind of kiss that fits a person saying goodbye at a front door in a good mood. It's outrageous. I love him for it. I open the door and step out into the hallway.
Cal isn't in the hallway, but Gemma is.
"Oh," I say.
"Hi, Hanna." Gemma's voice is perfectly pleasant. "Were you looking for pillowcases?"
"Yes."
"Did you find the pillowcases?"
"I did."
"Great. I was going to grab one myself. Deluca had a nose thing."
"A nose thing."
"Yeah, he — it's a whole — he's fine. You don't want to know. Do you need help carrying the pillowcases you definitely got?"
I look at her. Gemma's face is full of the particular careful neutrality of a woman not quite looking at the closet door, which has just swung open a second time behind me, because Ty is now exiting, and Gemma is politely not acknowledging this sequence of events.
"I'm good."
"Okay."
"Gemma." I lower my voice.
"Hanna." She reaches past me into the closet, selects a single pillowcase, and drapes it over her shoulder.
"I'm going to go take care of Deluca's nose.
I didn't see anything. I don't know anything.
If you want me to not know anything, I'll never know anything.
If you want me to know something, I'm an excellent knower. Up to you."
She turns and walks down the hallway.
Ty is three feet behind me. I turn and look at him.
"That," I say, "was almost a disaster."
"That was a disaster."
"Gemma is fine."
"Gemma is — yes. Gemma is fine. Gemma is actually a blessing. But — "
"We need better infrastructure."
"We need to not do this at the station. Starting tomorrow. And also forever."
"Agreed." I gesture between us. "In a bad way."
"Yes." His mouth does the thing. "We are terrible at this."
"Please go somewhere else."
"Yeah." He goes — to the apparatus bay, where he's supposed to be.
I go to the kitchen.
Cal is at the stove in his bare feet, which is against kitchen policy on account of what Derek did with the marinara in February, stirring pasta without a care in the world.
"Where were you?" He doesn't look up.
"Pillowcases."
"You were gone a long time."
"The light burned out."
"In the closet?"
"Screwed the bulb tighter. It worked."
He goes back to stirring without pursuing it.
Cal doesn't question things that don't fit an obvious pattern of suspicion, which means I can tell him essentially any story and he'll accept it, and I've decided for the last three days that this is a tool in our toolkit.
Ty has told me I'm overestimating this toolkit. He’s probably right.
"How's the pasta?"
"It's pasta." He dumps a mountain of it into a bowl and hands me sauce from a jar, then parmesan from a container the size of a paint can.
"Hanna."
"Yeah."
"I'm going to say something." He leans on the counter.
My stomach drops. It's the pasta, I tell myself.
"I've been thinking about the Derek thing at the bar.
And about Kevin. The dating thing." He picks up his fork, sets it down.
"I think I was being a lot. I think I see you like you're still a kid, and I know you're not a kid.
You're almost thirty. You're a whole grown person, a paramedic, you've been out of my sight for ten years and managed fine.
And the moment you come back I'm all up in your business, telling people off in bars, trying to set you up — "
"Cal — "
"I'm not apologizing."
"Okay."
"I just want you to know I see it. And I love you."
"Cal."
"I do."
"I know."
"Anyway. That's the whole thing. You figure out your own love life. I'm out." He shoves a bite of pasta in his mouth with the face of a man who's said the hard thing and is moving past it at lightning speed.
I can't eat the pasta.
I can't eat the pasta because I'm a liar.
I'm lying to Cal at the kitchen table on a Tuesday night while he's sincerely apologizing for loving me badly, eating pasta, and my brother just told me — in the only way Cal knows how to tell anybody anything — that he's going to try to be better, and I'm going to burn in hell.
"Hanna."
"Yeah."
"You okay? You're not eating."
"I'm eating."
"You've had one bite. Are you tired or something?" He leans forward. "Should I get Gemma?"
"No, I'm — "
"Ty!" Cal yells, because when in doubt, Cal yells for Ty. It's a habit he formed somewhere around when our father died and has never broken. "Ty, come here, Hanna's being weird. She's not eating pasta."
"Don't yell for Ty, Cal — "
"She's being weird!"
Ty appears in the kitchen doorway looking exactly like a man who's been listening from the apparatus bay.
"What."
"She had one bite and she's sitting there." Cal waves his fork. "I don't know, she's in her head. You're good at fixing her. I've noticed this over the years. I don't know why. Fix her."
"I can't fix her."
"Hanna." Ty gives me the voice he's used on Cal for a decade — indulgent, long-suffering. "Are you okay."
"I'm fine."
"She's lying," Cal says.
"I know." Ty doesn't move from the doorway. "But I can't fix her, Cal."
"You always fix her."
"Hanna can fix Hanna."
"Hanna fixes everybody else." Cal's fork goes down. "Who fixes Hanna? She can't be her own fixer. Tyler."
"Cal — "
"One sentence. One Ty sentence. You know what I mean. Her face is going to do a thing, and she's going to eat her pasta. Just do it."
Ty looks at me with the expression of a man who's been conscripted. "Hanna. Eat your pasta."
I look at him.
Cal turns to me.
I pick up my fork and eat a bite.
Cal claps his hands together once, like a magician revealing a trick. "See. Magic."
"Cal."
"Ty has a voice she responds to. Probably because he's older."
"He's older by four years, Cal — "
"It's a brother thing, but more effective, because Ty doesn't have the baggage."
I eat another bite of pasta and look, for one specific half-second, over Cal's head at Ty in the doorway.
Ty is looking at me with the face of a man who's just been asked to do a party trick with his beloved and has done it successfully and is going to have to sit with that for the rest of the evening.
I eat all of the pasta. Every bite. Like a woman who is, in point of fact, going to burn in hell.
Cal is pleased. He gets seconds, pours himself more water, and eventually wanders to the rec room to deal with Deluca's gaming situation, and the moment he's down the hall Ty sits down in Cal's chair.
"I can't," I say.
"I know."
"I can't lie to him while he's apologizing to me for loving me — "
"I know."
"He's literally apologizing, Ty." My voice drops. "For loving me wrong. While I'm sitting there doing — "
"Hanna." He puts his elbows on the table. "Breathe."
"I'm breathing."
"You aren't."
"I — "
Riley walks into the kitchen.
She walks in the way a woman walks in when she's been in the building for ten minutes and has been triangulating. Civilian clothes, to-go coffee from Peak Grounds, here for a fire report with Aiden on the Maple case. She stops in the doorway and looks at me.
"Hanna. Gemma's looking for you in the bay."
"Okay."
"Right now."
Her tone doesn't leave room for negotiation. Riley isn't my boss. Riley is absolutely my boss in this moment, and I stand up and go.
Gemma is in the apparatus bay. Not because she needs me — because Riley told her to be there. She's still holding the pillowcase.
"Hi."
"You don't actually need me."
"No," Gemma says. "Your face was doing a thing. You need a five minute break."
"Yes."
"Breathe."
I breathe. Gemma stands there with me and doesn't make me talk, and when I'm ready she holds out the pillowcase.
"I don't need a pillowcase, Gemma."
"I know. But every time you see me for the rest of your life, I'm going to be holding one. Just as a gift. I want you to live with the knowledge that at Station 7, we know how to be discreet."
"I love you."
"I know."
I walk back inside, past the kitchen where Cal and Ty are at the table, Cal’s talking, Ty listening. Ty glances at me for exactly the right amount of time and no longer, and I keep walking, past the rec room, into the bunk room, up into my bunk, curtain pulled.
I stare at the ceiling.
At two a.m. my phone buzzes, face down on silent.
Ty: Are you awake.
Me: Yes.
Ty: I love you, Hanna.
I stare at the screen for longer than I've stared at a screen in my life.
Me: I love you too.
Ty: We're going to figure this out.
Me: Yeah.
Me: I'm going to lose my career in a linen closet.
Ty: We're done with the linen closet.
Me: Agreed.
I put the phone down.
Somewhere in the station, Derek is snoring.
I fall asleep.