20. Carson
Carson
The eggs burn because I forget the butter. I scrape them loose with the spatula and slide them onto Cadie’s plate anyway, brown side down like she won’t notice. She does.
“Daddy.”
“Yes, Pumpkin?”
“When is Lori coming back?”
It is seven since she leaves, and Cadie asks the same question. I set the plate next to the cereal she’s poured too full and give her the answer I don’t believe, because I don’t have a better one.
“She needed some space, sweetheart. Give her time.”
The real answer would make her cry over breakfast, and I can’t watch my daughter do that. So I keep giving her this one instead. I turn back to the stove and rinse the pan. Looking at Cadie’s face while I lie to her is beyond me. Not at 7:15 a.m., running on four hours of interrupted sleep.
“You said that yesterday,” Cadie says behind me.
“Still true today.”
“Is it still going to be true tomorrow?”
I don’t answer that. The water hisses in the pan and I watch it go down the drain. Outside the kitchen window, the January sky sits flat and gray over the live oaks. The whole county looks washed out and still.
She needed some space.
That’s the line I give Cadie. The one I give my mother. The one I tell myself every night on the porch after Cadie goes to bed, while I sit in the cold and leave the light on because I don’t know what else to do that isn’t driving to her door.
The truth is simpler and worse.
I don’t know if Lori is coming back.
I say okay when she tells me she is leaving.
I say I’ll be here.
I watch her drive away at midnight with a duffel bag in the passenger seat and I don’t chase her. Don’t call.
Don’t say the three words lodged at the base of my throat since December 27th, since the blue-gray morning light, the warm weight of her pressed along every inch of me, and her heart beating steady under my palm.
I say okay because I tell myself letting her go is letting her choose.
When it is day three, my mother calls. She doesn’t ask how I am, or say Lori’s name. She asks me what kind of pie Lori likes. I tell her apple. She says I see in her I-already-know-that voice and hangs up. I get it now. She isn’t asking about pie. She is baiting me.
By evening, she is at Lori's rental with an apple pie and a thermos. I know this because I find the thermos on my counter this morning, clean and return, with a text that reads, You're right about the pie.
On day four, I drive halfway to her rental.
Get as far as the turnoff past the feed store and sit in my truck for nine minutes with the engine running.
Her rental is dark and small at the end of the gravel.
There is no light in her window. I spend nine minutes arguing with my own hands about whether to put it in park.
I tell her she could decide, and I mean it, even if meaning it is slowly taking me apart.
I put the gear in reverse and head home.
I don’t sleep well. Sleep evades me since Boxing Day. I wash the sheets the morning she leaves, because I need to stop reaching across the mattress for somebody who isn’t there. It doesn’t help. I still reach at 2 or 3 a.m., my arm across the cold side and my hand on the edge of her pillow.
Cadie finishes her eggs, carries her plate to the sink she can’t reach, and sets it on the counter for me.
“I drew one for you,” she says.
She slides a piece of paper across the table.
Same drawing she does all week, with slight variations in the colors.
Four stick figures. The tall one in the hat.
The small one in rainbow boots. The baby in a basket.
The brown-haired woman with blue eyes and wild hair. LORI in shaky capitals across the top.
“That one’s for the fridge,” Cadie says. “The other one is at her house.”
I look at my daughter.
“Ella takes it. I asked.” She pulls her backpack off the hook by the door. “Somebody has to do something, Daddy.”
She says it plainly. Certain. Looking at me like I’m the slow one.
Tell me about it, Kid.
I tape the drawing to the fridge next to the school lunch calendar and stand there with the magnet cold under my thumb. My six-year-old draws what she wants in crayon and sends it across town.
I sit on my porch every night with a light on and no words, waiting for a woman to read my mind.
I do this with Megan.
Same silence.
Same holding pattern Tyler runs on a rig in the Gulf with no working phone while his wife falls apart and his daughter ends up on a stranger’s porch.
I am beginning to realize that waiting is not patience when the person you love needs to hear your voice.
I drive Cadie to school. She doesn’t mention Lori again.
Her boots are on the dashboard because I gave up that fight in November.
At the drop-off loop, she leans across the console and wraps both arms around my neck and holds on two seconds longer than usual.
Doesn’t say why. The gap in her front-tooth smile catches the light when she pulls back.
“Bye, Daddy.”
“Bye, Kid.”
She jumps down. I watch her walk in with her backpack half-zipped and her ponytail crooked and I sit there until the minivan behind me honks.
At home, I wash the dishes and stand at the fridge looking at the drawing. I think about driving to the diner, walking through the door, hat against the frame, doing the whole first-time routine from scratch, back when I had the nerve for easy stupid charming words.
The leather ring on my right hand catches the light when I shut the faucet off. My father’s. Five years on my hand.
He drives to her rental the first night.
He says, Son, a porch light is a fine thing but it is not a sentence.
He is right.
I’m going to tell her. Tonight. I don’t know which words to use yet.
I just know that one more night with the light on and my mouth shut makes me Tyler.
Same silence. Same conviction that keeping quiet keeps people safe.
It doesn’t.
It keeps them alone.
The station alarm goes off at 4:47 a.m. Three tones through the pager on the counter. Structure fire, east side of downtown.
It's the converted brick warehouse on Pecan Street, the old cotton warehouse turned into apartments fifteen years ago, with exposed beams and original brick.
The same building every fire inspector in the county flags twice a year.
Full crew needed. Possible occupants on the second floor.
I’m moving before the second tone finishes. I call Marisol. She picks up on one ring because the whole network knows what is happening.
“I’ll be there in ten,” she says. “Go.”
I kiss Cadie’s head where she sits doing homework at the kitchen table. Her pencil stops.
“Is it a big one?”
“I don’t know yet. I’ll call.”
“Daddy.” She catches my sleeve. “Come home, okay?”
“I always do. Don’t worry.”
I’m in the truck in under two minutes, with the turnout gear in the back. The sky is the color of old nickel and I can see the smoke column before I clear the ranch road, a thick gray rope twisting above the trees east of the square.
At the station, I’m dressed in ninety seconds flat. Helmet, hood, coat, pants, boots, gloves, pack. My hands know the order. The rest of me is still back at the kitchen table with a crayon drawing and words I still don’t say. The engine rolls before the bay door finishes going up.
Captain Mu?oz is on the radio and the chatter is tight: second floor partially collapsed, two civilians upstairs, no confirmed exit. Hundred-year-old brick over a timber frame, you know how that holds.
We pull up and the warehouse is lit at the second-floor east corner. There are flames through two windows, with smoke banking from the roofline in a thick gray shelf. The street’s blocked and I see two engines, a ladder, and the chief’s SUV on the scene. Neighbors stand behind the tape.
“West, you’re with me.” Mu?oz taps my shoulder and points at the east stairwell. “Two unaccounted for. Husband and wife, second floor rear. We go up, find them and head back. Stay on the wall.”
“Copy.”
We go in.
The stairwell is passable but the smoke hangs at shoulder height and thickens on the climb. The mask does its job. The heat builds through the coat and gloves, a pressure that gains with every step, the air getting heavier the higher we go.
My left hand is on the wall. Count. Landing, turn, second floor.
The hallway opens up and it’s bad. The ceiling is down at the midpoint, the floor joists from the third story collapsed into charred wood and plaster.
There’s a fire to our left in the east unit, loud and working, that low roar underneath the crack and pop.
Mu?oz gestures right, past the collapse.
We go over the debris. I find footing on a joist and swing across.
Something shifts and I go down hard on one knee.
My shin meets a bracket through the bunker pants, white pain, shin to kneecap.
I keep moving because stopping in this hallway is not an option.
I reach the rear apartment and the door is open. The smoke is lighter here, pushed east by the draft. I sweep right, and Mu?oz sweeps left.
In the living area, a man is on the floor between a couch and a recliner, conscious, coughing, one hand gripped white-knuckled on his wife’s arm.
She’s against the wall near the window. They are gray-haired, both of them.
Eyes wide, mouths working for air, but breathing.
He’s holding onto her with the grip of a man who isn’t letting go.
I know that grip. I wear it every day for the women in my life. And the one who is not in it.
“Fire department. We’re getting you out.”
His legs buckle when he tries to stand. I get him up by the belt and shoulder.
Mu?oz takes the wife. We move them back toward the hall, slower now, both of them coughing, the smoke heavier at the collapse point.
I lift him over the debris and pass him across to Rivera.
Something catches me across the forehead as I duck under a hanging joist, a sharp crack and a wet line above my left eyebrow.
I wipe it with my glove, and it comes back dark. I keep going.