20. Carson #2
We move down the stairs and out the door.
The cold air meets my lungs and the coughing starts, the deep bark that shakes through the ribs.
I set the man on the curb and the medics take over.
His wife is out ten seconds behind us, Mu?oz at her elbow, and she grabs her husband’s hand on the stretcher and holds it in both of hers.
Mu?oz keys the radio. “Interior clear. Two civilians out, both breathing. Second floor’s going. Recommend defensive.”
The radio hisses. The chief says, “Copy. All souls accounted for. Good work. Go defensive.”
I pull my mask off. The cold stings the cut above my brow.
There is blood in my eyebrow and sweat cooling under my hood.
My hands are shaking, which is the adrenaline leaving my body and not fear, though the difference doesn’t matter much.
Everything goes loose and sound comes back wrong, sirens I didn’t hear inside, the hiss of charged lines, a dog barking somewhere down the block.
I lean against the engine bumper and breathe. Blood drips off my brow onto my coat. I don’t wipe it.
And it catches me. Standing at an engine bumper with blood on my face and soot in my lungs, the words I've refused to say for weeks arrive whole.
I love her.
That’s it. That’s the whole thing. Plain and sure and sitting in my chest since before Boxing Day. Since the night on the porch when I held the back of her head while she cried.
When I don’t kiss her because what she needs then isn’t a kiss.
It is someone who sits there and does not fix it and does not leave.
I have love her since the walk from the pasture with her hand in mine.
Since the first morning at the diner counter when I watch her make her own coffee and memorize three sugars and a splash of cream like it is information I need later.
I love her and I let her leave because I thought letting her go was letting her choose.
It isn’t, and it’s clearer now.
Letting her choose means giving her something to choose between.
It means standing in front of her with the words out loud and letting her do whatever she wants with them.
Tyler keeps his silence on a rig in the Gulf. His wife leaves a baby on a porch. His family almost ends.
I keep mine in my own kitchen and Lori packs a duffel bag and drives away at midnight.
I watch what his silence does to him and I learn nothing.
That ends now.
Tonight, before I wash the soot off, I’m driving to her rental and saying it, and it will not be smooth or practiced or anything close to the speech I rehearse at the coffee pot two months ago.
It is just true.
I reach for the radio to tell Mu?oz I need ten minutes.
That’s when I hear a woman’s voice.
Behind the tape. Not words yet, just a sound that starts in the body before the mouth catches up, the noise a person makes when something terrible is arriving and the brain can’t keep up.
“My grandson.” The wife. On the stretcher, oxygen mask half off, still gripping her husband’s hand. Her eyes on the second-floor windows where smoke rolls out in dark folds. “Oh god. Oh god, my grandson was upstairs! He was in the back bedroom. He was sleeping —”
The back bedroom and the small twin bed in the far corner against the wall come back to me. She tells us it is her and her husband, and that nobody else is up there. I clear that room. I sweep it myself and see that the bed is empty.
It is empty because nobody is on it. I doesn’t look under it.
My stomach drops. Everything I plan for tonight falls through the floor because I’m going back inside this building. I know it before Mu?oz opens his mouth.
His eyes meet mine. One look.
“One minor unaccounted for,” Mu?oz says into the radio. “Back bedroom, second floor rear. Re-entry.”
The radio comes back loud. One minor. One minor. Second floor.
I’m already running.
The building sounds different the second time. Something above me gives a long low groan, deep enough to feel through my boots. The stairwell is thicker with smoke. I put my mask back on. My world shrinks to the four feet the facepiece gives me, and past that, the smoke shifts.
The radio squawks in my ear. West. West, do you copy? Do not re-enter without —
Two breaths past the landing and the hallway is gone. My left glove on the wall. I count by instinct. I register the bathroom door and the linen closet. The collapse is worse, flames licking through the gap from below. I go over it fast. The floor flexes under my boot.
I reach the back bedroom and the door is open where I left it. Smoke is at chest height and I drop to my knees because the air’s better on the floor.
I crawl to the twin bed and reach under it. My glove sweeps a carpet, a shoe, a stuffed bear.
And then him.
He is small and curled tight against the wall in the far corner, knees to chest, arms over his head.
A boy, maybe four. He’s folded himself down to nothing, trying to take up as little space as a scared kid can, and something in that smallness goes through me like a nail.
I get my hand around his arm and pull. He comes out light, barely any weight, and I tuck him inside my coat against my chest with his face at my neck where the mask bleeds warm air.
If he’s breathing, my skin will feel it.
I feel it, shallow and faint. But it is there.
He is four years old, the same size Cadie was when Megan leaves.
I pivot for the door.
The doorframe splits in one loud crack. A ceiling joist drops across the opening, hits the floor, and punches through in a shower of sparks and embers.
The heat catches the back of my calves first, rolls up my legs, and shoves me a step toward the window.
Fire comes up through the new hole, fast and bright.
The doorway is gone and the black wood is burning.
Sparks are rolling along the baseboard and smoke is pouring through the gap where the floor used to be.
I don’t have my exit.
I’m standing in a back bedroom with a stranger’s grandson against my chest, and the hallway I came in through is on fire.
Cadie.
Her name fills the space behind my eyes.
Her homework on the kitchen table. The two extra seconds she holds onto my neck this morning. Come home, okay?
Lori.
Laughing in my doorway in the borrowed flannel with her hair down, looking back over her shoulder at me with her blue eyes. The laugh she doesn’t know she still has, the small bright one. The way she falls asleep in three breaths when someone holds her. How she says my name as she comes undone.
I’m not dying in this room with her name left unsaid.
I turn around. The window is on the far wall, double-hung, made of old glass.
I shift the boy to one arm and drive my elbow through the lower pane.
The glass holds. I hit it again. On the third time, it breaks clean and January cold rushes in.
Smoke pours out, and for one second, I can see the street below.
The engines, lights, and ladder truck angled toward the building.
Then above me, the roof shifts. Long and structural, timbers flexing under weight they weren’t built for.
I know this building is done.
Mu?oz is on the radio. I hear him through the noise, through the fire, through what’s left of the hallway coming apart behind me.
West. West, come in. Carson. Report.
I don’t answer. I hold the boy against my chest and face the broken window, the cold dark air and the ladder truck two stories below.
The only word left in me — the one I carry since the back-pasture walk in December and her hand slipping into mine on cold gravel, since I say okay when I should say stay, is —
Lori.