Chapter Sixteen Noelle
Light is sitting high on the wall when my eyes open.
Late morning light. I stare at it without moving. My head is pounding behind both eyes, my mouth is dry, and I’m lying on top of the covers in yesterday’s clothes.
My boots are at the foot of the bed. Side by side. Paired.
I drop my boots where I stand. Every night, one thuds by the desk, the other ends up wherever it ends up. These are lined against the bed frame with the laces tucked in.
I close my eyes again and the night comes back in fragments.
The gym floor, cold through my jeans. The photograph.
Grant filling the doorway, then the doorway empty.
Mateo’s voice, low and steady, going on and on about nothing.
Wes’s shoulder. And then a gap, and inside the gap, movement.
An arm under my knees. Stairs. Someone’s heartbeat under my ear, slow, unhurried, climbing.
Carried. I was carried to bed, and someone tucked my laces in, and I slept eleven hours in my clothes.
I press the heels of my hands into my eyes until colors bloom.
When I sit up, I stop halfway.
I don’t know why. I sit on the edge of the mattress and scan the room. Bed. Desk. Duffel on the chair. String lights dead over the headboard. Everything where it should be. I keep scanning anyway, but nothing raises its hand. After a minute, I grab my towel off the hook, give up, and go shower.
The hot water takes the headache down from a shout to a mutter.
Back in the room, dressed, hair dripping down my collar, I reach past the desk for my hairbrush.
My hand stops in the air.
The legal pad is crooked.
I keep it square to the left edge of the desk, pen on top. The pad sits an inch off square. The pen lies next to it.
I stand there with water running down the back of my neck. Then I look at the file stack.
The permit folder is second from the top.
It goes third. Oldest at the bottom, and I have restacked that pile every night for three weeks, and the permit folder goes third.
The desk drawer is open half an inch. Through the gap, the corner of my external drive.
And the mug. I use last night’s mug as a paperweight on the finished stack, and it’s sitting there now, except it’s sitting a thumb’s width off the dried coffee ring it left on the top page.
The ring shows at the edge like a brown crescent moon.
Whoever put that mug back put it where a mug should go.
Not where mine was.
I don’t touch anything. I kneel and go through the stack folder by folder, page by page, my pulse tapping in my throat. Insurance filings. Permits. Subsidiary registrations. The rebuilt case, all four hundred pages of it.
Every page is here.
I sit back on my heels on the floor of my room. Down the hall, a door opens; somebody’s footsteps pass, ordinary, the building going about its noon.
Somebody stood where I’m kneeling. While I was on a gym floor two stories down, somebody turned these pages one at a time, read what I’ve built, and squared the stack back up an inch off true.
They didn’t take anything. They didn’t need to take anything. Reading it was enough.
I look at the door. No lock on the inside, never has been, it’s a firehouse dorm. Sixty strangers came through this building during the storm. Couriers. Utility crews. Off-shift rotations trading through the bay.
I get up, wash my hands, and stand at the window until my breathing slows down.
Then I open my laptop and start typing the incident report, and stop, because the report goes to the station captain, and delete it, and close the laptop.
Tomorrow.
***
Lunch runs in shifts. I take the second one after his voice starts up in the bay, running Callum through ladder evolutions.
Mid-afternoon I come down the main stairs with two folders, and Grant turns into the far end of the hallway with a clipboard.
We both keep walking. His eyes come up. Mine come up. Ten feet out, he nods, one short drop of the chin. I nod back. We pass, his sleeve close enough to brush mine, and neither of us slows down, and I hit the stairwell door harder than it needs.
At four Mateo sets a plate next to my laptop, grilled cheese cut on the diagonal, and walks away without a single word about it. I eat facing the wall.
At six I open the incident report draft again. My cursor sits in the empty field where his name goes.
The tones drop at six forty.
Both rigs. Structure fire, commercial, eight blocks north.
From the window I watch the lights strobe up the block through the falling snow until the dark swallows them, and my lips are already moving. Grant. Wes. Mateo. Tara. Danny. Callum. Rico.
Kowalski has the house. He’s at the kitchen table with the radio and his coffee, and he doesn’t say anything when I take the chair next to him, just slides the volume up two notches.
The traffic runs ordinary. Size-up. Assignments. Ventilation. Kowalski drinks his coffee. My tea goes cold in front of me.
Then a voice I don’t know says, “Command, be advised, we’ve got fire running the ceiling against the layout here. It’s moving toward us.”
Kowalski’s mug stops in the air.
He sets it down without drinking. His thumb starts moving back and forth on the handle.
“Say again,” Grant’s voice.
Static swallows the answer. Then the channel stacks up, three voices at once, and out of the middle of it Grant again, flat and loud: “All companies, back it out. Everybody out. Now.”
The roll call comes back name by name. Kowalski’s thumb goes still on the mug.
One name comes back attached to the word Mayday.
Rico.
I’m on my feet with no memory of standing.
The radio pours it out in pieces, flashover, second floor, we’ve got him, we’re out, medic, and Kowalski reaches over without looking and closes his hand around my wrist and holds it to the table, and we stay like that, an old man and an investigator, pinned to a kitchen table by a speaker, until the channel says conscious and says burns and says Harlem Hospital, and his grip loosens one finger at a time.
“Fed,” Kowalski says, to the radio, to nobody. “Fire doesn’t run against the layout on its own.”
He picks up his mug. Puts it back down without drinking.
***
The rigs come back after nine.
I stand at the edge of the bay. The doors grind up, and the engines pull in, and the crew climbs down, and nobody says anything.
Callum sits on the bumper with his mask still hanging off his neck and stares at the floor between his boots.
Danny puts a hand on his shoulder in passing and leaves it there a second longer than a pat.
Tara strips her gloves, folds them together, and stands holding them like she’s forgotten the next step. Somebody’s helmet goes onto the shelf with both hands instead of one.
Wes sees me. He crosses the bay, stops in front of me, and says, “He’s alive. Awake in the ambulance. Cursing.” Then he stands there another second, like there was going to be more, and there isn’t, and he goes to rack his gear.
I climb the stairs. I pass my own door and keep walking, because that room has somebody else’s fingerprints all over the air in it, and I stop at the window at the end of the hall.
Snow falls through the streetlight cone. I wrap my arms around my stomach and hold on.
My files, read page by page. Rico, eight blocks north, in a burn unit. The same week. And me, standing at a warm window between the two, without a mark on me.
I press my forehead against the cold glass.
“He’s stable.”
Tara. I didn’t hear her come up. She’s still in her station tee, hair flattened, a hospital sticker peeling off her chest. She joins me at the window and looks out at the snow instead of at me.
“Awake,” she says. “First thing he asked the nurse was whether his eyebrows made it.”
Something between a laugh and a cough comes out of me. “Did they?”
“One of them.” She rubs her eyes with the heel of her hand. “Give him a week, it’ll be the best story in the station. He’s already workshopping it.”
The snow keeps coming down through the light. Her sticker crackles when she breathes.
“Somebody went through my room last night,” I say.
Her head turns.
“While I was in the gym. My files. All of them, page by page, put back almost right.” I keep my eyes on the streetlight.
“And tonight a fire runs against a building’s layout and Rico’s in a burn unit.
I’ve been standing here trying to make those two things live in separate boxes, and they won’t go.
” My arms tighten over my stomach. “This crew fed me. Carried me to bed. And I’m the reason dangerous people are looking at this station.
He’s in that bed, and I keep thinking I carried it in here with my luggage. ”
Tara doesn’t answer right away. When I look over, she’s watching me with her jaw set sideways, tired, thinking.
“You know when the first station burned?” she says.
“November eighth. You know when I first heard your name? December. Somebody was lighting firehouses while you were still forty blocks away, not knowing we existed.” She shrugs, and winces, the shoulder catching.
“This thing’s been ticking under the city for months, Noelle.
It was always going to blow up near somebody.
You didn’t build it. You’re just the first person who showed up looking for the wires. ”
“Rico’s still burned.”
“Yeah. He is. And you still didn’t light it.” She peels the sticker off her shirt, folds it in half, and puts it in her pocket. “Both those things stay true. Nobody said it was a comfortable arrangement.”
I don’t have anything to say to that. It doesn’t wrap around me; it doesn’t ask anything of me; it just stands there in the hallway, level.
“Visit him tomorrow,” she says, pushing off the sill. “He’s unbearable without an audience. Bring the good coffee, the hospital stuff is punishment.”
Her footsteps fade toward the bunks. I stay at the window with her words, turning them over, testing the weight.
I don’t know if I believe her yet.
I keep every word.
***
Near midnight, my throat is dry, and the vending machine upstairs is empty, so I go down.
The bay is dark except for the strips along the floor and the tree glowing in the common room. I’m halfway to the kitchen before I see him.
Grant, at the workbench along the far wall, under the little bench lamp.
Rico’s helmet is in his hands. The shell is scorched along one side, the shield fogged white with heat, and he’s turning it slowly under the light, and his thumb keeps moving over the burned place, back and forth, the same slow line, like the mark might come off, like it might tell him something.
His hands stop.
He looks up and finds me across the dark bay.
The bench light carves his face in half, one side lit, one side gone.
He doesn’t say anything. I don’t say anything.
Between us the whole day stands in the dark, my room, his hallway nod, the radio, the helmet in his hands, the gym before all of it, and the tree lights blink through their colors against the trucks, red then green then gold, patient, oblivious.
His thumb moves over the scorch mark once more.
I fill my glass in the kitchen and carry it up the stairs, and his light is still on below me when I go.