Chapter 3
Chip
The ambulance smelled of plastic and medicine, and I couldn’t get the number forty-two out of my head.
Forty-two steps to the front door. I had told him that.
I had said it out loud to a man whose face I couldn’t see, a man who picked Sable up and carried her toward the door ahead of me.
Forty-two steps was the average gym layout for a single-story commercial space with an entry vestibule, allowing for treadmill rows, free weight zones, and ADA-compliant aisle widths.
Cornish Iron was three feet wider in the cardio aisle, which made it forty-three.
I’d gotten it wrong.
I should tell him.
The paramedic clipped a pulse ox to my finger.
She had red hair and freckles, and a name tag I could read because she leaned in close.
KAYLEIGH. She said something I missed because the oxygen mask hissed and the siren above us started up.
Sable pressed her body along the length of my left thigh, hard, deliberate because she knew my anxiety was spiking.
“Heart rate’s high,” Kayleigh said. “Sir, can you tell me your name?”
“Russell Cornish. Chip. Russell is my legal name. Cornish became Corn Chip. Corn Chip got shortened to Chip when I was eleven and never left. Chip is what people use.”
“Okay, Chip. Are you having any trouble breathing?”
“Smoke in–inhalation reduces hemoglobin’s capacity to carry oxygen by binding carboxyhemoglobin—”
“Chip,” she interrupted me gently. “Are you having any trouble breathing?”
I checked. The mask was loud. The air inside it tasted of nothing. My chest was tight in a way that was less about smoke and more about the encroaching panic.
“No.”
“Good. That’s good. Stay with me.”
The back doors were still open. They were about to close.
I knew that because the second paramedic, a stocky man whose name I didn’t catch, had a hand on the inside latch.
Then he stopped. Someone outside was talking to him.
I heard a voice I’d heard ten minutes ago in the gym, lower than the sirens, steady.
“Hey. Two seconds.”
My firefighter, Rourke, ducked his head into the bay.
His helmet was off. His hair was dark with sweat and stuck to his forehead, and his face was streaked with soot from the eyebrows down.
Up close, without the mask, he had a wide mouth, and the blue eyes I’d already cataloged were now focused right on me.
“You good?” he asked.
I opened my mouth. Closed it. The script for good was supposed to be automatic, but I couldn’t find it.
“My knee,” I said.
“Yeah, I figured.” Rourke glanced at Sable. Then at Kayleigh. “Hey, Kayleigh, the service dog will need to go with the patient.”
“Hey, Dane, and yeah, it’s all good,” Kayleigh said.
Dane.
Dane Rourke.
I scrambled to pull off the mask, rearing back when Kayleigh tried to get it back on me. Sable pressed right up to me, the weight of her head in my lap.
“What about… what about the gym? I co-own it with my brother. Matt. He isn’t at the gym right now because he’s at the obstetrician with his wife.
Lena. Sh-she’s thirty-six weeks pregnant with their first child.
Her blood pressure was elevated at her last appointment, and she’s had a headache that doesn’t respond to acetaminophen for the past two days, and Matt doesn’t know any of the numbers because he asked me not to give him numbers right now.
I’d prefer he didn’t have to come here today, which means I’d prefer the answer to my next question to be…
” I pressed harder. “… yes. Is the building still standing? Please.”
Dane glanced back at me. He didn’t smile exactly, but he looked kind. “The back wall’s bad, but Tim and Court got on it fast, and it’s all still standing. Okay?”
I nodded once. I lost the battle with Kayleigh and the mask. My head felt heavy.
“I’m a hockey player,” I said. My voice was garbled, but I wanted him to know about me.
After all, he’d saved me. That connection would be a good one.
Hockey was the thing I was. It was the clearest sentence I had about myself, the one that had been true the longest and never needed revising.
The only sentences I had that weren’t my verbal dump about the gym ownership were forty-two steps, Sable, can she ride with me, and you have pretty blue eyes.
I’d said that out loud. To a stranger. With a face full of ash and a knee that would not hold weight. The replay didn’t stop and would not stop. I could feel myself wanting to stim, my fingers already moving, so I pinned them under the strap of the gurney instead.
“Take care of him,” Dane said, sort of to himself, then he tapped the door frame twice and stepped back.
“You got it,” Kayleigh said.
The doors shut. The bay went smaller. Sable shifted against my leg. The siren rose, and we moved.
Genesee Memorial intake was a corridor of fluorescent strips and the wrong kind of beeping.
I kept my eyes on the ceiling tiles and counted them.
Twenty-two from the door of Trauma 4 to the foot of the bed.
The tiles had a stain pattern in the third row that suggested a roof leak above a non-essential utility room, repaired but not replaced.
I told this to nobody. Nobody had asked.
A nurse with a shaved head and a soft voice cut open my left running pants from cuff to mid-thigh.
He apologized before he did it and again afterward.
The material was already ruined, with smoke and water and one black smear that was probably tread rubber from the treadmill belt.
I liked those training pants. They were a Tuesday pair.
Today was Tuesday. Tomorrow would have been a different pair.
Sable lay on the floor at the head of the bed, harness still on. They had asked if she could be moved. I had said no, and the nurse with the shaved head hadn’t pushed.
“On a scale of one to ten,” the EMT asked. She was small, and her badge said HERNANDEZ. “How would you rate the pain in this knee?”
“Six. It was an eight when the treadmill was on it.”
“Was the treadmill running?”
“No. The belt was off. A ceiling beam came down on the console end and tipped it. The motor housing is the heaviest part. It pinned my lower leg between the rail and the floor. My patella flexed in the wrong direction.”
She didn’t look at me strangely as I self-diagnosed.
“X-ray, then probably an MRI tomorrow if I don’t like what I see. I’m guessing hyperextension, possible MCL strain. We’ll know more when I see the films.”
“How long will I be off the ice? I mean, I play for the Rochester Copperheads. Number twenty-five.”
She paused, then smiled, quick and tired. “My husband goes to all your home games. He’d know you.”
“Probably not me, but he will know Walker Hannan.”
“He keeps saying you’re on a winning streak, right?”
“Thirty-one wins, ten regulation losses, four in overtime. Sixty-six points through forty-five games. Top of the division by five with a game in hand on Hartford. Goal differential’s plus-forty-three on the year, plus-twenty over the streak.
Power play sits fourth in the league at 24.
3 percent, kill’s second at 86.1 percent.
Twenty-seven games left. Calder Cup track if we keep winning.
” She blinked at me as I dumped my thoughts on her and cleared her throat.
“Okay then,” she began. Matt said people weren’t being rude for not having a response to what I said.
I was just too clever for my own good. I didn’t care either way as long as I could get the thoughts out of my head and into the world because only then did the pressure ease.
“You’ll likely be out two to four weeks if I’m right about what this is. Longer if I’m wrong.”
Two to four weeks. Sixteen to thirty-two practices. Eight to fifteen games, depending on the schedule. A road trip in the middle of that to Hartford and Providence, that I was going to miss.
“Okay,” I said.
She touched the back of my hand, very briefly, and then she was gone.
I called our captain, Walker Hannan. After all, Matt didn’t need a phone call from his brother, who was in a hospital bed, today. He needed his phone to be quiet, and I hope identifying myself as co-owner meant the firefighters, or cops, or whoever, wouldn’t hassle him.
Cap picked up on the second ring, and from the echo and road noise, he had to be in the car.
“Chip?”
“I was in a fire at Cornish Iron.”
“What? Are you okay? Is Matt okay?”
“I was the only one there, and now I’m in Genesee Memorial.”
“What? Shit. We’re coming.” I heard him give instructions to someone to take the next exit. “Where are you?”
“Trauma 4. They’re going to X-ray my knee. It’s a hyperextension. Probably an MCL strain. Two to four weeks if the doctor is right.”
“Jesus.” A long breath. “Okay. Is Matt with you?”
“No. He’s in the hospital with Lena, who isn’t well, so we’re not telling him anything right now.” There was a pause on his end that I recognized as Cap deciding whether to argue with me. “I have Sable with me.”
“Tell her I said, good girl.”
“She can’t hear you through a phone, Cap.”
“Then tell her in person. We’re forty minutes out.”
I closed my eyes after he hung up, dropped my hand off the side of the bed, and Sable pushed her head up under it and stayed there.
The intake nurse came back with a clipboard. I gave him my insurance card, my date of birth, and my emergency contact, Matt, even though I instructed that no one should call him.
“Allergies?” the nurse asked.
“None.”
“Medications?”
“None.”
“Any history of anxiety, panic, or sensory issues we should be aware of for treatment?”
I looked at him. He was waiting, pen up, no judgment in it.
“I’m autistic,” I said. “Loud noises and bright lights are difficult. The dog helps. If you can tell me what you are about to do before you do it, I will be fine.”
He wrote that down. “Got it. Anyone touches you; they tell you first. I’ll put it on the board.”
“Thank you.”
He nodded once and left.