Chapter 3 #2
I sat there in a paper-thin hospital gown on a bed that was the wrong height, with a knee that was already swelling against the ice pack, and I thought about how today had been.
Tuesday: gym opens late, electrician at nine, light run, Matt back by lunch.
That was the whole shape of today. That shape is gone now.
The gym was probably gone too, or at least the back wall was.
I hadn’t asked Firefighter Dane Rourke how bad the rest of it was because he’d told me it wasn’t gone, and I’d decided to believe the man with the pretty blue eyes without verification from another party.
They wheeled me to imaging. Sable came as far as the door, and a tech with kind eyes promised she wouldn’t move her. The X-ray hurt, but it only took six minutes. I knew because I counted. Counting helped. Counting always helped.
When I came back, Cap and Finn were in the room. Cap was by the window, and Finn was on the visitor chair with one leg crossed over the other and his hands folded around a cup of vending machine coffee.
“Hi, Chip,” Finn said.
“Hi.”
Cap dove straight into talking to me. “I caught Matt in the OB parking lot and told him.”
“I said—”
He held up a hand. Cap was one of the few people who could stop me from talking once I had the words in my head.
“He’s all good. Lena’s fine. Her pressure was high, but they are sending her home with a monitor and instructions to lie down.
Matt is going to come straight here once she’s settled.
He wanted to come now. I told him he didn’t need to worry. ”
“Thank you.”
Cap pulled a chair up to the bed. Finn stayed where he was. Cap didn’t say anything for a minute. He looked at my knee, now wrapped and elevated on a pillow, then at Sable, who had reattached herself to the side of the bed.
“You’re okay,” he said, finally, and I don’t think it was a question.
“I’m okay.”
“You didn’t sound okay on the phone.”
I considered what he said and thought I had sounded fine on the phone. I’d reported the facts and given him the diagnosis and the timeline. The script had been correct.
“My voice was probably flat,” I said. “It does that when I am running on backup.”
“Backup,” he repeated.
“When the main system is busy with panic.”
Cap had figured me out a long time ago and decided to stop trying to translate me, and I appreciated that more than I had ever told him.
“Dane Rourke pulled me out and saved Sable too. Dane is RFD. Station Eight, I think, based on the patch I saw on the captain’s coat. He carried me to the door. He came to the ambulance before they closed it to tell me the gym wasn’t gone.”
Cap watched me while I said it. I don’t always know what people are looking for in my face. Cap, I think, was looking at how I said the name. I’d said it twice. I noticed that I’d said it twice after I’d said it twice. At least it wasn’t three times.
“Huh,” Cap said.
“He had beautiful blue eyes. The color of the recycling bin at Mabel’s, the one for cans, not glass.”
Cap raised an eyebrow, and Finn smiled into his coffee.
It was a little past nine in the evening when they wheeled me into a single room for the night.
The doctor wanted me on observation for the smoke inhalation, a precaution I appreciated.
The room had one window, and the blinds were open.
From the bed, I could see a sliver of the city, a piece of black sky, and the reflection of my own face in the glass, half in shadow.
Matt came at a quarter past. He didn’t say anything at first, just sat on the edge of the bed, very carefully, put his forehead against mine for about three seconds, and then sat back.
“Lena?” I asked.
“Sleeping. Mom is with her.”
“Good.”
“You scared the shit out of me, Russell.”
“I know. I’m sorry.”
“You don’t have to be sorry.”
“I am, though.”
He reached down and rubbed Sable’s head, and she leaned into his hand. For a moment, I had the two of them together, and the rest of the room could go away.
Matt stayed for an hour. He told me what he knew about the gym, which wasn’t much.
The back wall was a loss. The floor had taken on water, and the front half of the building was structurally sound.
The fire inspector would be there in the morning.
He had already called insurance from the OB parking lot because Matt was Matt.
“Looks like it was electrical,” he finished with a sigh.
He kissed the top of my head, something he hadn’t done since I was twelve, and left.
The hospital quieted down after that. Sable was on the bed at my feet, which wasn’t standard, but the night nurse had pretended not to see.
The ice pack on my knee had warmed and was replaced once.
The pain was a four. The math on the season was a six.
The math on Matt and Lena was somewhere I wasn’t going to look at until tomorrow.
I closed my eyes, but I didn’t sleep.
What I did instead was replay the ambulance's back doors. Dane Rourke’s head ducking in.
The smell of him, smoke and something else underneath, sweat and laundry detergent and the rubber of his coat.
The way he had asked “you good?” and waited for me to answer instead of answering for me.
The way he had said “take care of him” to Kayleigh.
I didn’t have a category for how I was feeling.
I tried gratitude. Gratitude was the obvious file.
I had been pulled from a fire by someone whose job was to pull people from fires, and the appropriate response was a thank-you.
I had said thank you, and the file should have closed.
It didn’t close. The file kept opening itself again every time I pictured his mouth moving around the word “good,” every time I pictured the sweat in his hair, every time I’d heard him speak, as if reminding himself who he was before he stepped back from the doors.
I tried adrenaline. Adrenaline was a known thing.
The literature on post-rescue effects was clear.
People formed temporary attachments to first responders that wouldn’t survive contact with normal life.
This was a documented phenomenon. This was probably what was happening.
I was probably going to wake up in the morning, and the file would close on its own.
I tried that one for about ten minutes. It didn’t hold either.
I opened my eyes and stared up. The ceiling of the hospital room had eighteen tiles in the field of view from where my head was on the pillow. Sable shifted at my feet and sighed a long doggy sigh and went still again.
“Dane Rourke with blue eyes,” I said to the ceiling, just to hear how it sounded in my own voice in a room where nobody else could hear it.
“Dane Rourke.”