5. Six Seconds
Chapter five
Six Seconds
OWEN
Kitchen fire. Maple Street. Single story, occupant out, neighbor called it in.
Routine. The kind of call a probie writes home about and everybody else forgets by lunch.
Tater takes the officer seat. I'm behind him with Cooper, one of the green kids, who's checking his gloves for the fourth time like they might've changed size since the last check.
"Grease fire, probably," Tater says over his shoulder. "Mrs. Delgado. She fries chicken with the phone in one hand. It was gonna happen eventually."
The engine takes the corner onto Maple and I see it. Gray smoke pushing lazy out a side window. Nothing behind it. No black, no pressure, no rollover conditions. A fire you could put out with a bucket and a bad attitude.
We pull up. Mrs. Delgado is on the lawn in a housecoat, madder at the chicken than scared of the fire. Tater's already talking to her, easy, like they're at church.
I pull the line. Cooper backs me. We stack up at the front door and I put my hand flat on it. Cool. I open it.
And the smoke alarm is screaming.
That's all it is. A nine-dollar smoke alarm from the hardware store, shrieking from the hallway ceiling the way they do.
My legs stop.
Not slow down. Stop. Like somebody pulled a breaker in my spine.
Because I've stood in a hundred doorways since Chicago and mostly the sound is just a sound. But some days it isn't.
Some days it drops me right back onto the third floor that was mine, the hallway carpet we picked out together, the alarm going and going under all that roar — one stupid loyal machine still doing its job for two people who couldn't hear it anymore.
Today it isn't just a sound.
The Maple Street hallway is right there. Ten feet of linoleum and a smoking stove at the end of it.
I can't make my boots take it.
My eyes still work. That's the hell of it.
Light smoke, lazy, no heat pushing back. A door that opened easy under a cool hand. Grease and a ruined pan. I could knock this fire down with a wet towel and I know it. Every trained inch of me knows it.
My boots don't care what I know.
One second. Two.
Cooper's voice behind me, unsure. "Peterson?"
Three. Four. The alarm keeps screaming. My hands are sweating inside my gloves and my heart is trying to climb out through my collarbones.
Five.
A hand lands on my shoulder. Big. Familiar.
Six.
"I got the nozzle," Tater says, loud and normal, like this is a thing we planned. "You get the window, get that smoke moving."
He steps past me. Takes the line out of my hands smooth as a card trick and walks down the hall like it's his own kitchen.
I go break a window. Because my legs will do that.
The whole fire takes four minutes. Charred cabinet, dead stove, one very crispy skillet of chicken that Mrs. Delgado wants to sue. Cooper does overhaul with his chest puffed out like we took a high-rise.
I stand in the yard coiling hose and I don't look at anybody.
***
Tater finds me behind the engine while the others load up.
He's got his helmet off, hair mashed flat, and he leans against the rig next to me and doesn't say a word for a while.
That's a Tater tactic. I've watched him use it on scared kids and drunk drivers.
Silence with a friendly face on it. People fill it themselves.
I'm not people.
"Say it," I tell him.
"Say what?"
"Whatever you rehearsed on the way over here."
He scratches his jaw. "Six seconds."
"You counted."
"I count everything. I count my kids at the pool. I counted." He looks out at the street instead of at me, which is a mercy. "You gonna tell me how bad it actually is?"
"It's not bad."
"Owen."
"It was a smoke alarm. It caught me off guard. That's all."
"When's the last time you made entry on a working fire? A real one. Not a stove."
The question sits there between us like a live wire on wet pavement.
Because he already knows the answer. It's in my file, the one Chicago sent down, the one I know Chief Weyland read with his glasses down his nose.
Two years of small stuff. Car fires. Dumpsters. Medical runs. Every structure assignment, some officer found a reason to put me on the pump or the ladder or outside ventilation, because nobody wanted to find out on a fireground what everybody already suspected.
Nobody's tested it. Including me.
"You want my card pulled," I say. "Fine. Pull it."
"That's not what I—"
"Then what, Tater? You want me to sit in a circle and talk about my feelings? I came down here to run calls and clear my head. Today I ran a call. The fire went out. Everybody's breathing."
It comes out harder than he deserves. Way harder. He recruited me. He covered for me twenty minutes ago without blinking, without making Cooper any the wiser, and I'm snapping at him like he's the problem.
He takes it. That's the worst part. He takes it, nods slow, pushes off the rig.
"Everybody's breathing," he agrees. "Today."
He walks around to his seat. Doesn't say the rest of it. Doesn't have to.
Today was a stove. Someday it's going to be a building with people in it, and six seconds is a lifetime, and we both know which lifetime I'm thinking of.
I climb in the back. Cooper's still grinning about his overhaul. Kid smells like victory and burnt chicken.
I stare out the window the whole ride back.
***
That night I can't sit still in the farmhouse, so I go to the station gym. It's a converted bay with a bench, a rack of mismatched dumbbells, and a radio that only gets two stations, both of them sad.
I load the bar heavier than I should and get under it.
The plan is simple. Lift until my arms shake, go home, sleep like the dead. It's the only therapy that's ever put points on the board.
It works for about twenty minutes.
Then, somewhere between sets, my brain slides off the leash and goes exactly where I've been dragging it back from all week.
The nurses' station. Monday. Her taking my discharge plan apart one piece at a time, wearing that look. Chin up, eyebrow cocked, mouth doing that thing where it fights a smile because smiling would be losing.
Her mouth.
I rack the bar hard enough that the plates ring.
No. Absolutely not. I am not standing in a fire station at nine at night thinking about the mouth on a woman whose entire purpose in this town appears to be embarrassing me in front of medical professionals.
I add ten pounds.
She called me a Labrador. To my face. In front of Amos Kessler, who laughed so hard his monitor beeped.
Another ten.
She's got a countdown clock on her whole life. Couple months and she's gone, off to some other town, some other hospital, some other firefighter with stitches in his arm. That's not a person you think about. That's weather. Weather passes through.
I press the set. My shoulders burn. Good.
Except here's the thing my body knows that my head keeps voting down.
When she was stitching me up that first night, hands steady, close enough that I could see the freckle at the corner of her jaw, something in my chest went loose.
First time in two years. Like a knot I'd stopped noticing because it had been pulled tight so long.
I didn't ask for that.
I rack the bar. Sit up. Put my head in my hands and breathe.
Then I go stand under the shower in the station washroom and turn the handle all the way to cold.
I last forty seconds.
My hand turns it warm again like it belongs to somebody else, and I stand there with the water hammering my shoulders and quit fighting.
She walks into my head the way she walks into a trauma bay.
Like she owns it. Scrubs gone. That smart mouth gone soft for once, saying my name instead of a diagnosis.
I brace a forearm on the tile and take myself in hand, and in my head it's her hand.
Her steady stitching hands. Her hips. The full sweet weight of her, the shape those scrubs keep hinting at and never confess.
It doesn't take long. That's the embarrassing part. Thirty-four years old, coming apart in a station shower with a nurse's name behind my teeth, biting down so it can't get out.
After, I stand in the steam and wait for the guilt.
It comes. It always comes. But it comes in wrong. For two years my body's been a tool. A thing I feed and punish and put to work. Tonight, it wanted something. Wanted it hard enough to override the whole system.
I don't know where to put that.
I shut the water off, towel down, and don't look at the fog on the mirror.
I don't drive straight home, either. The truck takes the river road and pulls off at the overlook above the water without asking me first. I sit with the engine running. My hand finds the chain through my shirt and stays there.
I don't say anything. Not yet. Two minutes of dark water and cicadas, then I put it in reverse and go home.
***
Saturday morning, I come into the station kitchen for coffee and there's a piece of paper waiting at my spot at the table like a court summons.
Tater's across from me eating cereal out of a mixing bowl. He doesn't look up. That's how I know he did something.
I pick up the paper.
MEET BACHELOR #4: OWEN PETERSON, it says across the top, in a font that belongs on a rodeo poster.
I read the first line. Then I read it again, because my eyes reject it.
Owen is a gently used Willowbend original, recently returned from the big city.
Runs good, some cosmetic damage. Six-foot-two of brood with a heart of gold buried in there somewhere, ladies.
He can carry you out of a burning building OR carry all your groceries in one trip, and he will glare handsomely while doing either one.
"Tater."
"Mm." Still eating.
Enjoys: long silences, lifting heavy objects, visiting the elderly. Dislikes: fun, joy, being perceived.
"Tater, what is this."
"Your auction bio." He points his spoon at it. "Turned it in Wednesday. Rue said it was the best one she got. Said, and I'm quoting her here, that it had voice."
Bid with confidence: all sales final, no refunds, some assembly required.
"You wrote me up like a used truck."
"A gently used truck." He finally looks at me, and his face is pure sunshine, the face of a man who has never done anything wrong in his life. "I could've mentioned the tragic thing where you cried at my wedding. I showed restraint."
"I'm not going tonight."
"You're going. Chief's orders, department morale, new engine, all of it." He gets up, rinses his bowl, claps me on the shoulder on his way out. Same shoulder. Same hand as Tuesday, and we both feel that, and neither of us says it.
At the door he stops. Turns around. And there's a grin spreading across his face that I have known since tenth grade, and it has never once meant anything good for me.
"Oh, and Owen? Doors open at six."
"Fine."
"Wear the tight shirt."
"I don't own a—"
"And you might want to bring your A game." He taps the doorframe twice, real casual. "Debbie's been taking pre-bids on you all week. Cash envelope in her locker at the hospital. Last I heard it was up to two hundred dollars, and the nurses haven't even had payday yet."
He's gone before the words finish landing.
Pre-bids.
An envelope. In her locker. At her hospital.
The flyer crumples in my fist.
A stage. A spotlight. This whole town watching a pack of nurses buy me like a heifer at the county fair. And every one of those women works the same floor as a smart mouth and a pair of eyes I've been trying to sweat out of my system all week.
I don't need to go to this auction.
I need to run the other way like the hounds of hell are on my ass.