17. Cold
Chapter seventeen
Cold
Owen
The problem isn't that the night was wrong.
That's the thing I can't say out loud. Not to Tater. Not to the ceiling at four in the morning. Not to the woman asleep three feet from me with her hair spread across my pillow like she's got a right to it.
The problem is that it was right. Righter than anything's been in two years. And joy feels exactly like betrayal when you've spent that long convinced you don't get to have any.
I lie there and count her breaths instead of sleeping.
By sunup I've already decided how this goes. I hate myself the whole time I'm deciding it.
***
She's at the stove when I make it to the kitchen. Boot on, crutches under one arm, moving slow so I don't fall on my face and ruin the performance. She's got two mugs out. She doesn't turn around.
"Coffee's not ready."
"I can wait."
She turns then. Looks at me the way she looks at a chart that doesn't add up.
"You slept fine." Not a question.
"Yeah."
"Good." She pours both cups. Slides one across the counter like it's just coffee. Like the whole kitchen isn't sitting there between us with the night still on it.
"Nellie—"
"Don't." Fast. Too fast. "Don't do the face. I know the face."
"I'm not doing a face."
"You're doing the face where you're fixin' to be responsible about something." She wraps both hands around her mug. "We're adults. It was one time. Nobody's writing it on the whiteboard."
I look at the whiteboard. ANGRY SUNSHINE, in her handwriting, big and smug, the letters she wrote while I was too doped to defend myself. Four weeks old. The ink's gone soft at the edges.
I look at it too long. She catches me looking.
"Right," I say. "One time."
"Right."
Neither of us believes it. I can see it sitting in her jaw, same place it's sitting in mine. But she says it like a closing argument, and I let her win.
I take a drink of coffee I don't want. Set the mug down. Pick it up again.
"Been thinking about what Osei said," I say. "About testing stairs."
Her spoon stops halfway through a stir.
"He said supervised. One or two, hand on the rail, somebody with you." She was standing right next to me when he said it. Took notes on her phone like it was rounds. "That's not the same as cleared."
"Close enough. Figured I'd head out to the farmhouse. Get out of your hair."
The kitchen goes quiet. Not comfortable quiet. Hospital quiet.
"Today?"
"No sense dragging it out."
"You've got two weeks left on the—"
"I know what I've got left." It comes out harder than I mean it. I watch her take the hit and put her face away, one drawer at a time, until there's nothing left in it but nurse.
"Okay," she says. "Sure. That's good progress. You'll want your own bed."
"Yeah."
"I'll get your meds together."
"Nellie."
"You'll need the schedule written down; you never remember the evening dose—"
"Nellie."
She finally looks at me, and for one second there's a girl standing in a kitchen instead of a nurse, and everything I feel is right there behind my teeth. It wasn't one time. I'm not leaving because I want to. I'm leaving because I woke up happy and couldn't stand it.
"Thank you," is what comes out instead. "For all of it."
"It's what I do," she says. "I patch people up and send them home."
She turns back to the stove. Conversation over. And I stand there on my crutches in a kitchen that smells like her coffee, being handed exactly the door I asked for, hating every square inch of it.
Tater picks me up at noon. Nellie hands him my duffel on the porch and tells him to make sure I ice it at night, and she says it to him, not me, and that's how I know how bad I've done it.
I look back once from the truck. She's already gone inside.
***
Tater lasts two days before he comes for me.
He hauled my duffel up those farmhouse steps himself and didn't say one word the whole drive, which for Tater Monroe is the same as biting clean through his own tongue.
Two days. Then he finds me in the engine bay, elbow-deep in the pump panel, torquing a bolt that doesn't need it.
"So Debbie went by the cottage yesterday," he says. "Dropping off a casserole dish."
"Okay."
"Says the whiteboard's wiped clean."
My hand slips off the wrench.
"It's a whiteboard, Tater."
"It's not a whiteboard and you know it." He leans on the rig, arms crossed. "I carried your bag out of that house, Owen. I watched that woman tell me about your ice schedule because she couldn't stand to look at you. I gave you two days to come tell me what you did, and you didn't, so here I am."
I keep working. He lets the silence sit until it gets heavy enough I have to say something to make it stop.
"I'm not doing this with you."
"You did the same thing after Claire." His voice doesn't change.
That's what gets me. He's not needling, not this time.
"Went cold on everybody so nobody could take anything else off you.
Wouldn't return calls. Told your mama you were fine right up till the write-ups started stacking. How'd that work out?"
I put the wrench down.
"That's not the same."
"It's the exact same, brother. You're just wearing a different shirt."
I want to swing back. I've got two years of practice swinging at anybody who gets close to the truth. But something in me, something that's been cracking slow since a nurse with a stethoscope called me a Labrador, doesn't reach for it.
I stand there instead. Let it land.
"I know how to go cold." It sounds smaller than I want it to.
"Shut the door before anybody else gets carried out of my life on a gurney.
That part I could teach a class on." I make myself say the rest. "It's the staying I never learned.
Letting somebody matter and standing there anyway, knowing what it costs when it goes wrong.
I don't know how to do that, Tater. I don't know if I ever did. "
Tater's quiet a minute. Then he pushes off the rig and comes around where I have to look at him.
"Maple Street," he says. "The kitchen fire. You stood in that doorway six seconds, Owen."
My stomach drops. "We covered that already."
"Well we didn’t go over all of it, I got more to say." No heat in it. That's the worst part. "Smoke alarm went off and you weren't in Willowbend anymore. I took the nozzle and didn't say nothing, because it was a nothing fire and a green probie was watching."
"It was one bad morning."
"When's the last time you made entry on a working structure fire? A real one."
I open my mouth. Close it. He already knows the answer, same as he knew it behind the engine on Maple Street. Two years. Not once since Chicago. Everything since has been grass fires and kitchens.
"That leg's gonna heal," he says. "And the day it does, the chief puts you back on a truck. One of these days it won't be a nothing fire. What happens to the man next to you when that doorway's got somebody behind it?"
"That's not gonna—"
"You don't know that. I don't know that.
That's the whole problem." He picks at a callus on his thumb, looking at his hands instead of me, which is what Tater does when something costs him.
"I recruited you. I told the chief you were solid.
If something goes wrong in a fire because your head's still in Chicago, that's on me too, brother.
I can't keep covering and calling it loyalty. "
That one lands harder than the doorway did. Because he's right, and because I've been letting him carry it.
Neither of us says anything for a minute. Somewhere in the station a phone rings and quits.
"Department keeps a counselor on retainer," he finally says. "Free. Nobody's business but yours. Not the chief's, not mine. Guy's ex-Army, works with guys who've seen the worst day of somebody's life and can't put it down."
"Tater—"
"I watched you carry Claire for two years like a pack you won't take off, and I kept my mouth shut about it because it wasn't costing anybody but you.
" He's already texting. My phone buzzes in my pocket.
"Now it's costing Nellie, and someday it's gonna cost whoever's on the other side of a door with you.
So. Phone number. What you do with it's on you. "
He picks up the wrench I set down, checks the bolt, snorts.
"You stripped this."
"I know."
"Good talk," he says, and walks off, and that's Tater. Never stays long enough for you to argue.
***
I don't call.
Day after, I don't call either.
Third day, light duty, I'm in my truck on lunch with the number pulled up and my thumb hanging over the green button like it weighs forty pounds.
I hit it.
One ring. I hang up before the second. Heart going like I made entry on a working fire. Hands shaking on the wheel of a truck that isn't moving.
"Coward," I say to the windshield. Her voice, not mine. Coward, following me out of that bedroom with a washcloth still in her hand.
An hour later, coming back from a supply run, I pull off on the shoulder of Route 9. Not the station, not the farmhouse, a stretch of fence line that doesn't belong to anybody — and dial again before I can talk myself down.
This time I let it ring.
"Doc McKinly." Calm voice. Older.
"Yeah, hi. My name's—" And then nothing. My name. Ten seconds and I can't get my own name up my throat.
He doesn't rush me. "Take your time. Ain't going anywhere."
"Owen," I finally get out. "Peterson. Willowbend FD. Tater Monroe gave me your number."
"Monroe." I can hear him smile a little. "All right, Owen Peterson." A chair creaks on his end. "Tell me one true thing. Doesn't have to be the big one."
I look out at the fence line. At the heat coming up off the blacktop.
"I lost my wife in a fire two years ago," I say. "And last week I was happy for one night, and I ran from it like the building was coming down."
Quiet on the line. Not empty quiet. Listening quiet.
"That'll do," he says. "Thursday, four o'clock. Come as you are."
I sit on that shoulder a good five minutes after we hang up, staring at nothing, feeling like I set down something I've been carrying so long I forgot it had weight.
Doesn't fix anything. But I made the call before I knew one single reason a man would have to. That part's mine.
***
Thursday comes and goes. I'm not fixed. But I sleep four hours straight, which is a record, and Friday I catch myself rehearsing in the truck's side mirror like an idiot.
"Nellie. The cold thing wasn't about you." Stop. Start over. "I need you to know—"
I'm three sentences into an apology with no audience but my own reflection when my phone buzzes on the dash.
DEBBIE SUE: Are you with Nellie??
Two question marks. Debbie doesn't do two question marks.
ME: No. Why.
The three dots come up right away. Stop. Start again. Stop.
I watch that bubble like it's a heart monitor. Like it's telling me something before the numbers do.
"Come on," I say out loud, to nobody.
The dots come back one more time — ten full seconds, like she's writing something and deleting it and writing it again —
Then they stop for good.
Nothing.
I call her. It doesn't even ring. Straight to voicemail, which means the phone's off, and Debbie Sue Monroe's phone has not been off one time in the twelve years I've known her. That woman answers in church.
I sit in my truck with my apology dying behind my teeth, and every instinct I own — every one that's kept me alive walking into buildings other men run out of — is saying the same word on a loop.
Wrong. Something's wrong. And it's got Nellie's name on it.
My hand's on the gearshift before I've decided a thing.