Chapter 27 – Dylan
TWENTY-SEVEN
DYLAN
“He forgot his phone.” Grant is standing in the doorway to the house with his hand extended and Grady’s cell in it.
“Thanks. He isn’t here, but I’ll give it to him when he gets back.”
“Where’d he go? You guys couldn’t have left five minutes before us.”
“I don’t know. There was a call on the scanner, and Grady said he had to take a drive.” Grant swears under his breath and sighs. His reaction makes me uneasy. “What is it?”
“The one time Emerson convinces me to turn it off.” He laughs, starts to speak, and then stops.
He runs a hand through his hair with the same mannerism that his brother does and it makes me smile.
“He’s having a rough go of it.” I can tell it pains him to tell me, almost as if he’s betraying his brother by talking about it with me.
“You’re the second or third person who has used that phrasing.” Damon, Desi at the grocery store, and now Grant. “What exactly does a rough go of it mean? What am I missing?”
He twists his lips and then continues. “The guys at the station are worried about him. We’re all worried about him, in fact.”
“But he told me he agreed to do the calendar. It’s a step in the right direction, isn’t it? It shows he’s coming to terms with his burns?”
“It is, a big one for him personally, but it’s the scars we can’t see that are worrying me.
One of his crew, Bowie, called me a few weeks back.
He said Grady isn’t engaging on the job.
If there’s a fire, he can’t bring himself to breach the building.
” My heart falls. “Bowie said he’s fine on medical calls but show up at a hot scene, and he freezes. ”
“Which doesn’t instill any confidence in the guys,” I conclude and then think back to Grady’s rejection of whatever meeting was going on at the station yesterday.
The exchange with Veego. I thought Grady’s unexpected request to take me to the station was to get back at Jett .
. . and now I wonder if it was to prevent them from pulling him into a confrontation he didn’t want to have.
It all makes sense now, and I grieve for Grady.
“I was there the other day. I thought it was just about the calendar.”
“He’s too proud to let anyone know he’s having trouble.” Grant’s concern for his brother is so real. It’s almost as if he’s trying to wear the burden to carry it for his brother.
“Is there anything I can do to help?”
“I wish I knew, but all I can think of is that he needs more time. I don’t know. None of us have been through this before. I wish there was a way to help ease the survivor’s guilt or else when he actually gets the nerve to walk back in the fire, I fear he’s going to be looking for punishment.”
“He’s punished himself enough.”
“He has. And he’ll always blame himself so there’s no use trying to tell him different. I know from experience.”
“Then what do we do?” I all but plead.
“We have patience. And we find a way to show him every day that if he doesn’t start to live again, he’s wasting his second chance at life.”
The front door shutting startles me awake. My guitar falls off my lap and onto the floor with a musical thud as I scramble up and look toward the kitchen.
Grady stands there, shoulders sagging, eyes wary, and every part of him on edge. Our eyes meet for the briefest of seconds, his more like a glare of contempt before he throws his keys on the counter and walks back out without a word.
It’s the first time I’ve ever felt uncomfortable in his home, and frankly, I’m not sure what I should do or what is going on.
And then I hear it.
The pound of the hammer. The deep, resonating thud, thud, thud of his aggression being taken out on wood and metal in what appears to be the only way he knows how to cope. I stand at the window and watch him, the scanner’s steady, controlled chaos the background to my thoughts.
I’m not sure how long I stand there and watch Grady move here and there beneath the spotlight illuminating the small part of the backyard where he works, but the tension in his movements never seems to diminish.
My feet move without thought, the need to comfort more important than the awkwardness of intruding on his private moment. Outside I wait, not saying anything but knowing he is aware I’m there.
And still he doesn’t say a word.
“Is everything okay?” I finally bite the bullet and ask.
He grunts in response.
“Do you want me to go to a hotel for the night so that you can have the house to yourself?”
“No. It’s fine. I’m fine.”
Uh-huh. Like I believe that for a second.
So, I sit on the steps of the porch and watch him work. Time passes, measured by the number of mosquitos I swat away.
“There was a fire tonight,” he finally says, but he doesn’t stop marking a piece of wood and lining it up.
“Are all the guys okay?”
He grunts again, which I take as an affirmative.
“You want to talk about whatever is bugging you? Tonight’s fire? The guys?” I take a deep breath and go there. “Your fire?”
“Jesus fucking Christ. Again? Which one of them called you or stopped by and set you up to pretend you’re my goddamn shrink?”
I exhale an unsteady breath. “None of them. I figured something was bugging you. I’m a smart girl, Grady. Most of those around you who care about you are smart too. I assume they all want to help you with whatever it is you need help with.”
“I don’t need help with anything.” He spits the words out despite their untruth.
I don’t push further. The cadence of the hammer becomes a metronome to his anger until it slowly eases with each and every stroke.
And then there is silence. Nothing but the silhouette of a man in conflict against the blinding light. His head hangs down, his hands fall lax, his shoulders sag.
“Today is the anniversary. Of my fire.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah. It was convenient timing for my parents to have a barbecue at the lake.” He chuckles but shakes his head.
“There was a fire tonight in the same set of warehouses where our fire happened. When I heard the call, my first thought was arson. The point of origin in our fire was never determined, and it’s always been easier for me to blame someone for everything that happened instead of faulty wires or some shit like that.
So, I heard dispatch on the scanner, and all I could think about was if it was arson, the son of a bitch wanted to come back and take a trip down memory lane.
Get a thrill from watching firefighters run in that building and get off if one of them didn’t make it back out. ”
“Was it?”
He pauses momentarily and then moves toward me, taking a seat beside me unexpectedly. “Nah. It was just one of those things. A perfect storm of mishaps in an old building.”
“Well, that’s good, right? Not the fire part, obviously.”
“Mm-hmm.”
“Did you wish you were there?”
“I was there. I watched it from afar.” His voice is distant and cold, but his body is warm beside mine. It seems like such a weird dichotomy to me.
“No, I mean, did you wish you were fighting it?” I ask despite Grant’s comments earlier.
“Are you going to push me on this too, Dylan?” He doesn’t look my way, just stares at the hammer in his hand.
“I wasn’t aware I was pushing. I just wondered if being back there made you want to get your firefighting fix.”
His laugh is long and low with a hint of self-deprecation. “My firefighting fix? I think I got plenty of that. I think the question you’re asking is why I’m being such a pussy and not grabbing my turnouts and laying down pipe like a probie running into his first fire. Am I right?”
Proceed with caution, Dylan.
“That isn’t what I said.”
“It may not be what you said, but it’s what you meant.”
I start to skirt around the issue but figure it isn’t going to do either of us any good if I do. So, I dive right in. “You’re right. It is what I meant.”
His body jars beside me. “At least you’re honest when everyone else tries to beat around the fucking bush.”
“So?”
“I wanted to go in. Fires are few and far between in Sunnyville, so it isn’t like there’s a fire every week to test me .
. . but when there is, it screws with my head.
Every part of me wants to run in and do my job, and then I hear Drew screaming, feel the flames as they try to eat me alive, and I have a full-blown panic attack. ”
I’m shocked by his honesty, so I give him some right back. “Having a panic attack would seem like a completely logical reaction, Grady.”
He hangs his head for a beat. “My dad used to say that bravery was being scared to death and suiting up anyway.”
The correlation he’s drawing is instantaneous to me. He doesn’t feel like he’s brave anymore. And yet, I will not refute him. Such a thing will fall on deaf ears, so I try another angle.
“Does this have anything to do with why you insisted I go to the station the other day?”
He crosses his arms on his knees and rests his forehead on them.
I give him the time he needs and stare at the many moths flying through the light while I wait.
“It was a company meeting. A we’re-not-sure–if-you’d-have-our-backs-in-a-fire meeting.
” There’s hurt in his voice, but more importantly, there’s fight left too.
“They don’t blame you, you know,” I say when every part of me knows he thinks they do.
“I know they don’t,” he lies.
“No one does, Grady.”
He grunts as his shoulders heave up and down, but he doesn’t look up, and he doesn’t speak.
“Is there anything anyone can do to make the transition easier for you? This is what you love, it has to be crippling you not to participate in what you live for.”
“Stop talking about it. There’s a start. Stop whispering behind my back. Stop staring at me like I’m going to fucking break. I’m already broken, Dylan. That’s what they don’t get.”
“Grady . . . there has to be something—”
“How about this? I’ll step into the fire when you decide you’re going to sing your own songs yourself instead of wasting all your talent and ability on people who take you for granted like Jett does.”
It’s my turn to have my feathers ruffled, and they definitely are.