I’ve never been more grateful to see anyone in my life.
Gray with soot, caked with salt and sweat, I knew that as soon as the adrenaline wore off, I’d collapse. There’s nothing on this earth more exhausting than a big fire. Every foot of hose weighs eight pounds when it’s full of water. We’d hauled 250 feet of hose that day, working the flames, feeding the line. No CrossFit regime or “fireman’s workout” can even compare to what you’re really doing when you work a fire. You come back blistered, chafed, and dehydrated from the inside out—with your shoulders, back, hands, and basically every cell in your body stinging and aching.
At first you barely feel it. Adrenaline distracts you.
Then it hits.
Despite it all, after we got off shift, all the guys were heading to Boston to check on Owen. The chief and the captain were already there—had gone straight from the scene. I headed toward my truck a few steps ahead of the guys, but Tiny and Six-Pack followed me and climbed in the passenger side without even asking.
We drove in silence. The sky drizzled rain the whole way, and I remember thinking how strangely loud the wipers sounded. I’d never noticed how loud they were before.
The captain had sent group texts to our entire shift several times with updates, but they were vague: The rookie’s heart rate and breathing had stabilized, but he had a collapsed lung. They were keeping him in a medically induced coma for the foreseeable future. They were going to treat him in the hyperbaric chamber and then take him to the ICU.
My brain jolted around from thought to thought. I’d see the rookie, sleeping safe and alive in my bed, and then the channel would skip to his melted mask and his smoking gear. I’d feel the memory of his mouth on mine, and then I’d flip to the moment when I tubed him. When panicthreatened to freeze my chest, I’d focus on the good signs. “We’ve got air,” the medic had said.
We had air. We had a pulse.
As far as I knew, that was still true. Now I just needed to get to Boston.
I held Owen in the front of my mind, as if that might help him somehow.
But somewhere in the back of my mind, other questions waited to be answered.
Why had we gone into that building at all? What could DeStasio have been thinking? What the hell just happened?
There was no “little boy” in the fire. I’d dreaded finding a body all day, but there was never any sign of a child. Had DeStasio hallucinated it? Had he panicked? He’d fought way too many fires to be fooled by a shadow, and it left me with a question I couldn’t answer.
What, exactly, had DeStasio seen in that window?
BY THE TIMEwe stepped off the elevator at Mass General in Boston, the waiting room was packed standing room only with Owen’s extended family, the entire guest list from his parents’ party—from sisters to cousins to friends called “uncle”—plus about fifty retired firefighters right out of Central Casting in their FD shirts and dad jeans.
Friends of Big Robby’s, I supposed.
I remember it now as a blur of navy-blue station shirts, overgrown mustaches, Dunkin’ Donuts cups, and cigarettes.
Could you smoke in the hospital waiting room?
No.
Did those ornery old firefighters give a shit?
Hell, no.
The wives were all on one side of the room, sitting in chairs, leaning toward each other, talking and gabbing and worrying. The guys were all crammed in the hallway, standing close, faces somber.
I was the last one off the elevator, and after the guys had meldedthemselves into the group, I looked up to see the whole crowd fall quiet to stare at me.
Like, no talking, no coughing, no moving. Except the one person who half-whispered, “There she is.”
She?Only one “she” had just stepped into the room.
At first, I wondered if maybe they recognized me as the drunk girl from the party, and now my identity as a firefighter was being revealed.
But then I remembered I was a smoke-stained mess.
I hadn’t showered or changed. My skin was smeared gray with soot, and my shirt was stained and blotchy with salt. My hair was matted. I reeked of smoke and sweat and muck. My uniform was damp in some places and soaked in others from sweat and hose water.
I looked nothing—at all—like the girl who had showed up with Owen that night.
