All that changed when I told her story.
Now, she had me on her side—too little and too late, but right there at last, all the same.
Putting that long-unspoken night into words changed the memory. It was no longer some kind of poison gas that snaked around my consciousness, formless and uncontainable and lethal. Now it had words. Now it had a shape.
A beginning, a middle—and, most important, an end.
IT TAKES Alot out of you, confessing your darkest secret. I went home and slept like the dead.
And when morning came, something about me was reborn.
I lay in bed under a pattern of sunshine from my window and marveled at my capacity to do the impossible.I’d told the story of Heath Thompson.I’d told the whole soul-destroying story, and I’d lived to see the dawn. Of all the brave things I’d done in my life, that one was the bravest.
If I could do that, I could truly do anything.
And now I was going to the hospital to see the rookie, no matter what anybody said.
Just try to stop me.
But when I headed downstairs, I found that my mother’s house was full of firefighters.
Not just any firefighters, either. Station Two, C-shift. My crew.
They were doing chores.
Six-Pack and Case were in the kitchen, repairing my mother’s broken window. Tiny was on a ladder in the living room, replacing the lightbulbs in a ceiling fixture. And the captain was sipping coffee at the kitchen table with my mom, in her bathrobe.
“Oh, honey,” my mom said when she saw me. “You’re up.”
The captain turned, saw me, too, and stood up. “Morning, Hanwell.”
As soon as the guys heard him, they all called out, “Morning, Hanwell!”
I wasn’t sure what to make of them all. “What are you doing here?”
“It’s a long story,” the captain said.
“They showed up here at seven forty-five and started fixing my broken window,” my mom said. “Then they asked me to make a list of every single honey-do I could think of for them, and they’ve been hard at work ever since.”
I looked at the captain like,What the hell?
“These guys,” my mom went on, chirpily, gesturing at Six-Pack andCase, “are going to repaint my garden fence. And this one”—she gestured at Tiny—“adjusted that broken gate latch out front, tightened the loose cabinet door, and fixed the leak behind the toilet.”
She looked pleased.
I frowned at the captain. “Why?”
He looked right at me. “By way of apology.”
“What are you apologizing for?” There were so many possibilities.
“DeStasio throwing a brick through that window, for starters,” the captain said, nodding at it.
I blinked. “You knew it was him?”
“I do now.”
“How?”
