Case sent him looking for a left-handed screwdriver. Six-Pack filled his locker with packing peanuts. We hung his boxer briefs from the flagpole. One day, we set his bed on four empty soda cans and remade it so it would collapse when he got in that night. And nobody ever missed an opportunity to dump water on him.
After he delivered his first baby on the box, the guys said, “How was it?”
And the rookie, shaking his head in disbelief, said, “It was like watching an avocado getting squeezed through an apricot.”
That night, the guys hung a bag in his locker with a snorkel, dive mask, and flippers, labeledOB/GYN DELIVERY KIT.
To be fair, there were also some funny calls. The lady who called us for menstrual cramps and kept talking about her “groin-icologist.” The fierce little poodle that attacked the rookie’s bunker-pants leg and wouldn’t let go, even as he hopped around trying to fling it off.
Just about the only thing the rookie didn’t see in those first weeks was a fire.
Until the day of his—our—six-week-iversary at the station, when we got a call for a garage fire at an abandoned house at the edge of town.
It was a perfect first fire. We ran lights-and-sirens, and we were the first on scene. We got to use the hoses and even worked in a lesson for the rookie about how to read the colors of the smoke.
Afterward, doing demo in the smoldering remains, I heard the captain giving the rookie advice. “A fire’s like a living thing,” he explained. “You have to treat it like a worthy adversary. It eats and it moves, and it’s going to go on eating and moving until we stop it.”
I looked at the rookie’s face. He looked flushed, and exhausted, and awash with adrenaline.
I knew that feeling.
“Pretty great, huh?” I said, as we walked back to the engine when it was all over.
“What?”
I elbowed him. “Fighting a fire.”
We were passing a drain in the parking lot, and I hopped right over it before turning back and realizing that the rookie had stopped to bend over the drain and throw up.
After a minute, he stood back up, wiped his mouth, and kept walking toward me. “Yeah,” he said then. “Really great.”
THAT NIGHT, Ihad a nightmare.
Not uncommon. I had lots of nightmares. But I didn’t usually have them on shift.
In this one, I dreamed I was suffocating. I must have stopped breathing during the worst of it, because when I woke up, there in my storage-closet bed at the station, I was gasping for air and nauseated—as if I really had been suffocating.
As soon as I woke, I stood up. Then I staggered to the light switch, flipped it, and stood panting for a long while, right there by the door, blinking, repeating to myself, “Just a dream. Just a dream.”
I didn’t want to go back to bed after that.
I went to the kitchen to get a glass of water.
And guess who was there? The rookie.
I stopped in my tracks at the sight of him. He wascooking.
I checked the wall clock. It was 2:00A.M.
I started to back out of the room, but he sensed me there and turned.
He looked me over. Then he held a pan out in my direction. “Want an omelet?”
“No thanks,” I said.
I’d been spotted, so might as well get my water. I shuffled to the sink.
He was chopping at a cutting board while butter melted in a pan, and I found myself watching him.
