Here’s the most essential truth about firefighting: It’s a helping profession. People get into it because they want to help others. Yes, okay, maybe they also want to wear the bunker gear, or bust things up with axes, or drive a big red truck with a siren.
But firefighters are basically good guys at heart. I’m not saying they don’t get into trouble, or have difficulty processing their feelings, or harbor a little unexamined sexism—or other isms. They’re human. They’re messy and imperfect and mistaken. At their cores, though, they’re basically good people.
This was the crux of it.
Iffirefightersweren’t the good guys, then maybe there just weren’t any left.
IN PRACTICE, THEweeks at work that followed were not all that different from the weeks before. I still got to work on time and did all my chores and duties with care. I still ran calls and took care of patients and brought my A-game. I still took a six-mile run every day. I still practiced parkour and studied the course whenever no one was looking. Maybe I ignored the rookie a little harder than I had before, but it wasn’t like I’d ever actively sought out his company. For various reasons.
On the surface, things probably looked about the same.
But nothing was the same.
That night with the rookie had opened me up in the most profound way. It’s like I was a flower bud on a time-lapse camera and I just exploded into petals and tenderness and color.
I keep thinking that if I’d walked into that locker room the next morning as my usual, armored self, seeing that graffiti would have smarted, yes. But it wouldn’t have shredded me like it did.
What choice did I have but to retreat after that? What choice was there but to armor back up? It was self-preservation.
But now I knew what I was missing. Now I remembered what it felt like not to be alone.
And now that I knew, it was unbearable.
But I bore it anyway. That’s what we do, isn’t it? That’s the thing I always love best about the human race: how we pick ourselves back up over and over and just keep on going.
Still, the loneliness after I turned away from the rookie was so excruciating, so physical, that I actually felt like I might wither and die.
And so, the next best thing: crochet club.
Maybe, I thought, if I soothed the loneliness elsewhere, I could find a way to be okay.
Josie and Diana were always delighted for me to join them, and they gave me a giant basket of yarn balls to wind. And even as I marveled at how low I’d sunk—winding yarn balls!—I had to admit that the softness and the rhythm of the motion were pretty soothing, after all. Especially the chenille.
To be truthful, it wasn’t just crochet club. I looked for every opportunity to be around either of them. I started showing up at the kitchen table for coffee. I helped prepare dinner. I volunteered to help Josie in her shop. When Diana invited me to go to the movies, I said yes. When she asked me to help in the garden, I did that, too. And when she hugged me, as crazy as it sounds, I hugged her right back.
It was like I was starving for human connection—and had been, all along—but I’d only now just figured that out.
My plan was to feast on friendship at home so that I’d be satiated when I got to the station.
It kind of worked.
Except that I never seemed to get satiated. The more connection I got, the more I wanted. You know, like when you take a nap, but when you wake up you’re somehow sleepier than you were before? That was me, all the time—with humanity.
To everyone’s astonishment, after Diana and Josie had failed to even coax me out of my room for so long, now they couldn’t get rid of me. To my relief, they were delighted. And they were also hell-bent on solving the Case of the Slutty Locker.
They treated it like a Nancy Drew moment, and they questioned me about each guy on the crew, trying to nail down our suspects.
“It could have been any one of them,” Diana announced one night.
“I say it was the captain,” Josie said. “He’s the one who saw her at the party giving the rookie a blowjob.”
“Can I just reiterate that I did not give the rookie a blowjob?”
“Notyet,” Josie said.
“The captaindoesmake a good suspect,” Diana said, totally unflummoxed by the topic.
“Well,” I said, “he doesn’t think women should join the fire department.”
