Page 57 of Second Alarm
"That was luck."
"That was Derek being Derek."
"Ty."
"Yeah."
"I have to go."
"Okay."
"We can't — "
"I know."
"We're going to figure this out." Her eyes hold mine steady. "Okay?"
"Yeah."
"Ty."
"What."
"I'm still in."
"Me too."
She leaves with her cup of nothing, walks down the hallway, and disappears into the bunk room.
I stand in the kitchen with my hand on the counter for a long minute. I dry a dish that doesn't need drying, put it away, turn off the light, and sit at the table in the dark. The fridge hums the way the fridge at the academy used to hum. I put my face in my hands.
I laugh once, quietly, into my palms.
It's a real laugh. The first real one I've let myself have in a decade.
Chapter 11
Hanna
Night One: I draw inventory duty with Ty, alone, in the briefing room, at midnight.
It's a paperwork shift. Two clipboards, two cups of coffee, three boxes of EMT supplies to be counted into a spreadsheet. We do it without talking for the first forty minutes. I keep my eyes on the box. He keeps his eyes on the spreadsheet. Neither of us looks up. We are, in the way only firefighters in a quiet station at midnight know how to be, fully professional.
At forty-three minutes, we reach for the same pen on the table at the same moment. Our hands don't touch. They come close enough that I can feel the warmth at the back of his knuckles in the air around mine. I take the pen. He takes the other pen. We go back to our clipboards.
At forty-five minutes, he looks up. I'm already looking up — have been for thirty seconds, without moving my head. His eyes find mine across the briefing-room table. Neither of us breathes for what I'd like to call a beat and what is, by my count, four full seconds.
Beck walks past the doorway at forty-eight. He looks in, nods, moves on. For one one-second visual sample, Beck has seen two firefighters doing inventory at midnight. Nothingelse, because there is nothing else to see, because we are professionals.
I finish the inventory at twelve fifty-two. I lie in my bunk for two hours not thinking about the four seconds, but thinking about the four seconds the entire time.
Night Two: a transport call to the urgent care on Spring Street, ten thirty-three a.m., an older man with chest pain that's, on the monitor, a benign rhythm change, and on his wife's face, the worst thing that's ever happened. I'm in the back of the rig with my hand on the man's wrist, my voice in my paramedic register, calm and warm, and at minute six I look up at Ty in the review mirror — he's driving — and I lose three seconds. I lose them counting his pulse instead of the patient's. The patient's pulse is sixty-eight. I write seventy-one on the run sheet because I'm not reading the patient. I catch it before we hand off the patient to the ER nurse. Nobody dies. The patient is fine. I'm not.
In the bay after, Chief Rodriguez is at the engine bay door. She isn't waiting for me. She watches me hop out of the rig, watches Ty hop out of the rig and makes a note on the clipboard she's holding for entirely unrelated reasons — without looking down, without looking at us. Then she walks back into the office without saying anything to anyone.
In the locker room I sit on the bench with my hand pressed flat against the metal of my locker and think about how I have, for the first time in ten years on the job, written the wrong number on a run sheet because Ty Brennan was driving. The patient is fine, Chief Rodriguez wrote a note about us, I'm twenty-nine years old, and I have, exactly today, run out of room.
Three nights later, in the linen closet of Station 7, I have Ty Brennan pressed against the shelving unit full of launderedpillowcases, the light is off, the door is closed and we’re almost quiet. This is, I'll concede, not a sustainable long-term strategy.
