Page 36 of Second Alarm
"Yeah. Yeah, that tracks." Cal nods. "Portland was, what, pretty similar system to us?"
"Basically the same."
"Yeah. Makes sense."
He goes back to his Cheetos. He doesn't pursue it. He doesn't see it. He's, as he's always been, the single most oblivious man I've ever known, and today, for a single unearned moment, the obliviousness is the thing that saves us.
Or maybe he sees it. Maybe Cal Larsen sees it the way Cal Larsen sees the things he doesn't want to be seeing. There's a half-second, between the Cheetos and the swallow, where his eyes go to my coffee cup, and then to the way Hanna is sitting on the floor of the rig with her knee an inch from my boot, and then to the door of the rig, and then back to the floor. He doesn'task any of the questions a man might ask in that half-second. He swallows.
I've known Cal Larsen for thirty years. Cal Larsen isn't oblivious. Cal Larsen is, on a tactical level, the most observant man at this firehouse — he saw a hairline crack in the rim of a fire hydrant in 2019 from ten feet away and called the city about it on his lunch break. What Cal Larsen is, when it comes to me and his sister, is a man who has decided that the easiest version of his life is the version where he doesn't look. So he doesn't. He looks at the floor. He looks at the Cheetos. He looks at the door.
He keeps looking at the floor, looking at the Cheetos, and somewhere underneath all that floor and Cheetos he is, I think, holding his breath, because if he ever does look up, the version of his life he's been protecting is going to end.
I look at Gemma over Cal's head.
Gemma is polishing the interior side mirror. Gemma isn't looking at us. Gemma has a very small smile on her mouth that I don't think is about the mirror.
I finish my coffee. I put the cup in the sink in the kitchen and go to the locker room. I sit on the bench. I close my eyes for three minutes. I do the thing I've been doing for ten years, which is the counting thing, which is counting backwards from a hundred in three-second intervals, because it occupies the part of my brain that would otherwise be doing something I can't afford.
At count twenty-two, a shadow falls in the doorway.
I don't open my eyes. "Don't."
"Didn't say anything," Cal says.
"You were going to."
"I was going to." A pause. He comes in anyway, towel around his neck, Gatorade in his hand. The bench creaks when he sits. He doesn't crowd me. He just sits.
"You okay?"
"I'm okay."
"You sure? It was kids. That's — "
"I know what it was, Cal."
"Yeah." He lets it sit there a second. "I'm proud of you. I don't say that enough."
"Stop."
"I'm saying it anyway. I'm just — I'm glad we were both in there today. I'm glad it was you and me."
I open my eyes. I look at his stupid earnest face, the Cheetos dust still in the corner of his mouth, hair sticking up where the helmet pressed it. My best friend. The man whose sister I'm in love with. There's a ledger somewhere with my name on it, adding up numbers I'm going to owe, eventually, to someone.
"Yeah," I say. "Me too."
"You want a Gatorade?" He holds up the one in his hand.
"Sure, Cal."
"Red or blue?"
"Surprise me."
"Red." He sets it on the bench beside me and gets up.
He claps me on the shoulder. He walks out of the locker room, and I hear him in the hall, whistling, because my best friend whistles after hard calls, because Cal's whole coping strategy is noise.
