by Hannah Paige
Sirens.
Sirens.
Sirens meant first responders.
“Oh my God, oh my God!” she gasped, dropping the remote and sprinting out of her apartment. She didn’t realize that she’d forgotten her keys and wallet inside until she was out on the sidewalk. Police cars and firetrucks barreled down Worth Street and people gathered outside of apartment buildings, just trying to make sense of what they’d all seen on their television screens. The streets were clogged as people pulled over, stopping their cars, either in response to road blocks that were being set up without a moment’s delay, or to see the horror for themselves, in person, in their own city. Pam pushed her way down the sidewalk and cut across the typically hectic intersection where Worth met Broadway, today completely stalled with stopped cars, in order to reach the fire station a few blocks away. Her tunnel vision blocked out most of the noise and ambling, confused, and petrified people that surrounded Pam on every street corner. By the time she reached the station, she was breathless and a cold sweat had seeped through her sweater.
She expected it to be a madhouse, riddled with chaos and panic. But it was eerily empty. The trucks were gone, the coats weren’t hanging on their hooks, the hats had already been grabbed and jammed on heads. Blonde heads and brunette heads. Fathers and brothers and uncles heads. Heads of those she’d fed at barbeques. Heads she’d never really taken the time to know.
She shook her head, covering her mouth, “No, no, no, no…”
“Pam?” a woman called from behind her.
Pam spun around to see Gina, the only worker—from what Pam could tell—that had been left at the station, “Gina, Gina, where’s Darin? Tell me Darin’s still here. Tell me he got sent home and I missed him in transit. Tell me my husband’s not down there.”
Gina’s mouth opened slightly, then she closed it again, like she was too afraid to say the words that ebbed on her lips.
She didn’t need to answer. Pam knew. Darin would have been on the first truck out.
“No, goddamn it, no!” she screamed, running her hands through her hair. Her eyes darted around, looking for something that would tell her this was a dream. They finally made their way down to the ground and it was then that she realized she hadn’t even put shoes on before leaving her home. She’d sprinted out, crossed streets, and here she was, with bloody, asphalt-dyed, bare feet. It wasn’t a dream. She hurt too much for it to be a dream.
Pam moved in a daze. She tried to maneuver her way down to the towers, but there were so many roadblocks and barricades that she was forced to turn around before she got too close. It didn’t matter how many times she screamed at the police officers that her husband was in there, that he was a firefighter, a first responder, that she was his wife, Darin McCann’s wife. It didn’t matter, because she wasn’t the only one screaming: for a loved one, for help, for answers.
Then she remembered what her father-in-law had told her: to get to the hospital as soon as she could. Maybe Darin was already at the hospital. Maybe Pam would get lucky and find him there. She’d never thought that she would consider herself lucky to find her husband in a hospital but seeing him hooked up to an IV was a far better alternative to—she couldn’t think about an alternative right now. She had to get to the hospital.
That was where she found the chaos. Physicians were running everywhere, prepping rooms, and throwing plastic gowns over their clothes as sirens constantly screeched outside. Pam grabbed a doctor’s arm before she could jog past her,
“I’m looking for Mr. McCann, he’s…” she couldn’t believe it, but her mind was actually drawing a blank; what did her father-in-law look like? Was he brunette or had he gone gray? Tall or on the shorter side? He didn’t wear glasses, right? Could she pull out practical details, past the wall of nausea and worry that had built up inside her?
The doctor sighed and glanced wistfully at the chart in his hands, probably thinking a patient with strep throat looked optimal right now, “If he came in prior to an hour ago, then he’s probably been discharged. But if he’s still here, then he’ll be upstairs, second floor, most likely.”
Pam took off, passing up the elevator for the stairs after seeing a mass of physicians exiting it. She took the steps two at a time—her feet numb, now—and reached the second floor. It was quieter than the ground floor, where the ER was stationed. The nurses behind the desk were all on phones, arguing with people, desperately trying to clear the place out. A few people rocked themselves back and forth in the chairs in the waiting room across from the front desk. Pam felt her chest constrict even tighter at the sight of Mr. McCann sitting amongst a cluster of other old men.
Both his elbows were propped up on his knees, his fingers interlaced. His head was bent over and his eyes were closed. Pam had never, in all the years that she’d known Mr. McCann, the grumpy, sarcastic, opinionated but completely lovable, old man, she had never once seen him pray. And she was terrified by the sight of him starting the habit today of all days.
“Mr. McCann,” she breathed, padding over to him.
He lifted his head and upon opening his eyes, Pam gasped at the corneas, burned scarlet from him rubbing at them in his stricken state, “Pam—”
One of his friends, who wore an army veteran baseball cap, rose to his feet, offering Pam the seat next to her father-in-law. She thanked him and took it, “I know. He’s not here, he’s not in that emergency room. He’s there, I know he is.”
Mr. McCann nodded, extending one of his arms over Pam’s shoulder, and pulled her head to lean on him, “I know. There’s nothing to do. Nowhere to go. It’s best if we just wait here. Just wait here together.”
Pam jerked her head up, “There has to be something! We can’t…I can’t just sit here! How can you?”
His devastated look tore at Pam’s heart, “Don’t think I haven’t tried. We’ve been here for hours, got here at seven. Ron got bit by a rattlesnake so we rolled home early. When we heard, I demanded to be let down there, I…well, I didn’t use very kind words. They can testify.” He nodded without an ounce of effort towards the other men that surrounded him and Pam; each of them bobbed their heads in unison.
Pam shook her head, “No, no, we can’t just give up. You can’t just give up, not you. He’s out there, Darin is—” her voice snapped, “He’s out there and you’re telling me—” her voice hiccupped as a balloon of tears popped in her throat, “There’s nothing we can do but sit here and wait?”
Her father-in-law seemed to age ten years in that second that passed between them as he nodded, dejected and hopeless, “That’s exactly what I’m telling you, sweetheart.”
Pam hated herself for losing it so dramatically, then. She was a firefighter’s wife. She was supposed to be prepared for this, for the thought of someday losing her husband to the job. But not like this, not in an act of terror that happened in a second, on a Tuesday, on laundry day. She ground her teeth together, wishing she could even feel the pain that the tense movement should have inflicted on her jaw. She dug her fingers into her skull. But she was numb as she shook with tears and felt her world crumble out from under her. And to think that the first thing that crossed her mind that beautiful, late summer, Tuesday morning was that it was laundry day.
Ian
The sound of Ian’s home phone stirred him from a deep sleep. He hadn’t gotten home from the hospital until close to 1:00 am and had planned on sleeping in on his day off this week. He groaned, rolling out of bed, and shuffled into the kitchen before snatching the phone from its base.
“This better be good.”
“Oh, shoot! Did I wake you up again? I can never get your schedules right!”
Ian rubbed his eyes as his sister’s shrill, young voice came over the line. It didn’t matter that she was now old enough to drink—she liked to remind him of that every chance she got—she would always sound young to Ian, who was eight years older than her. “You have impeccable timing.”
“Woops! I’ll call back later, you go back to�
�”
“Jackie, I’m up now. What is it?”
“Well, I have some good news.”
“Yeah? Did you get another cat?” he toyed, picturing his sister curled up with her three cats because she ‘just couldn’t leave the last kitten!’
“Oh, hush. No, I said good news, not fantastic. I have an interview tomorrow for an internship at a law firm. A real law firm! Apparently, someone got my information from NYU and they called me yesterday afternoon! How great is that!” she squealed, waking Ian up one hundred percent now; he leaned away from the phone and laughed.
“That’s great, Jackie,” he shot a glance over to the microwave clock—10:45 am—and remembered the days when he thought that was almost lunchtime.
“Right? So…in celebration, I’m taking some friends out for dinner tonight.”
“And by friends, I’m assuming you’re referring to the two nerds you still associate with?”
“Says the one who has found body charts fascinating since he was six,” she retorted, and Ian chuckled, “As I was saying, I’m inviting some friends and family out to dinner, so of course you’re at the top of my list.”
“Thanks, Jackie. I’d love to—”
“Great! It’s at seven, at Volare.”
Ian smiled at her choice. She’d loved Italian food since he’d taken her to her first pizza parlor for her fourth birthday, and Volare was the best in town: pricey, but the best, “Fancy, I guess I’ll have to break out the suit and tie.”
“Well, after coming to the startling realization that after four years of undergrad, I signed up, and will be paying a pretty penny for another three to four years of school, I first contemplated reaching for a bottle of Jack, then considered offing myself. But then I remembered that Volare has a fabulous wine selection and to-die-for garlic bread and settled on calling to make a reservation before I bury myself further in debt and books.”
Ian sat down on one of his metal bar stools and swiped a finger over his marble countertop: spotless, the way he liked it, “Fair enough. Are you inviting Dad?”
There was a pause over the line, “Well, I reserved a table for five…but I thought I’d run the idea past you first, to make sure it was okay.”
Ian smiled at his sister’s undying loyalty. He and his father had butted heads since Ian told him that he wanted to go into medicine. Ian thought that his father, a man in the medical profession himself, would have been thrilled to hear that he was aspiring towards such a career. But his father was too focused on the fact that Ian wanted to help people that had injured their bodies, not their minds.
The psychiatrist career path was always a little too…out-there for Ian. He believed in what was in front of his eyes, what he could see, what he could fix; blood, a broken bone, a nicked nerve, those were the kinds of injuries that Ian knew he could heal. But when it came to what went on in people’s heads, how they felt, Ian was lost. Law school, on the other hand, wasn’t anywhere near their father’s field, and didn’t offer competition for his own work, giving him and Jackie plenty of room to build a relationship.
Ian loved his sister for her understanding towards his position with their dad and felt his heart swell at her urgency to keep Ian—who, she’d told him several times, she’d always been closer with than the father that they shared—happy when all three of them were together, which didn’t happen too often anymore, “Thanks, Jackie. I’ll be fine, go ahead and invite him.”
“Are you sure?” there was the slightest bit of hesitancy in her voice, but Ian knew her well enough to know when she wanted something. He couldn’t blame her for wanting to share a special night with her dad.
“I’m sure. Go ahead and invite him. I’ll see you at seven?”
“Thanks, big brother. See you at seven. Love you!”
“Love you too,” he hung up, returning the phone to the kitchen counter.
It was still earlier than he would have liked to be awake, but Ian had never been one of those few lucky people who could fall back asleep in a blink of an eye; once he was up, he was up.
He went back to his bedroom and threw on some jeans, guided by the thin streams of light that squeezed through the blinds on his windows. He tossed a loose t-shirt over his head and, after putting on socks and shoes, grabbed his wallet and keys, and headed out of the apartment. He jogged down the stairs from his fourth floor apartment and out into the sea of people and noise that was commonly known as Tribeca.
Though it bothered most people, Ian liked the noise. The constant white noise helped calm him, kept his mind from getting too busy. He was always thinking, and to walk out into the tumult of downtown forced his mind to sit still with all of the noises, the smells, the sights, bombarding him on every street corner. Besides, with constant racket around him, it gave Ian a valid reason for not talking to people he passed on the street: they wouldn’t hear him anyway.
Only a few blocks down from his apartment, Ian stopped at a coffee shop. There was a line all the way to the door and Ian took his spot in line, standing in the doorway.
“Hey, is that apartment upstairs still available?” the woman in front of Ian called after a server hurrying up to the front of the store to deliver a bagel to a customer drumming his fingers on a table.
The server shook his head, “Sorry, no. In fact, the woman who finally rented it is moving in tomorrow.”
Ian’s suit was new. He hadn’t owned one at all until his sister’s graduation a couple months ago, when she’d begged him not to show up in scrubs—which would have been like him, if he was being honest with himself. The cuffs still felt stiff around his wrists and the buttons weren’t worn down, their edges crisp, unsmoothed by fingers, as of yet.
Up until Jackie’s graduation, he’d had no reason to buy a suit; he never went anywhere. Even before he was at the hospital, and free time became a luxury he didn’t have, Ian had never been a social one. He’d chosen books over people, independent study instead of high school. He wasn’t a shy person, not to his knowledge, that is; he just didn’t like what the world had to offer him. He didn’t see the point in going out on his night off, in sidling up to a beautiful woman in a squalid bar or wasting his time making friends with people that he would just end up spending money on. He had more important things to do, more practical things. He was a doctor. He was not a friendly person, not cranky or rude, just not a socialite either. He hadn’t been to one party in his life and didn’t plan on changing that any time soon. He hadn’t had a girlfriend since his acne had cleared up and he’d discovered the novel invention known as contacts. He ate the same meals for lunch, dinner, and breakfast—when he was lucky enough to grab it. He walked to work to keep himself in shape and read medical notes in his spare time, though that was in short supply in his second year of residency.
Ian rolled the mirror across its tracks, sealing up the closet filled with a few sweaters, casual t-shirts, sensible pants, and collared shirts—these were his favorite to wear—and of course, the multiple sets of scrubs on the left side of the hanging rod. He sat down on his bed to tie up his dress shoes then tucked his wallet into his inside jacket pocket. One last look in the mirror—to smooth down his hair (black, sensible, just like him)—and he was out the door. He glanced down at the silver watch on his wrist: right on schedule, as planned. The street was packed. Taxis and street lamps lit the road, while windows in the towering skyscrapers and apartment buildings lit the sky like hovering TV screens: always on, always blinding. He heard a man shouting at another in a foreign language, probably from the Chinese restaurant one block down, along with the cackle of a group of teenagers directly across the street from him.
He paced up to the street corner—the easiest place to hail a cab on his block—and joined the mob of people trying to attract the buzzing mustard-tinted bumblebees that consumed New York City. Finally, one pulled up to him and he was climbing in when the passenger door on the other side opened, slammed shut. A young woman collided against him as they both slid into the bench seat.
“Ma’am, if you please, I’ve been waiting a long time. Could you just find another cab?” Ian tried his best to be polite, but he was, at heart, a New Yorker, and this was his cab, fair and square.
The woman, her cheeks flushed, and bright blonde hair pulled into a sloppy ponytail, shook her head, “No way! I have been on this street corner for the past half hour, trying to hail one of these stupid things! Do you have any idea how hard it is to actually get one in real life? The movies don’t do this barbaric process justice! Just stick out your arm, whistle, give them a nice smile. They’ll pull right over and let you hop in. That’s what the movies teach you. They leave out all the shouting and the shoving and the stink eyes! My God, those cabbies look like serial killers and then some of them didn’t take a card, so I had to get out and then do it all over again! And you know what? I haven’t eaten all day because I’ve been trying to move all of my stuff into my new apartment with no help, none whatsoever! I am starving, tired, cranky, and have decided that I don’t even like New Yorkers, you know why? Because you’re all rude and impatient and…and just flat out mean. I had a man shove me out of his way because I was standing in between him and his afternoon shot of caffeine. Well, excuse me, I was just trying to move my TV through the coffee shop and up into my apartment! By all means, let me just get out of your way because your espresso is far more important than getting my belongings up to my new home. So, no. No, sir. I will not just ‘find another cab’,” she fumed at Ian, who was doing his best not to laugh at the hectic woman. Her flushed face had morphed into a full crimson ball of fury as she vented her day’s troubles.
“You moved into the coffee shop four blocks down?” he asked.
“Hello? Are either of you going someplace, or you just gonna sit there and chat?” The cabi called, sitting taller to look in the rear-view mirror at the two of them in the backseat.