“And what will you do?” she asked.
I wasn’t sure what she meant. I frowned. “I’ll get a map of the city and learn the territory before I get there. I’ll show up on time ready to work, and I’ll work hard—”
The captain cut me off. “That’s not what I mean.” She leaned across her desk to hand me a blank piece of paper.
I took it.
Then she found a pen in a drawer and flung it at me.
I caught it.
“How did you wind up here?” she asked then.
“I was recruited straight out of the academy.”
“Having graduated at the top of your class,” she added, “easily passing both the written and physical tests—and then I handpicked you to come here. And you’ve been a valued asset, a tireless worker, and a rising superstar ever since.”
She waited for me to see her point.
I didn’t, though.
She leaned closer to spell it out. “You have no idea what it’s like to work in a place where you’re not wanted. You’ve been recruited—welcomed—into every job you’ve ever had.”
She wasn’t wrong.
“But all that’s over now,” she said. “The day you walk out of here, all that’s gone.”
“Is it going to be that bad?” I asked.
“It’s going to be worse.”
I looked down at the sheet of paper. “What’s the paper for?”
She leaned back in her chair. “I’m going to give you some hard-won advice. And you’re going to take notes.”
“Okay.” I popped the cap off the pen and waited.
She paused for a second, like it was hard to know where to start. Then she began. “First: Don’t expect them to like you,” she said. “They dislike you already, and they’ve never even met you. These guys will never be your friends.”
She looked at the blank paper under my hand. “Write it down.”
I wrote it down.
She went on. “Don’t wear makeup, perfume, or lady-scented deodorant. ChapStick is okay, but no lip gloss—nothing shiny, no color. Don’t paint your nails. Don’t wear any jewelry, not even earring studs. And cut your hair off—or keep it back. Don’t take it down or shake it out or play with it—ever. Don’t even touch it.”
I wasn’t going to cut my hair off. That was where I drew the line.
“So the idea is to make them think I’m a guy?”
“They will know you’re not a guy. The boobs are a dead giveaway.”
I corrected: “To make them less aware I’m a girl?”
She nodded. “Whenever possible.” She went on. “Don’t giggle. And don’t laugh too loud. Don’t touch anybody for any reason. Don’t carry a purse. Don’t use the upper registers of your voice, but don’t allow too much vocal fry, either. Don’t sing, ever. And if you make eye contact, make it straight on, like a predator.”
“Are you joking?”
She raised one eyebrow, like, Do I ever joke?
No. She was not joking. I was going to have to look up the term “vocal fry.”
“Follow your orders,” she went on. “Don’t ask questions. Know the rules. Go above and beyond at every chance. If your captain says to run a mile, run two. If he wants you to dead-lift one fifty, do one seventy-five. How much can you dead-lift?”
“Two hundred.”
“Impressive. How many pull-ups can you do?”
“Twenty.” A lot, even for a guy.
“You need to do thirty, at least—and with ease. Get on that. Forty would be better. And make sure you can do at least a few one-handed.”
I wrote down 40 pull-ups.
“Don’t ever act afraid. Don’t ever hesitate. Don’t ever admit it when you don’t understand.”
“What if I don’t understand, though?”
“Figure it out. Like a man.”
I had no idea what that meant, but I wrote it down, too.
“Don’t back down from a challenge,” she went on, “and if you go up against somebody, make damn sure to win. No fear! If your hands start shaking, sit on them. If you get an injury, ignore it.”
“You always tell us not to ignore injuries.”
“New rules: Never admit to being hurt. Pain is for the weak.”
I wrote down PAIN = for the weak.
“They will ignore you. They will exclude you. They will resent you. Being nice won’t help. Working hard won’t matter. Just by your very presence there, you are attacking them, trying to steal something that’s rightfully theirs, trying to infiltrate and dismantle their brotherhood. You’ll be a hen in a wolf-house, and they will eat you like a snack the first chance they get.”
She paused, and I thought about where all this advice was coming from.
She was trying to help me face my future, but she was clearly talking about her own past, about the path she herself had walked to get where she was. My admiration for her went up another thousand percent—even as my own confidence started to flag.
I tried to regroup. Maybe things had changed. She’d joined up thirty years ago. They’d barely invented the sports bra back then. I thought about the friendly camaraderie I’d always known at our station—what a solid brother- and sisterhood we had.
The captain sounded like she was describing some distant dark ages.
I wondered if it could still really be this bad.
“You can’t let anything bother you,” she went on. “You can’t get offended. You can’t be girly. They will test you and test you before you earn a place among them—and you might still never get one. They’ll tease you relentlessly, and it might be good-natured, or it might be cruel, but it doesn’t matter either way. They will burst in on you while you’re in the bathroom. They will goose you on the butt. They will dump ice water on you while you’re fast asleep in your bunk. And don’t get me started on the duct tape. It is what it is. It’s the life. Don’t get mad. Don’t file reports. Your only choice is to laugh about it.”
I circled the word “laugh.”
“And don’t talk too much, either. Remember: What women think of as sharing, men see as complaining.”
I could feel my shoulders starting to sink.
“Here’s another one: Don’t have feelings.”
“Don’t have feelings?”
“Don’t talk about them, don’t explore them, and for God’s sake, whatever you do, don’t cry.”
“I never cry.”
“Good. Keep it that way.”
I wrote the word “feelings,” circled it, and drew a line through the circle. Feelings: bad.
“Last, but not least,” she said, tapping the paper with her finger like she really wanted me to pay attention. “No sex.”
She waited for me to protest, but I didn’t.
“No sex with firefighters,” she went on. “Or friends of firefighters. Or relatives of firefighters. Even acquaintances of firefighters.” She pointed at me. “If they even get a whiff that you’re attracted to somebody anywhere near the station, you’re a goner. That’s the biggest rule, and I saved it for last: Do not sleep with firefighters.”
“So I need to live like a nun.” Not a problem. Tragic celibacy for the win.
“Until you’ve proved yourself, yes. Because there’s no faster way for you to go down in flames than to screw one of the guys.”
“Just hypothetically,” I said then, already knowing the answer, “would the guy go down in flames, too?”
The captain took off her reading glasses and gave me a look like, Please.
“I like you,” she said then. “I’ve always liked you. You’ve had it easy, and now you’re about to get the opposite. Maybe it’ll break you, or maybe it’ll make you. If you play it right, your struggles might even lead you to your strengths.”
I had no idea how to play it right.
Then she said, “My best advice to you? Find one person you can count on. Just one.”
I looked the sheet over. “So, to succeed in my new job, I basically need to be an asexual, androgynous, human
robot that’s dead to all physical and emotional sensation.”
She sat back in her chair and nodded, like, Yep. Simple.
I nodded.
“Just be a machine,” she said. “A machine that eats fire.”
Six
THE DRIVE ACROSS the country gave me a lot of time to think things through.
I didn’t even turn on the radio.
I just drove with the window down, the air roaring in and swirling around me.
Had all that really just happened? Had I really just torpedoed my career—the best thing in my entire life? Had I beaten up Heath Thompson on a stage in front of three hundred of my most esteemed colleagues? Had I given up a promotion to lieutenant by refusing to apologize? What the hell?
One thing I couldn’t decide: Had refusing to apologize been standing up for myself—or sabotaging myself? I could see arguments both ways. As I left behind everything and everyone I cared about back in Texas, and as I pictured my emptied-out apartment and my dad’s garage filled with storage tubs of my stuff, and as I watched the road ahead of me stretch out farther and farther into uncertainty, the question lingered.
It could have been worse, I kept telling myself.
I kept thinking about a woman I’d rescued from a plane crash not that long ago. The pilot, her boyfriend, got caught in a crosswind during landing and cartwheeled. The guy walked away without a scratch, but the woman was so burned, crushed, and wedged, we had to strip the plane apart with the hydraulic cutters.
During the extrication, she told me they had just gotten engaged. On that very flight.
Then she insisted it was the happiest day of her life.
After a while, in the fire service, calls start to blur together in your mind. But a rare few stand out. Something about that woman stayed with me—something about the way I’d glimpsed her future before she did. Her life as she knew it was gone, and I was the first one to know.
That’s how life is. Things happen. Lives get broken. Some people never can put themselves back together.
I wondered if she would.
I wondered if I would.
All I’d had to do was shake the man’s hand and walk off the stage. Instead, I put him in the hospital. Which was still a lot less than he’d done to me. But what was that old saying my dad loved so much? The best revenge is forgetting.
I clearly hadn’t forgotten a thing.
Despite all my efforts.
In my defense, I hadn’t expected to see Heath Thompson there. I’d had no warning. It was supposed to be the mayor—a friendly, portly fellow I’d met several times before. It was the shock of seeing the monster himself. I hadn’t had time to prepare. If I’d known it would be him in advance, maybe I could have acted differently.
Or not.
Maybe, if I’d known, I would have skipped the banquet entirely.
Maybe I wasn’t as completely fine as I wanted to think.
And now—insult to injury—I was moving in with my mother.
The last person I would have picked.
She didn’t even know the real reason I’d agreed to come. She thought I was just being nice—just doing my daughterly duty.
Or maybe she thought I’d softened toward her. Or even decided to forgive her. Was she expecting bonding? Was that on her agenda?
There would be no bonding.
I was going there to do a job. I would help her until she’d adjusted to her new eye situation, and then I’d find somewhere else to live. If I could prove myself at the Lillian FD, I’d move to Lillian. If not, I’d move somewhere else. Somewhere closer to home—preferably some place with tacos. A year at the most, she’d said. But it would take much longer.
Oh my God. I was moving back in with my mother.
How long had it been since I’d lived with her? Not since before she’d left us—on the night I turned sixteen.
A lifetime.
Would she notice how different I was now?
Would it bother me when she noticed?
Would she try to change me back?
And if she did that—if she insisted on comparing and contrasting who I’d been before with who I’d become now—what would that do to me? Would it drown me in sorrow for everything I’d lost?
I sucked in a deep breath and sat up straight.
I needed a strategy. The one thing I couldn’t do right now was to become emotionally destabilized. I had worked too hard and come too far.
The only safe approach I could see was to keep my distance. Yes, I had to live in her attic, but we’d be housemates and nothing more. I’d go to work, and take long runs, and work out, and do whatever chores she asked of me, and that would be it. My mother—and life, and circumstances, and Captain Harris—could force me into this situation. But nobody could make me like it.
* * *
ARRIVING IN ROCKPORT, I spotted my mother’s house right away. I didn’t even have to check the address.
It was a tiny, classic New England saltbox shape, with gray shingles, just as I’d seen everywhere on my drive up, but it was covered, doorstep to roof, in painted flowers.
The front door, and all around it, and the windows and shutters and window boxes—all brightly, lovingly hand-painted with folk-art reds and pinks and oranges. The tiny front yard overflowed with real flowers as well, in a colorful, tangled jumble, draping over the picket fence.
Yep. This was Diana’s place.
She’d lived in Rockport for a full decade, but I’d never visited. She kept on inviting me, and I kept on declining.
Some part of me had never wanted to see the life she’d left us for.
Now, here I was, moving in.
I stood at the garden gate, but I couldn’t seem to make myself walk through it.
The sheer cuteness of her painted house felt disingenuous. The world might pass this sweet-looking house and decide that an equally sweet person lived in it. But I knew the truth. No amount of painted flowers could cover the truth. She was still the person who’d left us. She was still the person who had disappeared when I really, really needed her.
She was still one of the greatest disappointments of my life.
I tried to get oriented by looking around at the town’s sheer, unadulterated, almost aggressive New England charm.
It wasn’t like I hadn’t been warned. According to Diana, if you’d ever seen a movie that featured a “charming seaside village” for any amount of time, it was Rockport. She could rattle off ten of them in as many seconds. And her house, she swore, was at the epicenter of the cuteness—in a historic fishing village nestled on a narrow jetty called Bearskin Neck that curved out into the harbor.
She’d described it before, of course. I just hadn’t been paying attention.
Quaint little dollhouse-like stores decorated with weathered wooden buoys sold everything from T-shirts to jewelry to ice cream. Shutters were painted cheery pastels, and planter flowers bloomed everywhere. It was too idyllic to be true, and next to my big, hot, multicultural, gritty, authentic, beloved home city of Austin, this place felt absolutely fake.
Yet it felt like my mom, too. She herself was charming, and well groomed, and lovely. I could see why she would feel drawn here. It felt like her in a way Texas never had. I felt a surge of jealously toward this adorable town and all it had to offer. It had gone up against Austin, and won. But the real loser was me.
Just then, the front door opened. And there she was. My long-lost mother. Not literally lost, since, technically, we made an effort to see each other from time to time.
But lost all the same.
It had been a year since I’d seen her—for coffee, the last time she’d been passing through Austin—and I felt the familiar sensation that seeing her always gave me in the years since their divorce. A particular kind of numbness that happened when my heart wanted to flood with all the things people feel about their mothers—but I flat-out refused to let it.
There she was. The lady who had always been my mother. Exactly the same.
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Except, wearing an eye patch.
It was so strange to see anyone in an eye patch, let alone my own mother. Then there was the patch itself, homemade out of blue calico fabric with flowers—which was even more off-putting than the fact of it in the first place. Who had a homemade eye patch?
That had to be the eye with the mysterious ’oma, of course. The sight of the patch made her situation—and by extension mine—seem real for the first time.
It also made her seem a little larger than life.
Or maybe that was just her.
I reminded myself again that she was only Diana. Of course, our parents get an extra dose of importance in our minds. When we’re little, they’re everything—the gods and goddesses that rule our worlds. It takes a lot of growing up, and a lot of disappointment, to accept that they’re just normal, bumbling, mistaken humans, like everybody else.
Her hair was grayer now, and she wore it in a short bob that curled forward under her ears. She’d never been a big one for makeup. She wore the same canvas apron she’d always worn, with a lifetime’s worth of smears and drips of glaze on it in every color known to nature, over wide-leg linen pants and a linen shirt that were both somehow the exact right ratio of wrinkled to pressed.
I’d forgotten how beautiful she was. I could say that without softening toward her, couldn’t I? That was just a cold fact. She was beautiful.
But also, for the first time in my life, I thought she looked old.
She tried to step toward me, but she stumbled over a corner of the welcome mat and had to bend down to study the two steps down to the sidewalk.
By the time we reached each other, the resentment I’d been feeling had mixed with so many other feelings and impulses—sorrow, regret, loneliness, protectiveness, admiration, affection—that it became something else completely.
Complicated.
She moved in for a hug in slo-mo. I saw her lean in, and I thought, Don’t hug me. Don’t hug me.
Then she hugged me.
I stepped back when she released me.
“You made it,” she said then, raising her one good eye to take me in.
“Nice eye patch,” I said.
She touched it, like she’d forgotten it was there, then smiled as if I’d embarrassed her. “A friend made it for me,” she said. Her fingernails had clay under them, as always, and she had a paintbrush tucked behind her ear.
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