Things You Save in a Fire

by Katherine Center

  The rookie stood back up to show me, his face bright with good fortune. “Look at these little guys!”

  “Half Chihuahua,” the old lady said, “and half poodle.” Then she tilted her head to gesture next door. “The neighbors.”

  “A Poo-huahua,” the rookie said, nuzzling his face down into the puppy’s fat belly.

  “Rookie,” I said, shaking my head. “No.”

  “Don’t you think the station needs a mascot?”

  “Shut it down, rookie,” I said, as menacingly as I could.

  But he held the puppy up to me. “Look at that face.”

  That was it. I drew the line at puppies. “I’m out,” I said, walking away.

  When the rookie caught up with me a minute later on the front walk, I did not turn back to look. “Tell me you don’t have a puppy in your arms.”

  “I don’t have a puppy in my arms,” he said from behind me, pleased with his own restraint.

  “Good, because—”

  “I’ve got him in a basket.”

  Thirteen

  I DEVELOPED A strategy for dealing with Diana: one-word answers only.

  It turned out, I was right all along. She didn’t just want me to help her with groceries and stairs. She wanted to hang out. She wanted to be friends.

  She wanted forgiveness.

  She claimed she was just glad to have me around, but her actions made it clear that she wanted more. Wherever I was, she’d show up there. If I tried to read a book in the living room, she’d read a magazine in the living room. If I was making a snack in the kitchen, she’d make a pot of tea. If I took a stroll down to the rock jetty, she would coincidentally be in the mood for a stroll of her own.

  She was companionable. She was low-key. But she failed to comprehend something important: I didn’t want to be her friend.

  Quite the opposite, in fact.

  In the years after she left, I built my entire life on a foundation of routine and order and low drama. That meant setting schedules and keeping to them. It meant going to the same place and eating the same things and following the same routines over and over. It also meant doing everything in a careful, controlled, regimented way.

  And that was before I’d even moved here. Now I’d turned everything inside out. I had ten times more chaos than I could handle. The last thing I needed was to hash out old disappointments with a woman I’d already given up on.

  I was here to be helpful, and pleasant, and do my duty. I was not here to play Bananagrams, or to learn the art of crochet, or to bare my soul. To anybody.

  But Diana didn’t get it.

  “Answer a question for me,” she said one night as I tried to escape after dinner to practice a little parkour.

  “Busy,” I said, at the door.

  “You’re always busy.”

  “Sorry.”

  “There’s something I need to talk to you about.”

  I just shrugged and gestured toward the road. “Working out.”

  The house was so tiny that those nighttime escapes had become a kind of salvation. I’d jog the narrow streets of the jetty and then on into town and around the coast, vaulting, leaping, climbing, and swinging. It did make it feel like the whole town was a playground.

  Usually, by the time I got home, Diana was fast asleep with her white noise machine running. But on this night, she waited up. When I walked back in, she was perched in the living room like a spider.

  “Come talk to me for a minute,” she said.

  “I’m not really a big talker,” I said.

  “You used to be.”

  “I used to be a lot of things.”

  I sat down, as requested, but I chose the chair closest to the stairs, and I perched at the edge, ready for my quick getaway. As I sat, she studied me. “I want something from you,” she said.

  I met her eyes. “What?”

  “I want you to forgive me.”

  Well, that was blunt. “We don’t always get what we want.”

  “I don’t want you to do it for me. I want you to do it for you.”

  I drew in a long breath. “We’re not going to be friends, Diana.”

  “This isn’t about being friends.”

  “Kinda seems like it is.”

  She frowned at me. “I’d like to be your friend, I would. I can’t deny it. In addition to loving you—I’ve always just really, really liked you. So I’m not going to pretend like I feel the same way about you that I would about some stranger off the street. But that’s not what I mean when I say I want you to forgive me.”

  I waited.

  “This is about something far more fundamental than that.”

  I waited again, as long as I could, before finally giving in and asking, “What?”

  “This is about you finally setting down all that anger you carry around with you everywhere you go.”

  She wasn’t wrong. I did carry anger around. Maybe not everywhere—but almost.

  And it was a lot heavier than you’d think.

  I could have lied then, I guess. Or gone up to bed. Or even fled back out the front door into the night. But I just didn’t. Did I want to set down all that anger?

  Of course I did.

  I let out a long sigh before saying, “I just don’t know how to do that.”

  She leaned a little closer, waiting for more.

  I’d already started. Might as well finish.

  “I always kind of thought that forgiveness would come with time,” I said. “That the bitterness would slowly fade like a scar until I couldn’t even really find it anymore if I looked. But that’s not what happened. It didn’t fade. It hardened. Other things around it faded, but the memory of the day you left is still as sharp as if it just happened. I can still see your car pulling out of the driveway. I can hear the pop of the tires as they rolled over those seeds from that Chinese tallow tree. I can see the side of your face, absolutely still like a wax figure as I banged on the window. I can feel every emotion I experienced that day in slow motion. If anything, the memories have gotten stronger.”

  Those memories were tied to other memories, of course, and there was no way I was going to share anything more with her. But what I was saying was true enough. “I know that forgiveness is healthy. I know the only person you hurt when you hold on to bitterness is yourself. But I literally wouldn’t even know how to start. How do you forgive people? How does it even work?”

  These were meant to be rhetorical questions.

  “You’re in luck,” Diana said then. “I happen to be kind of an expert on forgiveness.”

  “Who have you had to forgive?” I asked. As far as I could tell, she was far more likely to be the victimizer than the victim.

  “Myself, for starters,” she said. “And then lots of other people. You don’t get to be my age without disappointments. My parents, in some ways. Various friends. Your dad.”

  “Dad?” I said, like, Please. “Dad is perfect.”

  “He’s hardly perfect.”

  “He was good to you.”

  “Yes, he was.”

  “He was good to you, and you cheated on him.”

  She snapped to attention. “I never cheated on your dad.”

  I gave her a look, like, I know all about it.

  “Is that what he told you?”

  “That’s what he told Aunt Caroline. I just overheard him.”

  “I did not cheat on your father,” she declared again.

  “You left him for another man,” I said, like, Case closed.

  “Yes. But I didn’t cheat.”

  I couldn’t help it. I crossed my arms.

  “The semester I came up here as a visiting professor, I was desperately lonely,” she said then. “I didn’t mean to fall in love with Wallace. But I sat by myself every day at lunch—the art teachers were a strangely snobby crew—and he started sitting with me every day. He was terribly funny. And charming. He wore these gray cable-knit sweaters, and he had the most wonderful gravelly voice. He always sme
lled like gingerbread. I don’t know how to describe it. We just had a spark. The more I saw him, the more I wanted to see him. His wife had left him not too long before we met, and we were both just so … alone. He very quickly became the best thing in my life up here. And I’m sorry to say it, because your dad is a really good person, but as much as I did love him, I was never really in love with him. I married him because he was practical and helpful and good—but not because he ever swept me off my feet. I’d never felt that feeling in my life before I met Wallace. I didn’t even know it existed. It was like being caught up in a windstorm. But I never slept with him or even kissed him in all that time. We held hands a few times—passionately—but that was it.”

  Diana rearranged herself on the sofa and kept going.

  “I don’t know if you’ve ever been in love—”

  I shook my head.

  “But it’s a hell of a thing. It’s all-consuming. You can’t think about anything else. There I was, middle-aged but consumed with fire like a teenager. I didn’t just want to be with Wallace, I needed to. I came up with a plan that I would wait until after you left for college. It was only two more years. I figured I could hold out that long. But then, on the night I confessed my feelings to Wallace—and the plan—he told me that he was sick.”

  Diana closed her eyes for a second. Then she went on. “He had a disease I’d never heard of called pulmonary fibrosis, and there was no cure. His lungs were basically shutting down. They thought he had maybe two years left. Suddenly, it turned out, we were running out of time.”

  This was new information to me. I knew she’d left us to be with a man named Wallace. And two years later, I heard that he had died. But I never knew until this moment that she’d known he was dying when she left.

  “I had an impossible choice to make then,” she said, rubbing at some dried glaze on her finger.

  He’d been dying when she left.

  It tinted the story a slightly different hue, I’ll give it that.

  “But you had to leave on my birthday?” I said, my throat feeling thick. “My sixteenth birthday.”

  She nodded. “He had a surgery scheduled that Monday morning. He was healthy enough to try a lung transplant at the time, though it didn’t ever take the way they’d hoped. I waited until the very last minute, but then, by the afternoon of your birthday, I had to go to make it in time. He was scared and alone.”

  “I was scared and alone.” It came out like a whisper.

  But she heard it.

  She nodded. “I thought if I stayed until your birthday, it would be like splitting the difference. I could be with you in the morning, and see you, but then get to him in time to take him to the hospital.”

  My chest felt heavy, like it was sagging.

  “That’s become a defining fact about our lives,” she said then, “that I left on your sixteenth birthday—and it was horrible timing, I admit. But I was trying to stay as long as I possibly could. I wanted to take you with me, if you remember.”

  I did remember. She’d asked me to come, too. But I couldn’t leave my dad—and I was so indescribably angry at her for tearing our family apart that I didn’t even want to talk to her, much less move across the country.

  But that didn’t mean I wanted her to go.

  I wanted her to come to her senses and stay with us.

  “Why didn’t you just tell me about Wallace being sick?” I asked.

  “I hadn’t even told your father yet. I didn’t know how much he could handle. He cried so hard when I told him, I was afraid he might hurt himself. I thought maybe I could explain better after things settled down. I was making the best decisions I could. I honestly didn’t realize when I drove away that day that you’d never speak to me again.”

  I gave her a look like, Come on. “I’m living in your house. Not sure it’s accurate to say I never spoke to you again.”

  She gave a nod, like, Fair enough. “But I lost you.”

  She wasn’t wrong. She had lost me.

  Now was probably the time to confess to her about the other big event of my sixteenth birthday. I recognized, as I watched her lift a shaky hand to readjust her eye patch—blue-and-yellow check today—that it wasn’t entirely fair of me to let her go on thinking that she alone was responsible for all the misery in her wake. Now was probably the time to give her a real answer to that breezy question about whatever happened to Heath Thompson.

  But I couldn’t. I had never talked about it in my life, to anyone. And up until this moment, I’d believed I never would.

  Instead, I changed the subject. “So,” I said, more to fill the silence than anything else. “How does forgiveness work?”

  She nodded, like we’d come back to the point. She gave a businesslike sigh and sat up straighter. “There are a lot of different methods for chipping away at forgiveness. Just saying the words ‘I forgive you,’ even to yourself, can be a powerful start.” She did not pause to see if I’d say them but kept right on. “Forgiveness is about a mind-set of letting go.” She thought for a second, then said, “It’s about acknowledging to yourself that someone hurt you, and accepting that.”

  Done, I thought.

  “Then it’s about accepting that the person who hurt you is flawed, like all people are, and letting that guide you to a better, more nuanced understanding of what happened.

  Flawed, I thought. Okay. Check.

  “And then there’s a third part,” she went on, “probably the hardest, that involves trying to look at the aftermath of what happened and find ways that you benefited, not just ways you were harmed.”

  I gave her a look. “That last one’s a doozie.”

  “Agreed.” She nodded. “The biggest—and the best.”

  “Are you telling me I need to try to find upsides that came from your leaving?”

  “It sounds greedy of me, doesn’t it?”

  “A little.”

  “But that’s just the way it works. I’d tell you the same thing if we were talking about anyone else.”

  “You know a lot about this.”

  “I’ve had a lot of time to study.” Next, she tilted her head. “Can you think of any upsides? Can you think of any good things in your life that wouldn’t be there if I hadn’t left?”

  I let out a long breath. I frowned. I thought about it for a long time as I stared at the floor.

  Then, at last, I said, “I got very, very good at basketball.”

  Fourteen

  MY STRATEGY FOR avoiding the rookie was much like my strategy for avoiding Diana. And about as effective. As determined as I was to get away from the rookie, the captain was just as determined to throw us together. We had to sit side by side at meals in the wobbliest two chairs. We had to clean the bathroom together, and do the chores nobody else wanted. We had the worst two parking spots, the farthest away.

  For a while, we always got lumped together as newbies.

  I worked hard to change that. Practically speaking, this meant pulling pranks on the rookie—establishing that I was a prank-er, not a prank-ee.

  So: Hiding his clothes while he was in the shower? Me. Pouring ice water on him while he was fast asleep? Me. Filling his shoes with water and putting them in the freezer? Me. Whatever the guys needed done, I did it. I volunteered. I thought it would separate us. I thought it would distinguish me with the crew. I thought, at the very least, it would annoy the rookie and discourage him from being so nice all the damn time.

  But it didn’t. He was Big Robby’s kid. He’d practically grown up at a firehouse. He knew the honor of being pranked. He laughed every single thing off, and I never saw him look even mildly irritated. Pretend OJ made out of mac-and-cheese powder? Awesome. Mayonnaise on the toilet seat? Epic. Fake poop in his bed? Hilarious.

  One morning, I convinced him to pee in a plastic cup and leave it on the captain’s desk.

  “You don’t want to mess around with drug testing, man,” Six-Pack chimed in. “We all turned ours in at the start of shift.”
r />   “You don’t want him to think you’re hiding something,” Case added, all casual, from his perch in front of the TV.

  The rookie looked around at all of us, deeply suspicious. But he took the cup off the table and started to walk out. “Don’t forget to label it with your name,” Six-Pack called after him, and flung a Sharpie at his head.

  Ten minutes later, the captain came busting into the kitchen. “Callaghan!” he bellowed.

  The rookie looked up from making a sandwich. “Yes, sir?”

  “Why is there a goddamned cup of lukewarm piss on my desk with your name on it?”

  The rookie squeezed his eyes closed as we all fell out laughing. He suppressed a smile and then shook his head. “I’m sorry, sir. I was told you were collecting urine samples today.”

  “And who the hell told you that?” the captain demanded.

  But the rookie didn’t rat us out. “I can’t remember, sir.”

  With the crew, my strategy worked. But with the captain, it backfired. As soon as he stopped thinking of me as a rookie, he started wanting me to deal with the rookie.

  Which meant he threw us together even more.

  Especially since, in the wake of my opening a can of whoop-ass on Tiny in B-ball, I now had a new problem. Nobody wanted me to play hoops because I was too good.

  Ironic.

  Somehow, in the afternoons, just as any pickup game was starting, the captain would send me off to practice essential skills with the rookie.

  Which meant the one guy in the world I was desperate to get away from was forced to spend hours every shift putting his hands all over me. Repeatedly. Slowly. For long periods of time.

  While the guys shot hoops out back, I had to let the rookie check my spine alignment with the pads of his fingers—all the way up and all the way down, again and again. I had to let him splint my hands, my ankles, and my knees, and strap me to a backboard and put me in a C-collar, leaning across and brushing against me as he worked the straps. I had to take off my shirt and sit in my sports bra while he practiced placing EKG pads in the right order on my chest. And all the while, the closeness of him would wake up all my senses like static electricity. The mouthwatering scent of his laundry detergent and his general manliness would waft past me in relentless waves.