Things You Save in a Fire

by Katherine Center

  “Apparently, I fucking do,” I said. “Now, pick somebody. And then send him outside.”

  * * *

  I STOOD OUT back in the parking lot, surveying the course, and waited.

  A few minutes later, the captain showed up and said, “That was a hell of a speech.”

  I held still, eyes on the course.

  “It could be somebody on a different shift, you know.”

  “It could be,” I said. “But it isn’t.”

  “I can’t imagine any of our guys would do that to you.”

  “Maybe it was you,” I said, not looking over. “I’m pretty sure you told my old captain that women in the fire service would be the downfall of human civilization.”

  The captain leaned forward until he caught my eye. “It wasn’t me, Hanwell. Do you want to know why?”

  I shrugged, not looking over.

  “I did say that to your captain. But in the short time you’ve been here, you’ve made me change my mind.”

  I looked down.

  I believed him. But I wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction of admitting it. “So you say,” I said.

  “The guys don’t want to take your challenge. They say you don’t need to prove yourself. They want me to give you a pass.”

  “I won’t take it.”

  “That’s what I told them.”

  “Go back in and tell them to pick somebody, then,” I said.

  “Who gives the orders here, Hanwell?”

  “You do, sir. So go back in and act like it.”

  The captain went in, and a few minutes later, they sent out Case.

  “Nope,” I said, the minute I saw him. “That’s just insulting.”

  “I’m the choice,” Case said with a shrug. “Deal with it.”

  “Case,” I said, “you could not run this course if your life depended on it.”

  “That’s why we all picked me,” he said. “Nobody wants you to lose.”

  “I’m not going to lose,” I said. “Now get back in there and pick somebody real.”

  A few minutes later, the rookie came out.

  “Why didn’t you call me?” he asked, referring, I supposed, to the brick.

  “What would you have done?”

  He shook his head, looking out at the course. “I don’t know. Helped you sweep up, maybe.”

  “Maybe it was you who threw it,” I said then.

  “You couldn’t possibly think that.” He searched my eyes.

  I shrugged. “Maybe you’ve been nice to me this whole time to throw me off your trail. Maybe you secretly want me gone.”

  “Trust me,” he said. “I want you the opposite of gone.”

  I looked away. “I don’t trust anybody anymore.”

  “You don’t have to do this,” Owen said. “Nobody wants you to.”

  “Why are you out here, anyway?” I asked. “Shouldn’t you be inside, deciding?”

  “They’ve already decided.”

  I turned to him. “Who is it?”

  He shrugged. “It’s me.”

  I let out a bitter laugh. “Of course it is,” I said.

  “What does that mean?” he asked.

  I was marching toward the course. “Call the guys. Let’s get this done.”

  The guys gathered near the pull-up bars.

  “Who’s got a stopwatch?” I said.

  Tiny raised his phone, open to the stopwatch setting.

  It wasn’t a perfect plan, of course. But I just needed to do something. Anything.

  The rookie and I took our places.

  I’d been practicing as inconspicuously as possible. I worked on elements of the course when the guys weren’t looking, mostly because I never wanted them to see me do anything I wasn’t good at. Twice a year, the captain had said, we’d run it together, and I didn’t want to be embarrassed. More than that, I wanted to kick ass.

  So now, suddenly, it was that day.

  Time to see if all that on-the-sly practice and self-taught parkour would do the trick.

  Necessity, as always, was the mother of invention.

  I’d watched the guys do the course before. When they jumped to grab the bar, they grasped with their hands and hoisted up against gravity. But I didn’t have the option of jumping for the bar. The only way for somebody my size to grab it was to do a wall run up the pole, then a turn vault.

  It was the only way for me—but also a better way.

  The momentum would do most of the work for me. I wasn’t crawling up over the bar so much as grabbing it as I went by. The guys started with their heads below it, but using the pole as a kind of springboard helped me grab the bar with my head already above—then it was just a little farther to pop up into a hip catch, and then I could spin over it and drop.

  I used some version of a wall run to approach every tall structure on the course, using it to shift my momentum from forward to upward. I used the cat leap to get myself over that eight-foot wall. I used the thief vault and the lazy vault to sail over most of the log hurdles, adding a pop vault for the tall ones. Who says hours watching YouTube are wasted?

  I also used the lache technique to swing across the eight parallel bars. Of them all, this one probably saved me the most time. The guys would hang from the bars, reaching forward to grab the next bar before letting go of the first one. I didn’t have that option because my arms were not long enough to touch both bars at once. I had to propel myself forward, using legs and momentum, and “fly” from bar to bar. If you get the rhythm right, you never slow down, just zip along under the bars, arms pumping. The guys never had to trust themselves to fly.

  Even my landings were better. The guys would drop, absorbing a little impact with their knees, and then keep lumbering forward. I would land like a cat and spring back up, catching that momentum to propel myself ahead.

  So I felt pretty confident standing there, about to start. Owen was the youngest, and probably the fittest, of the guys.

  But I could still beat him.

  * * *

  CASE CLANGED A metal pipe against another as our starting gun.

  “Go!” he shouted, and we were off.

  I didn’t even look at Owen, I just launched—hoisting and spinning, vaulting and leaping into a massive lead over him before we were even halfway done.

  I worked the course like a pro. It was more like ballet choreography than anything else. I skimmed under the monkey bars, vaulted over all the logs without ever breaking stride, and scaled the eight-foot wall without faltering.

  At the top of the wall, with only the rope climb left to go, I had a good one-minute lead on the rookie.

  But then I landed wrong.

  Maybe I had too much momentum. Maybe I was distracted by all the guys watching, but when I hit the ground on the other side of the climbing wall, rather than shifting straight into a parkour roll, I caught the side of my foot and felt it bend under me.

  I heard a crack.

  I felt the pain sear up to my brain and then reverberate back down—and I’ll admit, it threw me off. I made a quick self-assessment. Definitely sprained. Possibly fractured. I heard a clonk to my right and looked up to see Owen hook over the top of his wall and drop down. I took off running, limping badly, and he scrambled after me.

  One final thing: the rope climb. Parkour couldn’t help me too much with this one. It just called for the standard technique of wrapping the rope in a J-hook around one foot. I’d done it before, but this time my injured ankle wasn’t quite working right.

  I’d tell it to push, and it would just kind of disobey.

  The rookie had a real advantage over me here. Not only did he have two working ankles, he also had big guy shoulders. I was strong for a woman, but his shoulders were twice the size of mine. There really was no way I could beat him up the rope. But I wasn’t giving up.

  The rookie and I were neck and neck when I gave up on my legs and just started climbing arms only, hand over hand, letting everything else dangle below me. It was harder
, and slower, but it was my only option, and the truth is he beat me to the top. But then, in his haste to drop back to the ground and head for the finish line, he dropped too fast. He hit the ground hard and fell on his side. I dropped fast, too—rope-burning my palms as I went—but I never lost control. I landed on one foot, just as he was getting back up, and I took off running, ignoring the searing pain shooting from my ankle all the way to my hip, and crossing the finish line a good two seconds before him.

  Here was the weirdest thing about winning that race. There was no cheering, no hugs, no high fives. There was just me, and my throbbing, angry ankle, as I collapsed on the ground, and a whole crew of firefighters surrounded me in disbelief, admiration, and maybe even a little respect.

  “Does it hurt?” Six-Pack asked.

  It hurt like hell. “Nope,” I said.

  “We’re going to need a medic,” Case called out, and all the guys raised their hands to volunteer.

  “Let me guess,” I said. “You’re going to make the rookie do it.”

  They did.

  Six-Pack and Case lifted my arms around their shoulders and helped me limp back to the station. Tiny went off to find me a set of crutches.

  Had I solved all my stalker problems?

  Maybe not.

  But I’d impressed the guys. I’d maimed myself to do it, but I’d impressed them.

  And even better: Nobody had been willing to bet against me.

  It felt pretty good to hear that.

  “You wouldn’t really have resigned, would you?” Case called out.

  “I would have,” I said, dead serious.

  “I wouldn’t have accepted it,” the captain said.

  “Maybe not this week,” I said, reminding him of the choice he still had to make.

  Back inside, the guys were back to their rowdy selves, already retelling the tale, and imagining how it would have gone if Case had been my competition, hooting wildly at the idea of his round body trying to hoist its way over the hurdles.

  Owen tended to my ankle.

  As the guys got louder, my little corner with Owen seemed to get quieter.

  I watched his hands wrapping cold packs around my ankle. They were pretty scraped up.

  “You okay?” I asked.

  “Fine,” he said. “You okay?”

  “Totally fine,” I said.

  The rookie smiled. “That was unbelievably amazing, by the way. How did you learn to do all that?”

  I shrugged. “YouTube.”

  As I watched him work, my brain kept circling back to one moment during the course. The moment when he’d fallen at the bottom of the rope. Something about the way he’d fallen seemed strange to me.

  “Why did you fall at the bottom of the rope?” I asked then, quietly.

  He kept his head down, wrapping my ankle with a bandage. “Just hit too hard, I guess.”

  “Did you hurt yourself?” I asked.

  He kept his head down but shook it. “Nah.”

  “Weird,” I said.

  “Lucky,” he said, still not looking up.

  I was studying him. “If you hadn’t fallen right then, you would have won.”

  “You don’t know that,” he said, head still down.

  “Rookie,” I said then, lowering my voice. “Did you fall on purpose?”

  He finished wrapping and taped it in place. Then he lifted his head and looked straight into my eyes—and I knew the answer.

  “Rookie,” I said, gearing up to scold him.

  But he leaned in. “There was no way in hell you were quitting the department today. Not if I had anything to say about it. You deserved to win, and you won. Now shut up.”

  I could have kissed him.

  I also could have argued. I could have insisted that he come clean to the guys. I could have demanded a do-over—at some future date when my ankle was healed.

  I didn’t get a chance to do any of those things.

  Before I had time to respond at all, my phone rang. It was in my bag across the room, but Six-Pack jogged it over to me.

  It was Josie. “Hey,” I said.

  “Hey. I’m sorry to call you at work.”

  “It’s okay,” I said. Something was wrong.

  “It’s about Diana,” Josie said. “She collapsed. Actually—that’s not right. She had a seizure.”

  Twenty-two

  SHE HAD A seizure.

  Normally, a word like “seizure” would prompt my usual sense of calm-in-the-storm to kick in.

  That’s not what happened this time.

  I was always at my best in a crisis. But not today.

  This time, kind of like when you see lightning flash, and then you hear a clap of thunder, panic flashed through my chest, and then I heard it in my voice. “What happened?”

  “She was making breakfast, and the seizure hit. She fell to the floor, but she smacked her head on the counter as she went down.”

  My brain was like a lightbulb with a short in it. “You called 911?”

  “Yes. We’re already at the hospital. Rockport County.”

  That counter was granite. “Does she have a concussion?”

  “They’re assessing her now,” Josie said. “She has a bruise on her forehead the size of an apple.”

  “Better to bruise on the outside than on the inside,” I said, to comfort her. And myself.

  Josie was pretty flustered. “She was making French toast,” Josie said, her voice incredulous at the memory, “and then she froze for a second, and then she kind of snapped in half and dropped. It was so fast. And the sound of her head hitting that counter…” Josie made a sob-like noise. “I ran to her, but I didn’t know what to do. I’d never seen anything like it.”

  “She’s lucky you were there,” I said. “How long did it last?”

  “I don’t know,” Josie said. “Two minutes? Three? It felt like a thousand. Can you come?” she asked. “Right now?”

  “Of course,” I said. “I’m on my way.”

  Before I’d even pressed END, Owen was helping me to my feet. He knew something was up, but he didn’t ask. He handed me the crutches Tiny had found.

  I moved toward the guys, who were all still gathered around the table. My whole body felt wobbly, but I forced it to work right, mind-over-matter style.

  “Could I speak to you, Captain?” I asked.

  The guys all fell silent. They recognized the sound of panic in my voice. They all turned to watch me.

  The captain heard it, too. “Shoot,” he said.

  “My mother’s had a seizure,” I said.

  He nodded, all business. “Is she at Fairmont?”

  “They’ve taken her to Rockport County.”

  The captain nodded. “We’ve got you covered, Hanwell. Get your things, and we’ll call in somebody from B-shift.”

  “Thank you,” I said.

  As I hobbled away, getting my bearings with the crutches, the captain called out after me, “Hanwell!”

  I turned back.

  “Anything you need, anything at all … it’s yours.”

  Then the captain told Case to give me an escort. And to use the lights and sirens.

  * * *

  AT THE HOSPITAL, Josie was waiting outside my mother’s room, nursing a paper cup of tea with the tag still hanging over the side.

  “What happened to you?” she said, when she saw the crutches.

  “Tiny sprain,” I said. “Don’t even feel it.”

  I moved toward the closed door, but Josie whispered, “She’s sleeping now.”

  “Any word on the assessment?” I asked.

  Josie said, “No head injury that they can see.”

  “That’s good,” I said, nodding in approval.

  “They want to keep her overnight,” Josie said, “for observation.”

  Josie looked shaken. Her expression had that intensity people get in emergencies—when every detail matters. It hadn’t been an easy few hours, and that kind of stress is never good for you, but when
you’re just into your third trimester, it’s maybe a little worse.

  The sight of her gave me an impulse that I gave in to: I volunteered for a hug for the first time in a decade. “You did great,” I said, wrapping my arms around her and giving a squeeze. “You did just fine.”

  “I needed that,” she said when I let go.

  I smiled. “I’m out of practice.”

  “But talented.”

  “Go home now,” I said then. “Get some rest. You’ve had a rough day so far.”

  Josie nodded. “Not a big fan of hospitals.”

  “I’ve got this,” I said, trying to sound way more at ease than I felt. “I do this for a living.”

  Josie took my hand and held it, and then peered at me like she was making a decision. Then she said, “She turned around, you know.”

  I frowned, thinking we were talking about the seizure. “She turned around?”

  “On your birthday. The day she left. She drove for hours, crying the whole time, until finally, somewhere in Arkansas, she decided to turn around and go back. She couldn’t do it, she decided. She couldn’t leave. She pulled off at a truck stop, planning to get back on the interstate going south instead of north.

  “Before she even finished at the pump, she got a call from Wallace. He was just checking in. Just saying hello. But the sound of his voice stopped her. She stood there for several minutes after they hung up. Then she called it: She couldn’t leave him to face it all alone.”

  “And she kept going.”

  Josie nodded. “He needed her.”

  “I needed her,” I said, almost a whisper.

  “But you had your dad. She told herself you’d be all right.”

  My throat tightened. Oh God. What if she had turned around? What if she had showed back up at our house that night? Could my life have unfolded in a completely different way?

  But it wasn’t a real question. Even if she’d come back, it would have been too late. Even as she stood by the side of the highway in Arkansas deciding what choice to make, I had already made choices of my own.

  There was no changing it. There was no possibility of a different story.

  There was only what had happened. And how to carry on.

  I looked up to see Josie smiling at me. Then she reached out and tucked a wisp of hair behind my ear. “She believed you’d be okay,” she said again. “And she was right.”