February Burning: A Firefighter Secret Baby Romance

by Chase Jackson

  “An ischemic stroke,” he continued. “This occurs when there’s a blockage in an artery that prevents proper blood flow to the brain. Without oxygen, the brain tissue begins to atrophy and die. There can also be some swelling…”

  Doctor Jurgen slid an image across the desk between us, printed on a translucent black film: a CT scan of my grandfather’s brain.

  “This scan was performed when your grandfather was admitted to the ER,” Doctor Jurgen explained. “The dark area that you see here--” his finger circled around a dark speck that freckled the shadowy grey brain matter “--is the tissue that was damaged as a result of oxygen deprivation.”

  I blinked down at the CT scan, trying to process what the baby-faced surgeon was telling me.

  This wasn’t just tissue…this was my grandfather’s brain. Somewhere, amidst the shadowy shapes and foggy clouds that appeared on the film, there were eighty-odd years of life housed in that brain; eighty-odd years of memories and experiences and thoughts and opinions that had shaped Colonel Thomas Hudson into the man that he was.

  As Doctor Jurgen drew his finger around the dark speck on the CT scan, I wondered how much of the Colonel had been lost along with that damaged tissue.

  Colonel Thomas Hudson was a man of many distinctions: a decorated Lieutenant Colonel in the US Army, a pillar of his community, and an all-around American hero…

  But there was one distinction that had never quite stuck: “grandpa.”

  From the time that Brady and I were old enough to talk, our father’s father had staunchly insisted that we refer to him only as ‘the Colonel.’

  It’s not like “grandpa” suited him, anyways. As Brady liked to put it: the guy was about as soft and cuddly as a Brillo pad. While other kids grew up with grandfathers that looked like Santa Claus and retired to Florida, Brady and I just had the Colonel.

  He might have been a revered war hero, but Brady and I knew him to be stiff, rigid, and cold. In that sense, he was just like our father.

  Unlike our father, the Colonel was a man of duty. What he failed to provide in affection or emotional support, he made up for in stubborn loyalty. Even after my father kicked me out of the house, the Colonel never stopped calling to check up on me. And after my father died, those phone calls started to feel like a lifeline; like one of the last pieces of my family that I had left. Besides Brady…the Colonel really was the last piece of my family that I had left.

  The Colonel still called me every few months. And since moving back to Hartford, I had even gone to visit him once or twice. We never talked about anything deeper than football or the weather or politics, but I still found a sense of comfort from those conversations. I knew that in some weird, fucked up way, that was the Colonel’s way of showing that he cared. Those brief, awkward phone calls gave me a stronger sense of family and loyalty than my father had given me in the entire eighteen years that I spent under his roof.

  “Your grandfather was very lucky,” the doctor said, dragging me out of my thoughts and back into that sterile white office.

  “He was at a grocery store when the symptoms presented. A bystander recognized the signs of stroke and called 911. Your grandfather was immediately brought to the ER. We were able to operate and remove the blockage before he suffered from any substantial tissue loss or damage.”

  “What does that mean?” I asked. “Will there be permanent damage? Will he be ok?”

  “It’s too early to know for sure. Sometimes the tissue can heal and function normally again, and other times the damage is permanent and the patient will suffer from some form of impairment.”

  “Impairment? What kind of impairment?”

  “Reduced motor skills, difficulty speaking, behavioral changes, cognitive deficiencies…anything, really. The brain is a fragile thing, and every patient responds differently.”

  I slumped back into my chair, feeling numb.

  “The good news is that we caught this early,” Doctor Jurgen continued. “With the proper rehabilitative care, I think your grandfather has a good chance at making a full recovery. Rest assured, he’s in good hands.”

  I wasn’t going to feel ‘assured’ about anything. At least not as long as I was stuck in that sterile white office, sitting across from this dumbed-down Doogie Howser and his little ballerina hands.

  “I want to see him,” I said.

  “He’s still recovering. It might be a while before he’s awake, and it might be even longer before he’s cognizant enough for visitors--”

  “I want to see my grandfather,” I insisted. “Please.”

  Doctor Jurgen sighed, then he stood up from his desk and motioned for me to follow him.

  As soon as we stepped out of the office, I caught a glimpse of the cloudy grey morning sky through the tall glass windows that lined the hospital corridor.

  “It’s morning,” I noted, feeling surprised.

  “Just after 7 AM,” Doctor Jurgen confirmed with a glance at his Apple Watch. Then: “It’s easy to lose track of time when you’re at a hospital, because in here it feels like time stands still.”

  He was right. As far as I was concerned, time had stopped moving the second I got that phone call. I had dropped everything and driven straight to the hospital, leaving my truck parked in the tow-away zone reserved for fire personnel.

  By the time the ER nurse was able to track down my grandfather, he had already been rushed into emergency surgery to treat the blockage that had caused his stroke. I was pointed to a waiting area and given a voucher for a free cup of coffee from the hospital cafeteria.

  After that is when I lost all track of time. I’m not sure how long I spent pacing the waiting room. It could have been minutes, it could have been hours. I do know it felt like days. I imagined myself stranded in that damn waiting room forever, until I looked like Tom Hanks in Castaway.

  My cell phone died, so I had to use the phone at the front desk to call Brady. I tried three times…no answer.

  I had tried to call Vanessa, too. I had even gotten as far as dialing the Hartford area code before I realized that I didn’t know her number by heart. It was stored in my phone…my dead phone.

  Finally a nurse came to find me in the waiting room. She was able to confirm that my grandfather had made it out of surgery and was being moved to the recovery ward, but she couldn’t tell me anymore than that. The surgeon would have to explain the rest. So I waited a while longer, and finally I was brought to Doctor Jurgen’s office.

  And now it’s 7 AM…

  Doctor Jurgen led me through the recovery ward, then stopped abruptly in front of the plain white door leading to ‘Patient Room 1.’

  “Remember, your grandfather is recovering from surgery. That takes time, and it may take several hours for him to fully regain consciousness and become responsive.”

  “I understand.”

  “I’ll give you some privacy,” Doctor Jurgen said. “There’s a call button by his bedside if you need anything.”

  I listened to the doctor’s footsteps fade down the hallway, and then I was alone again. After spending the night in a lonely hospital waiting room, grappling with the possibility that I might lose the closest thing to a ‘father figure’ that I had left, it felt surreal to know that the Colonel was just on the other side of that door.

  I filled my lungs with a deep gulp of air, then I pushed the door open and stepped into the room.

  I was greeted by more grey morning light, spilling in through the cracks of the partially-shut blinds that covered the window. The Colonel was propped up in a hospital bed. He looked alive, like he could open his eyes at any moment. Besides the white bandage that covered the entire right side of his neck, he didn’t even look unwell. He definitely didn’t look like a man who had been on the verge of death less than twenty-four hours earlier...

  There was a empty chair next to his bedside, and I took seat.

  “Good morning, Colonel,” I said awkwardly.

  No response; not so much as a flinch.
/>   “I know you’re probably pissed that I haven’t called in a while, but this seems like an extreme way to retaliate, don’t you think?”

  I never cursed in front of the Colonel. When we were kids, Brady had made the mistake of muttering “fuck” during a rare visit to our grandfather’s house. He had spent the rest of the night deepthroating a bar of Dial soap. That was one lesson that I was happy to learn via my big brother.

  Now I waited for the Colonel to reprimand me for cursing by jumping out of the hospital bed and chasing me through the hospital with a bar of soap. But instead, he remained perfectly still.

  I slumped back into the chair and closed my eyes, trying to pretend that this was just one of our phone calls.

  “The Pats are having a good season. I bet they’ll make it to the Superbowl again.”

  Silence.

  “It looks like it might rain today. All those grey clouds in the sky…”

  Nothing.

  “I met someone.”

  All I could hear was the sound of my own heartbeat, thumping heavily in my ears. I had never told the Colonel anything like that before. We didn’t talk about relationships or dating or women. The Colonel never asked, and I never had anything to tell.

  Until now…

  “Her name is Vanessa,” I explained, folding my hands together in my lap to stop myself from fidgeting. That was another thing the Colonel hated: fidgeting.

  “She was the maid of honor at Brady’s wedding and I know you’re not supposed to say this, but she stole the show. She was the most beautiful girl in the room. I couldn’t take my eyes off of her.”

  I paused and kept my eyes pressed shut, waiting for a response. Again, there was nothing but silence.

  “I would tell you what happened next, but…it would probably just piss you off.”

  I blinked one eye open. No reaction. I blinked shut.

  “We’re having a baby.”

  I stared into the darkness of my eyelids as the words echoed through the hospital room.

  “I was scared shitless at first,” I admitted. “I always figured that having kids was something that guys like Brady did. You know…guys who had their shit together. Not guys like me.”

  “I spent years trying to avoid those things. Home, family, obligation, disappointment… I was always moving from place to place, always trying to get further away from it all. At least, that’s what I thought. But…what if I wasn’t actually running away from anything?”

  I realized that my hands had gone numb from how tightly I was squeezing them together, and I unclenched my knuckles.

  “What if that entire time, I was actually trying to find something that gave me a reason to stop running? What if that entire time, I just wanted to find something that made me stop and stand still?”

  I forced a deep breath and wrapped my hands around the vinyl armrests on the chair.

  “Vanessa makes me want to stop running and stand still,” I said.

  That was the first time I had admitted it -- even to myself -- and the vulnerability of those words made my head spin in circles.

  “I want to give our baby all the things I never had: a childhood filled with laughter and good memories and love. I want us to be a family…”

  I opened my eyes slowly and blinked down at the Colonel. More grey light was spilling through the window, and I could see the weary lines and wrinkles in his face more clearly now.

  “I want you to be part of it, too,” I said softly. “That’s why you need to pull through this and get better. You have a great-grandchild to meet.”

  I studied the Colonel’s perfectly still face. Then, in a whisper that even I could barely hear, I said:

  “Please, Grandpa…”

  That was the first time I had ever addressed him as something other than ‘Sir’ or ‘Colonel.’

  Just then the still silence of the room was broken by the sound of gentle knocking, coming from the door. I jerked up out of my chair, startled, and my eyes shot up and landed on my brother, standing in the doorway.

  “Brady...” I stammered in shock. “How long have you been standing there?”

  “Long enough to know that ‘congratulations’ are in order.”

  Fuck.

  “I wanted to tell you sooner, I just--”

  “We can talk about all of that later,” he interrupted. “How’s the Colonel?”

  “Well…he had a stroke,” I said. “I’ve been here all night. He just got out of surgery a few hours ago. The surgeon seemed optimistic, but we won’t know for sure until he wakes up.”

  Brady nodded, digesting the information. Then he asked: “Why didn’t you call me, to let me know that all of this was going on?”

  “Huh? Brady, I did…I tried calling you three times last night.”

  “I was at the firehouse, so my cell was on silent. But I never saw any missed calls or voicemails from your number…”

  My brother had a tendency to avoid calls from numbers he didn’t recognize…especially if they were local Harford numbers.

  “I had to call from the hospital phone because my cell died. And I didn’t leave a voicemail because…well, I didn’t think this was the sort of thing that you tell someone in a voicemail.”

  “I would have rather heard it from a voicemail, than from Duke Williams.”

  “What do you mean? Why did you hear about this from Duke?”

  “After I tried calling you about a dozen times last night, I finally called Duke to see if he knew where you were. He told me that you had rushed to the hospital.”

  I frowned.

  “Why were you trying to call me?”

  “Everybody’s been looking for you,” Brady said. “I wouldn’t be surprised if the Hartford Police Department is getting ready to launch a statewide manhunt as we speak.”

  “But…why? I’ve just been right here all night…”

  “Vanessa didn’t know that. She called the firehouse in a panic last night, looking for you.”

  “Vanessa?” my heart immediately sank. “What happened? Is she ok?!”

  “We can talk in the truck,” Brady said. “Come on. Let’s go.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO | VANESSA

  “Pick your poison!” Summer said, fanning out an assortment of Freeze Pops in every color of the rainbow.

  Just looking at the plastic tubes of frozen neon sludge was enough to send a chill through my body.

  “Maybe later,” I wiggled deeper into the down comforter that I had wrapped around myself on the couch.

  “Come on, Vanessa. Doctor White said that you have to keep forcing fluids so you don’t get dehydrated.”

  “I don’t think Freeze Pops are what he had in mind when he said that,” I attempted a weary smile.

  Staying hydrated wasn’t the only thing that Doctor White had lectured me about. Although my bloodwork hadn’t pinpointed the definitive cause of yesterday’s fainting spell, the doctor believed that there were likely several contributing factors: hormone fluctuation, a sudden drop in blood pressure, poor circulation, dehydration, fatigue…

  His official diagnosis was that I was overworked, and his prescribed treatment plan was that I take it easy for the remainder of my pregnancy. No more long days spent working on my feet.

  After spending the night in the hospital for additional testing and observation, I had finally been given a clean bill of health and discharged earlier this morning. I felt like I had fallen down a flight of stairs and hit every single emotion on the way down: panic, humiliation, fear, relief, shame, failure, hope, desperation… And that list didn’t even begin to cover the range of emotions that I had felt towards Josh Hudson.

  When I had been unable to get ahold of him, I had felt alone, abandoned, and disappointed…but I had still held onto the glimmer of hope that there was an explanation. Maybe there was a fire or an emergency; maybe he was busy being someone else’s hero...

  I might have been able to forgive Josh for bein
g MIA when I needed him the most. But when I learned that he hadn’t told anyone about my pregnancy? Well…there weren’t even words to describe how that had made me feel. There was no explanation or excuse that could possibly justify why he had kept me and our baby a secret…

  I still hadn’t heard from Josh and, after my phone call with Brady, I decided that it was for the best; I had nothing left to say to him.

  By the time I got home to my apartment and curled up in the fetal position on the couch, I felt completely drained of emotion altogether. I was just exhausted.

  “Fine,” Summer grumbled now as she plopped down next to me on the couch, ripping the top off of a pink Freeze Pop. “We can do this the hard way…”

  “The hard way?”

  “Yep!” she reached for the TV remote. My eyes flicked up to the flat screen mounted on my living room wall, and I watched as Summer launched the Netflix app.

  “What are you doing?”

  “I’m picking a movie for us to watch!”

  “I have some movies saved on my watchlist--”

  But Summer had already scrolled straight past the psychological thrillers and gritty action movies that were saved in my watchlist.

  “I think we should try something different,” she said with a sunshiny smile. She navigated down the Netflix home screen until she reached the ‘search by genre’ menu.

  “What do you mean, ‘different’?”

  “I mean the sappiest, cheesiest, most cringe-worthy romantic comedy that I can find!”

  Summer selected the ‘romance’ genre, and the TV screen flooded with thumbnails of chick flicks and rom-coms.

  “Please don’t make me watch one of these movies...” my face twisted into a genuine expression of torture.

  “The choice is yours,” Summer said. She turned to me and held up a tube of frozen neon pink ice. “Freeze Pop…or rom-com.”

  The idea of watching a rom-com after the events of the last twenty-four hours seemed like a particularly cruel and unusual punishment. I scowled as I swiped the Freeze Pop out of her hand.