by Amy Hatvany
I managed a small smile at my partner’s use of the word “we.” “I’ll figure it out,” I said.
Mason gave me a wary look. “I won’t tell the captain that you lost it,” he finally said. “As long as you promise to find a way to deal with whatever caused it.” He paused. “You got me?”
I nodded.
“Seriously, bro. If I see even a hint of that kind of shit again, I’m reporting it.”
“Right. Absolutely.” While my partner had my back, I knew there was no way Mason would risk putting another victim we were treating in even further danger.
“I’ll get a handle on it,” I said, having every intention of doing just that. I’d go for more runs—I’d make them longer and more intense, every night before work, draining my body of the same excess adrenaline that, for whatever reason, had sent me over the edge today. If I was going to have the kind of life I wanted, I needed to wipe out the weakest parts of me. I needed to become the kind of man a woman like Amber deserved.
• • •
I woke up the next morning to the sound of pounding on my front door. My eyes creaked open, my lashes sticking together as I peered at the clock on the nightstand. It was just past noon, and I’d only been asleep for five hours. My shift—the rest of which, to my relief, was much less eventful than the rollover accident—had ended at three a.m. And while I’d been exhausted when I got home, I still had a hard time winding down, the residual stress hormones in my body serving up the worst kind of emotional hangover there is—my head pounded and my limbs trembled, my heart thumped a disturbing, discordant rhythm inside my chest. When I finally did drift off, it was into a restless slumber, filled with vivid images of bodies on fire—of flesh melting away from bone.
The person outside my apartment pounded again. “Coming!” I shouted as I pulled on a pair of shorts and a T-shirt, and then stumbled into the living room. I yanked open the door, surprised to see my father standing in front of me, his right arm raised, hand in a fist. “Dad,” I said, keeping my hand on the doorknob, blinking fast in order to bring my eyes into better focus.
“We need to talk,” he said, barreling past me, not waiting for an invitation.
“Come on in,” I said, unable to keep the sarcasm from my voice as I shut the door behind him. The last time he had been to my apartment was when I first moved in, two years before, and I needed to borrow his truck, before I had bought my own. I hadn’t seen him since the brief, tense conversation we’d had at Amber’s graduation party three weeks ago. Now, I watched as he dropped onto my couch and crossed his arms over his broad chest.
“You got any coffee?” he barked. “None of that prissy latte-mochaccino shit, either. The real thing.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Hold on.” I headed into my small kitchen, grabbed a mug from the cupboard, and popped a French roast pod into my Keurig machine, gripping the edge of the counter while I waited for it to brew, wondering what the hell was so important that my dad needed to come over and wake me up on a Sunday morning. Despite my best intentions to remain calm, my heartbeat sped up, and I felt my face get hot. Once the first mug of coffee was done, I made another for myself and carried them both back into my living room, handing one to my father. He took a short sip and then set the mug on the small table in front of him. “I heard you worked the tanker accident last night.”
“I did.” I sat in the chair opposite him, and my first swallow of coffee burned the roof of my mouth, all the way down my throat to my belly. I coughed, sputtering a bit when I continued. “I think most units in the area were called, weren’t they? I figured you were helping put out the car fires.”
“You figured right.” He stared at me intently. “What you didn’t figure is that one of my boys delivered that burn victim to you and your partner. Or that he watched you stumble all over the goddamn place instead of doing your fucking job.”
I froze, my mug in midair, and forced myself to hold his gaze. “It wasn’t that bad,” I said, instantly set on the defensive, thinking this was the absolute last thing I needed right now—my father tearing me down. You’re not thirteen anymore, I told myself. You don’t have to put up with his shit.
He narrowed his eyes. “Not that bad, huh? You got the line in right away? You didn’t sit there doing nothing, leaving the victim to lie there writhing in pain? How do you think I felt, being told my son looked like a pussy?”
I dropped the mug I held to the table, not caring when the hot liquid sloshed over the side. “What the hell does it have to do with you?” I demanded.
“It has to do with me because what you do, however you fuck up, reflects right back on me.”
“Oh, I see,” I said, curling my hands into fists, trying to control the rising tide of my anger. I couldn’t believe he had the audacity to criticize me like this. Or maybe I could. It was what he’d always done. The stormy rage I’d felt toward him for years rose up and I wanted to call him out on every bullshit thing he had ever done or said. I wanted to make him pay. “It’s always about you! About you and what you want! Never me or Mom. No wonder she divorced you!”
“I don’t know what you’ve been smoking, Son, but that’s not what went down. I’m the one who divorced her. And now she can’t stand the fact that I don’t have to put up with her crap to get laid.” He gave me a look so full of pride, it took everything in me to not punch his smug face.
“You’re disgusting,” I said in a low voice. “You think it’s something I aspire to, sleeping with the skanky women you date? You think that makes me jealous?”
“I think you’d do just about anything to get into your sweet little Amber’s panties.”
I glared at him, my jaws clenched. “Don’t talk about her like that.”
He leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees, fingers laced together, and smirked. “I see the way you look at her. The way you’ve always looked at her. You’d give your left nut to get a piece of that ass.” He shook his head. “It’s never going to happen. Not with a girl like her. You’re too fucking scared to step up and be anything but a whiny little lapdog, following behind her. Yap, yap, yap.”
“Shut up,” I said with as much venom as I could muster. I stood, knocking into the table with my shins. My entire body quaked as I pointed to the door. “Get out.”
He didn’t move. Instead, he calmly reached for his coffee and took another sip, then looked up at me after he set the mug back down. “What do you think your captain will do when he hears how you fucked up? That partner of yours might keep his mouth shut, but he’s not the only one who saw what happened.” He paused, and then stood up, too, his gaze locked on mine. “My guess is you’d be ordered to talk to the department shrink. Maybe get put on leave. Even lose your job, if they find out you don’t have the balls to do it.”
“You need to go,” I growled. Hatred coursed through me. I couldn’t believe that this man, the one person I should be able to look up to and go to for support, was threatening to destroy my career for the sake of his own ego. Because he thought my failure might make him look bad.
He took the few steps to the door and put his meaty hand on the knob, pausing before turning it. “You know what, Son?” he said, looking over his shoulder. “I’m glad you didn’t decide to become a firefighter. Because no matter how hard I tried to toughen you up, you never had it in you. You just don’t have what it takes.”
Before I could respond, he slammed the door behind him. I didn’t move, his words banging their way through my entire body. I listened to the ragged edges of my own breath and the rumble of his truck’s engine as he drove away. Would he go straight to my captain and tell him how I’d screwed up, or was he just playing a power game with me, putting on a show? My work was everything to me—I loved helping people in need, being there for them in the midst of the worst moments in their lives. I loved having an experienced partner like Mason to show me the ropes. I’d worked hard to get where I was, and I worried that just when things with Amber seemed to be going well, a suspension—or even the l
oss of my job—might send her right back into Daniel’s arms.
I worried about these things, but mostly, as I stood in the silence, my heartbeat throbbing like an open wound inside my chest, I worried that my father might know me better than I knew myself. That all the horrible things he’d said about me, the painful jabs he’d thrown, might just end up being true.
Amber
“Come on, Pops!” I said, jogging in place at the end of our block, looking back at him about twenty feet behind me. “You can do it!” It was a little after three o’clock on the Fourth of July, which had turned out to be a warm, sunny Sunday after a stormy night of hard-driving rain. I had convinced my dad to take a walk with me, and now was encouraging him to jog part of the way home, which would help shift his metabolism into fat-burning mode and keep it there for the rest of the day.
“I’m glad one of us thinks so!” he gasped as he pumped his arms a little harder in order to catch up. His round face was red, his black hair damp, and his forehead beaded with sweat. But while his breathing was labored, he could still talk without too much effort, so I knew his body wasn’t being pushed past an unreasonable limit.
“There you go!” I said, when he came up next to me. “You did it! And now we walk to cool down.” I patted him on the back and smiled. “I’m proud of you.”
He leaned forward and set his hands on his knees, arms bent and elbows out, breathing hard. “Isn’t that supposed to be my job . . . being proud of you?”
“I’m an adult now,” I said in my normal voice. At this level of exertion, I hadn’t even broken a sweat. “It’s a two-way street.”
“An adult? No way. You’re still my baby girl,” he said, straightening back up. He wiped the moisture from his brow with his forearm. “And a taskmaster, it seems.”
“I’ll take that as a compliment,” I said, as we began to amble down the sidewalk.
“You should.”
I grinned. “I love what I do. I can’t wait to take it to the next level.”
“That’s what that certification will do, right? After you take the test?” my dad asked. “Give you bigger and better job opportunities?”
“I hope so,” I said. “That, and moving to Seattle should really help. I can spend a few years building a strong clientele working at a gym, and then use that experience to eventually apply for a job at the Seahawks training facility. I figure if I start at the bottom, maybe as an assistant to a coach or trainer, they’ll have to at least consider me if a senior position working directly with the players becomes available. It might not happen right away, but it will happen.”
“That’s my girl,” he said, smiling wide. “No goal too high.”
“Thanks, Pops.” I smiled in return, even as the muscles in my throat tingled with the threat of impending tears, knowing how hard I’d worked to get where I was, and how close I’d come to losing it all back when I’d been sick. It had been a bit of a struggle to stay on my regular food plan since I’d been home, but it helped that, after some subtle prompts, my dad had agreed to try to start eating healthier, too, so I’d managed to reach a compromise with my mom: I would eat whatever she made for dinner each night that I wasn’t out with Tyler, and she and my dad would eat the low-fat, protein-packed breakfasts and lunches I prepared for us all. It was working well so far, and my dad had already lost six pounds.
“Hey, Mom,” I said, once we were back inside the house. She stood at the kitchen counter, using a cookie cutter on a rolled-out round of pastry. The air smelled of apples and cinnamon stewing on the stove, and I assumed she would be covering the top of the pie with the stars made out of dough, just like the image she’d shown me on her Pinterest account the night before.
“Hello, my loves,” she said, looking up from her work. “How was your walk?”
“Brutal,” my dad said as he dropped into a chair at the table. He winked at me. “Our girl’s a gladiator. You should have come with.”
“Maybe next time,” my mom said. “I had to get this done for tonight.” She looked at me. “You’re sure you and Tyler don’t want to join us at the Millers’? Liz is coming, too.”
The Fourth of July was the one summer holiday that my parents didn’t throw a party at our house. Instead, we always spent it with their friends Sara and Jeremy Miller, who lived in a big place out on Eldridge Drive. Their back deck overlooked Bellingham Bay, lending an amazing view of the city’s fireworks show.
I shook my head as I opened the fridge and grabbed two bottles of water. “Tyler’s partner and his wife are going to be at this party we’re going to,” I said. “We’ve been trying to get together with them for weeks.”
My mother drew her brows together over the bridge of her nose. “Okay,” she said, which I suspected was a two-syllable code for “You’re ruining a family tradition.”
“Daniel’s not driving up?” my dad asked as I handed him one of the bottles.
“Nope. He volunteered to work,” I said. “The gym pays him double time on the holiday.”
“I’m surprised Tyler’s free tonight,” my mom said. “Don’t they usually need more paramedics and firemen on the Fourth?”
“He and Mason lucked out and didn’t get scheduled.” My phone, which I’d left on the counter, buzzed, vibrating against the granite. I picked it up and saw a text from Daniel. “Hey baby,” it said. “Time for a quick call?”
“Yes!” I responded, and then turned to my parents, bottle of water and phone still in hand. “I’m going to take a shower,” I said, leaving them alone as I headed down the hall and upstairs to my room.
Once the door was closed and I was lying on my bed, I quickly pressed the call button next to Daniel’s picture on the screen, and a single ring later, his voice was in my ear. “Hi, gorgeous,” he said. “How are you?”
“I’m good,” I said. I told him about the walk-slash-jog with my dad, and my mom’s giving me an unspoken hard time about not going with them to the Millers’ party.
“What are you doing instead?” he asked.
I stared up at the small spiderweb crack in one corner of my ceiling. When I was little, I used to pretend that Charlotte, from Charlotte’s Web, lived there. “Tyler invited me to a party with some of his friends. It should be fun.”
Daniel was silent, so I waited a moment, and then went on. “Everything okay, babe?” I asked, wondering if, in our being separated from each other, Daniel was having any of the same doubts regarding our engagement that seemed to be haunting me. What if he ended it? I thought. How upset would I really be?
“You seem to be spending an awful lot of time with him,” he finally said, in a quiet, controlled voice.
I felt a pang of guilt in my chest, despite having done nothing with Tyler that could have caused it. Nothing tangible, at least. Appreciating how handsome he had become wasn’t cheating. I thought about something I’d once overheard my mom tell Liz when she was still married to Tyler’s dad and found herself attracted to a single doctor at the hospital: “You can look at the menu all you want, as long as you eat at home.”
“Well, yeah,” I said to Daniel now. “He’s my best friend. You know that.”
“I guess,” Daniel said, and then cleared his throat. “But if it was me spending all my time with some other girl, someone I was really close to, how would it make you feel?”
“I’m not spending all my time with him,” I snapped, immediately set on the defensive. “I’m at home with my parents a lot. And working full-time, too.”
“You didn’t answer the question,” Daniel said, his voice beginning to rise. “I think it’s reasonable to be a little worried about this dude.”
“No, it’s not,” I said. “We’ve known each other forever, and he’s really my only friend here. With all the shit I went through in high school, he was the only one who stuck by me. I’m not going to stop hanging out with him just because you’re feeling insecure.” As soon as the words left my mouth, I regretted them.
“Really,” Daniel said. The
word was a statement, not a question.
“I didn’t mean it like that.” I sighed. “Look, I’m sorry. But I need you to trust me. Especially if we’re going to get married.”
“If?”
Shit. “You know what I meant,” I said, wincing at his tone. This conversation was not going well at all.
“Okay, sure,” he said.
When he didn’t say more, I spoke again. “So, we’re good?”
“Sure,” he repeated, but I didn’t believe him.
“I love you,” I said, trying to lighten the moment. “I miss you so much.”
“Have a good night,” he said. And then, without warning, he hung up the phone. For the first time since we’d been apart, he didn’t say that he loved me, too.
• • •
When Tyler turned onto the gravel driveway near the intersection of Hannegan and Kelly Roads, he looked at me and smiled. “You look great,” he said. “Did I already tell you that you look great?”
“You did,” I said, glancing down at the outfit I’d decided to wear, a V-necked, spaghetti-strapped, red sundress. It had a white and blue bandanna print around the hem, which hit me midthigh, and was sexier than what I normally wore, its style too revealing to allow me to wear a bra, but it flattered my figure and made me feel confident and strong, so I threw on a pair of wedge-heeled, white sandals to complete the patriotic-slash-sexy look.
“Well, it’s true. Your hair looks pretty like that,” Tyler said as he directed his truck toward the large gray house at the end of the drive.
“Thanks,” I said, feeling my cheeks flush as I reached up to smooth the beachy waves I’d managed to achieve with a curling iron. The style was a definite departure from the typical ponytail or messy high bun I tended toward most days. As I was getting ready, I had decided the best way to forget about the tense conversation with Daniel was to go to this party with Tyler and have an amazing time. I was going to look good, have a few drinks, dance my ass off. Being so focused on health and fitness throughout college, I’d never had much of a social life, but tonight, I needed to blow off some steam. I looked over at Tyler, knowing I could trust him to take care of me, even if he’d seemed a little tense when he first picked me up. He was distracted, somehow, his fingers drumming against his legs and a weird sort of stiffness stretched across his face.