BRIAN
FOR EVERY NINETEEN DEGREES HOTTER a fire burns, it doubles in size.
This is what I am thinking while I watch sparks shoot out of the incinerator chimney, a thousand new stars. The dean of Brown University's medical school wrings his hands beside me. In my heavy coat, I am sweating.
We've brought an engine, a ladder, and a rescue truck. We have assessed all four sides of the building. We've confirmed that no one is inside. Well, except for the body that got stuck in the incinerator, and caused this.
"He was a large man," the dean says. 'This is what we always do with the subjects when the anatomy classes are through."
"Hey, Cap," Paulie yells. Today, he is my main pump operator. "Red's got the hydrant dressed. You want me to charge a line?"
I am not certain, yet, that I will take a hose up. This furnace was designed to consume remains at 1,600 degrees Fahrenheit. There is fire above and below the body.
"Well?" the dean says. "Aren't you going to do something?" It is the biggest mistake rookies make: the assumption that fighting a fire means rushing in with a stream of water. Sometimes, that makes it worse. In this case, it would spread biohazardous waste all over the place. I'm thinking we need to keep the furnace closed, and make sure the fire doesn't get out of the chimney. A fire can't burn forever. Eventually, it consumes itself.
"Yes," I tell him. "I'm going to wait and see."
When I work the night shift, I eat dinner twice. The first meal is early, an accommodation made by my family so that we can all sit around a table together. Tonight, Sara makes a roast beef. It sits on the table like a sleeping infant as she calls us for supper.
Kate is the first to slip into her seat. "Hey baby," I say, squeezing her hand. When she smiles at me, it doesn't reach her eyes. "What have you been up to?"
She pushes her beans around her plate. "Saving Third World countries, splitting a few atoms, and finishing up the Great American Novel. In between dialysis, of course."
"Of course."
Sara turns around, brandishing a knife. "Whatever I did," I say, shrinking away, "I'm sorry."
She ignores me. "Carve the roast, will you?"
I take the carving utensils and slice into the roast beef just as Jesse sloughs into the kitchen. We allow him to live over the garage, but he is required to eat with us; it's part of the bargain. His eyes are devil-red; his clothes are ringed with sweet smoke. "Look at that," Sara-sighs, but when I turn, she is staring at the roast. "It's too rare." She picks the pan up with her bare hands, as if her skin is coated with asbestos. She sticks the beef back into the oven.
Jesse reaches for a bowl of mashed potatoes and begins to heap them onto his plate. More, and more, and more again.
"You reek," Kate says, waving her hand in front of her face.
Jesse ignores her, taking a bite of his potatoes. I wonder what it says about me, that I am actually thrilled I can identify pot running through his system, as opposed to some of the others-Ecstasy, heroin, and God knows what else—which leave less of a trace.
"Not all of us enjoy Eau de Stoned," Kate mutters.
"Not all of us can get our drugs through a portacath," Jesse answers.
Sara holds up her hands. "Please. Could we just… not?"
"Where's Anna?" Kate asks.
"Wasn't she in your room?"
"Not since this morning."
Sara sticks her head through the kitchen door. "Anna! Dinner!"
"Look at what I bought today," Kate says, plucking at her T-shirt. It is a psychedelic tie-dye, with a crab on the front, and the word Cancer. "Get it?"
"You're a Leo." Sara looks like she is on the verge of tears.
"How's that roast coming?" I ask, to distract her.
Just then, Anna enters the kitchen. She throws herself into her chair and ducks her head. "Where have you been?" Kate says.
"Around." Anna looks down at her plate, but makes no effort to serve herself.
This is not Anna. I am used to struggling with Jesse, to lightening Kate's load; but Anna is our family's constant. Anna comes in with a smile. Anna tells us about the robin she found with a broken wing and a blush on its cheek; or about the mother she saw at Wal-Mart with not one but two sets of twins. Anna gives us a backbeat, and seeing her sitting there unresponsive makes me realize that silence has a sound.
"Something happen today?" I ask.
She looks up at Kate, assuming the question has been put to her sister, and then startles when she realizes I am talking to her. "No."
"You feel okay?"
Again, Anna does a double take; this is a question we usually reserve for Kate.
"Fine."
"Because you're, you know, not eating."
Anna looks down on her plate, notices that it's empty, and then heaps it high with food. She shovels green beans into her mouth, two forkfuls.
Out of the blue I remember when the kids were little, crammed into the back of the car like cigars wedged in a box, and I would sing to them. Anna anna bo banna, banana fanna fo fanna, me my mo manna… Anna. ("Chuck," Jesse would yell out. "Do Chuck!")
"Hey." Kate points to Anna's neck. "Your locket's missing."
It's the one I gave her, years ago. Anna's hand comes up to her collarbone. "Did you lose it?" I ask.
She shrugs. "Maybe I'm just not in the mood to wear it."
She's never taken it off, far as I know. Sara pulls the roast out of the oven and sets it on the table. As she picks up the knife to carve, she looks over at Kate. "Speaking of things we're not in the mood to wear," she says, "go put on another shirt."
"Why?"
"Because I said so."
'That's not a reason."
Sara spears the roast with the knife. "Because I find it offensive at the dinner table."
"It's not any more offensive than Jesse's metalhead shirts. What's the one you had on yesterday? Alabama Thunder Pussy?"
Jesse rolls his eyes toward her. It's an expression I've seen before: the horse in a spaghetti Western, gone lame, the moment before it's shot for mercy.
Sara saws through the meat. Pink before, now it is an overcooked log. "Now look," she says. "It's ruined."
"It's fine." I take the one piece she has managed to dissect from the rest and cut a smaller bite. I might as well be chewing leather. "Delicious. I'm just gonna run down to the station and get a blowtorch so that we can serve everyone else."
Sara blinks, and then a laugh bubbles out of her. Kate giggles. Even Jesse cracks a smile.
This is when I realize that Anna has already left the table, and more importantly, that nobody noticed.
Back at the station, the four of us sit upstairs in the kitchen. Red's got some kind of sauce going on the stove; Paulie reads the ProJo, and Caesar's writing a letter to this week's object of lust. Watching him, Red shakes his head. "You ought to just keep that filed on disk and print multiple copies at a time."
Caesar's just a nickname. Paulie coined it years ago, because he's always roamin'. "Well, this one's different," Caesar says.
"Yeah. She's lasted two whole days." Red pours the pasta into the colander in the sink, steam rising up around his face. "Fitz, give the boy some pointers, will you?"
"Why me?"
Paulie glances up over the rim of the paper. "Default," he says, and it's true. Paulie's wife left him two years ago for a cellist who'd swung through Providence on a symphony tour; Red's such a confirmed bachelor he wouldn't know what a lady was if she came up and bit him. On the other hand, Sara and I have been married twenty years.
Red sets a plate down in front of me as I start to talk. "A woman," I say, "isn't all that different from a bonfire."
Paulie tosses down the paper and hoots. "Here we go: the Tao of Captain Fitzgerald."
I ignore him. "A fire's a beautiful thing, right? Something you can't take your eyes off, when it's burning. If you can keep it contained, it'll throw light and heat for you. Its only when it gets out of control that you have to go on the offensive."<
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"What Cap is trying to tell you," Paulie says, "is that you need to keep your date away from crosswinds. Hey, Red, you got any Parmesan?"
We sit down to my second dinner, which usually means that the bells will ring within minutes. Firefighting is a world of Murphy's Law; it is when you can least afford a crisis that one crops up.
"Hey, Fitz, do you remember the last dead guy who got stuck?" Paulie asks. "Back when we were vollies?"
God, yes. A fellow who weighed five hundred pounds if he weighed an ounce, who'd died of heart failure in his bed. The fire department had been called in on that one by the funeral home, which couldn't get the body downstairs. "Ropes and pulleys," I recall out loud.
"And he was supposed to be cremated, but he was too big…" Paulie grins. "Swear to God, as my mother's up in Heaven, they had to take him to a vet instead."
Caesar blinks up at him. "What for?"
"How do you think they get rid of a dead horse, Einstein?"
Putting two and two together, Caesar's eyes widen. "No kidding," he says, and on second thought, pushes away Red's pasta Bolognese.
"Who do you think they'll ask to clean out the med school chimney?" Red says.
"The poor OSHA bastards," Paulie answers.
'Ten bucks says they call here and tell us it's our job."
"There won't be any call," I say, "because there won't be anything left to clean out. That fire was burning too hot."
"Well, at least we know this one wasn't arson," Paulie mutters.
In the past month, we have had a rash of fires set intentionally. You can always tell—there will be splash patterns of flammable liquid, or multiple points of origin, or smoke that burns black, or an unusual concentration of fire in one spot. Whoever is doing this is smart, too—at several structures the combustibles have been put beneath stairs, to cut off our access to the flames. Arson fires are dangerous because they don't follow the science we use to combat them. Arson fires are the structures most likely to collapse around you while you're inside fighting them.
Caesar snorts. "Maybe it was. Maybe the fat guy was really a suicide arsonist. He crawled up into the chimney and lit himself on fire."
"Maybe he was just desperate to lose weight," Paulie adds, and the other guys crack up.
"Enough," I say.
"Aw, Fitz, you gotta admit it's pretty funny—"
"Not to that man's parents. Not to his family."
There is that uncomfortable silence as the other men grasp at words. Finally Paulie, who has known me the longest, speaks. "Something going on with Kate again, Fitz?"
There is always something going on with my eldest daughter; the problem is, it never seems to end. I push away from the table and set my plate in the sink. "I'm going up to the roof."
We all have our hobbies-Caesar's got his girls, Paulie his bagpipes, Red his cooking, and me, I have my telescope. I mounted it years ago to the roof of the fire station, where I can get the best view of the night sky.
If I weren't a fireman, I'd be an astronomer. It takes too much math for my brain, I know that, but there's always been something about charting the stars that appeals to me. On a really dark night, you can see between 1,000 and 1,500 stars, and there are millions more that haven't been discovered. It is so easy to think that the world revolves around you, but all you have to do is stare up at the sky to realize it isn't that way at all.
Anna's real name is Andromeda. It's on her birth certificate, honest to God. The constellation she's named after tells the story of a princess, who was shackled to a rock as a sacrifice to a sea monster-punishment for her mother Casseopeia, who had bragged to Poseidon about her own beauty. Perseus, flying by, fell in love with Andromeda and saved her. In the sky, she's pictured with her arms outstretched and her hands chained.
The way I saw it, the story had a happy ending. Who wouldn't want that for a child?
When Kate was born, I used to imagine how beautiful she would be on her wedding day. Then she was diagnosed with APL, and instead, I'd imagine her walking across a stage to get her high school diploma. When she relapsed, all this went out the window: I pictured her making it to her fifth birthday party. Nowadays, I don't have expectations, and this way she beats them all.
Kate is going to die. It took me a long time to be able to say that. We all are going to die, when you get down to it, but it's not supposed to be like this. Kate ought to be the one who has to say good-bye to me.
It almost seems like a cheat that after all these years of defying the odds, it won't be the leukemia that kills her. Then again, Dr. Chance told us a long time ago that this was how it usually worked-a patient's body just gets worn down, from all the fighting. Little by little, pieces of them start to give up. In Kate's case, it is her kidneys.
I turn my telescope to Barnard's Loop and M42, glowing in Orion's sword. Stars are fires that burn for thousands of years. Some of them burn slow and long, like red dwarfs. Others-blue giants-burn their fuel so fast they shine across great distances, and are easy to see. As they start to run out of fuel, they burn helium, grow even hotter, and explode in a supernova. Supernovas, they're brighter than the brightest galaxies. They die, but everyone watches them go.
Earlier, after we ate, I helped Sara clean up in the kitchen. "You think something's going on with Anna?" I asked, moving the ketchup back into the fridge.
"Because she took off her necklace?"
"No." I shrugged. "Just in general."
"Compared to Kate's kidneys and Jesse's sociopathy, I'd say she's doing fine."
"She wanted dinner over before it started."
Sara turned around at the sink. "What do you think it is?"
"Uh… a guy?"
Sara glanced at me. "She's not dating anyone."
Thank God. "Maybe one of her friends said something to upset her." Why was Sara asking me? What the hell did I know about the mood swings of thirteen-year-old girls?
Sara wiped her hands on a towel and turned on the dishwasher. "Maybe she's just being a teenager."
I tried to think back to what Kate was like when she was thirteen, but all I could remember was the relapse and the stem cell transplant she had. Kate's ordinary life had a way of fading into the background, overshadowed by the times she was sick.
"I have to take Kate to dialysis tomorrow," Sara said. "When will you get home?"
"By eight. But I'm on call, and I wouldn't be surprised if our arsonist struck again."
"Brian?" she asked. "How did Kate look to you?"
Better than Anna did, I thought, but this was not what she was asking. She wanted me to measure the yellow cast of Kate's skin against yesterday; she wanted me to read into the way she leaned her elbows on the table, too tired to hold her body upright.
"Kate looks great," I lied, because this is what we do for each other.
"Don't forget to say good night to them before you leave," Sara said, and she turned to gather the pills Kate takes at bedtime.
It's quiet, tonight. Weeks have rhythms all their own, and the craziness of a Friday or Saturday night shift stands in direct contrast to a dull Sunday or Monday. I can already tell: this will be one of those nights where I bunk down and actually get to sleep.
"Daddy?" The hatch to the roof opens, and Anna crawls out. "Red told me you were up here."
Immediately, I freeze. It is ten o'clock at night. "What's wrong?"
"Nothing. I just… wanted to visit."
When the kids were small, Sara would stop by with them all the time. They'd play in the bays around the sleeping giant engines; they'd fall asleep upstairs in my bunk. Sometimes, in the warmest part of the summer, Sara would bring along an old blanket and we would spread it here on the roof, lie down with the kids between us, and watch the night rise. "Mom know where you are?"
"She dropped me off." Anna tiptoes across the roof. She's never been all that great with heights, and there is only a three-inch lip around the concrete. Squinting, she bends to the telescope. "What can you see?"
> "Vega," I tell her. I take a good look at Anna, something I haven't done in some time. She's not stick-straight anymore; she's got the beginnings of curves. Even her motions—tucking her hair behind her ear, peering into the telescope—have a sort of grace I associate with full-grown women. "Got something you want to talk about?"
Her teeth snag on her bottom lip, and she looks down at her sneakers. "Maybe instead you could talk to me," Anna suggests.
So I sit her down on my jacket and point to the stars. I tell her that Vega is a part of Lyra, the lyre that belonged to Orpheus. I am not one for stories, but I remember the ones that match up with the constellations. I tell her about this son of the sun god, whose music charmed animals and softened boulders. A man who loved his wife, Eurydice, so much that he wouldn't let Death take her away.
By the time I finish, we are lying flat on our backs. "Can I stay here with you?" Anna asks.
I kiss the top of her head. "You bet."
"Daddy," Anna whispers, when I think for sure she has fallen asleep, "did it work?"
It takes me a moment to understand she is talking about Orpheus and Eurydice.
"No," I admit.
She lets loose a sigh. "Figures," she says.
TUESDAY
My candle burns at both ends;
It will not last the night;
But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends—
It gives a lovely light!
—EDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAY, "First Fig," A Few Figs from Thistles
ANNA
I USED TO PRETEND that I was just passing through this family on my way to my real one. It isn't too much of a stretch, really—there's Kate, the spitting image of my dad; and Jesse, the spitting image of my mom; and then there's me, a collection of recessive genes that came out of left field. In the hospital cafeteria, eating rubberized French fries and red Jell-O, I'd glance around from table to table, thinking my bona fide parents might be just a tray away. They'd sob with sheer joy to find me, and whisk me off to our castle in Monaco or Romania and give me a maid that smelled like fresh sheets, and my own Bernese mountain dog, and a private phone line. The thing is, the first person I'd have called to crow over my new fortune would be Kate.
My Sister's Keeper Page 4