Man of His Word

by Cynthia Reese

  Finally the truck turned off, and Kimberly could once again speed up. “And Daniel?” she prompted.

  “He was working with a rookie—a young fellow— Oh, my, I didn’t even think to ask how he was. I should have called his mama. Look at me, I’ve lost my fool mind,” Ma murmured. “That kid— What possessed him, I don’t know, and Louise could have it all wrong, she was going off what she’d heard. He’d climbed up into the suspended ceiling and got his BA—that’s his breathing apparatus—caught.”

  “And of course Daniel went up after him.” Kimberly had the sudden urge to throttle Daniel if he was alive enough to feel it when she got to the hospital.

  And there was the hospital. She yanked the wheel toward the ER entrance, pulled up and parked. Ma was out the door and around the car before Kimberly even turned off the engine.

  But then Ma froze.

  Kimberly yanked her apron from her waist and tossed it into the car. Following Ma, she saw the clusters of firefighters in various degrees of turnout gear gathered around the ER entrance. She realized that the older woman had seen something that made her fear the worst.

  “Ma?” She came up on one side of Daniel’s mother while Marissa flanked her on the other.

  Ma captured both Kimberly’s and Marissa’s hands. “Oh, girls. I’m so glad you’re with me.”

  The firefighters parted ways so the three of them could move through the dense throng. Kimberly could hear scraps of tales that were suddenly cut off as the women approached.

  “—had to cut Chris’s airline to get him out—shared one mask all the way out, and they were—”

  “—hot as the devil’s kitchen in there—”

  “—and pure lakes of fire. They can say all they want that lard has a flashpoint of six hundred degrees, but man o’mighty, I ain’t never seen it just explode into flames—”

  “—I swear, thought Chief was sure a goner, climbing up after Chris in that ceiling when the whole roof was about to collapse on both of ’em—”

  “—years of grease built up in that ceiling, fire burning from every direction and the smoke—couldn’t see my hand in front of my face—”

  “—who’s that with Ma? Is that—”

  “—girlfriend—”

  “—hear tell maybe it’s his daughter—”

  But as they passed, the firefighters descended into silence, except for a few brave ones who managed to almost look Ma in the eye and say, “Hey, Ma, you holdin’ up?” before dipping their heads respectfully in Kimberly and Marissa’s direction.

  The throng continued until they made it into the ER proper. It was almost a blessed relief when Kimberly found herself, Ma and Marissa ushered behind the door to the treatment areas, away from Daniel’s firefighters. The sight of doctors and nurses and medical equipment—now, that was familiar to her, scary, but a known quantity. She knew the territory.

  Out there? Something about all those somber-faced firefighters scared her to her core.

  “Hey, Mrs. Monroe!” one of the nurses called. “You’ll want to see Daniel, I’ll expect.”

  The woman came around the nurse’s station. “Now, don’t be alarmed. We’ve got him in trauma room two. It’s not too bad, but I think the doctor will probably admit him at least overnight.”

  “And the other boy?” Ma’s face was tense as she waited for word.

  “He’s okay, too—got more smoke than Daniel, but he’s breathing on his own.”

  “Glory be!” Ma let out a shaky breath. Kimberly thought the older woman might fold up in a heap on the floor as the tension went out of her.

  The moment passed, and Ma straightened her back, following briskly behind the nurse. Kimberly and Marissa trailed after them.

  The door to the trauma room was blocked by a doctor reviewing something on the screen of a small tablet. He looked up at their approach. “You told me your family would be here lickety-split,” he said to someone inside the room.

  And then she spotted Daniel, laid out on the gurney, his white T-shirt grimy with soot. The plastic tubing of an oxygen mask cut grooves into his cheeks, as smudged and blackened as his undershirt.

  When he caught sight of them, he struggled to sit up and swing his feet off the bed, pushing the mask away from his mouth.

  Ma rushed to one side and gently manhandled him back against the pillows. “You know the drill, Daniel,” she decreed as she replaced the mask. “You sit back and listen to what these doctors tell you. I raised you better than that.”

  “Dad!” The word tore from Marissa and she barreled into his arms. Kimberly saw him hold on to her tightly, burying her face in the crook of his neck, smoothing her hair, his eyes closed as though he was soaking up the very substance of her. A tear snaked a path through the soot on Daniel’s face.

  “Kiddo,” he said huskily. “I’m okay. No worries. What? You think one kitchen fire’s gonna do me in? Even if it was a mongo-giant economy-size one?” He waved a hand to indicate they should all gather in for one big hug.

  Kimberly fell into that embrace, not bothering to stop the flow of tears that poured down her cheeks.

  At first, it was enough to know that Daniel was alive and well and they could chalk up the experience to a near miss. Then her relief and her tears vaporized into fierce anger. She pulled back.

  “What?” he protested, the words garbled by the mask and a sudden coughing fit.

  “How could you? They said you crawled up into the ceiling—of a burning building! And with the roof about to cave in! You’re a fire chief, Daniel, not a—a superhero! You didn’t even have to go into work today.”

  Daniel shrugged. “I wasn’t trying to be a superhero. If I was—” He stopped to cough again and drew in a ragged breath. “Maybe I could have put that fire out with my X-ray ice vision, now, couldn’t I? Chris thought maybe there was another fire starting up in the ceiling—and he was right, by the way. All that grease from all those years of frying chicken had coated the framing up there. It went up like a torch.” The long speech set off a hacking cough that shook him. “Maybe he should have waited on me, because climbing up there by himself wasn’t the world’s smartest idea,” he choked out.

  “And climbing up after him, into a ceiling that could collapse at any minute under the weight of one man, much less two—how smart was that?” She folded her arms across her chest as she waited for his reply.

  “Well, it seemed like the thing to do at the time,” he quipped.

  “Are you serious? Daniel Monroe!”

  Daniel turned doleful eyes toward Ma in an apparent appeal for backup as he continued to cough in a way that sounded to Kimberly like a pack-a-day smoker.

  Ma patted his back, but nodded in Kimberly’s direction. “Preach on, Kimberly, you just preach on,” she said. She scowled at her son. “Scare us to death and then expect us to let you off the hook? When you’ve told us you’ll be careful?”

  “Sure, I was careful,” Daniel insisted, a crooked grin spilling out from beneath his oxygen mask. “Careful doesn’t mean risk-free. It means what it says—to be full of care. I climbed up in that ceiling full of care for my backside, that’s for sure.” He coughed yet again.

  “Careful?” Kimberly exploded. “Daniel—Daniel, please promise me you won’t take a chance like that again,” she begged, taking his hand in hers.

  Whatever amusement he had shown moments ago faded. “I can’t make you that promise, Kimberly. I can’t, because I’ve already given my firefighters my word that I won’t leave them behind. A man was down, don’t you understand? Chris needed me. And I’d do it all over again in a heartbeat.”

  “Daniel—” She averted her face so he couldn’t see her tears. “Don’t we count?” she finally choked out in a low voice. “I mean, where do we fit in? You give away your promises to everyone else. Where does that leave us?”

  His finger tipped her head back around, and he pulled her down on the edge of the gurney. “You count. I swear. It may not seem like it. But all I could think about
—” He shook his head, coughed some more. “I promise this—I won’t take an unnecessary risk. Because you do count.” He squeezed her fingers in his, pulled her down against his chest. “All of you. You count more than you know. But I have to keep my word, or what kind of man would I be?”

  As she lay there, hearing the thump of his heart against her chest, breathing in the sooty, ashy smell coming off him in wave after wave, Kimberly wept.

  She loved him. Somewhere in these past few weeks, she had fallen in love with this stubborn, obstinate man who took idiot risks and ran into burning buildings and wouldn’t break a foolish promise he’d made over a decade ago. And she knew, deep in her soul, that all it could ever lead to was anger and heartache and coming last in line to his precious promises.

  It was only then that she realized what Marissa had called him when she’d first laid eyes on him in the ER.

  Dad.

  Marissa had called him Dad.

  It made Kimberly weep all the harder, because worse than any pain she might go through herself was seeing her daughter go through that same pain—and being helpless to do anything about it.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  A WEEK AFTER the big fire found Daniel standing in the same spot he’d delivered Marissa exactly twelve years before. The summer sun bore down on him as hotly as it had that July Fourth, the patch of grass in front of the fire station still as lush and green.

  Her birthday. Today was Marissa’s birthday.

  He’d had a lot of time to think while he’d been laid up in the hospital. The doctors hadn’t been satisfied until he’d had clear lung films for two days straight, so he’d spent countless hours staring at a muted television screen.

  Thinking.

  He could have died. He very nearly had, though that was a secret that he and Chris would take to their graves. Nobody need know just how close the two of them had come to punching their tickets. No, Kimberly was mad enough already, and she had no idea what had really gone on inside that inferno of a kitchen.

  It had been Kimberly and Marissa’s faces that had come to him in that smoky darkness. He’d realized then with a startling clarity that if he didn’t make it out, he might take with him one of the few sure means Marissa ever had to find Miriam.

  In the hospital, in between visitors and flower deliveries and him shooing Ma and Kimberly home, Daniel had turned the quandary over and over in his mind. Now, finally back at work, standing at the very spot where all of it had started, he still was trying to figure out what to do.

  If it had been any other fireman besides him, would they have revealed Miriam’s identity already? Would his dad have told Kimberly? What was the right thing to do?

  He’d searched online for Miriam’s name. But an Amish girl who was determined to hide wasn’t so very easy to find. He’d spent a rainy afternoon using the hospital’s Wi-Fi to check out every possible lead.

  Uriel Hostetler was still alive, still full of acid-tongued hate for the English—or anybody who might question his authority.

  His son, Marissa’s birth father, wasn’t.

  A short newspaper article in an Indiana weekly turned up scant details about the farming accident that had taken his life. Daniel’s heart softened for old Uriel as he read the article. He knew a thing or two about loss, but he couldn’t imagine how it would be to lose your own child.

  He’d searched for an obituary, and as he read the brief account of the services, he recognized the name of the town. It was the settlement Hostetler had left to come to Georgia after a split in the church.

  Apparently Hostetler had smoothed things over.

  Yesterday, Daniel had given up on the internet and started dialing numbers to the town’s few non-Amish businesses. Someone somewhere had to know what had happened to Miriam.

  And they had. The woman at a local florist had revealed the information in hushed tones, as though she was afraid of being overheard, and only after she’d called the fire station’s number.

  It was a slim lead—the name of a community college across the Indiana state line in Kentucky. And that led him to a friendly alumni-affairs director who miraculously was in her office the day before a holiday, and who happily told him that, yes, Miriam was still on their alumni rolls, married now and living in Chattanooga, Tennessee.

  Which brought him here. On Marissa’s birthday. To this patch of lawn where he’d wrapped her as a wet and squalling newborn in his T-shirt and gazed at her with wonder.

  He gathered his courage and dialed the number the woman at the college had given him.

  “Hello? If this is a telemarketer, I—”

  “Miriam? Miriam Graber?”

  “Who is this?” she hissed, every bit of warmth draining from her voice. “How did you find me?”

  “I don’t know if you remember my name, but I’m Daniel Monroe—I’m the fireman who helped you with your baby. Marissa.”

  Silence filled the line, and Daniel thought she might have hung up on him. Then, in a low voice, she said, “I remember you. You helped me. I could have never gotten away if you hadn’t helped me.”

  “Look,” he began, digging his toe into the thick thatch of grass and jamming his free hand into his pants pocket. “I wouldn’t call, but it’s about Marissa. She’s sick, Miriam. She needs your help.”

  “I—I can’t help her. I can’t. That’s why I gave her up. So someone else could.”

  He ignored her words and pressed on. “Her adoptive mom—she’s really good, Miriam. I know you’d like her. But Marissa has this rare bleeding disorder and she needs your medical history. You could call her adoptive mom, you don’t even have to come back to Georgia—”

  “No! No! My husband—he doesn’t know I had a baby, and I can’t tell him. Because—because—” Miriam began sobbing into the phone. “I can’t have a baby now. Not after— They had to do a hysterectomy. And if he knew... I just can’t.”

  “He doesn’t have to know.” Only desperation would have made Daniel say this, encourage deception. “You could fax it here to the fire station, and nobody would be the wiser. You wouldn’t have to put your name down—”

  “No, I can’t.” Her tears had ended, and she was preternaturally calm on the other end of the line. “It’s not only Billy I’m worried about. How did you find me? If you can find me, Uriel can find me, and he knows—he knows about the baby. And he wants her now, the baby, and he’ll fight custody. I know him. After he lost his son, he got even meaner. He’ll take Marissa away from the only family she’s ever known, and he won’t think twice about it. And I will not let her go through that—I will not let him have her. I don’t want to know anything about her except that she’s safe. What I don’t know, Uriel can’t make me tell.”

  “You don’t seriously think—”

  “I do. There was this guy in North Carolina who was able to get his daughter back years later—and he’d signed papers terminating his parental rights. I saw it on the news. They took it all the way up to the Supreme Court. Uriel Hostetler will stop at nothing—he’d probably kidnap her and skip the courts altogether. Either way, Marissa would be gone. And you can’t let that animal have her. You can’t, Daniel, please. You promised me you’d keep her safe. You promised.”

  He could dismiss the immature fears and requests for secrecy from a sixteen-year-old girl, but now Miriam was a grown woman of twenty-seven or twenty-eight and was asking the same thing.

  Keeping him bound to that promise.

  He closed his eyes. Tried one more time. “I haven’t told them about you. But they need your medical information. That’s all.”

  “You know that’s not all. If you tell them, they’ll figure it out. They’ll want more. And if they find out I was Amish, and where I came from, they’ll go looking. Uriel—Uriel will still be there. After he’s dead, then I can, Daniel. But not while he draws a breath. You have to understand.”

  In the background, he heard a man greet Miriam with a “Hi, honey, I got the hot-dog buns you wanted. Now, why
do they sell ten hot dogs in a package and eight buns?”

  Miriam came back on the phone, hushed and hurried. “I’ve gotta go. Don’t call back, and, please, don’t tell anyone. Think of Marissa, and keep your promise.”

  * * *

  KIMBERLY HUNG UP her phone and sank down on the porch steps, weary from the late-afternoon heat bearing down on her. She put her head in her hands.

  She hadn’t expected Judge Malloy to call her on the Fourth, especially not as late as four o’clock in the afternoon. He’d been kind...but final. He could not release Marissa’s birth mom’s records, not even with identifying demographics redacted, not without the woman’s permission.

  Which kind of meant Kimberly needed to know the woman’s name.

  Which kind of meant she needed the woman’s medical records.

  Talk about a vicious circle.

  What a great Fourth of July present, she thought sourly. The news seemed even worse coming on Marissa’s birthday.

  Something landed on the ground by her feet with a thunk, and a soft brown nose pushed up through her hair, snuffling gently. She peered down to see the Monroes’ old chocolate Labrador shooting his biggest, roundest puppy-dog eyes at her.

  Now that he’d captured her attention, he nudged the battered tennis ball at her feet. “Oh, Rufus... You miss Daniel, don’t you? You got used to him hanging around while he was off work, throwing you balls to retrieve.”

  Getting to her feet, she threw the ball into the pasture and watched as Rufus loped off after it. If only she could send Rufus to fetch Marissa’s birth mother. He wouldn’t give up. He’d hunt until he found her.

  Well. There was nothing left to do but pack up and head to Indiana. She’d let Marissa have one more day here—Ma had secretly baked a huge birthday cake for Marissa to serve at the cookout tonight, and Marissa was pumped about going to the fireworks at the park afterward.

  But tomorrow—tomorrow they needed to start the drive to Indiana. There was nothing left for them here.

  Her heart protested that. She knew it to be true, though. Even if it felt as though she were ripping out a part of herself to leave the Monroes behind—leave Daniel, her heart whispered—Kimberly had to remind herself that Daniel, if he wanted, could stop her.