Fireplay

by Suzanne Chazin

  “I’m not a shrink.”

  “And I’m not looking for one. But my son is losing it. He’s got a little girl, and Kerry’s expecting another baby in April. I don’t think he’s going to pull himself out of this without someone showing him the way.”

  “And I’m the poster girl for the gutless—is that it?”

  “I never said that. I never thought that. And Jimmy didn’t, either. I just never faced what you faced that day—what Doug’s facing now. Please, Georgia—a half hour just telling him what you went through—that’s all I ask.”

  17

  Douglas Hanlon lived two blocks from the beach, in the basement apartment of a white, stucco-sided raised ranch that his wife’s family owned. Ray Connelly, Doug’s father-in-law, was a retired New York City police detective. Kerry and Doug met when Doug was on a leave from the army, sunbathing one day at nearby Jacob Riis Beach. They married when Kerry was five months pregnant with Jenna, who was now four. Doug’s appointment to the FDNY four and a half months ago had been the promise of a better life to come.

  But now the dream had shattered. Georgia could see it on Kerry Hanlon’s face as she opened her parents’ front door. There was shock and suspicion in her eyes until she caught sight of Seamus. She opened the door a little wider. Hanlon introduced Georgia.

  “She’s a fire marshal, Kerry. And a family friend. Doug spoke to her right after the fire. I think he should talk to her again.” Georgia was thankful that Hanlon didn’t elaborate on why Georgia was the designated “talker.”

  “Have you found the arsonist?” asked the young woman. There was a note of desperation in her voice as she pulled at the seams of her oversized denim shirt. It was probably Doug’s. The sleeves were rolled up, the shoulder seams hung halfway down her arms, but her belly, five months pregnant, was straining at the buttons. She looked too tired for a woman in her midtwenties.

  “I’m afraid the investigation is still ongoing,” said Georgia. “But I’d like to talk to Doug anyway.” From the living room beyond, voices quieted. There was only the canned laugh track of a sitcom coming from a television.

  “Is Doug downstairs?” Hanlon asked her.

  Kerry nodded. A little girl with wispy blond hair scampered over in feet pajamas, dragging a large, floppy-eared stuffed rabbit.

  “Poppa!” the child cried, running up to Seamus Hanlon and wrapping her arms around his knees. “Can you play with me? Daddy won’t play with me!”

  “Your old granddad’s always up for a game, lass. Let me just take care of business first.”

  Hanlon introduced Georgia to Kerry’s family: her ex-cop father, mother, two brothers, two sisters, a couple of spouses and one baby. For such a large gathering in such a small house, it was surprisingly quiet. Everyone was in a somber mood tonight. Kerry led Georgia down the stairs to the basement. Seamus stayed behind to play with his granddaughter.

  The back of the basement was above ground, so it had a door that opened onto the backyard with full-sized windows on either side. Still, it was a claustrophobic space. The ceiling was low and set with acoustical tiles. And the furniture had the look of a couple just starting out. The kitchen table was surrounded by mismatched chairs. Framed wedding photos were hung prominently over the sagging floral couch. Toys were scattered all over the worn rug. A small bathroom had been built off the kitchen area and two flimsy doors had been set into Sheetrock walls that cordoned off two bedrooms. One door was open to a child’s bed. The other was closed. Georgia could hear the chatter of a television set on the other side. Kerry knocked on the hollow-core door.

  “Doug? Baby? There’s a fire marshal here to see you. You spoke to her at the fire.”

  Kerry opened the door. The room was dark except for the bluish flickering light of the television. The bed took up nearly the entire floor space. There was room only for a small night table and a portable closet. The items had the flat, assembly-required look of warehouse imports.

  Doug Hanlon blinked at the shaft of light coming into the bedroom. He was wearing a light blue T-shirt that said Virginia Beach on the front, and black sweatpants. His blisters looked less raw, the fluid had abated, but he hadn’t shaved since the fire. He had part of the chenille bedspread between his fingers and he was twisting it violently while a game show host told a screaming contestant that she was a winner. Bells and a horn sounded at the news. Hanlon flinched as if they belonged to a fire truck instead of a TV show.

  “Doug? Remember me?” asked Georgia.

  “Uh-huh,” he answered in a hoarse, distracted voice.

  “Your dad’s worried about you. He says you won’t talk to him.”

  Hanlon shrugged. “There’s nothing to talk about.” He returned his gaze to the television.

  “He wants you to come with him to Captain Russo’s wake.”

  “No.” Hanlon twisted the bedspread some more between his fingers.

  “You think it’s going to be easier a day from now? Or a week? Or a month?” asked Georgia.

  “Nobody’s mad at you, honey,” said Kerry. Georgia said nothing. Civilians didn’t understand the firehouse code. Rightly or wrongly, Doug felt he had broken faith. And deep down, so would they. No one would say a word out of line to him, but the awkwardness would be there. The sideways looks and conversations that would fall away as he walked over.

  “Please, Dougie,” Kerry begged. “Please just come upstairs. The whole family’s upstairs. No one wants you to be alone down here.”

  “I want to be alone, all right?”

  Georgia could hear the tension building in his voice. The whole house seemed tense.

  “I can’t live this way,” said Kerry, her voice beginning to choke up. If Georgia could recall anything about her own mood swings when she was five months pregnant, it was that she was always on the verge of tears. “You’ve got to talk to somebody. If not me, then your dad. If not him, then this marshal here. We can’t go on like this.”

  Hanlon turned on her. “We can’t go on like this because I should’ve died in that basement yesterday. Me, Kerry. Not Captain Russo. Not Tony. Me. You want me to be happy about that? Just because you’re not a widow? You’d have been better off a widow.”

  Kerry started to cry. Georgia wanted to disappear into the Sheetrock. She didn’t know what to say to either of them. She could see what was happening. Making his wife cry was a far easier guilt for Doug Hanlon to bear than feeling responsible for the deaths of two firefighters. He could make up to Kerry. He could never make up to Russo and Fuentes.

  “Why are you doing this?” Kerry sobbed. “Why are you pushing everyone who loves you away?”

  Georgia didn’t even know she was answering until the words left her mouth. “Because you hate yourself, don’t you, Doug? You wish to God they were burying you instead. And everyone’s well-intended sympathy—it just sounds like pity to you. Pity for a coward. A loser…”

  Kerry stopped crying. Her face got hard. “How dare you talk about my husband that way? Who the hell do you think—”

  “She’s right.” Hanlon flopped back on the bed and looked at the ceiling. “That’s how I feel. I don’t want anyone’s sympathy. I just want to die.” He brought a forearm up to shield his eyes. Now they were both crying. Oh, this is going very well—very well, indeed, thought Georgia. Bring on the Mid-East conflict.

  Kerry pushed past Georgia and sat next to Doug on their bed. “Don’t talk that way,” she said to him. She gave Georgia a sharp look. “Don’t let this woman mess with your head. She doesn’t know a thing about what you’re going through.”

  “Unfortunately,” said Georgia, “I do.”

  Hanlon palmed his eyes and sat up.

  “I’ve been there, Doug,” said Georgia softly. “I know the pain. The guilt. The self-hatred and what-ifs. I know what it’s like to be scared to death to see the firefighters you used to work beside every day. I know about those sleepless three A.M.s, those bargains with God. I know about feeling like every comment from a brother has a
double meaning, every look from an officer casts a shadow of doubt.”

  In the flickering light of the room, Hanlon’s eyes met Georgia’s. They were no longer blank and glazed. They held the pleading look of a drowning man.

  “Let’s take a walk to the beach,” she offered.

  He swung his feet off the bed. Kerry touched his elbow and gave Georgia a wary look. “I thought you were here to talk to Doug about the investigation. Now you’re filling his head with all sorts of—”

  “Kerry,” Hanlon said hoarsely, putting a hand on his wife’s shoulder. “I’ve got to do this, okay? I need to do this.”

  They bundled up and walked the two blocks to the boardwalk that fronted Rockaway Beach. It used to be made out of wood. Now the weathered boards were gradually being replaced by ones constructed from gray recycled plastic—a blessing, Georgia decided, since she was still wearing black pumps and the plastic didn’t have bent nails and splinters and knots that could swallow a heel.

  The stores along the promenade—ice cream stands, an arcade, a five-and-dime—were all shuttered tight on this December night. The streetlights cast a cold, yellow glare on their shoulders. To her right, Georgia saw the infinite blackness of the Atlantic, broken only by the roaring crash and spray of white surf. She wrapped her black wool coat tightly around her. Hanlon, by contrast, seemed oblivious to the bitter wind. His down jacket was open to only a T-shirt beneath. It was as if nothing could touch him anymore. Georgia recalled the feeling. After Petie Ferraro died, just putting food in her mouth felt like an unnatural act.

  “Are you eating?” Georgia asked him, breaking the silence. He shook his head.

  “Not really. Not sleeping, either.”

  “Staying away from the booze?”

  “I don’t think you can get through this without drinking.”

  “Be careful, Doug. You, especially.”

  “I’m trying,” he said. “I know it would break my dad’s heart if I…” He swallowed the thought, embarrassed. They both knew that Seamus had conquered his own demons in that department years ago.

  Hanlon sighed. “I just wish I could go back to the hour before everything happened. Jesus, you know how many guys my house lost on nine-eleven? Six. Six fathers and husbands and sons. And now, I just put two more names on the wall.”

  “I understand you feel that way,” said Georgia. “But I can assure you that in time, others will forget you were there. People move on. I know it’s hard to believe, but things will get better.”

  “I look in the mirror, and I hate the man looking back at me. That’s never going to change.” Hanlon stopped in midstride and braced his hands on the rails of the boardwalk. He stared out at the surf. In the shadow of streetlight, Georgia could see his glassy eyes. She took a deep breath of sea air. The cold rush of it in her lungs felt good.

  “Tell me about the men—Captain Russo and Tony Fuentes,” she said, hoping to divert his thoughts to something he could feel positive about. “What were they like?”

  “Captain Russo was a firefighter’s firefighter,” said Hanlon. “A real standup officer. Calm. Fair. Nobody ever saw that man get rattled. All the guys told me I was lucky to be a probie under him. He never made you feel like an idiot, even when you were.”

  “And Tony Fuentes?”

  “My best friend on the job.” He smiled sadly. “Tony grew up in the Bronx, in a tough Puerto Rican neighborhood. He said all us Irish and Italian kids from the suburbs were nothing more than rednecks who couldn’t parallel park.”

  “Sounds like he had a sense of humor,” said Georgia.

  “The best. He was never mean about it, but he hated pretense of any kind. Every time someone boasted a little too much about what they did at a job, Tony used to bring in a toilet plunger from home and knight the guy, ‘Sir Full-of-Shit.’ I heard that after he got a medal two years ago, he even knighted himself.” Hanlon shook his head. “He had three girls and he was dying for a son to play stickball with. He kept telling me that baby number four was gonna be named Tony Junior, even if it was a girl.” Hanlon’s voice caught in his throat and he looked out at the surf. “I can’t believe he’s dead. I keep expecting to see him.”

  “It’s like that,” said Georgia. “You talk a lot to shadows.”

  “Tell me what happened,” Hanlon said thickly. “To you, I mean. When you, uh…”

  “I was assigned to Queens Engine Company Two-Fifty-two, but I was doing an overtime tour in Ladder One-Eighteen across the floor.”

  Georgia never talked about that horrible day anymore—not to anyone. She’d done her best to make peace with her past. Now, every word felt like it weighed a hundred pounds.

  “We got a run to a fire in a row frame. I was doing a search, got turned around and started running out of air. And like you, I got rescued by someone more experienced—a firefighter named Petie Ferraro. He threw me out of a room as it flashed over. Then the floor collapsed beneath him.”

  Georgia closed her eyes. She could still feel the heat melting her face piece and the strong, secure grip of Ferraro grabbing her turnout coat and flinging her like a rag doll out of that room.

  “I thought Ferraro was right behind me, but he’d fallen through the floor. I ran to a window and gulped some air. By the time I understood what had happened and went back, it was too late. He never regained consciousness and died the next day.”

  “But you went back for him, at least,” said Hanlon. “I didn’t.”

  “You couldn’t, Doug. Nobody could. They were trapped behind falling debris. If you’d gone back, you would’ve died, too.”

  “That’s not what the other men think—I know it. They think I ditched them.”

  “Has anyone said anything to you?”

  “Nah. Jack O’Dwyer—he keeps telling me I did fine. But he never looks me in the eye when he says it. And everybody else—they just kinda slide away from me. I know what they feel, Georgia. I feel it myself. I don’t belong on this job.”

  “Then by your definition, I don’t belong on this job either.”

  He wiped a hand across the stubble on his cheeks and stared out at the waves without answering.

  “Listen to me, Doug. Since that day, I’ve been awarded two class-one medals. I’ve crawled through a burning apartment to rescue a downed fire marshal. I’ve helped evacuate civilians from a New York City landmark on the brink of a major explosion. And I’ve risked my life to save a cop and a fire marshal from certain death by drowning. I’ve spent my career and my life trying to make something good out of the bad that happened that day. I didn’t quit. Nothing good can come of quitting.”

  “I can’t hurt anyone else if I quit,” said Hanlon.

  “And you can’t help anyone else, either. That’s why you joined the fire department, isn’t it? To help people?”

  Georgia leaned her back against the boardwalk railing and listened to the steady pounding of the surf. It rumbled like a joist giving way in a burning building. It sounded like the nightmare that each of them would relive for the rest of their lives.

  “Doug, listen to me. You have every right to grieve. But at some point, if that’s all you do, then Russo and Fuentes will have wasted their lives to give you yours.”

  “I don’t know what else to do.”

  “If you really want to honor them, then you’ve got to be brave and keep doing the work they would’ve done if they were here. Find a way to honor them, Doug. They have enough people to grieve over them.”

  18

  Georgia didn’t sleep that night. Her dreams were filled with the memory of Petie Ferraro, his sly grin beneath his black mustache, the nonsense Italian words he sang in the firehouse kitchen, the care he lavished on the firehouse rigs as if they were his personal vehicles.

  In her dreams, he would always be making spaghetti sauce. And then the smoke would come. Dark gray smoke. It would billow out of nowhere, and suddenly they’d be back in that row house in Queens again. And Georgia would be gulping air out of a shattered
window, looking down at shards of glass and a rusted red tricycle on a patch of dirt. When she had this dream, she always woke up gasping for air. And she always woke up thinking—not of Petie, for she guessed on some level that she couldn’t bring herself to think of Petie. She woke up thinking about her father.

  Ferraro’s death haunted her in the details and the guilt they inspired. But her father’s death, ironically, had a more subtle power over her. It was the power that came from not knowing. What were George Skeehan’s last moments like? Did he suffer? Was he afraid? Was there a firefighter who could’ve pulled him out? Was there a chief who shouldn’t have let him go in the first place? His death had robbed her of a future with him. But it had also robbed her of a way to make sense of the loss. Her father had not died saving anyone. Like Petie, he had been the hero in a drama for which there were no villains or victims. Where was the villain in a child playing with matches? Or an untended cigarette? Or an overloaded electrical circuit? Where was the closure? Georgia’s family had never gotten any, nor had Petie Ferraro’s. And that’s what often plagued her most on those sleepless three A.M.s

  I can give closure to the families of Joe Russo and Tony Fuentes, Georgia reminded herself. I can bring their killer to justice—if I go undercover for the FBI.

  On Saturday morning, Georgia called Krause. “You’ve got your deal,” she told him. “I’ll pose as McLaughlin’s girlfriend if it means getting a shot at him when the FBI is finished.”

  “Excellent,” said Krause. “Come into the office as soon as you can. Agent Nelson and I will be here. We’ll set everything up.”

  Georgia begged her mother to watch Richie for the day, then slipped into her most conservative clean clothes—a white turtleneck sweater, a black wool pants suit and some low-heeled pumps. She was heading out the door when the phone rang. She hoped it might be Jamie Sullivan. She was surprised to hear Nathan Reese’s voice on the other end.