“Well . . . if he sets you on fire, then let me know. I know a guy who could probably put it out.”
I was slouched on the couch with my legs sticking out in front of me. Denny kicked me in the shin. “Don’t be a dick.”
“I’m not being a dick.” Reaching down, I rubbed my shin. “I just don’t know what you want me to do. This is Axe we’re talking about.”
“Tell him to get off his fucking high horse and stop acting like a goddamn warden around here.”
“What do I look like, your mother? You tell him.” I set the magazine on the coffee table. “I’m going to bed.”
“He only opens up to you.”
“What?” I gave him a confused look. I couldn’t remember Axe ever opening up to me. “Does he have me confused with Dr. Phil?”
“No . . . ” Denny’s frustration got the better of him, and he punched the wall.
“All right,” I said, walking over to him and then putting my arm around him. “Let’s go fuck with my brother, and then we’ll think of something to do to Axe.”
Playing practical jokes always turned him around.
We sneaked into the room when Kasey was in the shower and put four cans of Coke that we’d shaken up for a good ten minutes under the posts of the bed he slept in. Then we froze Axe’s socks for the second time this month and put red Kool-Aid in his shoes. Last time we did that, his feet were red for a week.
“Feel better, little buddy?” We were walking back into the lounge when the alarm went off.
“Actually,” Denny said as we both started downstairs, “I do.”
“Engine 10, Ladder 1 . . . Battalion 2 . . . 800 block, cross streets are University and Western . . . ”
When the apartment address came across the scanner, I went cold. I’d never felt fear like that. It was instant, from my head to my toes, numbing and all-consuming.
The guys looked at me as we loaded onto the truck. “Is that your . . . ” Their voices trailed off as I started to shake, my head nodding vigorously.
We pulled out. Anxious eyes watched me carefully, not knowing what to say.
I had just talked to her. She was fine.
And then my thoughts went to one person. Ridley.
My breath tripped when the apartment number was called out on the scanner and Mike turned around. This was real. This was so fucking real, and I had to deal with it.
“They’ve activated a second alarm already . . . ”
I felt sick. My stomach dropped, my heart stilled, and I could almost feel the blood drain from my face.
Never did I think he’d actually hurt her. It never crossed my mind.
And all this time, the warning had been there. But most of all, I had pushed him toward it. I had baited him with the one thing that had the power to destroy me. That was the worst feeling of all. I knew it now . . . something he’d known all along.
With my mask and air already on, we came around Western, and the smoke was billowing through broken windows shattered from the heat on the fourth floor. Our apartment faced the back so I couldn’t see how bad it really was, but there was no stopping me when I got off that truck.
My dad tried to catch me. Kasey tried, too, and Axe even blocked me, but not this time. I was going in no matter what. They wouldn’t stop me like they did at the pier.
As with any firefighter, I was there to access the situation and respond based on my training. How can you do that when your mind is stuck on one thing?
How do I save my family when I’m so clearly caught up with anger?
My hope was slipping through my own fingers as I was forced to make one decision, one that changed lives. I climbed the stairs, forty pounds of gear weighing me down as I took them two steps at a time.
The thick brown smoke and the sagging wood let me know I didn’t have long. If I was going to get to them, I needed to move now. I started taking the steps three at a time and finally reached the fourth floor.
All I heard now was heavy breathing — my own, that hollow sound the SCBA made, the beep of our monitors tracking me as I searched through smoke thick enough to blind you. As a matter of fact, I couldn’t see anything. All that surrounded me was the roar of the nearby flames and blackness.
Sweat poured down my neck and back under my bunker gear.
Where I was standing, the temperature was a mere 150. Maybe a little higher. Near the ceiling, it could be thousands. Crawling, I made my way to the door. Axe was beside me now, Denny and Kasey behind him.
When I got to our apartment and saw that it was fully engulfed, I lost my head in the smoke and reacted as recklessly as I felt, consumed in my own flames. My family was in there, and I let that thought take over.
If Logan had been there, he would have said, “Someone else’s emergency. Don’t make it yours. Slow down.”
I think there are times when you don’t know your own strength. Times when you surprise yourself.
Axe had the TIC (thermal image camera) with him, searching through the blackness. We saw nothing. The camera renders infrared radiation as visible light and allows us to see through smoke and displays for us where someone might be.
The first person we came across was Georgia, passed out near the door. She was breathing, and Denny grabbed her and took off.
The next person? Him. I wanted to leave him. I did.
But I knew the answer. We wouldn’t leave him, but I’d be goddamned if I was going to save him. “Leave him!”
Axe and Kasey both looked at me. “We can’t do that.”
“The fuck you can’t!”
My focus wasn’t on them. It was on my family.
I knew my kids couldn’t survive as long in that thick smoke. They were in our master bathroom, inside the shower, Smoke was on the floor next to them, dead.
I felt a rush of anger, knowing Ridley had started this fire. I just knew it, and my dog was dead because of him.
I grabbed Gracie, who was the closest to me, while Axe got Jayden, who was just next to her in the shower, soaking wet. They’d somehow turned the shower on.
Both were both limp but breathing and coughing – which was a good sign. Sean met me in the hall and took Gracie from my arms. On my hands and knees, I searched for my girl while another firefighter grabbed Lauren, who was next to Aubrey.
I found her tied to a chair, face down and unconscious. But breathing. Immediately I thought of Logan, and that night on the ship had returned. Images of his body being carried off the ship, telling Brooke, all of it. I couldn’t shake it.
“Trust me. I’m grabbing him, and I’m right behind you.”
But then I suddenly could. Right now I could save her. I could.
“Stay with me, honey,” I begged, running down the stairs, pieces of the apartment collapsing around me. “Please. Please just stay with me.”
She was whispering words I couldn’t understand, couldn’t hear.
“You’re okay . . . hold onto me. I got you.”
“Our b-b-babies . . . ”
“Breathe, baby . . . please, just breathe . . . ” Removing my mask, I put the air to her face, urging her to breathe. “Breathe for me! Please just fucking breathe! Don’t leave me . . . please!”
When we got outside, they ordered the building evacuated. Everyone was out.
The paramedics took over and got Aubrey in the ambulance. I looked around, frantic for Jayden and Gracie.
Kasey grabbed for me. “They’re okay. They’re already being transported.”
The light blurred, but I focused on one image. A tarp being pulled over a body.
But it’s the look from my girl that had broken my fucking heart. I couldn’t fix this. I couldn’t save them. She was dying, and there was nothing I could do about it.
When I closed my eyes, I tried to breathe, just simply breathe in a little, but there was no air. There was only smoke now. I was so fucked up I couldn’t see straight. I felt my heart drop into my stomach.
My body shook, and I couldn’t stop it. Nothin
g could. It was like poison being pumped through my veins. Rage rushed through me, my chest heaving in gasping breaths at the frail hope my family would survive this.
Smoke kills. It does. And it’s sometimes not right away.
I walked toward the truck, oblivious to the world around me. Nothing mattered. Minutes passed, and my fear rooted in place, fearing for their safety and embedding that gut-wrenching churning even further.
Would this be it? The night I lost everything?
Engine 10 to command, we’ve got the fire tapped.
10-4
* * *
Saturday, December 22, 2012
Jace
“SAVE HER . . . please!” I was in the way, I knew it. Frantically yelling out orders they didn’t need to hear. Orders they knew.
“We need to save her life, and you can’t be in here for this.” The doctor pushed me back. “Leave!”
I was pushed out the door before I could speak or fight to stay in there with her. And I sat right outside her door.
There was that stillness again. Flames roared around me, begging me to move, but I couldn’t.
Tears welled up. How could I have let this happen?
My stomach boiled at the thought.
“I’VE ALWAYS thought that I could handle everything,” I whispered to Jayden and Gracie, kissing their black-smeared faces. “But I was wrong. I can’t survive without you.”
Both lay in a bed receiving oxygen, but alert and looking at me. I didn’t know how. I have no fucking idea how they did it, but they’d gotten into the bathroom of our master bedroom and closed the door, and were inside the shower with it on.
It saved their lives.
“What made you turn the water on?” Gracie knew what to do in a fire, but panic had to have scared her.
“You taught me, Daddy.” Tears streamed down her face, her chin quivering as her bottom lip protruded. “Where’s Mommy?”
“She’s being saved . . . ” My legs threatened to crumble; if not, my words did.
My arms wrapped around my children, clinging to the only thing I might have left.
“RIDLEY’S GONE,” Axe said, his face emotionless. “He died of a head injury and bled to death.”
“How? Did you drop him down the stairs?”
He gave a dark chuckle. “I certainly wasn’t gentle . . . but he was dead before then. He was hit in the back of the head by something. Glass, probably, with the gash he had.” His weight shifted, his hands on his hips. We were both in full gear, aside from my jacket. It was with Gracie and Jayden. I said I had to step out when my mom came in so I could check on Aubrey.
They made me leave my jacket. They were okay. Both being treated for smoke inhalation but okay.
Aubrey was different. But she was still alive and breathing. She had second- and third-degree burns, and her throat had swelled from the smoke. They had a breathing tube in now and were treating her burns, which were mostly on her neck and shoulder.
“Ridley had a gun on him.”
My gut twisted and my lungs froze. The night could have gone so differently.
To my left, I saw Georgia sitting with Lauren. Both of them had just been released with minor burns and minor smoke inhalation.
“Is Aubrey okay?” Georgia asked, coughing with a fucking cigarette in her mouth, unlit.
My lips felt even more numb as she spoke. Everything then went frozen when I saw her with that bottle.
“Rock bottom doesn’t really exist for you, does it?” I said, feeling good about my choice of words to her.
“Fuck you.” We’d never gotten along and never would now. “I saved their lives. I went back for them.”
I fucking lost it. I’ve never wanted to hit a woman in my life so badly as I wanted to right then.
I was so fucking pissed when I saw her there with the bottle in her hand. As if today meant nothing to her. Aubrey meant nothing to her. I knew that much. But it still didn’t sit well with me. This woman needed to be put in her goddamn place.
“What are you doing?” she asked when I ripped the bottle from her hands, smashed it against the floor, and then slammed her back against the brick wall in the emergency room waiting area, my hands grasped tightly in the fabric of her shirt.
“What does it look like I’m doing?” I spat the anger I was feeling. The acid behind my words burned her face, and she flinched back the way I wanted her to. “You know what, you’re the reason why Aubrey questions my intentions and why Lauren can’t keep a fucking guy around. You’re the reason my family was even put in danger!”
“How dare you!” She honestly looked offended, and that pissed me off even more. She knew her shit. She knew what she was doing. Always had.
“How dare I? You’re kidding, while your daughter is in the ICU. How dare you!”
“You know what, Jace, you’re so high and mighty because you save people, but what about Logan? Huh? Didn’t save him, did you?”
Beside her, Lauren gasped, her hand placed over her mouth.
I lost it. Axe had to physically hold me back.
Georgia said nothing more but backed away from me. Maybe the shock of the night was catching up with her, or she maybe she finally regretted her actions. Either way, it rendered her silent.
“Everything Aubrey is today is despite you, and that kills you,” I yelled after her as she retreated through the sliding doors at Harbor View. “You thought for sure, hoped for it, even, that your girls would turn out like you, and they didn’t!”
IT TOOK me seven hours to calm down.
Seven long fucking hours. Georgia left, and I wasn’t sure if we would ever see her again.
But there I sat now beside Aubrey as she looked back at me. Bandages covered her neck and shoulder, and her face was red and splotchy as she held back tears.
“I’m sorry . . . ” She cried into her hands. “I’m so sorry.”
I sniffed, my forearm sweeping away what I wasn’t sure were happy tears, or tears of sadness. My family was alive. I had a lot to be happy for.
We had no place to live and nearly everything we owned was destroyed in that fire, but we had this. We had each other.
“What now, then?” she asked.
She turned to look me directly in the eyes, her expression of heartache and remorse mirroring my own. We didn’t speak, just stared at each other.
Tears streamed down her reddened cheeks. I quickly wiped her tears away and pulled her into my arms. “Aubrey” — I waited for her eyes to meet mine — “I love you, and I’m not going anywhere.”
“We . . . ” She started to say something and stopped, slumped back against the hospital bed.
“We save what’s worth saving,” I said. Pushing myself from the wall, I unfurled my arms and reached for her hands. “I love you.” I blinked, feeling nervous. “Do you want to know why I haven’t proposed to you?”
She nodded, slowly.
“I’ve wanted nothing more than to have you as my wife, especially knowing how dangerous my job is. I only want you. I’ve tried to propose, but the words ‘Marry me’ seem like nothing compared to the love I have for you. A ring, a piece of paper, that’s not what you need. You need me. You need our kids.” I blinked away tears, as did she. “What we have is something beautiful. All the bullshit we’ve been through has nothing on that. So if it’s marriage you want, I’ll give you that. To me it’s not about tying myself to you in every way but being with you in every way. There’s a difference. You just say the words, tell me what you want, and I’ll do that. If it’s marriage you want, I’ll get down on my fucking knees and beg for your hand. Just tell me what you want from me.”
She smiled. “What I want right now is you . . . and my kids . . . here with me.”
That was when my face spread into the warm smile I knew she loved so much.
This . . . right now . . . was something worth saving. It was worth all the tears in the world.
“There’s nothing in this world more important to me than you and our
kids. I’m sorry for every day when I’ve made you doubt that. I am.”
I know fires. I know how they live, how they breathe, how to contain them, what they do, how they’ll react to the conditions in which we had them, and why they move the way they do. Just the same, I knew her.
This, fire, her, it’s my gift. I could have had a different life, a less dangerous one.
But I didn’t. I chose this.
For that, I saved her life tonight.
She saved mine, too.
Aubrey was my prayer. She was my untold answer in all of this. She held the key to everything without even knowing.
Dispatch to command, is roll call complete?
Working on it now.
* * *
Monday, December 24, 2012
Aubrey
HE CARRIED the burden on his heavy shoulders when he didn’t need to. With eyes that held emotion, he gave me a glimpse, and for the most part, I ignored that glimpse.
Mostly because I didn’t want to look at him and see resentment in his eyes.
Fire can destroy everything. Love can destroy everything.
Maybe I felt guilty. I knew I shouldn’t, but I did. It couldn’t be helped. There was a part of me that didn’t realize how bad Ridley’s intentions really were.
There are times when you can’t give in. You can’t give up. Because if you do, what was the fight worth in the beginning?
These things in your life, they happen to you and they change you. They do. Over time, they change you in subtle ways. Maybe it’s a different route to work because of a close call at an intersection. Maybe it’s never eating at your favorite restaurant against because of that rancid meat you had one time.
My point?
All that shit takes a toll on you. Your decisions, your beliefs, all different in some way. You may not see them, but others do. They see it when you tense up at that intersection, gripping the steering wheel a little tighter, slowing down. They show in the way you avoid the meat and order a salad.
Something Worth Saving Page 29