“Then why are you so pissed off? This is what you’ve been waiting for, right? Me on the sidelines, like a good little girl, letting the real men do the work. These last three years, you’ve just been waiting for me to—”
“To get killed.” He leaned forward. “You got it exactly right, Anne. I’ve been waiting for the night when I have to go to our mother and tell her that you’re dead because—”
“I’m alive!”
“You lost a limb!”
“My hand! And I can still fight after this—”
“No,” he ground out as he lashed his arm through the air. “You’re med’d out. Permanently. And you know what? You deserve it.”
Anne recoiled. “You fucking bastard.”
“You never follow orders, Anne. Never. You violated safety protocol by sending Chavez up to the second floor instead of proceeding in your pairing—”
“So I saved his life. Otherwise he would have been trapped with me—”
“Or maybe he could have gotten you free before Maguire appeared with a goddamn chain saw in his hand.” Tom shook his head. “You want to know why I don’t like him? Fine. It’s because he’s just like you. He doesn’t listen, and he thinks he’s better than the rules. And that’s how people get hurt.”
“Guess you’ve done your homework. Did you interview everyone before coming in here just so you could stand there in your cloak of superiority and beat me over the head with the rule book?”
“No, I waited until I could talk to Maguire’s surgeon personally. Because I knew that was going to be the first thing you wanted to know.”
“Well, now you’ve reported your intel. So you can go.”
“Don’t get your back up with me. You were in the wrong. Maguire was insane. And both of you are in the hospital. The fact that it only cost you—”
“A place to put a wedding band,” she snapped as she lifted what was left of her arm. “Right? You want me stuck inside and knocked up with some man’s kid, being just like Mom, waiting for my husband to come home and justify my existence. That was the fucking fifties, Tom. People like me don’t have to be barefoot and pregnant anymore—hey, have you heard they let us drive cars and even vote now, too?”
“Leave Mom out of it. And this is not about you being a woman—”
“You sure about that? Oh, and as for Mom, I will bring her into anything I want. I am not going to be like her. No goddamn way I am going to get stuck living her life of reflected glory for someone who didn’t deserve the hype.”
Tom went quiet. “I do not understand you.”
“It’s more like you don’t understand our parents.”
“Yeah, well, excuse me if I’m not in a big hurry to buy into your perspective. For one, you’re in a fucking hospital bed because you did the wrong thing in a situation where your life and the lives of others depended on you following orders. And two, thanks for taking a shit all over the two people who raised us and worked their asses off so we could end up here, arguing in this hospital. Clearly, you’re a great judge of character.”
“Whatever, Tom.” Unaware she’d sat up, she let herself fall back again on the thin pillows. “You’ve never wanted me to be your equal. Tack whatever vocabulary you want on it, that’s what’s really going on here.”
“The hell it is. You never will be like me and not because you’re a woman. It’s because you’ve got a chip on your shoulder that makes you impossible to reason with or trust on the job. But like I said, that’s over now. You’re out, Anne. Good work.”
She stared down at the bandage and felt sick about so much. “You know what’s funny? I can set my watch on you. You just have to kick me in the nuts, especially when I’m down—and don’t bother pointing out that I don’t have any. You’ve spent the last two and a half decades showing and telling me that over and over again. Your position is very clear on the subject.”
“Maybe you don’t like hearing the truth.”
“Try telling it to me, just once, and I’ll let you know what it’s like.”
There was another long, long pause. “You need to call Mom. She’s worried sick about you.”
“I don’t have the energy to help her with that.”
“Right. Because you’re having too much fun being a burden.”
“Does it look like I’m enjoying myself?”
“Call Mom.”
Once again, a standoff. And as the two of them glared across the stark room at each other, she was reminded of pretty much every single interaction they had had since she’d entered the fire academy.
With that, she and her brother had become enemies.
“Leave,” she told him. “Just get out of here. I’m tired, I hurt all over, and I’m sick of the sight of you.”
“Call Mom. That’s all I care about.”
As Tom pushed his way through the door, all of Anne’s energy funneled out of her body and she was left with a skeleton that ached covered by a bag of skin that had ants all over it. Closing her eyes, she was aware of her stomach rolling.
In the background, that alarm began beeping like it was having a seizure.
Or maybe she was having one?
Medical staff ran in, a swarm of blue and white. But as Anne thought about Danny, her brother, her job, her family, she was content to fade away and let them save her . . . or not.
She didn’t really care one way or another.
chapter
8
And they did.
Save her, that was.
When Anne woke up the next morning, she turned her head to the window and looked out on a gray November day. It was impossible not to view the hospital room as a prison, with the wires and tubes going in and out of her as the shackles to keep her in place.
She had to pee. At least, she thought she did. Maybe it was the catheter irritating her?
Peeking under the sheets, she saw that the thing had been removed. Good to know—oh, that’s right. She’d threatened to take it out herself sometime before dawn, and when the staff had challenged her to try, she’d done it with a yank.
Lifting her left arm, she stared at the bandage and heard her brother’s voice in her head. Fear, an old, toxic friend, sidled up and started whispering all kinds of things in her ear, but even that din was drowned out by the abiding sense that she might well prefer to be dead right now.
When surrounded by flames, and no alternative, self-mutilation had seemed reasonable. Now, in this hospital room, with nothing but the postnasal drip of smoke down the back of her throat and an unseasonal first-degree “tan” on her arms, that imperative seemed a distortion of reality.
Which had condemned her to a life she couldn’t even contemplate . . . an acute nightmare of imminent death traded for a chronic one mired in lack of purpose.
Except come on, she told herself. She was used to proving them all wrong. She would come back from this. She would return to the stationhouse and her crew and her job. Her life. There were prostheses, right? There were accommodations that could be made.
There were Paralympic athletes who were every bit as strong and powerful as the so-called able-bodied. Attitude to get to the altitude, she told herself. And that shit needed to start right now because she had a long road ahead of her.
On that note, she sat up and reached for the landline phone on the bedside table. Palming the receiver, she went to—
As she brought up the stump, she felt her head spin as she realized she had no fingers to push “0” with. Freezing in place, with that receiver off the old-fashioned cradle, she couldn’t breathe . . . but then purpose brought her back to life, and wasn’t that always the case. Hitting the number with her right forefinger, she waited for an answer.
“Yes, ah—” She had to clear her throat. “What room is Danny—I mean, Daniel Maguire—in?”
When she got her answer, she hung up and sagged with relief. They didn’t give hospital rooms to corpses, so he must have lived through his surgery.
After a moment of rest, she took off all the monitoring sensors on her chest and debated removing the IV. In the end, she kept that in, considering it was the source of her morphine and on a pole that had wheels. Both were going to make ambulation easier—