“We got a call. House fire over on Jefferson.”
“How many vics?” I asked as I tossed the crumpled towels into the garbage. I turned to see Mason standing in the doorway, holding the door open with one beefy arm. My partner was a thirty-two-year-old man of Colombian descent with broad shoulders and chiseled flesh built up by regular doses of protein and two workouts a day. When I stood next to him, I felt pretty much invisible to any woman in the immediate vicinity. Those women would be sorely disappointed, however, if they thought they stood a chance of getting anywhere with Mason. He was happily married to Gia, a short and curvy firecracker of a woman who had, as I told Amber, recently given birth to their daughter. I was pretty certain if another woman tried to make a move on her husband, Gia, despite her size, would slam said woman to the ground.
“Not sure yet,” Mason said, smiling and smacking the wall with an open palm. “Git your butt in gear, boy! We got lives to save!” He lifted his chin and began to croon the chorus of the Fray’s “How to Save a Life” in a high-pitched falsetto.
I chuckled and shook my head, trying to erase thoughts of Amber from my mind so I could focus on doing my job. Focus was key, my first instructor had told me when I entered the EMT program at Bellingham Tech. If you weren’t focused, people died. It was that simple.
“So. Did you have fun last night?” Mason asked, once we were in the front seats of the rig and the engine had roared to life. My partner knew that I’d requested the holiday off for the specific purpose of being able to spend it with Amber, since she would head back to WSU the next day. It was rare for me to confess my feelings about her to anyone, but over the last year, spending hours of downtime with Mason, waiting for a call to come in, I’d started talking about my friendship with her—how we met, how close we were back in high school—and my partner simply guessed—correctly—that I had a thing for her.
“How’d it go?” Mason turned a corner sharply enough that I had to throw out an arm to brace myself against the dash.
“Okay, I guess,” I said, not wanting to tell him how my heart had squeezed with longing the instant I saw Amber standing in the kitchen last night. How just the smell of her made my muscles feel weak, and how, whenever she touched me, my breath stopped, wondering if her feelings for me might have finally—miraculously—developed into something deeper. For my partner’s sake—and my own—I needed to pretend that being Amber’s friend was enough.
“She still with that other dude?”
“Yep.” My voice clipped the edges of the word as it left my mouth.
“Sorry, man,” Mason said. The tires on the rig screeched as he blew through a stoplight and took a left onto Jefferson Avenue.
I stayed quiet, keeping my gaze locked on the red trucks with their bright lights spinning already at the scene, bracing myself to be around the flames, grateful that I wasn’t the one who had to fight them. I had originally thought I might follow in my father’s footsteps and become a fireman, but only because when I was young, he made it seem that I had no other choice.
“You have to grab this world by the balls, Son!” my dad used to say, wrapping a thick forearm around my neck in a fake headlock. “Teach it who’s boss! We’ll teach it together! Team Hicks, to the rescue!”
Before we moved to Bellingham and my parents divorced, I would nod enthusiastically when my father would make these kinds of proclamations, but even as I did, my stomach churned, fearing I could never live up to my dad’s expectations. I was the boy who carried dying bees out of our house into a shady place in the yard so the insects could spend their final moments peacefully, in their own habitat. The boy who had to force back tears when I saw a skinny, collarless dog wandering across a busy street. The boy who’d give my favorite turkey and cheddar sandwich to the homeless man sitting alone on a bench in the park. The boy whose father, seeing how anxious I always seemed to be, was constantly telling him to toughen up.
I flinched as I recalled the day that I decided there was no way I could do the same job as my dad. I was thirteen, and he took me to go see my “uncle” Curtis in the hospital. Curtis was my dad’s best friend, and they were both fighting a warehouse fire in the Georgetown district of Seattle when one of the walls of the building caved in. My dad wasn’t too badly hurt, but Curtis suffered third-degree burns on over eighty percent of his body. I still remembered the antiseptic stench of the burn unit as my dad and I stepped off the elevator. I remembered the other firefighters in the waiting room, the sobs of Kristin, Curtis’s wife, as they gathered around her. She was huddled in a chair, her face in her hands, but looked up when my dad and I entered.
“Hi, honey,” she said to me, reaching out with both arms. I took a few hesitant steps over to her and let her hug me. I had spent many afternoons at her house with Tracy, Curtis and Kristin’s daughter, when my parents both had to work. I liked hanging out with Tracy, especially when she went into the closet with me and let me lift her shirt so I could touch her barely budding breasts. She was the first girl I ever kissed.
Now, Tracy sat next to her mother with tear-streaked cheeks. She stared at the floor, black hair pulled into a messy ponytail, her tiny shoulders shaking. I wished I knew what to say.
“Can I take Ty in to see him?” my dad asked Kristin, who told him he could.
I gave her another hug, feeling awkward when she dug her fingers into my back. She clung to me; it felt like she was desperate for a comfort I didn’t know how to give.
“Come on, Son,” my dad said, and I reluctantly followed him down the hall and into a glass-windowed room.
Curtis—or what remained of him—lay in a bed, unmoving. His hair and eyebrows were gone; the only skin left on his body was in red, ragged patches. The rest of his flesh was blackened and peeling, shiny and slick with some kind of ointment, other spots covered with gauze. His eyes were closed; various tubes pumped medication into his veins and oxygen into his lungs. He looked like a monster.
“Hey, buddy,” my dad said, stepping over to stand next to his best friend. He swallowed hard. “It’s me and Ty. He wanted to come say hello.”
I hung back by the door, shaking my head when my father gestured for me to come closer.
“Get over here,” my dad said, through clenched jaws. He glared at me, and I was scared to defy my father so blatantly, but the air reeked of scorched meat, and without warning, my stomach heaved and I raced to the garbage can, where I vomited until there was nothing left inside me.