When I was done, I looked at my dad. “Sorry,” I muttered. My eyes watered and the back of my throat burned. I didn’t look at Curtis, worried I’d start puking again.
My father strode over to me, gripping the back of my neck with tight, thick fingers. “Damn it,” he hissed under his breath as he led me out of the room. In the car on the way home, my dad preached to me about the responsibilities of brotherhood. “Be a man, Son,” he said. “That’s all I want for you.” Even today, I could hear the disdain in my father’s voice; I could feel the shame that settled inside my chest.
“You ready?” Mason asked now, interrupting my thoughts. He parked as close as he could get to the address on the GPS screen. I nodded, looking down the street at the target house, which was already completely engulfed in flames. Seeing this, I wondered if the structure would be a total loss. I wondered if the people inside had found a way out, or if the firefighters at the scene had rescued them. I hoped their smoke alarm had warned them. I hoped the only thing turned to ash was their home. Over the years, I’d realized that my reaction to seeing Curtis in that terrible state wasn’t about being unable to handle its gory extremes but, rather, my fear that if I did his job, I’d end up just like him, burnt to a crisp in a hospital bed, dying three days later. It turned out that helping people like him, the victims of disaster, was something I was better suited to do.
After letting dispatch know we had arrived, Mason and I raced around the back of the ambulance and opened the doors, pulling out the gurney and grabbing the rest of the gear we’d need. Jogging down the street with my partner, I called out to one of the nearby fighters. “How many?”
“Just the one,” the fighter answered, pointing with a gloved finger toward the front yard of the neighboring house. Eight other crew members stood around the burning house, four of them on two hoses, trying to extinguish the blaze from the top down as the flames reached into the night sky with long, jagged arms. Another fighter kneeled over what looked to be a petite young woman lying on the neighbor’s grass on top of a yellow backboard.
“What we got?” Mason asked as we approached.
“Smoke inhalation. Female, unconscious, early twenties. Airway is clear, but breathing is rough. Neighbors say her name is Mollie. No one else on the premises.” The fighter moved out of the way for me to take over, and I slipped into work mode, checking for her pulse: strong and steady. A good sign. Then I took the oxygen mask Mason offered me and put it over the woman’s nose and mouth.
“She’s got slight burn demarcations around her nostrils,” I said. I checked the rest of her body for burns and saw several around her feet and ankles, a few big ones on her shins. They were red and blistering—likely second degree. I performed the rest of my ABC checks—airway, breathing, and circulation. “Skin color looks good.”
Mason slipped the blood pressure cuff around Mollie’s arm, and suddenly she began coughing, reaching up with a frantic hand to claw at the mask on her face. Her eyelids flipped open and she twisted her head back and forth hard, trying to gauge where she was.
“It’s okay,” I told her, touching her arm with the tips of my fingers to settle her. I needed to keep her calm. “You’re all right. You were in a fire, but you’re safe now. Try and lie still.” She thrashed a bit more, but seemed to have heard me, because she stopped moving everything but her eyes. I put my hand on her shoulder while Mason expertly slipped a needle into the crook of her right elbow. “We’re going to get some IV fluids and pain meds going for you.” I knew the membranes in her lungs and esophagus were inflamed; my first concern was making sure the levels of carbon monoxide and possibly cyanide, depending on the kinds of materials inside the house, in her system weren’t lethal. The fact that she was alert was a positive sign, but we needed to get her hydrated and straight to the ER so the doctors could run all the appropriate tests.
“You suffered a few burns on your feet and shins. Don’t worry, the burns look pretty superficial. We’re going to take care of you,” I told her. She nodded again, keeping her eyes on my face. I gave her what I hoped was a reassuring smile. “I’m just checking for broken bones,” I explained as I moved my hands down her arms, ribs, hips, and legs. Everything felt intact. I looked to Mason, who had finished putting in the IV. “Good to go?”
“Yep,” Mason confirmed, and jumped up to pull the gurney closer to us, then lowered it. “Hold on, sweetheart,” he said. “We’re just gonna lift you onto your magic carriage. You never know . . . Tyler here might be your Prince Charming.” He winked at Mollie, who was too disoriented to register the joke. Mason was determined to set me up with every cute, single victim we came across in the field, which occasionally got under my skin, but I knew my partner just wanted me to have as much happiness as he had with Gia. I wanted that, too, but it seemed like no matter what kinds of women I met, my heart compared them to what I felt when I was with Amber, and they all came up short.
I knew I wanted to become a paramedic the night nine years ago when Amber’s parents were out of town and I’d found her unconscious in her room, facedown on the fluffy blue rug next to her bed. I remembered crying as I told the 911 operator that she wasn’t breathing. I remembered riding in the ambulance while the paramedics shouted her stats into their radio, telling the ER what to expect. I watched, hand over my mouth, as they performed CPR and managed to restart her heart. I remembered thinking that this—saving people—was what I wanted to do with my life.
Tears stung the backs of my eyes as I recalled the terror I’d felt that night. Losing Amber was one of my greatest fears—a fate I’d only avoided by pushing down my feelings for her so deeply that I hoped she couldn’t tell they were still there. When she’d told me about Daniel back in August, they’d risen up before I could stop them, and her words—“you’re just jealous”—were not only painful, they were true. They also made me realize that I wasn’t as good an actor as I had thought. The only way I managed to hold myself together in that moment—to prevent myself from dropping to my knees and begging her to love me the same way I loved her—was to tell her to leave while I locked myself in my bedroom and punched the side of my hard oak dresser until my knuckles were bruised.
I was happy that she and I had managed to smooth things out, because the truth was I couldn’t imagine a life without her. Something had forever changed in me that first day we met, and I hoped that someday, maybe, that same exact something might change in Amber, too.
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