She hugged the man when he couldn’t continue, and it was a sad relief to be with someone who also felt guilt. “No one could have done a better job rescuing him.”
“This is my fault, I should have—”
Anne pushed him back. “Stop it. How could you have gotten to him any earlier? And you didn’t put him there. I did. You and the boys are heroes.”
“What if he doesn’t make it?” Moose eased back and dragged a hand through his hair. “I can’t breathe every time I think about it. He’s my best friend.”
As she stared into his tortured eyes, she knew they were all crazy. Every one of them who got into turnouts, and took their bodies and their minds into open flames for little money and lots of risk, for strangers, for animals they didn’t own, for houses they didn’t own, for people they weren’t related to . . . they were all insane. Because this was the other side of the adrenaline rush, the savior complex, the fight.
Tragedy was but a moment. Responsibility for it was forever.
And eventually, the latter turned you dark on the inside, molding over your emotions, making you toxic and uncleanable even as you looked the same on the outside. For every firefighter she knew who’d been hurt or died on the job, she knew even more who were corpses in their own skin.
They didn’t tell you about it when you were in the academy.
Good thing, too.
“Don’t blame yourself,” she said roughly. “You didn’t let him down, and you’re going to be there for him as he heals. And he will. He’s Danny Maguire, for godsakes. He’s unkillable.”
“You haven’t seen him yet, Anne. You need to prepare yourself.”
She looked into the room. So many machines and wires and tubes—a reminder that the human body was an incredible miracle, its countless autonomic functions a gift when they were operating as intended, and a cumbersome nightmare to have to approximate when they were not.
Taking her IV pole, she entered the sterile space and the sound of the whrrrring and the beeping got her truly frightened. And then she actually looked at Danny’s face.
Anne gasped. “Dear . . . God.”
There were stitches all down one side, as if part of his cheek and half of his forehead had been stripped off. Everything was swollen and purple and red, the features distorted to the point where if she hadn’t known it was him, she wouldn’t have recognized him.
And then there were his legs. Both in casts, one elevated like the third side of a trigonometry problem. Also, his arm and shoulder were wrapped . . . and he’d been intubated at some point, a bandage at the soft juncture in the front of his throat between his collar bones.
She went over and sat on the edge of the bed because the floor was suddenly going whitecap storm surge on her. She tried to breathe. Failed.
Now she cried again, and fuck it. Danny wasn’t going to know.
Taking his battered hand, she dropped her head and let the tears fall from her eyes to wherever they landed.
She had done this to him.
The loss of her hand she could live with as payment for her impulsive decision and rash behavior on scene. But this? This . . . catastrophic . . . injury to him? Even if he came through, she was never going to forgive herself and he was never going to be the same.
She thought of him saying that they were going to be back at the stationhouse, playing pong, before ten.
How wrong. How terribly . . . terribly wrong.
“Why didn’t you just leave me?”
As soon as she said it, she regretted the words as they seemed to put the burden on him, and this really was all her fault—
There was a clicking sound.
Looking up, she recoiled. His eyes were open, the white around the left one blood red, the pupils unmatched and glowing as he stared at her and tried to speak.
“Shh,” she said as he struggled. “No, please . . . don’t talk . . .”
Things started to beep faster, and then alarms went off, and she shook her head. “Don’t . . . it’s okay—”
He could barely speak, but she heard the haunting words loud and clear: “Couldn’t. Leave. You.”
Medical personnel flooded into the room, and they didn’t hesitate to get her out of there, passing her shuffling, trembling body off to Moose, who held her up off the floor in the hall.
On the far side of the glass door they shut, she rose up on her tiptoes to see around the crowd to Danny. His face was turned toward her, and through the chaos of the staff, he still stared at her, his puffy eyelids and all the bruises making it a miracle he could focus even a little.
And then the doctors and nurses blocked her view of him.
Deep in her soul, she knew that was the last time she would see him. That it was the last memory she was going to have . . .
. . . of the only man she had ever loved.
Ten Months Later
chapter
9
Harbor Street and Twenty-Second Avenue
Old Downtown, New Brunswick
As Anne turned onto Harbor Street, the tires of her municipal sedan crackled over the broken pavement and she winced at the blinding September morning sun. Putting the visor down didn’t help, but there wasn’t much to worry about hitting. There was no traffic, no pedestrians, and the commercial buildings in the neighborhood had been abandoned years ago.
Two hundred yards later, she hit the brakes and stopped across from the singed ruins of what had been a warehouse.
At least up until the two-alarm fire the night before.
There wasn’t much left of the structure, the mostly collapsed shell of the place painted black and gray from the blaze’s soot and smoke. Wafting over on the autumn breeze, the complex, crappy bouquet of extinguished fire was so familiar, she actually took a deep breath and felt the sting of nostalgia—
The sneeze came out of nowhere, kicking her head forward—and as she righted things and sniffed, it was like her nose was out of shape. Waiting to see if there was another coming, she wondered exactly when her nasal passages had degraded into special snowflakes. Had it been in those brutal first couple of weeks of recovery . . . or later, during PT? Had it been as she’d raced to get into class to get certified as a fire inspector? Or how about when she’d been interviewing around for her new job?
Was it two weeks ago, when she’d been hired by the City of New Brunswick to fill a low-man-on-the-ladder vacancy in its Arson Investigation and Fire Inspection Division?
How about now, on her first official day?
She looked down at the lapels of her cheap office suit. The laminated ID card hanging off a silver clip had her picture on it, and she tilted the thing up so she could see her own face.
Her hair was the same. Sort of. Longer now and loose on her shoulders—and those blond highlights from summer a year before were at the very ends. One more trim, and they were another thing gone forever from her life. Her face? Well, that was the same—actually, no, not at all. Her eyes were grim, and if she didn’t know better, she’d say that they were all black pupil, no blue around any rim. Skin was as white and flat as wall paint. Hollows under the cheekbones were testament to the weight she had yet to put back on.
That pink lip gloss she’d thrown on out of some kind of duty looked ridiculous on the thin, straight line of her mouth.
Dropping the image, she wiped away the slick layer she’d put on before she’d left her house. She hated the way the stuff tasted, and come on, like it was fooling anyone? She wasn’t a lipstick-and-perfume kind of girl, even if she was now a desk jockey.
Reaching for the door handle, her prosthesis thunked against the panel and she closed her eyes. Deep breath.
From out of nowhere, she remembered the morning after the fire, when she’d woken up in that hospital bed and tried to convince herself that she could go back to the stationhouse and resume her life as it was, a triumphant para-firefighter, just like those Paralympic athletes.