Page 54 of Christmas with Three Firemen

Two years before the fire.

I know that address.

I lived at that address until I was eight years old.

For a while, I don’t do anything.

The permit sits on the desk in front of me and I sit in the chair and read it again, top to bottom, like it might say something different this time.

It doesn’t.

The fire started in the walls.

That was the finding. Electrical fault, aged wiring, origin point inside the wall cavity between the third and fourth floors. Nobody’s fault. A building being old. A thing that happens.

Except the wiring wasn’t aged. The wiring was two years old.

The wiring was two years old, and it went in under a cost amendment approved for a Delaney shell company, and I have spent seven years learning exactly what cost amendments on electrical materials mean, and I have spent the last few weeks mapping how this specific company cuts corners on buildings it intends to profit from.

My parents died inside the walls of that map.

My hands are steady. That’s the strange thing. I keep looking at them, expecting them to shake, and they don’t.

I need the original fire report. The complete incident file, the responding crew’s documentation, the full burn analysis, because if the wiring was the cause, I need it on paper. The fastest copy is downstairs.

Fire stations keep archive boxes of their own incident records going back decades, and Firehouse 23 covered the Upper West Side response district before the boundaries were redrawn.

The district included West 107th Street.

I take the stairs quietly. The bay is dark except for the tree in the common room. The archive room is past the equipment room, narrow metal shelving, cardboard boxes labeled by year in handwriting that changes decade by decade.

I find the right year and carry the box back upstairs.

The incident file is halfway down, in a folder gone soft at the corners with age.

I read the report first, because I am still, somehow, doing this in order. The burn analysis is there. The origin documentation is there. It says what I already know it will say, and I note that and set it aside, because there’s something else in the folder.

A photograph.

A department photo, taken on scene after the fire was knocked down. The crew and the trucks and the building behind them, windows blown dark. The print has gone yellow at the edges. Men in turnout gear stand in loose formation, hollow-faced and smudged under the streetlight, exhausted the way you can only be after a fire.

I look at it left to right.

And then I stop, because at the edge of the frame, away from the formation, there’s a little girl sitting on the back step of an ambulance.

She’s small. Eight, maybe. She’s wrapped in a turnout coat four sizes too big for her, and her hair is a mess of red curls, and she’s staring at nothing, that stare I’ve seen on survivors at a hundred scenes since, the one that means the person is somewhere else and won’t be back for a while.

I know her.

Of course I know her. I see her in the mirror every morning. I’ve spent twenty-one years trying not to be her, and here she is in an archive box in a firehouse on East 96th Street, sitting on the back step of an ambulance in a coat that isn’t hers.

I don’t remember the photograph being taken. I don’t remember the ambulance. I remember almost nothing about that night except the cold, and the snow, and that somebody held my hand.

There’s a firefighter kneeling next to the girl.

He’s young. Painfully young, eighteen or nineteen, still built like a kid, his gear too clean next to the other men’s, and he’s kneeling beside the ambulance step with the little girl’s hand in both of his, and he isn’t looking at the camera. He’s looking at her.

I look at his face for a long time.