Page 59 of Christmas with Three Firemen

Both rigs. Structure fire, commercial, eight blocks north.

From the window I watch the lights strobe up the block through the falling snow until the dark swallows them, and my lips are already moving. Grant. Wes. Mateo. Tara. Danny. Callum. Rico.

Kowalski has the house. He’s at the kitchen table with the radio and his coffee, and he doesn’t say anything when I take the chair next to him, just slides the volume up two notches.

The traffic runs ordinary. Size-up. Assignments. Ventilation. Kowalski drinks his coffee. My tea goes cold in front of me.

Then a voice I don’t know says, “Command, be advised, we’ve got fire running the ceiling against the layout here. It’s moving toward us.”

Kowalski’s mug stops in the air.

He sets it down without drinking. His thumb starts moving back and forth on the handle.

“Say again,” Grant’s voice.

Static swallows the answer. Then the channel stacks up, three voices at once, and out of the middle of it Grant again, flat and loud: “All companies, back it out. Everybody out. Now.”

The roll call comes back name by name. Kowalski’s thumb goes still on the mug.

One name comes back attached to the word Mayday.

Rico.

I’m on my feet with no memory of standing. The radio pours it out in pieces, flashover, second floor, we’ve got him, we’re out, medic, and Kowalski reaches over without looking and closes his hand around my wrist and holds it to the table, and we stay like that, an old man and an investigator, pinned to a kitchen table by a speaker, until the channel says conscious and says burns and says Harlem Hospital, and his grip loosens one finger at a time.

“Fed,” Kowalski says, to the radio, to nobody. “Fire doesn’t run against the layout on its own.”

He picks up his mug. Puts it back down without drinking.

***

The rigs come back after nine.

I stand at the edge of the bay. The doors grind up, and the engines pull in, and the crew climbs down, and nobody says anything. Callum sits on the bumper with his mask still hanging off his neck and stares at the floor between his boots. Danny puts a hand on his shoulder in passing and leaves it there a second longer than a pat.

Tara strips her gloves, folds them together, and stands holding them like she’s forgotten the next step. Somebody’s helmet goes onto the shelf with both hands instead of one.

Wes sees me. He crosses the bay, stops in front of me, and says, “He’s alive. Awake in the ambulance. Cursing.” Then he stands there another second, like there was going to be more, and there isn’t, and he goes to rack his gear.

I climb the stairs. I pass my own door and keep walking, because that room has somebody else’s fingerprints all over the air in it, and I stop at the window at the end of the hall.

Snow falls through the streetlight cone. I wrap my arms around my stomach and hold on.

My files, read page by page. Rico, eight blocks north, in a burn unit. The same week. And me, standing at a warm window between the two, without a mark on me.

I press my forehead against the cold glass.

“He’s stable.”

Tara. I didn’t hear her come up. She’s still in her station tee, hair flattened, a hospital sticker peeling off her chest. She joins me at the window and looks out at the snow instead of at me.

“Awake,” she says. “First thing he asked the nurse was whether his eyebrows made it.”

Something between a laugh and a cough comes out of me. “Did they?”

“One of them.” She rubs her eyes with the heel of her hand. “Give him a week, it’ll be the best story in the station. He’s already workshopping it.”

The snow keeps coming down through the light. Her sticker crackles when she breathes.