Ashes of Fiery Weather (50 page)

“He never got over it,” Lizzie said. “Never. He always said Sean would have gone all the way to the top.” She looked at Aidan and smiled.

Aidan lowered his eyes.

“Amred always wanted to open a museum for the Brooklyn fire department,” Lizzie said. “I know there's the museum in the city, but he wanted one for just Brooklyn. Maybe a gallery. He had so many pictures. There are a few nice ones of Sean. I can't look at the ones from . . . from 9/11 yet.”

Aidan's jaw was working. Maggie reached a hand toward him but Eileen grabbed her elbow and shook her head. Maggie crossed her arms over her chest.

“It's way too soon,” Aidan said.

“I'll have to do it,” Lizzie said.

Eileen didn't know if she meant open a museum, which was hard to imagine, or simply go through the pictures. She stepped up and shook Lizzie's hand. “I'm sorry for your loss.”

Quick was best, she'd learned.

Usually at a wake they would linger, but as if they'd agreed ahead of time, they headed for the door. The three of them were almost out of the room when Eileen stopped.

“Fuck,” she muttered. “Wait here.”

She left her niece and nephew staring after her.

Eileen bypassed the line without a glance. The man talking to Lizzie quickly stepped back, and Lizzie looked at her expectantly, as though she'd been hoping for something more.

Eileen told her that at least a dozen guys from Brooklyn spotted Amred around the command center, snapping away like mad. Every single one reported telling Amred the same thing:

Get out of here, you dumb fuck.

For all of Amred's admiration of New York City firefighters, for all the guys who scorned it, mocked it, fed off it, ignored it, Eileen wanted Lizzie to know, she had to know, that now her brother was being talked about in firehouses all over Brooklyn. In the kitchens. They were talking about that day, how Amred was there, and all the days he was there, never asking for anything but to see the action up close. Firefighters were saying that Amred Lehane was the best. The best of his kind.

Without discussing it beforehand, she and Maggie and Aidan headed across the street to Lehane's. Through the first beer, they talked about Norah and the fire widows.

Eileen said she was trying to give the girls other names too, now that Norah was back to work full time. Even though Irish Dreams was hardly busy, because nobody wanted to fly.

“If they go out of business because of this, after everything Mom's worked for, then, Jesus.” Aidan frowned into his beer.

“Mom thinks a lot of people are going to want to go to Ireland next year,” Maggie said. “Pilgrimage.”

“Are you going back?” Aidan asked.

“Aunt Aoife's going to want Noelle to be buried at home, not here. I don't think Declan will say anything. Since they weren't married yet, he can't argue, really.”

Aidan didn't answer.

“You don't think they're going to find her, do you?” Maggie said.

“No.” Aidan drank from his beer.

Eileen supposed the lines around his eyes would disappear when he started getting more sleep. But perhaps not. He was twenty-seven years old. At twenty-seven, Sean had only eight years to live.

“I know you'll come to Ireland then, for the funeral or the service,” Maggie said to Aidan. “But you should maybe stay for a bit.”

“I'm not going on vacation.”

“I didn't mean that you'd take a vacation, for fun,” Maggie said. “But it might not be a bad idea to spend a few days.”

Eileen was about to jump in, head off the coming argument.

“Maybe in a few months,” Aidan said, surprising Eileen, and Maggie too, because her eyebrows went up.

She only nodded, though.

“More than a few,” he added. “Maybe in the summer. It'd be nice to get away from the heat.”

Eileen almost laughed. Aidan loved the beach. He planned to buy a boat and often talked about buying a house in Breezy Point someday.

“Maybe in August,” Maggie said, so softly Eileen almost didn't hear her.

“Maybe,” he answered.

They were silent for a moment. The bartender came over with more beers. “From the guy over there.”

The three of them turned to a man sitting at the bar. He was white-haired, clearly Irish. He raised his glass, and Aidan did the same back.

“Nice of him to include me even though I'm not in uniform,” Maggie said.

“Hey, Maggie, listen,” Aidan said. “You heard we found Brian Grady? They positively ID'd him yesterday.”

“Mom told me. It was in the paper too,” Maggie said. “I left Danny a message at his dad's house, but I don't expect he'll get back to me.”

“Yeah, he's not in a place to do that right now,” Aidan said. “I was in the crew that found him. Did you know that?”

Maggie shook her head.

Aidan hadn't said anything to her, but Eileen heard the story going around the Pit. A crew was digging when they saw the yellow stripe of a turnout coat. They kept going until they saw the letters
GR.
Then some tools marked with Brian's company were uncovered. All work stopped while the company and Chief Grady were called. When he and Danny arrived, the guys who'd made the find officially stepped off, except for Aidan, who asked to stay. Danny said he could.

Eileen understood. It wasn't just that Aidan and Danny were buddies from the neighborhood. Aidan wanted to be there because of the little girl neither he nor Brian had ever seen, and now Brian never would. He wanted to tell his niece someday that he helped bring one of her uncles out.

Kaitlyn,
Eileen thought. The name had not left her head since Maggie said it.

“I'm glad you were there,” Maggie said quietly.

“Danny was saying he's got a job ahead of him, with the boys,” Aidan said. “Separating the stuff in the press from what Kev and Brian were really like. But that's true for everybody, right?”

The estimate, Eileen had read, was over one thousand. One thousand children of the FDNY who had lost a father.

“The hero stuff?” Maggie said uncertainly. “I'd say they were.”

“Call them heroes, yeah,” Aidan said. “But not fucking saints.”

“They were good guys,” Eileen said, “but not a halo among them.”

The press kept pushing the idea that the firefighters ran into the buildings heedless of the danger. That phrase. The guys had been repeating it around the firehouse: I'm going down the basement
heedless of the danger.
I'm cooking these meatballs
heedless of the danger.
I'm cleaning these tools
heedless of the danger.

In speaking of the courage it took to run into burning buildings, the press made it sound like firefighters didn't give a fuck about “the danger,” whether it came from a smoldering hardware store that looked like an easy job or two skyscrapers hit by airplanes.

But the guys on 9/11 had not died gladly. Neither had Sean.

Eileen had been thinking a lot about how she'd told Mrs. Jimenez that if she'd not stolen Sean's money, his life might have gone differently.

In altering Sean's fate, Eileen had always imagined sparing Delia the loss of her child, freeing Norah from widowhood and saving herself from missing every single day the person she'd loved best until her daughter was born. And that was different. Quinn was a whole other category.

Until recently, though, Eileen had not considered what Sean would have done if he was given the choice of dying at thirty-five or driving out of Brooklyn into a much longer life. Presented with it at twenty years old, he would have gone away. What young guy wouldn't? But suppose it was the night before the fire, when Sean had been a husband for eleven years and a father for ten?

Eileen looked now at her niece and nephew, both coming up on thirty, their lives on the courses they'd chosen, or found themselves on. She thought of Brendan and Rose, still starting out, and of Norah, who had planned to stay in New York for a year and ended up spending a lifetime, most of it grieving.

Sean would not have chosen a life without her, a life in which his kids never existed. And he would not have run from the fire that killed him, even if he had been told it would.

The whole job was the pull between knowing you could get killed and thinking you'll always find the way out. Knowing what will happen if you don't. Going in anyway.

On ordinary days, nobody gave it much thought. And that, Eileen thought, was what you didn't understand unless you did the job yourself.

The counselors who were assigned to the firehouses didn't get it. Are you having nightmares about September 11? This was always their opening question. Nightmares and flashbacks were supposed to be the worst September 11 symptoms.

But over and over, Eileen dreamed about September 10.

The day is quiet as the whole summer has been quiet. O'Mara says, as he has a hundred times since August, Something big's coming, I can feel it in my bones, something big. And Bonafedes growls, Say that one more time, Billy boy, and I will choke you to death with one hand. They catch a couple easy jobs, nothing much, nothing to write home about.

Late in the afternoon, they go to Key Food to shop for the meal. The dog jumps on the rig. She's a terrier–sewer rat hybrid who'd turned up at the firehouse a few months ago. Eileen and Jimenez the probie and Killian and Ayres move through the supermarket's aisles at peace. Nobody sees them and begins to cry. Nobody comes up and says, You're saints, you're heroes, God bless you, and thank you, thank you, thank you. An old lady at the checkout clutching a can of Pledge and a five-dollar bill leans away from them, wrinkling her nose, because, yeah, they do stink, not of corpses and gray dust, but only the way they are supposed to, of black smoke from a good fire and garlic and something else, something like salt, like the sea.

And they jump back on the rig with pork chops for the meal and the dog lunges for the shopping bag and Rowley says, I'm going to kill that fucking thing, and Smithick gives the dog an M&M, laughing, and they are all laughing, and it is a good day.

In the dream, Eileen wakes to find a pristine blue and yellow morning, the most beautiful day in the history of New York City. A Tuesday. Always Tuesday.

CHAPTER SEVEN

September 10, 2012

KATIE HESITATED
on the sidewalk, studying the handsome three-story brick house that looked like neither the cloistered convent it used to be nor the museum it now was. The black iron gate was open, as was the front door. The tall windows were raised, and from inside came the murmur of a speech, or perhaps a prayer.

The website for the Brooklyn Firefighters Museum advertised a brief memorial program for firefighters and their families. She guessed it was on the tenth for the sake of the families who wanted to go to ceremonies at Ground Zero. It started at one o'clock and it was nearly one-thirty. She had procrastinated too long before setting out.

Katie told herself she had to go inside the museum to justify missing class only two weeks into the semester. She should go in because she'd taken the trouble to wear a new skirt. It was red and gold plaid, not the sort of thing she often wore, but she'd bought it for today because it looked like a kilt, and that seemed appropriate for the occasion. She'd decided on a T-shirt instead of a blouse, and her black shoes with the square heel that she'd bought because they reminded her of an Irish hard shoe, from when she'd taken step-dancing as a kid. Only after she escaped it did she get sentimental over Irish dancing, which had made her feel like she was trying to stand still and fling herself apart at the same time.

She walked up the front steps and into a vestibule between the outside door and an inner door. On a table, a book lay open for guests to sign. After picking up the pen, she paused. Long ago, she'd stopped hyphenating her last name and usually gave it little thought, except this time of year.

Katie R. McKenna.

A compromise. She set the pen down. There was a mirror on the wall above the book. As a kid, she'd played a trick with mirrors. She took off her glasses and stared at her reflection until it began to slip and blur, rearranging itself to form other features. She tried to keep her reflection still, like a photograph, but it was always fleeting, gone with a blink that she tried to hold back as long as possible. When it came, the unstoppable blink, Katie was left with her own face. Freckled, but lightly. The blue eyes and very dark hair that got her labeled Black Irish. She heard that one a lot.

Katie turned from the mirror. She left her glasses off and put them away, even though nobody here knew her, with or without them. She felt better seeing less well, as if her own blurry vision would be transferred to those looking at her, letting her hide in plain sight.

“You okay?”

A whisper.

Katie turned to see a girl of about her own age, standing behind her and carrying a guitar case.

“Oh, I'm sorry! I thought you were a kid.” She laughed softly. A heavy auburn braid hung over her shoulder, its tip nearly touching the belt of her jeans.

“It happens,” Katie said.

The skirt probably made her look like an overdeveloped sixth-grader. She should have worn all black.

The redhead hoisted the guitar case. “I've got to get this to the talent, who brought the wrong guitar. Sorry again.”

“Rose O'Reilly?” Katie said without thinking.

“Yes, Rose is singing. Do you know her?”

Katie shook her head. “Just from her website. I've never heard her sing in person.”

“She's just going to do a couple of songs. They want to keep the program short since the speeches and things went on too long last year.”

Her tone, as she spoke, had grown more absent. She reached up and touched her braid, tugging it as though she were ringing a bell.