Burning Down the House (28 page)

Because I knew every damn step, because I knew where the sterile burn wraps were on the rescue truck, and how to put my hands on the saline by opening one single sliding door up in the back of the truck, up next to the cold-water rescue suits and the steel-mesh Stokes basket for bringing victims in off rough terrain.

If it had happened to anyone but me, I would have known exactly what to do, would have known just how to keep that thin edge of confidence in my voice, would have known to sit them down and cover the burns—and their eyes—so no one would even think of needing to look for a mirror.

Because I knew how to look for full-thickness burns, the black charcoal crepe of thoroughly burned skin, and how to look quickly at the fringes of hair to see if fire had swept across someone's face. I knew what to look for to see if the casualty was getting shocky, what to do if I saw that shock—knock them flat on their back and get their feet up, get them ready to transport. I'd done that before, a dozen times.

I had gotten to the point that when I looked straight at a victim, I believed I knew exactly how things were going to unfold. Keep talking, keeping my voice calm and watching for any sign of shock.

I had just never thought I might be looking for those same symptoms on my own face.

Something else—something that happened at the back of that rescue truck as I sat on the metal step and felt the blisters across my forehead. The rest of the firefighters were hurrying back inside, carrying on with the training exercise. I hadn't realized that I would feel so lost, so distant, so very far away from everyone. That no one was going to ask me how I
really
was, and that if, through some miracle, they had, I would have used both arms to push them away.

Sitting out in the yard on a summer Sunday, I heard the crash and knew it could only be one thing. When I ran down to the end of the driveway, I could see the collision, almost head-on, front corner to front corner, an Astrovan and an ancient, sagging pickup truck down by the store. I'd been out of the department for months, but I ran straight for it anyway, and ended up sitting behind the van driver, hands again on a stranger's neck.

The pickup driver had no current registration, no licence plates at all, and his truck had been hit hard enough that it looked like an entire second skin of rust had dropped off the chassis onto the pavement.

“We were just looking at a house,” the van driver said over and over again, and it was a beautiful sunny afternoon, the sky wide open. The teens who always gathered in a knot to smoke near the bridge across from the store were wide-eyed and staring at the wreck, at the glass and plastic thrown everywhere.

The driver's wife and two kids weren't hurt, and they'd gotten out of the car, but the kids were terrified and were howling in that feral way you'd recognize if you'd ever heard it: mouths open with a loud sobbing moan that goes on until they run out of air and then starts up again as they suck it back in.

There were kids' toys, a pacifier and rubber teething toys, under my feet as I sat behind him, and he had airbag powder all over his face and a small cut on the bridge of his nose, oozing blood.

The road looked forty feet wide in all that sunshine, and it was hard to imagine how there could ever be an accident on a day like that. I asked if he was hurt anywhere else, and he told me his foot was crushed down near the brake. But I couldn't see down there because my hands were full and the airbag was draped down over his knees, and I remember thinking that he had on pretty silly-looking shorts.

I saw the fire trucks roaring straight towards us, and I imagined he wasn't going to buy a house in this town any time soon.

TWENTY-EIGHT

Every firefighter I have ever known knows the law of threes. If you get two nuisance calls, you're due for another. If you get two gruesome calls, there's one more on the way. Looking back, I think I realized I'd reached my three: the fire in the basement, Craig's dad, and getting burned.

In the end it was just too much. Too much work, too many nights awake, too many nightmares. Far too many nightmares. Too many regrets about telling my family that I was sorry for the time spent away from them when really I wasn't sorry at all.

It ended—not really with a bang, though. It was almost a shrug when it happened, everything winding down, suddenly making sense.

I got a promotion at work, and it seemed like a good time simply to walk away. I'd spent most of my adult life packing everything up into different boxes—my work, my marriage, firefighting, parenting, running, writing—thinking somehow that keeping all those things separate would help me keep going. But now the boxes weren't working the way they should; everything was melting down and creeping together like plastic toys at a house fire.

So I decided I would stop fighting fires. Again. This time for good.

But I was a fool for thinking I would ever just be able to walk away unmarked. And I was a fool for thinking it would be easy.

I wouldn't be able to let go of planning for imminent disaster— I still expect a crisis every single day. I know now it's a symptom of something else. I certainly didn't understand that preplanning would end up being a kind of learned behaviour that I would be stuck with, like a post-firefighter's nervous tic, some invisible scar that permanently hampers movement.

I watch my boys on their bikes outside my new city house, and I can feel my insides clenching up while I wait for the inevitable. In my imagination they are always inches away from falling and sliding along the pavement on their faces, moments from being hit by a car. Away from their bicycles they're just waiting to fall from trees and strike that last fateful limb on the way down.

Other parents simply ask their kids if their injuries hurt. I find myself asking peculiar, probing, offhand questions, trying to find out if there are symptoms of serious back injuries or ruptured spleens or intracranial bleeding. My boys fall off something and have to spend the next few hours following my fingers with their eyes on command, have to put up with being asked hours later if they feel dizzy or nauseous while I hunt down the signs of the delicate tissue rips that are at the root of concussions.

If I hear a screech of tires outside, I imagine that one of them has been hit—and the problem is that I know exactly what kind of injuries to expect, and I know what those injuries will look like. And I start planning: what to do, how to start. If they have a tooth knocked out, drop it in a glass of cold milk and head for the hospital. If they lose a finger, find it and pack it on ice and hope the vascular surgeon's on call.

And you die a little bit more every single time you plan for something to happen to one of your children. I don't know how doctors and nurses do it, especially if they work in children's hospitals.

Leaving the fire department was supposed to be a relief. I planned every word I would say, planned to tell them at the monthly meeting in the same way I'd joined up, except I'd say that with a new job as a daily newspaper's managing editor I just had to have more time for work. Instead, I dropped my gear in its red hockey bag on the floor of the upstairs meeting room and managed a handful of words from the speech I'd prepared in my head—“I've got a new job and a new truck and . . .”—before rushing out the door, crying and furious.

I was angry, because I felt as though I was letting the other firefighters down. Part of me knew I had to leave, but a lot of me wanted to stay. I couldn't imagine the idea of not having a pager with me, couldn't imagine not being on the balls of my feet all the time, waiting for a call. Angry because I still felt I was the best person to answer the calls, because I was trained and ready and alert and sharp.

Now I'm not so sure I was any of those things, except trained.

The simple, easy thing would be to blame everything on firefighting— to claim that it dynamited my life, that it wrecked my marriage, that it split my family, that I gave myself to firefighting and to the idea of helping other people and that I lost myself in the process. But it's nowhere near that simple. In its own way, that would be the same as saying I went into burning basements because I was brave and big and strong, when I was none of those. Firefighting was a part of it, a piece of the whole, but the fractures were just me—broken, busted, and stuck living with nightmares and ghosts.

Months later, I heard that my crew had responded to a fire call and found one of our own firefighters in his living room with a steak knife stuck in his chest. The responding firefighters couldn't convince the paramedics that the man had a serious injury, and he slipped into unconsciousness before the ambulance crew would put the siren on and head for the hospital. When he was finally conscious again, he told the police he did it himself. He didn't explain why—what was going on or what he was trying to do—to anyone.

When I heard about it, it stopped me cold. I knew the guy well. I can picture his squat little house, his pickup truck and his facial expressions, and I could imagine both the knife and him sitting there in the chair, shirt soaked with blood.

The firefighter who told me about it said that, when they looked, the knife was buried right up to the handle.

When I got home after resigning, I turned off the fire department radio for the first time in six non-stop years on call. But I didn't feel any relief. I just felt alone.

My hair is on fire.

Again.

I have no doubt that I have thousands of individual hairs on my head, because it seems like each one is burning down separately, each one a painful little wick ending at a nerve. My hands look like soft wax, penumbraed in blue flame. When I hold them up in front of my face, there isn't any reason to look for blisters, because any blisters would be bursting as quickly as they formed.

I'm crawling slowly forward, and I'm exhausted. It seems to take every scrap of energy I have to move, and there's someone moaning out in front of me, someone I can't see and maybe, I think, maybe it's me. I'm just going to put my head down now, because there's nothing left to do. The wallpaper is all down, the wallboard is falling apart, and the studs are burning in a geometric pattern no one has seen since the carpenters left and the Gyproc guys came through. It's like a big burning crossword, where none of the clues spell anything good. I'm supposed to keep moving, but I can't.

I wake up from the dream covered in sweat, moaning, and the first thing I do is to put my hands up in front of my face in the dark of the room to see if they are intact, because I can still feel them burning.

TWENTY-NINE

If I really thought I was getting away from anything, I was mistaken. I kept putting one foot in front of the other, with every step watching the ground crumble away.

One day I walked down a street in St. John's and saw the aftereffects of a fire I'd had nothing to do with fighting, a fire in a small blue row house, and the image conjured up ghosts from my own life.

Just passing the house, I knew it had been a small fire. I've got enough experience to tell that easily from the outside. Maybe electrical, maybe not. The porch light was still on, bright over the front door, so maybe the electrical panel was intact. Maybe it was a fire in the basement. It didn't look like something that started on the stove.

The people who lived there were gone, parts of their lives stuffed in the row of garbage bags that stood outside the front door, fat, dark-green soldiers oblivious to their assignments.

The snow on the steps was untouched. There was a shred of a moon, a thin pale curve, up behind the battered clouds. The air hung still; a small winter storm had blown through, but the night was lying exhausted, too tired even to breathe. The snow covered everything like stucco, hard, cold and deliberate.

There was one shirt hanging on the clothesline behind the house, and it was crusted with wet snow that had frozen. A plaid shirt, maybe felt, stiff in the breeze so that it waved all at once, one single swinging panel.

Two days earlier, there had been firefighters on the sidewalk and a police car, lights flashing, next to the curb. The firefighters were businesslike and offhand as they rolled up wet yellow hose, as if they had done it all a million times before. I could see that they hadn't had to cut through the roof to vent, that they hadn't even had to break the upstairs windows to let the heat out.

A day before that and there would have been nothing at all, not even the merest of hints of what was to come, no foreshadowing whatsoever.

It was a small blue semi-detached house in downtown St. John's, renovated a handful of months before the fire, and I had imagined that a couple had moved in there. There was something about the size of it, about the way things were inside: glass and plants, and none of the defensive decoration that comes when you have to deal with small, eager hands that batter around and break things.

Afterwards, the windows were matte black, sealed from the inside with the smoke. There was a spider fern in a downstairs window, choking with soot, a few stray fronds up against the glass.

I know about couples. I know how hopeful they can be. I know about secret, knowing smiles when they run into each other coming around corners. I can imagine them in there, painting the rooms before they moved in, talking about where everything would go. Picking the colours, buying the paint, sharing the heat of the tub while picking off the freckles of paint. They hadn't been there that long, but it was a house that just screamed out that the two people who lived there were painfully in love—it was stuffed with that, so full you could almost smell it, walking by on the street.

I remember fixing up a house when there were just two of us. Wallpapering first. One cutting and soaking the paper, the other hanging the sticky sheets and rubbing the bubbles out from underneath with the squeegee and then the sponge. Painting the thin trim around the windows, getting paint on my hands and on the glass. Empty rooms, without furniture, but full of the easy comfort of belonging.