Singe (13 page)

“I said stand
down
, Grant.” Brooks isn’t fucking around, and for good reason. The roof on the house could cave in any second, or worse. There’s no telling what else is in there, in terms of accelerants. It’s unlikely, but for all they know the whole place could be rigged to blow. Eli can be a cowboy sometimes, sure, but going in there before they’ve got the blaze properly managed is a stupid idea even for him.

Eli’s not deterred though. “Have Sharpie and Parker come around and cover me,” he argues. “Fifteen’ll be here any second, they can camp out in front.” Sure enough, Addie can hear Jim’s company’s sirens getting closer, that frantic
whoop
. “Come on, Cap, if she’s even alive in there, we don’t have time to—”

“Don’t tell me what we have time for,” Brooks barks. He’s squared off against Eli, feet planted wide and firm. The captain’s stripe on his helmet glitters.

For a minute, Eli just stands there, hands loose at his sides.

Then he takes off running toward the back of the house.

“Dammit, Grant,” Brooks swears into the open mic, loud enough that the feedback rings through Addie’s jaw. “
Stop
.” He darts after Eli immediately, a clunky foot chase in their turnout gear and boots, both of them disappearing behind the house. Addie can hear Brooks breathing into his radio, even and measured. Eli must have turned his off.

One second, two. Addie counts to seven-Mississippi before Brooks comes careening around the other side of the house.

Alone.

“Don’t just stand there!” He gestures wildly at Sharpie and Parker, grabbing a hose off the side of the engine without breaking his stride. “Christ, go cover him!”

Addie swears herself, offering up a quick prayer—St. Florian, patron saint of firefighters—as she yanks Mama’s valve closed. Now that Eli is inside, the mother-effing
idiot
, she can’t risk bringing a wall down on top of his dumbass head. Her hands are shaking inside her gloves. She thinks, very clearly:
If you die while we’re fighting, I will kill you again myself, sweetheart
. It’s one hundred percent against the rules to date somebody in your own firehouse, and this is
exactly
why.

What Addie
wants
to do is throw herself off the engine, grab a hose and run. Instead she makes herself climb calmly down into the cabin and look up what frequency Fifteen operates on. Their sirens are whining closer, pulling onto the end of the street. Addie takes a deep breath, switching her radio to their wavelength. “We’ve got a guy in there,” she tells Jim O’Neill, careful to keep her voice calm and steady. He’s known her since she was a kid, Jim has, he fought fires for her father, but Addie’s not about to let him hear how terrified she is of what might be going on inside that house. “There’s a kid upstairs.”

It takes a long time to bring the flames down. Addie keeps on chanting prayers inside her head. She registers snatches of the conversation over the radio, Brooks and Parker and Sharpie coordinating their movements at the back of the house, checking in with Jim’s guys up at the front. Nothing from Eli. By the time they’ve got the monster under control every muscle in Addie’s body is screaming for mercy, and her heart’s about to beat out of her chest with fear.

“What about the kid?” she asks over the radio, unable to stand it for one more minute. She thinks of Eli’s easy smile, the scars on his arms and his chest. She’s going to murder him, if he gets out of this alive. God, he’s too stupid to breathe air. “Should somebody go in and—”

“Here he is,” Parker interrupts, audibly relieved. “Fucking asshole. He’s got her.” Then a shout in the direction of the paramedics, “Can we get some help here, please?”

Eff it. Addie scrambles down out of the engine then, crossing the lawn just as Eli passes the little girl—a baby, no older than Paulina—off to the medics. Brooks is screaming his head off. Eli turns his head and sees her, and for a second neither one of them move.

“Hi,” he says finally. His radio is still off, so Addie sees his lips move more than she hears it. Brooks keeps yelling about safety procedures, both in her earpiece and in real life, a split-second echo with the mic delay. Addie yanks off her helmet and walks over.

“You,” she tells Eli, pointing at his chest. “
Fuck
you. Don’t you
ever
do that to me again.”

Brooks adjusts his tirade to include the sin of acting independently from the firefighting unit,
you are a member of this company and this company functions as a whole, Grant, it does not exist to back up your cowboy antics
. Addie knows he thinks she’s pissed that Eli forced her to shut off Mama before the blaze was properly under control. And she is, of course she is. But.

Eli takes off his helmet too. His face is soot-blackened, all the places his visor and neck protector don’t cover. A fire that serious, he should have been wearing a respirator. He’ll have to go to the hospital and get checked out for smoke inhalation. “I’m sorry, Addie,” he says, tone somewhere in the neighborhood of beseeching. “There was a kid.”

“There will be other kids,” Brooks growls. “You always need to follow orders.”

Behind them, Fifteen is switching over to handlines and heading inside to clear the house, take the fire from ‘under control’ to ‘out’. The mist from the big crosslay hoses wets Addie’s hair and face. She puts her helmet back on.

Brooks nods at her. “Everyone back to work. Not you, Grant. You’re going with the medics.” Obviously he’s had the same thought as Addie.

Eli shakes his head. “Cap, I’m f—”

“I said
get
, Grant.”

So. Eli gets.

It’s after lunch by the time the sooty, sweaty lot of them make it back to the firehouse. Addie collapses face-first onto the first bunk she sees and sleeps until mid-afternoon without the benefit of a shower, a streak of dirt across the clean white pillow when she finally blinks awake. Her head’s pounding something awful. She should have gulped some water before she passed out.

Sharpie’s in the kitchen when she stumbles in there, clean and changed and car keys in hand. “Hey,” Addie says sleepily, getting somebody’s plastic souvenir Big Gulp cup down from the cabinet and filling it with water from the tap. Her mouth feels fuzzy, and she downs half in one long sip. “Where you going?”

“Grant’s cleared to come back, lungs are good,” Sharpie tells her, crossing for the doorway. “Told him I’d come pick him up so Cap could rip him a new asshole.”

Addie swallows the rest of her water. “I’ll go,” she hears herself say.

Sharpie looks surprised. “Yeah?” he asks, eyeing her up and down. “You sure you don’t want to like, hose off?”

Addie just stares at him.

“Sorry,” Sharpie says, cringing in the face of a glare that’s borrowed from both her parents. “You look fine, you look—yeah. You go.”

“Thanks so much,” Addie says insincerely and clomps past him out the door.

“You’re an idiot,” is the first thing Eli’s paramedic tells him. “All of you fire boys. Bound and determined to make the most of that health plan.” Then she says her name is Lyn and thanks him for his service.

Lyn asks him how long he was in the smoke and has him take a few deep breaths, peering inside his mouth and throat and clucking her tongue like someone’s disappointed mother.

“Okay,” she says finally, buckling herself into a jumpseat that is not unlike the ones they have in the pumper. Eli has been inside an ambulance exactly once before, and he doesn’t remember it. “If your airway closes and I have to cut a hole in your throat, it will be your own damn fault.” She has him on an O2 mask the whole way to the hospital, deep slow breaths.

They bring him straight to triage, where a doctor and two nurses take what feels like an age to clear him for duty. During an especially slow moment, Eli ducks out to the front desk, attracting a lot of stares in his turnout gear. The EMTs are still there filling out paperwork, four of them in blue with their backs to him.

“Did she make it?” Eli asks. “The little girl?” She weighed less than Hester in his arms. Most of her hair had burned off. Eli could see the shape of her tiny scalp.

His EMT, Lyn, turns around and sighs. “We don’t know,” she says. “Are you sure
you
want to?”

Eli thinks about that for a minute, how you shouldn’t ask questions you aren’t ready to have answered. Finally he shakes his head. “No,” he says, feeling like the idiot Lyn thinks he is for the first time all afternoon. “I guess not.”

Back in his curtained off room he falls asleep while he’s waiting to get discharged, sacked out on the cot under the bright fluorescent lights like he hasn’t closed his eyes in ages. Addie Manzella’s the one who wakes him up.

“All right, Sleeping Beauty,” she says, kicking the hospital bed with the toe of one boot, and not gently. He smells smoke and sweat as he startles awake. “Let’s go.”

Eli blinks. “Hey,” he says, unable to keep from grinning at the sight of her. She’s filthy, and she’s royally pissed. It’s not a bad look on her. “I thought Sharpie was coming.”

“Yeah, well, you got me instead. Come on, get up. We’re going.”

Eli keeps smiling as he sits up, rubbing his head tiredly. “Did you wanna be alone with me again?”

“Screw you,” Addie hisses, jabbing one finger right at his chest. She—yeah. She doesn’t think he’s funny. Her dark eyes narrow angrily, a set in her graceful jaw. Those boy-straight eyebrows form almost a solid line. “Screw you, Eli, you know that? You were an asshole today, you put the entire company in danger and Fifteen besides, and you scared the
shit
out of me. Drew Beecher, that wasn’t enough for you, huh? I hope you’re thanking God that little girl’s going to live, because otherwise—”

“Wait wait wait.” Eli holds his hands up. “How do you know that?” he asks quietly. “About the girl?”

Addie glares at him. “I asked the doctor.”

“Oh.” Eli curls his fingers around the metal frame of the bed. On the ceiling, the curtain tracks form a neat semi-circle. Will’s curtains were blue with yellow dots. “That’s good then.”

His tone makes Addie stare harder, fierce eyebrows bunching up. “You’re fucking right it’s good,” she mutters. “Christ. You know what, never mind, do whatever you want. Let’s just go.”

Her car seems to have acquired more offal since Eli was last in it, a bag of kitty litter on the passenger’s seat and a stack of baby books up on the dash, one of her uniform shirts hanging up in a dry-cleaning bag. Addie jams her sunglasses onto her face while Eli moves the litter to make room. They cover so much of her face Eli finds himself staring at her mouth, a clean, pale pink against her smoke-grayed skin. She must have had a drink of something, wiped her lips. Eli wants to touch her.

He picks up a board book instead, flipping through it. “My dog was hit by a car this weekend,” he finds himself saying. “She broke her leg.”

“Okay,” Addie says, like
fuck you, why do I care
. The car smells sour, even with the windows rolled down. Eli can see a few clean lines on her neck where she sweat through the dirt.

“Okay,” Eli agrees. The book is one he owned as a kid, about bunnies who love each other all the way up to the moon, and all the way back. Will used to practice his reading on Eli with books like this, gradually moving onto novels. When he died, they were struggling through
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
together. Eli never finished it.

He’s just reaching up at a stoplight to set the bunny book down when Addie’s hand darts out and grabs his wrist. Her grip is like iron.

“What the
fuck
is wrong with you?” she demands, running a ragged nail over his scars. “Do you want more of these, is that it? How did you even
get
these in the first place, Eli, huh? Where in God’s name is your head?”

For a second Eli almost tells her. Then he thinks better of it and shrugs. “I don’t know,” he says, answering the second question and not the first one. “It was stupid, I don’t know.” Then, because he’s tired and his lungs ache and he wants to, he turns his wrist and laces his fingers through hers.

Addie snorts. “Oh my
God
,” she says, sounding like she can’t believe him, like everything about him is the setup of some long, tired joke. “You’re the worst, Eli, you know that?” She shakes her head, tongue at the corner of her clean pink mouth. The stoplight changes to green. “Where do you live?”

That is—that is not what Eli is expecting. “Where do I—”

“You heard me,” she interrupts. “We don’t need to do some ridiculous
Who’s on First
routine, just tell me where your house is.” The car behind them honks impatiently. Eli gives her his address.

Addie sighs. “Okay,” she says and flicks on her turn signal.

Up in his apartment fifteen minutes later, she surveys his living room furniture with a mixture of pity and disdain. “This is pathetic,” she pronounces, shaking her head sadly. He’s got one piece of art on the wall above the couch, a black and white poster he got at Target of a bunch of construction workers eating lunch on the beams of a half-finished skyscraper. “This is the home of a serial killer.”

“I’m divorced,” he reminds her, like that’s an excuse for something. He’s still not entirely sure what they’re doing here.

“Yeah,” Addie says, rolling her eyes. “I know about you.” Then, “Where’s your shower?”