Things You Save in a Fire - Katherine Center Page 0,109
confessing your darkest secret. I went home and slept like the dead.
And when morning came, something about me was reborn.
I lay in bed under a pattern of sunshine from my window and marveled at my capacity to do the impossible. I’d told the story of Heath Thompson. I’d told the whole soul-destroying story, and I’d lived to see the dawn. Of all the brave things I’d done in my life, that one was the bravest.
If I could do that, I could truly do anything.
And now I was going to the hospital to see the rookie, no matter what anybody said.
Just try to stop me.
But when I headed downstairs, I found that my mother’s house was full of firefighters.
Not just any firefighters, either. Station Two, C-shift. My crew.
They were doing chores.
Six-Pack and Case were in the kitchen, repairing my mother’s broken window. Tiny was on a ladder in the living room, replacing the lightbulbs in a ceiling fixture. And the captain was sipping coffee at the kitchen table with my mom, in her bathrobe.
“Oh, honey,” my mom said when she saw me. “You’re up.”
The captain turned, saw me, too, and stood up. “Morning, Hanwell.”
As soon as the guys heard him, they all called out, “Morning, Hanwell!”
I wasn’t sure what to make of them all. “What are you doing here?”
“It’s a long story,” the captain said.
“They showed up here at seven forty-five and started fixing my broken window,” my mom said. “Then they asked me to make a list of every single honey-do I could think of for them, and they’ve been hard at work ever since.”
I looked at the captain like, What the hell?
“These guys,” my mom went on, chirpily, gesturing at Six-Pack and Case, “are going to repaint my garden fence. And this one”—she gestured at Tiny—“adjusted that broken gate latch out front, tightened the loose cabinet door, and fixed the leak behind the toilet.”
She looked pleased.
I frowned at the captain. “Why?”
He looked right at me. “By way of apology.”
“What are you apologizing for?” There were so many possibilities.
“DeStasio throwing a brick through that window, for starters,” the captain said, nodding at it.
I blinked. “You knew it was him?”
“I do now.”
“How?”
“The rookie and I kind of pieced it together.”
I walked closer. “He’s awake? He’s okay? You saw him?”
He nodded. “Last night. They just moved him from the ICU.”
A funny little sob of relief passed through me, and then my eyes filled with tears—but I squeezed a tight blink to push them back. “How is he?”
“He’s on the mend,” the captain said. He shook his head at Diana. “Youth.”
I smiled and wrapped my arms around my waist. “You talked to him?”
“Yep. He asked after you.”
“He did?”
“He wanted to know if you’d been to see him.”
I felt my expression harden. “Did you tell him why I had not been to see him?”
“I did.”
“And what did he say?”
“He said DeStasio’s account of what happened at the fire was—his words here: ‘an utterly false pack of bitter-old-man lies.’ Then the rookie ranted and raved on your behalf and accused DeStasio of lying and being a sleazebag reptile. He got so agitated he gave himself a coughing fit.”
I smiled a little. “He called DeStasio a sleazebag reptile?”
The captain smiled a little, too. “He’s on a lot of medication.”
“Sounds like he’s feeling better.”
The captain went on. “When he’d settled down, I told him the department was handling it, that there would be a full investigation, and that we’d get to the bottom of everything, for sure. I meant to reassure him, but he kept pushing for information, and when it came out you’d been suspended, he quit.”
“He quit?”
The captain nodded, impressed with the gesture. “In protest.”
Good thing the captain didn’t know he’d been about to quit anyway.
“Anyway, I thought you were nuts when you confessed”—he cleared his throat—“your, uh, special feelings for the rookie. But now I’d say, just based on our conversation and, uh, his body language, it seems pretty mutual.”
That was it. Time to go. I needed to get dressed.
I turned toward the stairs.
“Wait!” the captain said.
I kept walking. “I’m going to Boston,” I said. “I’ve waited more than long enough.”
“But that’s why we’re here,” the captain said.
I stopped and turned around. “Why?”
“To take you to Boston.”
I angled back toward him. “Wait—why are you here?”
“To apologize to you,” the captain said, “and to your mother. And to try to make things right.”
“What are you apologizing to me for?”
“Suspending you, for one. You’re unsuspended, by the way.”