Things You Save in a Fire - Katherine Center Page 0,37

the station for a call.

I turned around and threw my last shot backwards, and without even waiting to see if it made it, I walked back toward the station.

The rookie saw me coming and held the door open. As I closed the gap, he shook his head in admiration. “You’re my hero.”

“Did it go in?” I whispered as I passed.

“Nothing but net,” he said.

I high-fived him without even breaking stride, and I never looked back.

* * *

DESTASIO SHOULD HAVE ridden with us to the call, but his back was giving him trouble, so the rookie came instead.

Firefighters don’t talk about “pain.” They don’t admit that things “hurt.” The most you’ll ever hear them admit to is “discomfort.” DeStasio had fallen during a roof collapse and been injured so badly that for a few days it was unclear if he would walk again. But he did walk again—part of his legend. Everybody knew he was in constant pain, but all anybody ever said was that his back was “giving him trouble.”

Basically, DeStasio suffered in silence every day, and the crew admired the hell out of him for it.

And on bad days, he got a pass and snoozed in the Barcalounger by the big-screen TV.

The fire call turned out to be for an “eight-year-old female, not breathing”—which sent us all into extra-high gear.

We were loaded up in forty seconds.

The rookie and I rode in the back as we ran full lights-and-sirens—pushing through intersections, veering around parked cars—to make it to the scene in under eight minutes.

Fast, but probably not fast enough.

Brain damage sets in after one minute without oxygen, and it’s irreversible at five. But “not breathing” could mean more things than you’d think, and with kids especially, you never give up hope until you have to.

Kids always break your heart.

There’s nothing anyone in the service wouldn’t do for a kid.

One of the first runs I’d ever made in Austin had been for a drowned girl about this same age, and I’d never forgotten her. We’d done CPR on her for thirty minutes—all the way from the scene to the hospital—without even thinking of giving up.

We never got her back, though.

With kids, it doesn’t matter. You try beyond hope, no matter what.

We entered the neighborhood and found the street. School was out for the day by now, and kids just home from school stopped on their front walks to watch us go by.

At the location, a tiny grandmother stood in her driveway. She waved her arms like semaphores. I knew even from the street that her eyes would have that look eyes always get when the souls behind them are recoiling into shock.

“This way,” she said, leading us into the house.

We followed, steeped in that sensation of focused attention that accompanies every call. You never habituate to it. You never tire of it. No matter how many calls you go out on. No matter how many unspeakable, hilarious, tragic, ridiculous, heartbreaking, disgusting things you see. That moment of anticipation, as everything in the world disappears except for the one life-or-death task in front of you, is always exquisitely the same.

There’s not a name for that feeling. But it’s really something.

“Over here,” the old lady said, turning the corner into a living room. The TV was on too loud. In a recliner up ahead, an old man was fast asleep with a cup of coffee beside him.

I frowned. “Him?” He was geriatric, not pediatric.

She didn’t break stride, urging us past the chair. “No.”

Behind him, on the floor near the kitchen, lay a pile of bath mats, and on top of the pile, unconscious and unresponsive, was a Chihuahua.

“Here,” the old lady said, the expression on her face urgent.

But it didn’t compute for me. I was looking for an eight-year-old child. “Where?”

“Here,” she repeated, gesturing at the dog.

The four of us looked down: brown-and-white Chihuahua. Dead as a doornail.

We looked back at the old lady.

She gestured at the dog. “My baby,” she said, and her voice broke into a genuine sob.

Eight-year-old female.

Six-Pack and Case looked at each other, then turned right around to walk back out the front door without a word. Only the rookie and I stayed.

My heart, which had clenched in preparation for a child, relaxed. I felt a wash of relief. Compared to the drowned girl, whose wet eyelashes I still saw sometimes when I closed my eyes, a dead Chihuahua seemed almost delightful.

I took a step back, then let out a long breath that I expected to be a sigh—but