Things You Save in a Fire - Katherine Center Page 0,96
themselves into the group, I looked up to see the whole crowd fall quiet to stare at me.
Like, no talking, no coughing, no moving. Except the one person who half-whispered, “There she is.”
She? Only one “she” had just stepped into the room.
At first, I wondered if maybe they recognized me as the drunk girl from the party, and now my identity as a firefighter was being revealed.
But then I remembered I was a smoke-stained mess.
I hadn’t showered or changed. My skin was smeared gray with soot, and my shirt was stained and blotchy with salt. My hair was matted. I reeked of smoke and sweat and muck. My uniform was damp in some places and soaked in others from sweat and hose water.
I looked nothing—at all—like the girl who had showed up with Owen that night.
I felt nothing at all like her, either.
My next thought, looking at all those stricken faces, was that Owen must have died.
I held my breath.
But then the captain pushed through the crowd, came up to me, clamped his arm around my shoulders, and steered me off in the other direction down the hall.
“Let’s talk,” he said.
“Is he okay?”
The captain sensed my anxiety. “He’s fine,” he said, and I closed my eyes, and my whole body felt like it was full of water. “Well,” the captain corrected, “not fine. They’ve had him down in the hyperbaric chamber since he got here, but they just brought him up for the night. We’ll see how he does for a while. He’s got edema of the upper trachea and second-degree burns on the face, a couple of broken ribs, and a collapsed lung.”
“So,” I said, “the opposite of fine.” More like fighting for his life in the ICU.
“He’s a strong kid,” the captain said. “He’s got everything to live for.”
I had a sinking feeling. “What’s the prognosis?”
The captain let out a long sigh. “Maybe fifty-fifty. He needs to make it through the night.”
I took a minute to concentrate on breathing. How did it work again? In, then out—or the other way around?
The captain gave my shoulders a final, awkward squeeze and then released me. “Good thing DeStasio caught that cyanide situation, huh?”
I looked up. “DeStasio?”
“If he hadn’t caught it,” the captain went on, clearly trying to stay positive, “we’d be facing a whole different deal right now.”
“DeStasio didn’t catch it,” I said. “I caught it.”
The captain frowned at me, like I’d taken leave of my senses. “Hanwell,” the captain said, like I needed to stop playing around, “DeStasio already filed his report.”
Was that supposed to explain anything? “Okay,” I said.
“He emailed it to me from his hospital room. I read it on my phone.”
“Why did DeStasio even fill out the report?” I asked. “He wasn’t the ranking medic on scene.”
“He was the senior firefighter,” the captain said, as if that mattered.
“What did his report say?”
The captain studied my face. “It says that he identified symptoms of cyanide poisoning while still inside the structure, and he instructed you to administer the antidote as soon as possible.”
I actually shook my head to try to clear it. “That’s not true. I’m the one who recognized the cyanide poisoning.”
“That’s not what the report says.”
“Then it’s incorrect.”
“Are you saying DeStasio filed a false report?”
That would’ve been a hell of an accusation. “I’d have to see it,” I said. “Maybe he was disoriented from his injury.”
“He seemed pretty coherent to me,” the captain said.
“Can I see the report?”
The captain shook his head. Then he gave a quick glance down the hall at all the people milling around the waiting room.
“That’s what I want to give you a heads-up about, Hanwell,” he said then. He took a step closer and lowered his voice. “It’s pretty damning.”
I frowned. “Damning?”
“You made a lot of mistakes today—rookie mistakes, really. I’m surprised at you. And though I’m sure you never meant to—”
I broke in. “What mistakes? I didn’t make any mistakes!”
The captain gave me an uncomfortable look that had a lot of pity in it.
“What mistakes did DeStasio say I made?”
The captain took a breath. Then he put on his reading glasses and lifted up his phone, presumably to read from DeStasio’s report. “Well, for starters, the way you insisted on entering the structure, even though—”
“I didn’t insist on entering the structure! That was DeStasio! He said he saw a child inside.”
“The report says you saw the child.”
“It was him.”
“Either way, you had standing orders not to go in.”