Things You Save in a Fire(91)

“You can’t take credit for this,” I said on the drive back. “I know what you’re thinking.”

“I can take credit for it, and I will.”

“Doesn’t that seem a little cocky?” I asked. “To think that you can just personally tell a malignant tumor what to do?”

She touched her fingers to the car window. “I think it’s the opposite of cocky. I am humbled by the wisdom of the body to take care of itself.”

“We don’t even know what caused the pause,” I said.

“That’s right, we don’t,” she said. “So that leaves me free to choose an explanation.”

“Maybe you’re just very, very lucky.”

“I am definitely very, very lucky.”

The doctor had given Diana a new prescription for some super-strong painkillers, not believing that she hadn’t even dipped into the first bottle. While we drove, she folded the paper into an origami bird.

When I noticed what she was doing, I said, “You might need that, you know.”

“Nah,” she said. “This stuff’ll kill ya.”

“So will a brain tumor.”

She gave me a look. “I read up on these pills. Nasty stuff. You get hooked, even if you follow all the rules. Then you get angry. You start lying. Your whole personality changes.”

“I know,” I said, nodding. We’d had to study it all for paramedic certification. She wasn’t wrong. “Even people who know better get addicted.”

She nodded, like wasn’t it a shame, but I suddenly found myself sitting very still—looking straight ahead at the answer to a question I didn’t even know I was asking. Even people who knew better got addicted.

Maybe DeStasio was addicted to painkillers.

It wasn’t all that uncommon with firefighters, given all their on-the-job injuries. DeStasio’s back pain was legendary—and so was his ability to endure it. Add to that the loss of his son, his problem drinking, his wife leaving—and the pieces seemed to fit together. Possibly.

I felt a strange twinge of worry. Not that DeStasio deserved it.

“It just hit me, right now, that DeStasio might be addicted to painkillers,” I said then, out loud.

My mom looked over. “Why?”

I walked her through my thinking.

“That’s a pretty good list,” she said.

“Maybe I should go check on him this afternoon,” I said.

“You want to go check on the guy who stalked you, lied about you, and ended your career?” she said.

“I’d been planning to go over there anyway,” I said, nodding at the turn of events. “But the plan was to yell at him.”

“Maybe you could bring him some soup instead.”

Safe to say, I had a lot of mixed emotions toward DeStasio at that moment. But I knew him too well to just decide he was evil and leave it at that. It was unequivocally not okay that he was taking it all out on me, but I could know that and also know that he was in pain. Both could be true at the same time.

I wasn’t sure if he deserved my compassion, but I did know I wanted to be the kind of person who would offer it. It’s not the easy moments that define who we are. It’s the hard ones.

DeStasio was clearly at the end of his rope. The addiction, the losses. There was nothing left of his life but smoldering rubble. I tried to imagine being him—being in that situation—and then having somebody like me show up at the department to break apart the last bricks in the foundation.

In his shoes, I might have made some bad choices, too.

Though probably not that bad.

“I think,” I said carefully, “that I’ve got a workable plan. First I’ll go over and punch him in the jaw. Then I’ll force him to stand face-to-face with his cruel, stupid behavior and hold him accountable. Then I’ll give him some homemade soup. Just to cover all the bases.”

“You’re forgetting something,” Diana said.

I glanced over and shook my head.

“What are you going to do after you yell at him—before you give him the soup?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“I think you do know,” Diana said, setting her little bird on the dashboard. Then she reached over, put a hand on mine, and said, “You’re going to forgive him.”

I shook my head. “I’m still bad at forgiveness,” I said.

“Well, then,” she said. “This is a great chance to practice.”





Twenty-eight


DESTASIO DID NOT answer his door.

I stood on his porch with a massive thermos of beef-and-vegetable soup on my hip, and I knocked and knocked.

Something didn’t feel right. His sedan was parked carefully in the driveway.

I set the soup down on the steps and went to the window to peer in.

The inside was dark. The place was a mess—papers everywhere, trash, several meals’ worth of old plates of food on the dining table. Suspicions about DeStasio’s quality of life confirmed: He was not doing well.

That’s when I spotted him at the far end of the living room, laying back in a recliner.

He wasn’t just ignoring me. He was unconscious. The skin around his lips was blue.

When you’ve seen it enough times, you just know.