Things You Save in a Fire(96)

Words were powerful, I realized in a new way.

No denying it now.

I had told my story. I had put it into words, at last. For DeStasio, of all people—but you can’t have everything. He wasn’t the only person to witness that moment, anyway.

I was there.

Telling the story changed the story for me. Not what had happened—that, I could never change—but how I responded to it.

It was like I’d been averting my eyes from that memory for ten solid years, but I’d finally forced myself to look again. And what I saw, at twenty-six, was so different from what I remembered from when I was sixteen.

Even though nothing about the story had changed, I had changed.

I’d begun telling that story to DeStasio because of how I wanted him to feel. I wanted to force him to recognize how hurtful his actions had been. Maybe he did, and maybe he didn’t. What I know for sure is that I felt something, hearing the story—something I never would have expected to feel for that stupid, na?ve girl I had been: compassion.

Looking back, I saw her—that teenage me—with different eyes. I saw her in the story as young, and trusting, and inexperienced—but not stupid. Not contemptible. Now, all these years later, she was someone I could root for, and understand, and hurt for. And in this crazy way, the fact that I could look, and listen, and care about her, and ache for her, and defend her—even if I couldn’t change anything at all—the fact that someone heard her, could stay in that moment with her and bear witness, meant that she wasn’t alone.

She wasn’t alone anymore.

She’d been so alone all these years, endlessly facing the worst moment of her life and completely abandoned by everyone. Even me.

All that changed when I told her story.

Now, she had me on her side—too little and too late, but right there at last, all the same.

Putting that long-unspoken night into words changed the memory. It was no longer some kind of poison gas that snaked around my consciousness, formless and uncontainable and lethal. Now it had words. Now it had a shape.

A beginning, a middle—and, most important, an end.



* * *



IT TAKES A lot out of you, 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?”