She’d been crying so hard, it had been a wonder she could drive, her face contorted into a mask of pain and suffering.
No, Anne thought. It hadn’t been a lie.
Coming back to the present, she saw where she had driven to and cursed. “Shit.”
It was the 499 stationhouse. Somehow, in her distraction, her hand and feet had taken here. Then again, it had been her father’s house, too.
Putting the Subaru in park, she sat back and stared across the road. The old red fire station was framed by the gray sky, its windows clean, the sidewalk swept free of fallen leaves, the bay doors down.
They were probably on a call. Even though it was cool, going on cold, the doors would be open for the fresh air if they were on-site.
Breath mints.
Anne, her brother, and her mother had been left without a father and a husband . . . and the woman had worried about Certs during the funeral.
It would have been so much easier to connect to her mother if Nancy Janice had wept and wailed. But appearances had always been the most important thing, not true strength. Inner conviction. Personal power.
By the time Tom had returned from that bike ride, Anne had hated both of their parents, her father for being a philanderer instead of a hero and her mother for enabling him. And in the decade and a half that followed, all of her emotions had gotten locked into that one-note of righteous anger and she’d fanned those flames ever since.
The truth was more complex, wasn’t it?
Hazy memories of things she hadn’t thought about in years bubbled up. She remembered her father coming home after long shifts, changing and leaving immediately for Timeout, her mother’s face falling in disappointment. She recalled with clarity Nancy Janice planting a patch of flowers in the backyard and her father making a wisecrack about wasting lawn space.
And worse, she relived what it was like to hear her father’s booming voice rattling the closed door of her parents’ bedroom. Big Tom had been a product of the military and as such, nothing in the house could ever be out of place. An errant pair of shoes, taken off by the back door to avoid mud being tracked in, had never been the kid’s fault.
It had been on Nancy Janice’s.
Looking back on it now, those standards which Anne had adopted and still had seemed like something altogether different than just a way to keep the house functioning properly and tidy.
They’d been an excuse to yell at the wife. A way of justifying the release of anger and frustration that built up as the result of a brutally hard and dangerous job.
God, Anne thought. Put like that, what else had she expected her mom to turn into?
Maybe the adaptive behavior of being a doormat wasn’t a critical character flaw.
Maybe . . it had been survival.
Chapter 41
“Help me . . . I can’t . . . breathe . . .”
Danny leaned down, putting his face in the side window of the T-boned car. The older woman behind the wheel was in her late sixties, early seventies, and there was blood in her gray hair from where her head had been stuck by the inside of the door on impact.
“I’m getting you out, don’t you worry. What’s your name?”
“Ce-Cecilia. My granddaughter—”
Danny nodded. “We got her out of her car seat. She’s just fine. Let’s get you free.”
The accident was off the shoulder of a four-lane intersection with turning signals. The woman had been traveling through with the green light when some hotshot had blown through the red arrow and hit her so hard, it’d taken her all the way off the asphalt and crushed her door in.
“I can’t . . . breathe . . .”
“There’s gonna be some noise. Stay with me, Cecilia.”
Bringing the hydraulic splitter up, he rammed the twin wedges into the hinged seam of the door and engaged the power. The squeaking and squealing rang in his ears as the tool separated the busted mess from the body of the car so that Danny and Moose could yank it free and expose the victim.
Paramedic team members ran forward and began their assessment as Danny tossed the useless hunk of door out of the way. The other car had cue-balled off into the weeds, the driver standing to the side with airbag powder all over his black shirt, his face swollen and red.
Made you want to go over and finish the job with your fist.
He refocused on Cecilia. Her mouth was open, and she was wincing and gasping. Given what kind of the shape her door was in, she probably had broken a rib or two and ended up with a pleural effusion due to a pneumothorax or hemothorax. Or both. At least that head wound looked mostly superficial even though it was bleeding.
She was going to live.
At least . . . he thought maybe she was going to live. What if she had underlying conditions? What if it was a blood clot in her lungs instead?
Or a myocardial infarc?
As the last of the light bled out of the sky, and the headlights of the rerouted traffic flashed in his eyes, his heart started to pound and he looked toward the ambulance again. In the glow from the bay’s lights, the four-year-old granddaughter was screaming her head off as strangers with scary-looking medical things came at her. Tears streamed down her bright red, tortured face.
She was terrified about her grandmother. All because some prick was in a hurry. How many times had he seen this, innocent lives interrupted by assholes who thought their shit was more important than the traffic laws.
“Danny?”
As his name came over to him on the oil-scented air, he turned and was blinded by strobe lights of the departing ambulance. When all he saw standing in front of him was a tall broad shape in turnouts and a helmet, reality bent and twisted, no longer something linear, but a convolution that doubled back on itself.
“John Thomas?” he breathed as he saw his dead twin brother before him.
“What the fuck?” Moose stepped closer. “What the hell are you talking about, Danny?”
“Sorry. Nothing. What’s up?”
Moose pointed to a flatbed truck that Danny hadn’t noticed driving on scene. “I thought you might appreciate not getting run over as that thing backs up. ’Cuz you don’t seem to have noticed it.”
As the reverse lights came on and the vehicle started coming toward Cecilia’s wreck, Danny got with the program, picking up the door he’d taken off like he’d meant to all along. It was alarming to note how much had progressed at the scene since he’d checked out. Both ambulances were gone, Duff was putting sand down over the oil leaks under the light, and the police squad cars were getting ready to release the rerouted traffic.
On the ride back to the stationhouse, he stared out the engine’s lowered window. The others were talking about the Patriots game that was coming up, and Duff was saying he needed to get laid, and Moose was talking about his Charger, and Doc was behind the wheel, humming.
Danny tracked all of it to reassure himself he was on the planet. That his brain was still capable of keeping up with reality.
As they came up to the firehouse, he didn’t know how he was going to make it through the rest of the shift—
The Subaru parked across from the bays had to be another figment of his imagination. But just in case it wasn’t, he jumped out as Doc stopped the engine to back it in.
“Where you going?” Moose called out.
Danny let his walking answer the question. And as he approached the Subaru, he was relieved when Anne put her window down.
Her eyes were sad as they looked up at him. “I shouldn’t be here.”
“Yeah,” he said. “You should.”
* * *
The bays of the stationhouse still looked the same, still smelled the same—like baked bread, fresh engine oil, and lemon air freshener.
Anne had never expected to walk into it again, and somehow, having Soot by her side on his leash, made everything easier. Guess comfort dogs worked.
She stopped between the engine and the ladder truck and looked up at the old-school pool that they didn’t use anymore. The hole at the top, which was in the center of the bunk room, had been paneled over.
But her father had used it during his time.
“You want dinner?” Danny asked quietly. “We got plenty.”
She leveled her head and looked at him. “You have bags under your eyes. You’re exhausted.”