“Twenty-four,” Dad says. “Greystone Road area, right? That’s a solid house. Medina’s been there a long time.”
Of course he knows. He probably looked up every station captain in the department the day I got accepted. That’s Dad. He doesn’t leave things to chance. He’s the kind of man who reads the entire manual before he opens the box, who maps three routes to any destination and picks the safest one, who spent two decades working for the post office because the benefits were good and the pension was reliable and his family would never wonder if the lights were staying on.
“It’s far,” I say.
“You’ll get used to the drive.” Mom pulls back and adjusts my cap. “You’ll carpool with someone. You’ll make friends. Oh, take a picture with the Hendersons. They’re over by the flag.”
I take pictures. I take so many pictures. With the Hendersons from church, with my academy friends, with Chief Garrison who barely remembers my name but smiles for the camera. Mom takes a photo of me and Dad where he’s got his arm around my shoulders and I’ve got my badge on and we’re both beaming and it’s maybe the happiest photo she’s ever taken of us and I’m performing every second of it.
In the car heading home, I sit in the back seat like I’m twelve again. Dad drives. Mom scrolls through the photos and shows me every single one even though I was in all of them.She’s already planning which ones to frame. The badge-pinning one for the mantel. The one with Garrison for the hallway. The family group shot for Grandma Eloise’s old frame, the heavy silver one that’s been sitting empty since they took down the last photo that was in it.
“We should do dinner,” Mom says. “Lorraine’s, the whole family. I’ll call your Aunt Denise.”
“Sure.”
“And I want to send a photo to Pastor Williams. He asked about you last Sunday.”
“Okay.”
“Station 24.” She says it like she’s tasting it. “That’s a good number. Strong number.”
I don’t say anything. I watch the streets go by through the window. We pass Haverford. We pass Mr. Franklin’s house, where the dog is barking at nothing in the yard. We pass the corner where the ice cream truck parks in July. We pass the firehouse.
Station 11. Red brick. Two bay doors, one open. I can see the tail end of the engine inside, the chrome bumper catching afternoon light. There’s a folding chair propped against the wall near the side door, like someone was sitting outside and went in for something and planned to come back. The American flag is limp in the heat. The station number is painted on the bay door in white, big enough to read from across the street, the same font it’s been in since before I was born.
We pass it. We always pass it. It’s just the firehouse between the park and home and I’ve seen it ten thousand times and today it looks like something I lost.
* * *
Dinner at Lorraine’s is loud and warm and I eat everything on my plate because when food is an expression of love in your family you eat it regardless of what your stomach is doing. Aunt Denise cries. Uncle Martin does a toast. My cousin Jaylen, who is fourteen and going through a phase where he thinks everything is lame, tells me firefighting is actually kind of cool, which from Jaylen is a standing ovation. Dad orders a bottle of wine and lets me have a glass even though he raised me on the belief that alcohol is for people who’ve earned the right to relax, and apparently today I qualify.
I sit at the table surrounded by people who love me and I smile and I laugh and I tell the stories from the academy they want to hear. The time we did the tower drill and I was the only one who didn’t hesitate at the top. The time our instructor made us do pushups in the rain for fifteen minutes because Rodriguez was late. The time I held the hose during the live burn and felt the pressure slam through my whole body like a second heartbeat and knew, all the way down to the floor of my chest, that this was it. This was mine.
Nobody asks if I’m happy about Station 24. They assume. Why wouldn’t I be? I graduated. I got a badge. I got assigned. The system worked. The machine took my application and my sweat and my sixteen weeks of showing up before dawn and spat out a result, and the result has a number and a captain and a start date, and that’s the job. That’s how it works.
It’s not how it’s supposed to work for me.
I know that sounds bratty. It sounds like a kid who got the wrong color bike on Christmas. But Station 11 isn’t a preference. It’s not a first choice that I can adjust away from with the right attitude and enough time. It’s the place I’ve been heading sinceI was nine years old and I didn’t know it yet, and now I know it and I’m being sent somewhere else, and everyone at this table thinks I should be grateful.
I am grateful. I’m a firefighter. I’m twenty-two years old and I have a badge pinned to my dress uniform and my dad cried when he put it there. I’m the luckiest person I know.
I’m also the saddest I’ve been since Grandma Eloise died, and I can’t tell anyone because the reason I’m sad sounds, to every person who loves me, like the most ungrateful sentence a girl could say out loud.
* * *
I hear the siren at eleven forty-three.
I’m in my room, which is the room I’ve slept in since I was four, the room with the ceiling fan that wobbles on the highest setting and the window that faces the street and the glow-in-the-dark stars I stuck up there in sixth grade that Mom won’t let me take down because she says they add character. My dress uniform is hanging on the back of the door. My badge is on the dresser, angled against the mirror so I can see it from the bed.
The siren starts low. Far away, south, building. Then it swings east and the pitch changes the way it does when the engine turns onto Haverford, which means it’s Station 11 because Station 11 runs Haverford and has for as long as I’ve been alive. I can track the sound through the neighborhood. The way it bounces off the buildings on the main road and then opens up when the engine hits the straightaway past the park. The way it peaks when it passes the intersection closest to our house and then fades as it heads north, toward wherever the call is.
I lie there and listen to it disappear.
Forty-three calls in the last month. I looked it up. Station 11 runs an average of forty-three calls per month, covering an area from Haverford to the bridge, including the commercial district, three schools, and the nursing home on Calloway. Their response time is one of the best in the city. Their incident completion rate is near perfect. Captain Donnelly has been running the house for years and her crew turns over less than any other station, which means people go there and they stay.
I want to stay.
I want to walk through those bay doors and learn the rigs and eat in that kitchen and run those streets, the same streets I’ve been walking since I could walk. I want to be the person riding that engine past some kid sitting on a playground wall eating a granola bar, and maybe that kid will see the truck and thinkthat’s what I wantand it’ll start for her like it started for me.
