"I'm alright, Shane."
He looked at me for a beat. The look was not Garrett's look. Shane wasn't running scenarios. Shane was asking. He had been my friend long enough that I owed him better than the version I'd given him.
I let some of it out.
"Ask me again in a month."
He nodded once.
"Alright."
He didn't push.
We did the walk-through.
The lieutenant was a woman I hadn't met. She was in her mid-forties, short hair. She shook my hand and told me Shane talked about me too much. The senior man on the engine clapped me on the shoulder and said welcome back. The probie was nineteen. He called me sir twice in the first thirty seconds.
"Don't call me sir."
"Yes, sir."
"Brother."
"Yes, sir."
The lieutenant laughed.
I did the morning check on the engine compartment because I'd done the morning check on every engine compartment of every shift of every house I'd worked at, and I wasn't going to stop now. Things were either on the rig or they weren't. I preferred to confirm it myself.
The tones dropped at nine-forty.
The dispatcher's voice came clean over the bay speakers. Structure fire, three-story walk-up, smoke visible from the second floor. Two and a half years away from the tones in this house, and my body found the gear without consulting me.
Boots. Turnout pants. Suspenders. Coat. Helmet. Gloves in the pocket because I'd grab them in the rig.
I was in the jump seat with the door closing before I'd had a conversation with myself about whether I was ready.
Shane was in the officer's seat now.
That was the difference.
We rolled.
The call ran how mid-tier calls ran. The smoke was the gray and lazy kind, which meant the fire was contained and venting. The front door was unlocked. I went up the stairwell behind the senior man with the line on my shoulder, and we found the fire in a back bedroom that had started in an extension cord and gotten as far as the curtains and the bedside table. We knocked it down in under five minutes. Nobody was home. The whole call ran thirty-eight minutes from tones to back-in-quarters.
I'd run a hundred calls like it.
The crew moved around me the way I'd been wanting a crew to move around me since I'd left for Hartsdale. When we stripped down in the bay, the senior man punched my shoulder once and told me it was good to have me back.
I told him it was good to be back.
I meant it.
It still didn't reach the place I'd been waiting for it to reach.
I got off shift the next morning at eight and walked.
Queens at this hour had a smell to it. Diesel, bakery exhaust, old rain on warm asphalt. The old man behind the counter at the second-block bodega lifted his hand at me when I went past. He didn't know I'd been gone for two and a half years.
