Nova screamed. She screamed through the stethoscope. She screamed through the pulse ox clip on her toe. I could see her from the bed—her fists up, her face red, furious at every hand that wasn't mine.
I sat on the exam bed with my arms empty and the shock blanket still over my shoulders and waited. The fluorescent hummed. The monitor beeped. I could hear Dr. Sato's voice across the room, calm, giving instructions to the nurse, and I trusted her because I'd worked beside her for years, and trusting her was the only thing I could do with my hands right now.
The exam room door opened.
Duke. He must have decontaminated at the scene, because the turnout gear was gone. He was in the Hartsdale Fire T-shirt and duty pants he'd put on in our kitchen that morning, his hair damp, pushed back from his forehead. His hands were the tell. The knuckles raw, the palms blistered. No gloves. He'd gone up without them.
Hank must have sent him. Or he'd finished his piece of the fire and come straight here, because that was what he did. He came.
He crossed the room to me. His arms went around me, his face against the side of my head, and I felt the full weight of what the last hour had cost him come through his hands on my back. He held on. I held on. His breathing was still hard from the work, and the smell of smoke was in his hair, and I pressed my face into his shoulder and let him be the only thing in the room for a few seconds.
He pulled back. Looked at my face. Looked across the room at Nova on the exam table, screaming.
"She okay?"
"Dr. Sato's checking her lungs."
He nodded. He sat in the chair beside my bed. A nurse came to his hands with gauze, antiseptic, and the careful wrapping of burns that needed to be assessed by the burn unit in the morning. He let the nurse work without looking. He watched the exam table.
I leaned into him. My shoulder against his, my arms empty, the weight of my daughter's absence a physical thing across my chest. His wrapped hand came up to the back of my head, clumsy with the gauze, and rested there.
The door opened.
My mother was in the doorway of the exam room. A wool coat thrown over a nightgown. Her hair was down around her shoulders—I couldn't remember the last time I'd seen her hair down. She must have seen the address on the scanner app or the neighborhood page, because nobody had called her. She'd driven herself to Hartsdale General in the middle of the night because she saw her daughter's building on a screen and knew where they'd bring her.
She stopped in the doorway. Her eyes moved across the room.
Dr. Sato was at the exam table with Nova, the stethoscope on her small back. Across the room, me—in a robe with soot on my face, bare feet on the linoleum, leaning into the man beside me. Duke in the same Hartsdale Fire T-shirt he'd left our kitchen in that morning, one bandaged hand on the back of my head.
My mother's hand went to her mouth.
Her eyes filled. I watched it happen from across the room—the composure that held through eleven weeks of measuring, breaking open under fluorescent lights in the middle of the night.
My mother crossed the room.
CHAPTER 22
Audrey
Four days since the fire. The hospital had kept us for one of them—Duke across the hallway with second-degree burns on both palms, Nova in the nursery on an observation protocol I could have written myself, me in a gown I'd seen on a thousand other people and never once on myself.
We were discharged together on the third morning. Duke drove us to his house on Elm, and the house absorbed us the way small houses do—completely, without ceremony. I owned three outfits, all of them borrowed. Everything else was in a building two miles away that I wasn’t ready to look at.
Duke worked the days in the firefighter rhythm—coffee, naps, the donated clothes folded into the dresser without asking which drawer. I worked the nights beside him, my hand on his chest, his bandaged hand over mine, the conversation we hadn't had about what came next sitting in the room with us.
He left for shift at five this morning. I lay in his bed alone for an hour before I got up.
It was late morning, the light coming through the kitchen window gray and flat. I was at the kitchen island in one of Diane's sweaters and a pair of Duke's drawstring pants. My coffee was in a mug that saidHartsdale Fire Annual PancakeBreakfaston the side. Nova was in the bouncer on the floor beside the island where I could see her.
I had a list started on a piece of scrap paper. Insurance company, the 800 number pulled up on my phone. Landlord. The bank, because my checkbook was in the apartment, and the apartment was gone. The L&D floor, because I was supposed to go back to work in two weeks, but I needed to extend the medical leave. The list was four items long, and I'd called none of them, because every time I picked up the phone, my hand started shaking and I put it back down.
There was a knock at the door.
I wasn't expecting anyone. Duke's crew knew his shift schedule, and the stream of donations had slowed. Astrid had texted that she was coming by this evening.
I crossed to the door. Opened it.
My mother was on the threshold.
