Page 52 of Christmas with Three Firemen

Eventually she straightens up. I step back and help her fix her clothes. She gathers herself, smoothing her skirt, buttoning her blouse. She looks at me once, something unreadable in her eyes, then says quietly:

“This doesn’t change the investigation.”

I watch her walk to the door.

“We’ll see about that,” I say.

She leaves without slamming the door. The silence she leaves behind feels heavier than anything else.

I stay in the office for a while after she goes.

There are reports to file. The storm shows no sign of breaking, and I have a crew to manage and an investigation happening inside my station that keeps producing evidence of something I’ve suspected for longer than I’ve said out loud. I have things to do.

I sit at my desk and look at the closed door and don’t do any of them.

Then I get up and get back to work, because that’s what I do. That’s the thing I know how to do when everything else becomes noise.

***

The station is quiet. The residents from the building down the block are settled in the bay for another night, shapes under blankets between the rigs. The crew is on rotating rest. The Christmas tree in the common room is still lit, the only light on the ground floor, and it throws long soft shadows across the apparatus bay.

I move quietly.

The stockings are in a box in the supply closet, the same box every year, brought out in the second week of December when the crew starts hanging decorations and the station transforms from a place of work into something that looks more like somewhere people actually live. I do this every year. I’ve done it since my third year as captain, when Danny Kowalski told me that someone had done it before my time and nobody had kept it up.

I find the hook rail along the mezzanine wall and start hanging them one by one. Each one has a name in my handwriting on a strip of white tape across the cuff. Mateo. Wes. Tara. Rico. Danny. Callum. The rest of the crew.

I reach into the box for the next one. It’s blank.

I hold it for a moment.

She’s been here three weeks. Her coffee mug is in the cabinet. Her boots are by the door.

I find the marker, write her name on it, and hang it at the end of the row.

I step back and look at the row.

Red felt, each one slightly different in size because that’s what you get when you buy out an entire discount store’s Christmas stock in one go.

I look at it for longer than I should. My brain, unhelpful and unasked, starts doing the thing brains do at midnight in quiet buildings.

It shows me next December. Her name on the tape again. The year after that. Her coffee mug permanent in the cabinet, her boots permanent by the door, her light permanent at two in the morning. Her at the crew table on Christmas morning arguing with Rico about something inconsequential, winning, looking satisfied about it.

The whole picture arrives fully formed, and I stand there holding it like an idiot.

A floorboard creaks behind me.

I turn.

The common room is empty. The tree blinks in the corner, red and green over the presents stacked underneath it, cheerful and completely indifferent to my dignity.

“Anyone there?”

The station answers with silence.

I stand there a moment longer, feeling faintly ridiculous. Then I shake my head, go to the kitchen, fill a glass of water at the sink, and take it with me up the stairs.

Behind me, the stockings hang in a row in the dark, her name at the end of them, in my handwriting.