Page 82 of Falling for My Grumpy Fireman

I tape his IV line. I check his pulse ox. I do not run out the ambulance bay doors and drive to River Road, and I want a medal for it, honestly.

The radio goes quiet for eleven minutes.

I know it's eleven because I watch every one of them crawl across the clock over the med room door. Somewhere in minute nine, Dottie starts pretending she's not standing next to me on purpose.

Then:

"Command, PAR check complete. All personnel accounted for. Repeat, all accounted for. Building's lost, everybody's out."

The med room. I make it as far as the med room.

I get the door shut and I slide down the cabinet with a box of alcohol wipes digging into my back and I cry the way you cry when your body's been saving it up. Ugly. Silent. Both hands over my mouth like I'm keeping a secret from myself.

He went in. He froze in a doorway six weeks ago over a kitchen fire, and tonight he went into a collapsing mill and came out carrying strangers, and every cell in my body is screaming two things at once.

Thank God.

And, quieter, meaner, in my mother's voice:

This time. He came out this time.

I press my palm flat against my stomach, low, where a circle the size of a lentil is busy becoming somebody.

"We're not doing this," I whisper. To the baby. To myself. To the version of me that was one breath from telling him everything at that fence line. "We are not spending our whole life waiting in yards."

I wash my face. I finish my shift. I hug Dottie, who doesn't know it's goodbye, which is the only way I could stand to do it.

Then I drive home and pull the boxes out of the closet.

***

Debbie's knock comes at midnight. Three raps, a pause, two more. I open the door and she's standing there in her party clothes with mascara on her cheeks and a look I've never seen on her.

She sees the boxes behind me.

"No," she says.

"Deb."

"No." She pushes past me into my kitchen like she owns it, which by now she kind of does. "You said Saturday. Saturday I could live with. Saturday gave me two more days to talk sense into you."

"He ran into a burning building tonight."

"And walked out of it!" Her voice cracks straight down the middle. "Honey, everybody walked out. It's a miracle night. The whole town's gonna be telling this story for twenty years and you want to spend it packing?"

"That's exactly why I'm packing." I fold the flannel. His flannel. I put it on top of the box and then take it back out and hold it, because apparently I'm keeping it, and I hate what that says about me. "Tonight, it's a miracle. Debbie, what about the night it isn't?"

"You don't know there's ever gonna be a night it isn't."

"My whole job is knowing." I hear my voice go clinical and I let it, because clinical is the only voice that won't break. "I've worked burn units. I've handed folded flags of a different kind to wives in waiting rooms. I have seen the night it isn't, more times than you've had birthdays, and I am not raising this baby in a yard watching taillights."

Debbie stands there breathing hard. Then she does the worst possible thing. She gets gentle.

"Nellie." She takes my hands, flannel and all. "Baby girl. Listen to yourself. You're not protecting him anymore. You're not even protecting the bean. You're protecting you."

"Maybe I'm allowed to."

"You are." She squeezes. "Every right in the world. But at least let him vote. That man crawled through fire tonight and came out the other side, and you're deciding for him that he's too broken to hear the best news of his life."