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“Daddy? Mama?” she says, trying to run to them, but the EMT stops her.
I nudge Angela and walk over to the little girl. “You need to go to the hospital, sweetie. Do you have a family member that lives close?”
She shakes her head and wipes her eyes. “Are they going to be okay?”
I can’t bring myself to lie to the little girl, but her parents are gone. My heart breaks thinking that she might have to go into foster care because of this.
Angela, Damon, and Tristan work to get the fire under control without me, while I try to calm the girl down. She’s too young to understand what this means for her. Without parents, she will be going with DHS workers tonight until they can find someone in the family that might take her. And if they don’t, the poor thing will end up in foster care. I try to hold the tears back, but it’s harder when her blue eyes are looking up at me. Her life has just changed drastically and there is nothing I can do about it.
“Why can’t I ride with Mommy and Daddy? I don’t want them to be alone,” she says, trying to push passed me as they shut the back doors of the ambulance.
“That’s not possible, sweetie. You have to ride on your own.”
She looks up at me through her lashes. “Will you ride with me? I’m scared.”
Normally, this isn’t something we do, but the circumstances call for it. She is all alone, and I don’t want her to think no one cares about her. She shouldn’t have to go through this alone.
“I’ll be right back,” I say, and then nod to the EMT waiting to take off.
Damon and the others are fighting the fire, and even though my job is to stay here, he might understand. He is a father, and can feel for this little girl.
“She wants me to ride with her. She’s scared,” I say.
He nods without hesitating.
Damon is someone I admire because this profession runs in his family for generations, too, but sometimes we have to bend the rules a bit. We are human after all.
I kneel in front of the little girl. “I can ride with you, but once we get to the hospital, they will take you to a room to be examined. They won’t let me go back with you, okay?
She shakes her head, and gets into the ambulance. The workers seem impatient, and it starts to bother me because they need to show this little girl some respect. How would they feel if this happened to them? They don’t have to be jerks to her.
They lay her down and secure her on the gurney before taking off because it’s required by the law. She is coughing up a storm, but her voice is starting to sound better, not all scratchy. I let the workers do their job while I try to keep her breathing into the mask, and not fighting them.
I tell her a story my father used to tell me at bedtime about a fearless King and Queen who would do anything to protect their kingdom and their children. It keeps her occupied until we pull into the ER ambulance bay, and they remove her. The nurse asks for her vitals and they whoosh her away to a room for observation and tests.
I don’t want to leave, because she is going to be all alone, and soon Child Services will show up to take her to a group home until they can reach out to anyone in the family that might take her in. However, in my line of work, I know that in most cases, the child ends up in foster care.
My cell phone rings, and it’s Damon.
“Swinging by to pick you up on the way back to the station, okay? Two minutes out.”
I know it’s not part of my job, but sometimes this becomes too much. My heart breaks every time I see a dead body, or a child hurt, and unfortunately, that happens as a firefighter. Maybe that’s why I’m going back to finish the last semester to get my English degree. My dad, the chief, knows that I didn’t plan on staying with the department forever. So, he can’t hold it against me.
Damon pulls up and I hop back inside next to Angela.
“How’s she doing?” she asks, putting her arm around me.
“She’s getting some tests done, I assume. They just rushed her back.”
My sister knows how much things like this eat away at me, and after all these years, I need a change of scenery. Something that doesn’t revolve around gas leaks, car crashes, and a lot of death. I’m sick of seeing these things.
When we get back to the depot, I take off my gear and go back into the sleeping area. I need a freaking drink after this, and before I have to focus on schoolwork hardcore.
Angela isn’t like me. She can turn her brain off after a scene like that, and I wish I was more like her in that aspect. My parents always tell me I have an enormous heart, and sometimes it’s not a great thing with a profession like mine.
Honestly, I didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life after high school, and my dad has always been my hero, so until I had a plan, he said I should just get certified and work at the station. Angela and I liked it at first, you know, seeing as there is a stereotype against women in this profession, but as we handled more calls with DOA’s, it slowly started bothering me. The emotional distress from these calls throws me into a depression. Seeing all that death and not knowing if we could have prevented it by being just a little faster responding to the scene, it started eating away at me.
“Shift is over!” Angela yells, and heads to the lockers with me following. “What are your plans for tonight? Anything special before your big day back at college?”
