To Protect & Serve (33 page)

He grabbed the roof ladder and half of the extension from the truck side and started up the lawn. Forty hours of ladder classes. He should know how to do this in his sleep. Click went the extension until it was positioned on the eve of the roof. One step, two, he climbed. At the top he angled his way onto the roof and closer to the peek where carefully he hooked the top of the roof ladder on and then attached himself to it.

“You got it?” Bob asked from the extension where he held the chainsaw.

“Done.” The chainsaw changed hands, and duty took over. He was here to do a job, a job that could mean someone’s life. That’s why he had started this in the first place, and now it was a part of him. The chainsaw in his hand roared to life. One life at a time. Just save one life at a time, and someday surely he would be able to out-run the ghosts that were gathering at his heels.

The dishes were all done. Lisa had even convinced herself that they would come back if she just put them all away. However, the dishes were away, and they still weren’t back. She knew she should leave, go home. There was no one here, no reason to stay, and yet something in her just had to know he was all right. She wished she’d had the sanity to decipher the message when it had come in, maybe then she would at least know where he
was, and what kind of call it was.

As it stood, she had no idea. Pushing through the break room door to the station beyond, she walked out as fear and helplessness fought for control inside her. One wire mesh step at a time she climbed until eight up, she stopped and slid down against the wall, praying like she had never prayed before. It wasn’t fair to ask him to do this, she told God. He had as much right to this life as anyone else—more than some. He was a good guy. He didn’t deserve to die out there fighting to save someone else’s life.

It was then that she thought about Dustin. How had his final call come in? Much like that one had? A simple call out, and he never made it back to the station. She wondered how it had happened. Maybe he was fighting the fire and he fell into something he couldn’t get out of. Or had someone made a horrible mistake, miscalculated how long a mission would take and he was caught without air. Was he alone when it happened? Or was someone there fighting to get him out immediately but it took too long? The scenarios, each one worse than the one before played and replayed through her head.

Had he known it was the end before it was? Had he felt it? In that last moment who had he thought about? Eve, to be sure. Jeff, maybe. But who else? Or was it too quick to think about anything or anyone? One split-second and it was over. How many one split seconds was Jeff facing right now? She tried to breathe for him, tried to force the air from her lungs into his—one more breath so that he might get to the next.

Exhausted by the non-stop battle she had been fighting since she’d first gotten that call in the middle of the night, she let her head fall back against the hard wall. She didn’t want to picture the scene he was living right now, and yet it was all she could focus on. Men racing around, trying to beat back a furious dragon bent on taking them down with it. And it could. It had. Her mind traced to Eve standing by that coffin, and Lisa’s heart twisted. Eve had loved Dustin, but what difference had that made? He was gone now.
From dust we came and to dust we shall return
. He was dust now. Cold and dead. What power had love wielded in the face of that moment when death took him? None.

Death took one look at love and laughed. It had swept Dustin into its arms and flown down into the pits of darkness. Love never fails? Who had been dumb enough to write that? From where she sat, it looked like love never triumphed. Even her mother’s love, that soul-sapping love she had professed to have, had died. It said so down at the county courthouse on the divorce decree.

Eve’s love was lying in a graveyard. Dead. Over and over Lisa had watched girlfriends, clients, employees. One minute they were so in love they were practically hysterical. The next minute they hated the other person. She had to be kidding herself if she thought that love could ever triumph in the end. It was ludicrous. What made her think that their love could last when so many others had perished before them? What made her think that they would be the lucky ones? What made her think that one day that truck wouldn’t pull back into this station, one rider short for all eternity?

And she would be the one left standing, holding a flag in some cold, gray graveyard, and love would again have lost. What was love anyway? It was a feeling, and feelings change. How many times had she said that to Haley when Haley had first come home talking about this wonderful guy she had just met? Walk a mile across burning coals… Lisa laughed softly at the thought. It wasn’t far from what she was doing right now. The searing pain shooting through her at that moment couldn’t have been that different.

Then his face drifted into her consciousness. Jeff holding her. Jeff smiling. Jeff sitting there gaze down that first night in the booth. “Ugh.” Her breath released with one whoosh as she banged her head against the wall, and then her forehead dropped to the hand she put to it. Thinking about him made her heart hurt, and that wasn’t how it was supposed to be.

“Love isn’t about when it’s easy,” her mother said in her ears.

“But does it always have to hurt this bad?” she asked the empty fire station beyond. “Because I don’t think I can stand it if it does.”

The fire was small. One truck. Two holes. Three hours. By eleven o’clock they were backing back into the station. The men around Jeff talked happily, glad to be home and hoping that would be the last call for the night.

“A shower’s going to feel really good right now,” Bob said. “You know you could’ve warned me about that flower bed.”

“How was I supposed to know you were going to take a mud bath in it?” Zack asked as Bob lifted his mud-caked boots from the floor. “I’m thinking, flowers, dirt, water. What did you think it was going to be, a rock garden?”

“Ha. Ha.”

“It’s stand down time, everybody,” Gabe called from the door as he slid out onto the concrete below. “First one to the showers, first one to bed!”

“Hallelujah!” Zack said, jumping down. “Don’t anyone get in my way! I’ve got a date with dreamland.”

Jeff slid out of his seat in the middle as Bob, Zack and the rest of the crew shuffled off to the showers. However, Gabe stayed back to go over the engine in case that wasn’t the only call for the night. When the others were gone, Jeff stopped. “You need some help?”

Gabe looked up as he flipped across the ladder brackets and laughed. “That’s a dumb question.”

“Just thought I’d ask. I can pull that cotton down and get a new one up there.”

“And Bob was worried about what the academy sent us,” Gabe said, shaking his head. “If you’re offering, I’m not saying no.”

With a hit on the engine door, Jeff went around the back, his boots clumping loudly on the floor. It wasn’t a problem helping Gabe out. Sleeping would be the bigger problem anyway. A hand up, and a hand up, and he was up top, pulling the one hose they had actually used down.

“I’m going to go get out of these boots,” Gabe called. “They’re killing my feet.”

Jeff nodded his acknowledgement and went back to work, sliding the hose down the back of the truck. Maybe if he worked a little while longer, he would be so tired he would be able to fall asleep. That would be a new phenomenon. He hadn’t had a good night’s sleep since…

That’s when in the middle of the dead quiet station he first heard the sound. Soft, pitiful, like a muffled sob. His hands stopped as his gaze swept across the room in instant concern. The moment he saw her huddled on the stairs next to the wall in the darkness, he knew who it was. The hose, already halfway down, dropped to the concrete unaided. His turnout gear was still in the truck, there was a hose he had promised to replace lying on the floor, but all his brain could say was that she was needed him right now. She needed him, and all else fell away.

He jumped off the truck, and in three strides he was at the stairs, but his steps slowed on the climb up when she looked down at him. Tear-streaked and care-worn, her face held only sorrow and fear.

“Lis?” he asked softly when his foot found the step two down from her and he slid first to a knee and then all the way down on the step in front of her. She was wrapped around herself, pulling her knees in so closely to her chest that he wondered how she could so much as breathe. Tenderly he reached out to touch her as the sorrow in her eyes knotted around his heart. “Have you been here the whole time?”

She looked at him and gulped back the tears as she nodded. “I couldn’t leave.”

“Oh, baby.” He tried to get closer to her, but the steps weren’t making that easy. “Why didn’t you go home?”

“I… I had to know you were okay,” she said as the tears overtook the words.

“Oh, God, I’m sorry.” When he reached up to brush the hair from her temple, the clasp around her knees broke, and she squeezed her eyes closed, fighting the flood right behind her eyes. She turned to him, and for a moment her head dropped onto his shoulder. He kissed the side of her hair as he held her gently. “I’m so sorry.”

Pain was all he saw in her eyes when she finally pulled back from him. “I’m sorry,” she said brokenly. “I can’t do this. I’ve got to go.”

In the next breath she stood, and her feet carried her past him down the stairs. “No, Lisa, wait.” He tried to grab her hand, but she yanked it away from his grasp as he stood. “Can we talk about this?”

She never slowed down. In
fact, she narrowly missed knocking right into Gabe when he reappeared from the hallway.

“Lis…a,” Gabe said in surprise, following her with his gaze as she opened the station door with a snap, walked out, and slammed it behind her. Then Gabe’s gaze traveled up to Jeff who stood in stunned speechlessness on the stairs above. “Oh, no.”

“Okay, that can’t be good,” Gabe said when the walls stopped ringing from the echo of the
slamming door.

“What makes you think that?” Jeff asked in sarcastic fury. “Everything in my life is always so almighty perfect, why should my love life be any
different?” He walked over to the engine and snapped the latch on the door before climbing into the cab and throwing his turnout gear to the floor below.

“Why didn’t you go after her?”

“Because she’s right, Gabe. She is. She doesn’t need this. She doesn’t need any of this.” He slid out of the cab, jumped to the floor, and slammed the door. “She doesn’t need to be sitting at home waiting for the phone to ring, knowing the next time it does might be worse than the last time it did. She doesn’t need that. She doesn’t.”

“But you need her.”

“You don’t think I know that?” Jeff asked harshly, not at all caring who happened to walk in and hear. “But it’s killing me to see that look in her eyes. It’s just one freak second away from catching up with us, and she knows it.”

“What is? The work?”

“The fire,” Jeff said, straightening so that he stood toe-to-toe, staring at Gabe from point-blank range. In exasperation he shook his head and stepped away. “They don’t give medals to the wives, you know that? For bravery in the face of a life they have no control over. They don’t hand out medals and give speeches for that.” He put his gear on the rack. “No, but it’s the wives who hold it all together at home. They’re the ones who go to the funerals and the hospitals, hoping that next time it won’t be them. And they’re the ones left to take care of the family when something does happen.”

He worked with the coils of hose that wasn’t cooperating and then stood and slammed a hand against the side of the truck. “Damn it.” His hand went up to his face to stop the emotions from pouring out of him. “I can’t ask her to do that. I should never have thought I could.”

“Jeff, this whole thing…”

With one yank Jeff pulled the hose up from the floor. “I’m going to go wash this thing out.” He walked over to the door to the washtub, where he stopped and turned. “Don’t worry about me. Okay? This might take awhile.”

Slowly Gabe nodded, and Jeff pushed the door open and stepped through it.

Tears had never burned so fiercely. Lisa’s eyes hurt from their relentless trek from her heart to her eyes and out onto her cheeks. The lights ahead of her on the freeway blurred as she reached up and swiped the newest batch away, but they were followed immediately by their replacements. How many had she already cried? Hundreds? Thousands? And yet there were that many more stacked up and waiting for a stray thought to hit her.

She sniffed them back and gripped the steering wheel. Confusion reigned in her brain. No thought could stay with her for more than a few moments at a time, and too many of those thoughts centered on what she was driving away from— who she was driving away from. Like he might actually be standing there, she looked in her rearview mirror, and a ghost from what seemed like a lifetime ago stood there, hands in his pockets, watching her drive away. The tears washed over her like a gigantic wave bent on sweeping her right to the bottom.

He had put too much soap in. The suds told him that, but he didn’t really care. If he could’ve dove into them and disappeared forever, he would have. Everything he had told Gabe was true, except for one thing. He had made it sound far too easy to let her go. That was a rip, a cleave, that would never heal, and he knew it. It was a wound destined to bleed from this point until forever and beyond. And he of all people knew about the forever and beyond part. He’d been living it ever since that firefighter had set him on the ground under the night sky kissed by fire and smoke and had run back into that house.

They said the bedrooms were too far gone at that point, the structure too unstable, that Bruce Melio should never have gone back in, and yet Jeff knew why he had. It was because of the pleadings of a 17-year-old kid who knew no better.

Jeff wiped the edge of his cheek with one wet arm. The roof was weak. The fire had already eaten away the attic by that point. They knew that. He didn’t. All he knew was that the two people he loved most were in the middle of those flames, and he pleaded for their lives. A memory ripped through him—a picture of him standing by his mother as the fireman handed a flag to Mrs. Melio, who crumpled over it like a can under a boot. He remembered the two little kids, too small to really understand, watching as their mother was led from the graveyard where their father now lay.

That was the moment that Jeff had decided that this was his destiny. That was the moment, in fact, when he had shattered his own mother’s heart into ever-smaller pieces although she wouldn’t know it for nearly a decade. That was the moment that the course of his life was forever set, and now in the face of that memory, he felt powerless to assimilate where duty to them stopped and love for Lisa started.

Through the long nights after the accident, he had lain awake thinking through all the things he could’ve done differently. Yes, he had felt more helpless and bitter in those hours than most feel in a lifetime. Yet not one moment of that could match how he felt when he looked into Lisa’s frightened, pleading eyes now. He had to let her go, let her get on with her life. It seemed impossible. It felt impossible, but somehow he had to find the strength to walk away. She deserved that much.

“This may be just a job to you,” Lisa said Tuesday afternoon as she faced down Kurt and Joel who stood before her desk like prisoners before a firing squad, “but this is my life. I’m not interested in half-done, shabby-looking, useless trash. Now when you’ve got this office supply campaign ready for someone other than a two-year-old, I want to see it. Until then…” She shooed them out with both hands.

The weekend, extended for Labor Day, had been spent trying to dig out from under the piles of paper on her desk. True, it needed done, but that wasn’t why she did it. Everyone else was going to picnics and parties and fireworks shows. Lisa had never gone to those when she had the inclination. Now, she definitely did not.

All those things smacked of having fun, and that already loathsome concept was made worse by the fact that it now seemed to be a one-way-ticket to thoughts of him. At all costs, she was avoiding thoughts of him.

When they were gone, she sat back for one second and then pulled herself forward. She would not give in to the thoughts stalking her. Not now. Not ever.

If Jeff could’ve kept his mind on the information the teacher was presenting in the hazmat class, it would’ve helped. Not that anything had helped since she’d walked out the door, but he could always hope. Once at home, he poured himself some water. Too tired and too frustrated with himself to make supper, he grabbed a bag of chips, sat down on the couch, and turned on the television. By now he knew the routine, either he would go to sleep on the couch sometime around 4:30 or eventually he would talk himself into going to bed and lay there until the sun came up, telling himself the whole time to just go to sleep.

He hoped it was a go-to-sleep-on-the-couch night. He hated the others. Just as he was settling in, the phone rang, and totally against all reason, he jumped up and rushed over to it, hoping it might be her. “Hello?”

“Mr. Taylor?”

“Yes,” he said as his heart fell.

“This is Zane’s Jewelry. Your ring is ready.”

Spiraling down, his heart plummeted. Why couldn’t life just go away and leave him alone?

“Mr. Taylor?”

“Umm, yeah. I’m here. I’ll try to get by and pick it up as soon as I can,” he said, not meaning one word of it.

“It’ll be ready when you are.”

As he hung up the phone, the word ‘never’ drifted through his mind.

Thoughts of Jeff were never far away from Lisa although she had made it a habit to camp out at her office instead of going home. Two days she had actually gone without sleep. When she did go home, even turning on a light was dangerous, so she mostly left them off. The darkness was good company. It felt safe, like maybe she could hide there, and life wouldn’t notice she was missing.

At work her temper was getting shorter and shorter so that all she had to do was walk into a room, and people ducked for cover. There had been a time in her life when that would’ve felt like power, but now it just felt lonely. She had called Haley who basically said, “I told you so.” And so, finally, by the end of September she was right where she had always thought she wanted to be: dealing with everything on her own. The only problem was she now hated every single moment of the life she had always thought she wanted.

“Taylor?” Captain Hayes asked, walking into the truck maintenance room as Jeff stood replacing the tools he had used to change the oil.

“Yes, Sir?”

“I was under the impression that Lisa would be sending me the schedule for the conference thing any time now, but I haven’t heard anything from her. She didn’t take a trip to Bermuda or anything, did she?”

Jeff went back to his task. “I wouldn’t know, Sir.”

“Uh-huh.” Hayes nodded. “And the fact that she won’t return my calls? You wouldn’t know anything about that either, now would you?”

“No, Sir, I haven’t talked to… her in a couple of weeks.”

“Uh-huh, well, if you could get her a message for me, tell her that it’s going to be hard for me to be there if I don’t know when I’m supposed to be there.”

Jeff nodded. “I’ll try, Sir.”

Hayes stood for a moment, grunted, and walked out just as Gabe walked in.

“Does the fact that we’re in here working on the truck, and they’re out there playing basketball not seem at all fair?”

Jeff hadn’t really thought about it. Working on the truck was something he could still lose himself in, and today more than most days he wanted to do just that. As of this evening he would be one step closer to full-fledged firefighter, but there wasn’t a part of him that really cared.

“So, what did Hayes want?” Gabe asked as he threw the rag he’d just wiped the grease from his hands on to the table. However, the motion was a little too hard, and it slipped off onto the floor. Instantly Jeff leaned down and retrieved it.

“I don’t know, some dumb thing about the conference.”

Gabe stopped and looked at Jeff. “
You still haven’t talked to her?”

Jeff shrugged. “I’ve been busy.”

“Man, you can be so pig-headed when you want to be. You know that?”

“Thank you very much.”

“That wasn’t a compliment.” For a moment Gabe rearranged the tools, and then he stopped. “You know she probably feels the same way.”

“What way?”

“Like the rest of life isn’t worth living if she can’t be with you.”

“I’m flattered.”

“No, man, you’re a guy who’s trashing what could be the best thing in your life, and for what? A stupid job?”

“You want me to quit?”

“No.”

Jeff turned to the workbench. “Well, she does.”

“Do you?”

“No. Yes. I don’t know. I don’t want to have to think about it anymore. Thinking about it
is getting me nowhere.”

“And not thinking about it is getting you…
umm, where?”

Jeff just glared at Gabe and slammed another tool onto the wall.

“Why don’t you call her? Maybe talking will get you somewhere.”

“It never has before,” Jeff retorted. “I don’t see how it’s going to help much now.”

“Well, it’s worth a shot.”

But Jeff knew better. Even if he could come up with the words, he could never say them— for more reasons than he could name.

The machine was blinking when Jeff got home the next morning, and he hit the button.

“Mr. Taylor, this is Zane’s Jewelry.” Jeff closed his eyes wishing life would just go away and leave him alone already. “We still have your ring. Please remember after 30 days it becomes property of the store. Thank you.”

“No. Thank you,” he said sarcastically as he punched the off button.

“Don’t even start,” Lisa said on October first as Tucker sat across the desk from her. “I’m doing the best I can here, and I only have two hands.”

“What about the other six out there?” He pointed to the door.

“Useless,” she said with a shake of her head as she clicked across the screen on her computer and then down the schedule which should have been printed a week ago. Every entry went right through her heart. The travel agency. That was Jeff’s idea. He had sat right there in that chair… “Ugh,” she growled at the screen. “You said we got 700 applications?”

“So far,” Tucker said. “We’re getting more into the office every day. Somehow I don’t think they noticed the September 21
st
deadline.”

“Apparently.”

“Vera was trying to keep up with them, putting the kids in the sessions they asked for and stuff, but then this audit came up, and she got pulled off, and now…”