I glanced up at the open maw of Silla’s door, steaming like the gateway to hell. Dim flames glittered within, but it seemed that the firefighters got the best of it. The smell of burning insulation had obliterated the scent of incense.
I snagged one of the EMTs as she went by. “Hey, has anybody seen a blond guy, maybe six feet tall, black jacket? He went back into the building to help, I think.”
The EMT shook her head. “No.” She triggered her radio and asked the firefighters. There was a brief volley of conversation, and someone took the oxygen bag from me. I waited, dripping and shivering, hoping that she would say that Merrel had been found in the confusion.
“They haven’t seen him,” she said. “But part of the building is too hot still to search.”
I looked back at the bar. I hoped he’d gotten out, that he was on his way home, safe and sound.
Curt stood beside me and offered me a shiny foil emergency blanket. I wrapped the crinkly material around my shoulders.
“Some night, huh?” he said, shaking his head.
I closed my eyes. “This. This is why I don’t go out anymore.”
CHAPTER 3: THE OFFERING
So I had something of a reputation for attracting catastrophe.
It started pretty early, when I was a teenager. When I was fifteen, I got in a car accident with my older sister. She’d been driving me home from a dance and swerved to avoid a deer. The car tumbled down an embankment, and we were trapped in the car, hanging upside down for almost an hour before a truck driver found us. I remembered whispering in the dark to her, telling her that it was going to be all right. Broken safety glass glittered in our hair, like ice, and I recalled the feeling of my blood pounding in my skull and blood dripping on the ceiling of the car.
My sister had been pretty badly hurt. She’d crushed her pelvis and had been in a wheelchair for months afterward. I had made out better, with a broken leg. We’d been cut out of the car and taken to a hospital, where the surgeons they summoned put us back together. I was fascinated at how they’d taken the bone jutting out of my thigh and folded it back, sewing me together like a doll with pins and stitches. My ambitions of playing soccer that year were blown, but I healed well. I had a small scar now, but never really thought about the injury much anymore.
My sister hadn’t been so lucky. She’d fallen into a depression after that, and I don’t think she ever fully climbed out of it. I wished that minds could be stitched together as easily as bodies, but her invisible wounds seemed untouchable by therapists and practitioners of the mind. I felt guilty, knowing that she wouldn’t have been out on the road if but for me.
When I was in college, there’d been a shooter at my school. I remembered the panic and the fear as I ran away from a classroom where distant pop-pop noises echoed. I learned later that the shooter had been a guy in my Psychology 101 class. He succeeded in killing our professor, the teaching assistant, and two girls in class who’d made fun of his dick pics.
Over the years, I’d come across a bus accident, a man having a heart attack in a waffle house at three a.m., a guy who overdosed on meth, and a woman who drank drain cleaner...and that was before I ever got to medical school. I felt as if things abated somewhat after that. I saw enough trauma every day at work that the outside world seemed to fade away. I went to work and back and rarely put myself out far enough in the world to encounter any random violence.
But things still happened. On my first day at Riverpointe General, a guy got crushed in an elevator fall. The first time I had dinner with Curt and Kara at a diner down the street, a guy tried to rob the place ten minutes after we arrived and committed suicide by cop. We’d spent dinner cowering in a stall in the ladies’ room.
It was fair to say that I should have grown numb to some of this stuff.
But I never really did. I felt an immense sense of sadness for people who suffered. Sometimes, I could do things to ease their pain. Sometimes not. And when I couldn’t, I still took it very, very personally.
After Silla’s burned, I called Nora for a ride home. I borrowed a tarp from the firefighters, and the three of us piled into the back of her car, dripping water and apologies onto the tarp. Nora waved the apologies away and took us through a drive-through for cheeseburgers before depositing us home, one after the other.
Carl was first. He walked up the steps to his townhouse, silent, his hands in his pockets. He’d been renovating it for the last six months, and I could see the new landscaping he’d put in – stones and variegated dogwood. It looked nice, like he was really creating a home for himself. He’d always considered himself a bit of a nomad, and I knew that it took effort for him to consciously put down roots. That was probably a comfort to him, now, flipping the light to the kitchen he’d built and walking the floors he’d sanded with his own hands.
Kara and I rode in silence after that, listening to the low-volume dance music that Nora played. Kara reached out and grasped my hand. Wordlessly, I held it. I didn’t know what to say about tonight. But I was grateful I hadn’t been alone.
Nora stopped the car before Kara’s address. Kara climbed out, and I watched her let herself in the front door of her bungalow. There were lights on, and a pair of cats sitting in the window, waiting for her. The black one with the star on her chest was Astrid, and the orange one, Sol, was washing her ears. I was glad that Kara would have the cats to soothe her, but I felt a pang of sadness knowing that there was no one waiting for me at home.
My friends had been building lives for themselves, despite their demanding jobs. I barely managed to keep ketchup on hand in my refrigerator. I could pack up everything I owned and put it in the pack of a pickup truck. I sunk into the seat, wondering what I’d built for myself.
“Penny for your thoughts,” Nora said.
I sighed. “I think...I think that I’ve built the career I always wanted. I’m good at it. I help people. But I feel like something’s missing, sometimes.”
Nora nodded at the rearview mirror. “It’s hard. When you achieve a goal, I mean. Nobody ever tells you what to do after.”
“Yeah.” I looked down at my hands. “I’ve spent all my life chasing a goal. Now that I have it...I feel a little lost.”
“It will come to you,” Nora said with certainty. “When you experience something like you’ve experienced tonight, perspective sometimes comes. Maybe not this instant. But it will come later.”
I smiled. “I wish I had your certainty.”
Nora pulled up before my apartment building. I gathered the tarp from the car and offered her a handful of soggy cash. She took it.
“You were right,” I said. “That place was rubbish.”
She gave me a half-smile and cracked her gum. “But you made it through in one piece. Just...call me first before you try any new places.”
“I will.” I nodded, wadding the tarp up against my ruined halter top. It was stained with red from my hairspray experiment. It looked like I’d walked out of a massacre.
She pulled away, and I took the elevator up to my apartment. I let myself in and headed straight for the shower. After three washings, I got the last of the red color and most of the smell of smoke out of my hair.
I wrapped myself in a fuzzy robe and padded to the bedroom. I didn’t bother to turn on any more lights. The drapes over the windows and the balcony door glowed with ambient light from the city.