Crash Lights and Sirens, Book 1 (4 page)

(She’s nice, the single mom. Nick buys her pasta primavera and a bottle of wine, then goes home and walks Atlas and knows the fault is his alone.)

Thursday’s his day off, so he heads to Home Depot to get tile for the downstairs bathroom. The house needed to be gutted when he and Maddie first bought it, ancient wiring and water damage. The floors were rotted through the entire downstairs. It’s not like Nick has got anything but time now though, so he’s ripping it all out real slow—taking it apart room by room and putting it back together how he wants it. He’s not sure what he’ll do when he’s done. It’s not a problem he’s likely to encounter anytime soon; the whole upstairs is still a time warp to the seventies, cabbage roses on the wallpaper and pink carpet in all the bedrooms.

“It’s hideous,” Maddie declared the first time he brought her up. “You can’t be serious.” She’d needed the wheelchair by then, was deliberately sitting on her hands so they wouldn’t twitch. But her smile, her eye roll and her laugh—all of those still worked just fine. “God, really, Nick? Look at the floor.” But her grin was delighted, both of them wheeling her from room to room so she could run a thumb along the avocado-green molding. Before they’d known the Huntington’s would progress so fast, they’d been planning on buying a fixer-upper and flipping it. Still, “I think I had that same wallpaper when I was three,” was Maddie’s final verdict. Her final-final verdict was even firmer—she absolutely didn’t want to put in an offer.

Two hours later she was screaming at him.

Nick had tried. He’d sat her down in their own tiny apartment and explained the whole sorry plan, how he wanted it, how this was something they could do together. But all she could say was, “And after I’m gone, what? What happens then, Nick?” She hadn’t liked the idea of him living alone any better than his sisters.

She wasn’t wrong. In the end, the only room they had time to renovate together was the entryway, stupid and inconsequential. To this day, Nick wishes they’d picked something else. Now it’s just him and Atlas and too much square footage, no visitors except for when Alexandra gets it into her head to bring by food. It’s probably just as well. Nick gets antsy when people are over, protective like he wants to hold out both arms and shield the gutted walls from prying eyes. He’s hoping that feeling will go away after it’s finished.

(“Do you even have a bed?” Taryn had asked last summer, her bare feet curling on the kitchen’s exposed subfloor. Everything smelled like smoke, even the hair between her legs.

“Yeah,” he said, and lifted her to the counter.)

At Home Depot he picks out a nice, bright tile, white with fissures that glow iridescent at the right angle. He’ll grout the backsplash first, work his way down. It’s boring work. He’s not very good at it yet either, which means he can’t concentrate on anything else. That suits Nick fine. He turns up the radio, shoves his sleeves to his elbows. Tries to clear his head. He takes a break halfway through for a sandwich and an Amstel, but for the most part he passes the afternoon unbothered by whatever ghosts live in this house. Atlas pads in as he’s washing the grout from under his nails, whining for a pee. He sulks when Nick doesn’t reach for the leash.

Nick makes a face, nudging the dog toward the back door. “I worked all day, dummy,” he says, holding the screen open so Atlas can trot through. “The hell did you do?”

His phone buzzes on the counter, insistent. There’s a message from Ioanna about the book club woman and also whether or not he’s coming to Stevie’s winter concert, plus a text from Falvey from half an hour ago.
you working tonight?
 

Well. That’s an easy one.
Nope
, Nick tells her.
Try Lynette for a ride.

He opens the freezer to see if there’s anything in there that could possibly become dinner, has just come to the conclusion that he’s probably gonna need to order, when his phone buzzes again.
no, I mean cause of that thing for Ortiz. you going?

Huh. Nick scratches the back of his neck for a minute, considering. Ortiz works with them, a young guy from Lee with a pretty wife and a new baby with a heart defect. There’s a fundraiser for the kid at some strip mall sports bar tonight, a fact Nick had completely forgotten. He guesses he’s got no plans, unless you count another beer and the Bruins game on Channel 5.

Thinking about it, he hedges. Then, making a face at himself even as he keys it in:
you?

The answer buzzes in immediately.
yeah.
Then two seconds later, no smiley faces to tell him where her head’s at,
maybe i’ll see you there.

So.

Christ. Taryn flips the phone over in disgust so it’s sitting face-down in her lap, the back casing all scratched up from the time Mikey tried to glue a smiley face onto it. Only one of the craft store googly eyes is still stuck down.

“Something wrong?” Emily asks, glancing up at the rearview. She doesn’t like looking away from the road a ton when she drives, Doc, jumpy enough that none of the other EMTs ever let her behind the wheel. A couple weeks ago, Taryn took her out to a back lot and tried to teach her how to drive stick. It was a disaster.

Taryn shrugs. “Not really.” And fuck, there isn’t—it’s not like
maybe I’ll see you
is some horribly revealing confession or something. Taryn has no idea what her damage is. The single googly-eye spins round and round in her lap.

“Is it your mom?” Doc asks, merging anxiously. Doc’s one of the only people from work who knows that things at the Falvey home are off, having once overheard a screaming match between Taryn and Jesse in the bathroom at Old Court. Or, at least, she overheard Taryn’s half—Jesse had phoned in a huff, pissed at being stuck on babysitting duty while Taryn was out with Pete. Taryn had had some very choice, very loud words for him about alcohol asphyxiation and the Department of Children and Families. Doc, who was sitting in the third stall, taking an eon to pee, heard the whole thing.

Taryn sticks the phone in her uniform pocket. “No,” she promises, pulling on a smile. “It’s nothing.”

They ride out the rest of the shift with no major incidents, just a routine broken arm on a kid about Connor’s age. He’s brave, so Taryn fishes a lollipop out of the bin they keep under the dash. She texts Jesse as they gas up the bus, predictably getting no reply. He came home two days ago while Taryn was sleeping off a night shift. She startled awake to the sound of Caitlin filling him in on the situation with Pete, first in whispers, then in hoarse shouts.

“You’re such a shithead,” Caitlin hissed when he banged back out the front door, one of the only times Taryn has ever heard her swear. “It was your stupid fault!”

It wasn’t Jesse’s fault, not really. It wasn’t anybody’s fault but Taryn’s. She’d tell him if he would return her calls.

please help me, jess
, Taryn keys into her phone, not bothering to press send.

By the time she changes back into her street clothes, she’s decided to skip the fundraiser altogether. It’s been two solid weeks since she went anyplace besides work or the Price Chopper or the elementary school to talk with Connor’s teacher about why his homework’s not getting done, but wanting to go out for the sake of going out isn’t a good enough reason to leave Caitlin in charge. She’ll make tacos for dinner, maybe. It’s fine.

She spends a good chunk of the drive home trying to figure out if she ought to shoot Nick another text—
jk, sorry, can’t make it after all
—or if that’s hugely presumptuous and lame, but it turns out to be a nonissue because when she lets herself into the house, there’s Jesse on the couch with both boys,
Lethal Weapon
on the TV and six sneakered feet up on the coffee table. “Jesse’s taking us for pizza!” Mikey announces giddily.

Taryn blinks, dropping her bag onto the recliner. “Oh yeah?” she asks, scritching her fingers through his carroty hair. Mikey’s only six, a good-natured chubster of a kid. She looks at Jesse. “You are?”

Jesse nods like somebody who hasn’t been totally MIA for the vast majority of the last three months. The
duh
is implicit. “Don’t sound so shocked,” he says.

Taryn bites back the retort on the tip of her tongue—this is way, way more than she was hoping for, after all, gift horse, et cetera. “Okay,” she says, smiling. “Thank you.”

There was a time when it wouldn’t have been a big deal for Jesse to take the kids for the night—for a full weekend, even, like he did when Taryn and Pete first started dating and went to Lake George for Memorial Day. She and Jesse have been a team from the time they were kids, through both of their mom’s remarriages—to Caitlin’s dad, who was okay, and to the boys’, who was not—and her half-dozen stints in AA. Both of them have been working since they were preteens, paying for whatever Rosemary couldn’t cover with short-term gigs or a government check. Jesse potty trained Connor all on his own. It was part of what made Taryn think she could make it work with Pete, the way Jesse helped her dam up the worst of the Falvey tidal wave. She thought she could be normal, just for a second. She thought she could have something normal.

Anyway. Turns out that’s not true.

Taryn flips through the mail on the table in the hallway—takeout menus, plus a letter from the bank she knows she has to look at but doesn’t have the stomach for right now—then heads upstairs to change her clothes. She digs through the messy closet for something that doesn’t look like she’s trying too hard for a pass-the-hat affair at a bar that reeks of buffalo wings most of the time, finally settling on a plaid flannel button-down that’s admittedly kind of tight in the chest. She’s rolling the sleeves up when Caitlin wanders in looking for snow boots. “You coming for pizza?” she asks hopefully.

Taryn smiles. “How about I drive you guys over?”

In the end even Rosemary tags along, one of her better nights, clear eyes and Mikey draped across her lap in the backseat. Taryn’s careful to pick a chain that doesn’t serve alcohol. She and Jesse made that mistake once and never again when they were teenagers, Fishbowl Friday and a triple bar rail of your choice served in an actual aquarium. It had been Caitlin’s fifth birthday party, a dozen of her tiny school friends sequestered away in the ball pit until their parents arrived. Now they always check.

“Good to go?” Taryn asks once everyone’s settled into the sticky booth. She’s reluctant to leave now that it involves turning her back on one of the most family-friendly displays the Falveys have managed in a solid month. Why couldn’t Pete have walked in on this? Both Connor and Mikey are ignoring her happily, clean and dressed, hanging all over their mom like puppies waiting to be cuddled. Rosemary’s pale, bright hair actually looks brushed. “I could wait until you guys have ordered, or…”

Jesse gives her a stiff nod, placing his wallet squarely on the table.

(“I guess I’ll just pay for everything, then?” he asked when she first announced her plans to move out. And no, she told him, no, she’d still chip in, she’d come by all the time, she’d feed the kids, she’d babysit. He asked her how much the rent on Pete’s condo was and slammed the door.)

Taryn sighs. Point taken. “Okay,” she says, waving goodbye to Caitlin, who’s annexed herself to the corner with a book peeking out the top of her big-girl purse. “Have fun.” As an afterthought she leaves Jesse the keys, the strip mall just a bus ride away. She can always get a ride back with Doc, or—

Well. She’ll cross that bridge when she comes to it.

The event’s already in full swing by the time she gets there. Taryn pauses under the electronic countdown to St. Patrick’s Day—thirty-seven days, four hours, eleven minutes, and fifty-five seconds, apparently—and strips off her gloves with her teeth. Doc is over by the bar with her drip of a boyfriend, Eddie or Elijah or something equally forgettable, Ortiz himself holding court at a center table with a dark-haired woman tucked under his arm. Taryn shucks off her coat and heads their way. She doesn’t have a whole lot of money to give, even for a baby with a heart defect.

Twenty-five bucks is better than nothing though, so Taryn folds the bills up to cover the numbers before dropping them into the bucket on the table. “Thanks so much for coming,” Ortiz’s wife says. She’s wearing full makeup, but underneath her carefully applied eyeliner it’s clear she hasn’t slept in weeks. Taryn smiles, feeling weirdly tight in her throat.

(“I think you’re a softie,” Pete said once, lying in bed and winding a long strand of her red hair around his fingers,
The Daily Show
murmuring quietly on the TV on his dresser. Pete was fanatical about the fucking
Daily Show
; they’d have sex before or after, but never during. “Underneath all your tough-guy paramedic stuff that you do.” He was just as wrong about that as he was about everything else when it came to her, basically, but it doesn’t mean a sick kid doesn’t get to her every now and then.)

She glances around for Kanelos—has been glancing around for Kanelos since she got here, if she’s being honest with herself—but either he’s disguised as a seventy-year-old woman playing Keno in the corner or he didn’t show after all. Taryn tries not to feel disappointed about that. If the past couple of months have proven anything, it’s that she can’t afford to be mooning over a guy. Any guy, Jesus, but especially not one as impossible as Nick.

She doesn’t want to think about Nick anymore, or about Pete, or about babies with holes in their hearts, so she heads over to the bar and orders herself a two-dollar draft. Doc spots her and comes crashing over in a cashmere sweater that probably cost half of Taryn’s take-home. “Are you getting food?” she asks, leaning into Taryn’s stool as she orders a vodka cran. “I would kill somebody for a quesadilla right now.”