Disguised Blessing (4 page)

“As soon as the morphine takes effect, she won’t feel the pain.”

“But what about her back? Shouldn’t they—”

“They have to keep her airway open and they can’t do it if she’s on her stomach.”

“Her airway?”

“It’s just a precaution.”

Two firefighters stood at each end of the gurney and guided it off the dock and up the hill. Lynda rolled her head from side to side, looking for a familiar face. “Mommy? Where are you?”

Catherine ran after them, calling, “I’m right here.” She made it to Lynda’s side and reached for her hand. “I’m coming with you.” She looked to one of the men in white for confirmation.

“Are you the mother?”

“Yes.”

“You’ll have to ride in the front—and there’s only room for one.”

Again, Catherine looked for Tom. She found him standing on the porch talking to a firefighter. “I’ll be right back,” she told Lynda. To the man in white she said, “Don’t leave without me.”

She ran to Tom and grabbed his arm to get his attention. “I’m going to the hospital with Lynda. Get my purse and meet me there with the car.”

“Now?” He glanced around at the assembled people as if he were the host of a party and couldn’t leave.

“Yes—
now.”
Instantly she went from being furious to contrite. He had no way of knowing Lynda was being flown to Sacramento and that they had to drive there to meet her. “Don’t forget my purse,” she said in a conciliatory tone. “I’ll need the insurance card.”

“How do I get to the hospital?”

The question dumbfounded her. Tom was a takecharge person. A man who gave orders, not took them. “I don’t know. Ask someone.”

He said something more, but she was halfway to the ambulance and couldn’t hear him over the sound of the engine. She had her hand on the door handle when she realized Brian had come up beside her.

He held out his hand and then turned it over. Lynda’s earrings filled his palm. “They were hot. I took them off so they couldn’t burn her anymore.”

He looked lost and devastated. He needed reassurance, but she had none to give. She put the earrings in her pocket and then gave him a quick hug. “Thank you—for everything.”

Two men, a firefighter and an ambulance attendant, climbed in back with Lynda. They worked with quiet efficiency in the cramped space, one cutting off her clothes, the other hanging an IV.

“How is the pain now?” Catherine heard one of them ask.

“Better,” Lynda murmured.

“There aren’t any medals for bravery around here. I want you to tell me when it hurts so I can do something about it.”

“I will.”

The depth of relief in Lynda’s voice made Catherine flinch. Lynda never gave in to pain. She’d even refused aspirin when she’d broken a tooth and exposed the nerve.

Catherine felt something in her hand and looked down at flecks of Lynda’s hair caught between her fingers. She rolled them in her palm until they turned into a fine powder.

She tried, but couldn’t stop her tears. What was to become of her beautiful, carefree daughter?

R
ICK SAWYER SPOTTED THE ROILING BLACK SMOKE
from the car fire six blocks away. He tapped his engineer’s arm and pointed. Steve McMahon nodded.

“Looks like it’s been going for a while,” Rick said. The fire was in the middle of an apartment complex in the poorer section of their district, and was most likely set by someone covering a theft. Car fires with bodies inside were rarely set in public places.

Steve slowed and hit the air horn as they neared an intersection, then swung the fire engine into the turn lane to go around the stopped traffic. Although bored with being at a slow firehouse, Rick liked his crew, especially his engineer. Steve knew his district and wasn’t a frustrated race car driver. He handled the fire engine with such finesse it could have been a sports car, and he had the uncanny knack of knowing precisely how Rick wanted to fight a fire from the moment they arrived on the scene.

“Hey, Captain—look over there,” Paul Murdoch said over the intercom.

Rick twisted in his seat to look out the back where the rookie pointed. Paul had spotted the fire. His grin of anticipation at responding to his first fire exposed every tooth in his mouth.

“That’s it all right.” Rick gave him a thumbs-up signal and turned back around, shaking his head.

Steve laughed. He’d heard the exchange through the headset that connected the cab to the rear-facing back seat. To Rick, he said, “You forget what it was like when you first came on until you get a rookie to remind you.”

Rick had been with the Sacramento Fire Department for eighteen years and could remember his first fire as clearly as if it had happened his last shift. His baptism had been more memorable than most—a warehouse fire where he’d found a transient still alive when every rule of medicine said he should have been long dead. Nothing in the intervening years had come close to the horror he’d felt that night. Now the ones he remembered were the saves. The man whose heart had stopped beating, who brought a cake to the firehouse three weeks later; the five-year-old girl they’d pulled from the bottom of a swimming pool, whose mother now brought her to the firehouse every year on the day she was rescued to celebrate her rebirth day; the thirteen-year-old who wrote them a letter thanking them for rescuing his dog from a burning garage.

Steve pulled into the apartment complex and around the back where they were greeted by an
excited man waving his arms. The car was an Oldsmobile, a ‘74 or ‘75, lowered, with junk rims and small tires used for spares in a lot of new cars. Rick called dispatch and told them that there were no structures involved and that their engine could handle the call, then climbed out of the cab and went over to the man.

“I got everybody out,” he said. “I told them they had to leave or they were going to be trapped inside when this thing blew and I couldn’t be responsible for getting to them if that happened. Figured it was my job being I’m the manager and all.”

Rick checked to see that his firefighter, Janet Clausen, had taken the hose off the rig and that the rookie wasn’t standing around with his hands in his pockets. “There were people inside the car?”

“No, inside the apartments. The car’s been here for weeks. Dumped one night with the insides gutted so it wasn’t no good to nobody. We called the cops. They said they’d come out but they never did.”

“So you cleared the apartments?”

“Got everybody over there.” He pointed to a group of men and women and kids, from toddlers to teens, intently watching the action from the sidewalk.

“Thanks.” He shook the man’s hand. “We appreciate your help. It makes our job a lot easier.”

The man lit up like a flashlight in a blackout. “Hey, no problem. I seen how these cars can go up when they start burning and I didn’t want no one hurt. I take care of the people who live here.”

“I’ll be sure and put what you did in my report.” Gently, he maneuvered the man away from the engine. “Now I think it would be better if you stayed over there with the others and let us take care of this.”

“Yeah, right.” He grinned. “Wouldn’t want to become no statistic after I went and saved everybody else.”

They had the fire out, the stolen car report to the police department, and the hose reloaded, and were back at the station cooking dinner—barbecued chicken, potato salad, and green beans—within forty-five minutes.

Paul looked up from dicing an onion for the salad. “Hey, Capt’n, mind if I ask a couple of questions about the fire?”

“Ask as many as you want.” Rick added a couple of shakes of garlic powder to the mayonnaise mixture and set the bowl aside.

“They taught us at the tower that burning cars don’t explode. And yet you told—”

“Do they explode on television?”

“Yeah, all the time. But—”

“Then they explode in real life. You’re never going to convince anyone Hollywood got it wrong, so you might as well save your breath.”

“So you were just shittin’ the guy?”

“I was thanking him. He did what he did believing he could be blown up at any moment. No way was I going to take that away from him.”

“Then they were right at the tower? Cars don’t explode?”

Rick didn’t mind the questions. The rookies that scared him were the ones who came out of the tower convinced they knew it all. “I didn’t say that. And the minute you believe it, you’ll have one go up on you.”

He opened the pickle jar and handed half a dozen to Paul to chop. “For an explosion to happen the tank has to be pressurized. If the vent got plugged somehow or the fill tube got closed off, theoretically, you could have it blow. In an accident, you’re more likely to be working with a ruptured tank and a rapid burn.

“What you have to remember is that to the layperson, there’s not even a fine line between an explosion and a rapid burn. While nothing goes flying through the air with a rapid burn, it’s impressive as hell to see gasoline pouring out and burning everything in sight.”

The captain’s phone rang in Rick’s office, interrupting the lesson. He wiped his hands. “I’ll be right back.”

Lyn Cassidy from the Firefighters’ Burn Association skipped her usual meandering path to the reason for her call and got right to the point. “I have a big favor. I know I promised you could have the summer off, but I’m desperate. We had a girl come in a couple of days ago and no one is available to take her case until August.”

Rick had graduated his last burn patient that past spring, a difficult case that had lasted four months past the prescribed twelve. The boy had years of treatment ahead of him, but was finally strong
enough emotionally for Rick to step back and let him reach out to others.

“What about Faith?” Both of the kids they’d taken care of last had graduated from the program at the same time.

The Burn Association assigned member firefighters as mentors for burned children and their families. They acted as guides through the tangle of agencies and programs available to patients, and as sympathetic listeners when the child or parent simply needed someone to talk to. Rick was convinced the program worked as well as it did because of the care taken with the pairings. With few exceptions, they’d found that children related best to someone of the same sex.

“She’s leaving for France next week.”

“Sydney?”

“Pregnant.”

He hadn’t heard the news, and he put it in the back of his mind to call and congratulate her and Manuel when he got off the phone with Lyn. “How old is this girl?” The age made a big difference. There wasn’t as much psychological damage when the patient’s body image hadn’t been set mentally. The younger the kids were, the more readily they accepted the scars as part of their makeup. Once the image was set, the change could be, and often was, devastating.

“Fifteen.”

Rick flinched. “How bad is she?”

“Twenty percent. Her back mostly. Some upper
arm involvement, some neck, one forearm, but no buttocks or head.”

“I’ve never worked with a girl that age. Would that be a problem?”

“I don’t know. It may be,” she added with reluctant honesty. “You’re the only man I even considered asking. If you can’t take her, I’ll wait until Faith can.”

“Tell me about her.”

“Her mother says she’s outgoing and gregarious. Very pretty. A cheerleader, and an athlete. Good student. Popular. No steady boyfriend. Goes out a lot with friends but isn’t into the one-on-one yet.”

“What happened?”

“She was at a party at their vacation home near Tahoe with friends and her sweater caught on fire. She panicked and ran. She got quite a ways before one of the boys caught her. Her mom’s single, but there’s a fiancé. I’m not sure how much help he’s going to be, though. He seems a little skittish to me.”

“What do you mean?”

“Not the kind who comes through in a crisis. Every time I’ve been at the hospital, he’s off somewhere and the mother is looking for him.”

“How is the mom handling it?”

“She’s still in shock. I have a feeling there’s some guilt working in the mix, but she’s not talking about it. At least not to me.”

“Can you give me a couple of hours to think about this?” He knew how to reach fifteen-year-old
boys; he didn’t pretend to understand the first thing about girls that age.

“I know I promised you the summer off…”

He’d been remodeling his house for eight years. Somehow, despite his best intentions, life kept getting in the way. “That’s not it,” he said. “I just don’t want to step into something where I might do more harm than good.”

“So you can’t talk boyfriends with her. You’re a hell of a lot better than no one being there at all. And if you think she needs to talk to a woman later, I’m sure Faith will give you a hand.”

“I’d like to think about it tonight at least.”

“That’s fine. But could you get back to me first thing in the morning?”

“Why then?”

“I have an appointment with the mother at ten. I’d like to be able to tell her when and if she can count on us.”

“And if I say yes?”

“Then I’ll call and tell her you’ll be taking the meeting.”

Rick hesitated. “Actually, it might help me decide what to do if I talked to her and got a feel for the situation. Tell her to expect me, but don’t say anything about my being officially assigned yet.”

“What if I tell her that you’re there for the initial hospital stay and let it go at that?”

“Sounds good.” Rick hung up and immediately dialed his neighbor, Sandra Brahams. He’d scheduled a delivery from the lumberyard for the next morning and someone had to be there to sign the receipt.

“You going to be home tomorrow morning—say, until around noon?” he said at her hello.

She laughed. “It’s a good thing I know your voice. Yes, as a matter of fact, I am. Who’s delivering what?”

“Meeks Lumber is bringing a load of drywall and the redwood for the back deck.”

“Where do you want it unloaded?”

“The garage is okay.” He had someone coming that weekend to help him hang the drywall in the dining room and kitchen or he would have postponed the delivery.

“Overtime?”

Sandra knew his schedule almost as well as he did. They shared a golden-Lab mix named Blue that lived at her and Walt’s house when Rick was working and at Rick’s whenever the dog saw his truck in the driveway. “A new kid came into the hospital a couple of nights ago. I have a meeting with the mother and her fiancé at ten.”

“I thought you said you were taking a couple of months off.”

“Yeah, well, you know how that goes.” In the background Rick saw the hall lights go on, the precursor to the bells going off for an alarm. “Gotta go, Sandra. There’s a run coming in.”

“See you tomorrow.”

Rick headed for the kitchen to help put the food away. The rookie sported a grin, the rest of the crew a look of acceptance. Rick shoved the potato salad in the refrigerator and went to the computer for the printout of the details of the call. He gave the
address to Steve and told his crew that they were responding to a woman locked out of her car.

Steve pulled into the parking lot of the Bel Air Supermarket, the one where they shopped for the firehouse. Rick looked around for a blue Acura and spotted it on the far side by the cleaners.

“Did you get the chicken off the barbecue?” Steve asked Rick.

“Not me.” Rick opened his microphone and looked at the back seat. “Either one of you get the chicken?”

“Uh-uh,” Janet said.

“What chicken?” Paul asked.

“Maybe we’d better order a pizza before we leave,” Rick said.

“Shit—not again.” Steve groaned. “I hate pizza.”

“Let’s see…” Rick held up his hands and moved them as if weighing the options. “Burned chicken…pizza. It’s your call.”

“What about Chinese?”

“Not enough money in the food fund.”

“Jesus—what happened to it? We were fifty dollars to the good last time I looked.”

“That standing rib roast we had last shift wiped us out.”

“Uh…Capt’n…,” Paul said. “I think there’s someone trying to get your attention.”

Rick looked up to see a woman standing beside the blue Acura. He assumed she was the owner. She glared at him, her hands on her hips, her mouth rapidly moving, her eyes full of fire. To Steve he
said, “You suppose she’s telling us we’re not moving fast enough to suit her?”

“Nah—she’s probably saying she left a chicken on the barbecue and wants to get home before it burns.”

Rick laughed. “Only an idiot would do something like that.”