Before I can finish my sentence, the station’s alert system kicks in.
“Think I’m becoming psychic in my old age,” he mutters as we bustle out of the lounge to respond to whoever needs us at one o’clock in the morning in this great, big, chaotic city.
***
By the time I get home from Station 47, it’s almost five in the evening and I’m running on scattered sleep. In the past twenty-four hours, I’ve stitched up a nasty stab wound, stabilized a burn victim, tended to three sorority girls who definitely snortedsomething they weren’t supposed to, transported an NYU freshman with alcohol poisoning to Mount Sinai, and responded to a minor car wreck on Broadway.
All in a day’s work.
Now, when I step into my apartment, it smells like Chef Boyardee and crayons. Leo’s latest art project is taped to the fridge, the glitter glue still drying around the edges, and Rosa is very subtly slipping sweet potato puree into my son’s canned ravioli—which is the only thing he’ll eat lately, so we’ve had to get creative.
“Hey, Evan,” Rosa calls over her shoulder.
“Hey! Where’s—”
“Daddy!”
Leo comes barreling around the corner, all knees and elbows as he crashes into me. I scoop him up, all the tension from my shift immediately melting away as I take in the sight of his carefree smile.
“Hey, buddy!”
“Me and Rosa built a firetruck out of Legos!”
“Attempted to build,” she clarifies with a laugh. “We tried our best.”
I set Leo down and try to take my jacket off, but he’s already yanking me down the hall to the tiny living room. Rosa chuckles in the kitchen. She’s been Leo’s babysitter since he was a toddler and Bella was still alive. She’s an older woman with adult children who have already flown the nest and she lives downstairs in the same building, so it’s worked out perfectly to have her help me out with Leo while I’m at the station.
Leo does a little dance as he waves his hands dramatically at the hard plastic construction on the coffee table. The firetruck in question is… abstract. It’s a little lopsided and it appears to only have three wheels, but there’s a tiny ladder and a bunch of little firefighter figurines that Leo has lined up neatly.
“This is the captain, just like Uncle Hale,” he informs me, holding up a figurine with a cartoonish frown. “And this is Old Bill because he has a big mustache. And this one is Noah because of he’s got huge arms. Oh, and this one is Miss Rita, but Rosa let me use a marker to color her hair blue. And this one is you because he fixes the broken people.”
Leo holds up what looks like a tiny surgeon in green scrubs, which isn’t quite accurate, but there’s no point in correcting a seven-year-old.
“The broken people, huh?” I shrug out of my jacket and crouch down next to the table with Leo.
“Mmhmm. See? This dinosaur’s tail fell off, so you helped put it back on.”
“How did his tail fall off?”
Leo giggles. “I cut it off with scissors.”
“Supervised!” Rosa chimes in from where she can overhear us in the kitchen. “It was supervised scissor usage!”
My son beams brightly and nods.
This time, I can’t help laughing. Kids are so weird.
Leo continues chattering, happily showing me all the finer details of the firetruck and its crew. But when Rosa calls him to the table for dinner, after which she’ll head out for the evening, my attention drifts toward the television on the other side of the small room. It’s playing the local news, and just when my gaze hits the screen, a glossy political ad starts up.
Andrew Banks. Leadership New Yorkers Can Trust.
My stomach drops.
“Now is not the time for people to be losing faith in their public servants,” the ad begins, Banks’ gravelly voice making him sound like he’s the narrator of a Ford truck commercial. “Unfortunately, Station 47 has lost its way. While hardworking families struggle, taxpayer dollars are wasted on social media stunts and vanity projects.”
Clips flash across the screen. Slivers of Noah’s infamous shirtless cat rescue, as well as a completely unrelated clip of Old Bill pretending to snooze behind the wheel of one of our engines, which was posted ages ago as part of a humorous campaign thatmultiplestations participated in.
And then there are more recent clips that have obviously been stolen from the content that Lila has posted. They’re carefully edited to make it look like we’re all just a bunch of idiots fooling around. Someone with a good eye took a fine-toothed comb to it all.
