“I think Mary wanted to know if you always had ambitions to be”—for a second Boyd thought she was going to say “brave firefighters,” but she caught herself—“part of the fire department.”
That was another question they got every year. If Boyd was there, he usually caught it first. His story—his dad was a firefighter, his grandfather a fire captain who died in the big mill fire the kids still heard about, and he always wanted to take up the legacy, even with the glasses and Ritalin prescription—generally played well to the under-ten crowd. But today the words stuck in his throat, and his chest felt painfully tight.
“I guess. I—that’s a good question.” He got that out and then choked.
Danni gave him a concerned look, but she stepped forward, all big bright smile and never-still hands as she talked.
“I always wanted to be a hairdresser,” she said, and everyone laughed. “Except I was really bad at it. I was bad at alotof things until I found something I was good at in the fire department.”
Boyd tuned her out as he cleared his throat in irritation. He knew this script. He’d done this a dozen times in Cutter’s Gap and some of the neighboring towns. Inspire, encourage, and tell the kids not to set fire to things—it was an easy assignment, and he’d always wanted to be a firefighter.
Right?
Danni nudged him. “And as for glasses,” she said, “I’ll let Boyd answer that since I have great eyesight. Boyd?”
He swallowed the lump that was still in his throat and grinned at the boy who’d asked the question. The kid had mild brown eyes behind thick lens.
“Firefighters do have to be able to meet certain vision requirements,” he said. “But wearing glasses doesn’t automatically disqualify you. I have contacts that I wear most days, and if I have to respond to a night call and don’t have time to put them in? I have brackets in my SCBA—that’s self-contained breathing apparatus—mask so I can wear my glasses. See?”
He’d brought his mask with him, slung over his arm, for show and tell. As he crouched down, the kids scrambled over so he could show them the insets and then slip the mask on over his glasses. The weight of the mask pushed his glasses down against his nose and pinched the bridge. It wasn’t supposed to do that, and he’d had it adjusted a dozen times, but it always did.
Sticky fingers left marks on the mask as the kids poked the plastic lenses and pulled at the straps. One of them tried to climb onto his shoulder like a parrot, and Ms. Kettler had to clap her hands together again to get them to shuffle back into position.
Back on track, Boyd stripped off the mask—that would definitely need a wash—and pushed himself back to his feet. He passed the baton to Danni to cover how much stuff a “girl firefighter” did. By the end of the course, the kids all wanted to be firefighters, and Jessica had been sent to the headmaster’s office because she asked if they’d ever seen a dead body.
DANNI SATin the driver’s seat of the truck with the door open and her heavy boots dangling out as she sucked down a bottle of Gatorade.
“You know what I’m scared of?” she said. “Ten years’ time, and one of those girls turns up at my door, just so pissed at me that I lied about how it didn’t matter that I have tits.”
“She’ll be fifteen,” Boyd pointed out as he shrugged out of his jacket. He could smell himself—hot skin, sour sweat, and the vague smoke-and-foam smell that never quite left his equipment. “Although if it’s Jessica, I don’t blame you for being scared.”
Danni nodded slowly. “Yeah, she was really into dead people,” she said. “But not really fire, so that’ll be Mac’s problem. What happened to you?”
She held out the Gatorade. Boyd shrugged as he grabbed it from her and took a swig. It was cherry. Again. He wiped his mouth and handed it back.
“I don’t know,” he said. “Just… made me think.”
“And the new experience scared you?” Danni teased. She stretched out her leg and poked him with her boot. The amusement faded from her face to leave something more serious. “I always figured it bothered you to come back here, but you never let it get to you before. You okay?”
Boyd chuckled without much humor. “It’s not that. I went to school here, remember, even after Sammy disappeared. It’s weird sometimes, but I got used to it. It’s just… some stuff has come up—”
“I heard that something new came up in the Calloway case?” she said cautiously.
That was definitely the sort of thing Mac didn’t want spread, but Boyd needed to talk to someone who wasn’t intimately connected with everything that had happened or was currently about to happen. He affirmed Danni’s guess with a brief nod and tossed his jacket in behind her.
“I can’t talk about it, but that’s going on. Then the kid asked about if I always wanted to be a firefighter. And I don’t know.”
“We’re going to be friends forever, Boyd.”He remembered Sammy’s confident voice as they “rescued” the cat from under the bed.“And we’ll be firefighters, and Shay will make sure we’ve got the fastest fire engine in town.”
“You wanted to be like your dad,” Danni said. “Most kids do.”
“Honestly, mostly I wanted to be friends with Sammy and ride around in a fire truck,” Boyd said. It hadn’t really been an ambition. They were kids who wanted a future that wouldn’t change anything, one where they still spent all day together and then hung out together in the evening until bedtime. “And after Sammy disappeared, I guess I felt I couldn’t change my mind? I mean, God, what if I don’t want to be firefighter?”
“Do something else,” Danni said with a shrug. “What are they going to do, drag you out of your accountant’s office and force you to go to incidents? It’s your life, man. They can’t make you do anything.”
That sounded good, but it didn’t feel true. Boyd tried to imagine everyone’s reaction—Mrs. Calloway, Shay, Mac—if he threw in the towel. It wouldn’t be pretty.
Before he could say that, the radio crackled with a callout—welfare check on a foul odor, which usually meant meth lab or corpse—and he climbed into the truck as Danni grabbed the handset to confirm they were on it.
