Page 46 of Christmas with Three Firemen

I work through it methodically. Check her eyes, her airway, her oxygen levels with the kit’s pulse oximeter. She watches me do all of it without speaking.

“You’ve done this before,” she says eventually.

“Field medicine. Two deployments.”

She absorbs that. “Army?”

“Marines.”

A pause. “How long?”

“Eight years.”

She looks at me steadily. There’s a question behind her eyes that she isn’t asking yet, which is how she operates. She banks things and waits for the right moment.

I put the kit away.

“Why don’t you push?” she asks. “You never push. You didn’t push me on the roof. You didn’t push me in the car just now. You just wait.”

I think about how to answer that honestly.

“Overseas,” I say, “the guys who got pushed to talk before they were ready were the ones who eventually stopped talking altogether. You push someone before they’re ready and you don’t get the truth. You get whatever they think you want to hear, and then the door closes, and it doesn’t open again.”

She’s quiet for a moment.

“So you wait,” she says.

“So I wait.”

She looks at her hands in her lap. The equipment room is small and warm, and the overhead light is steady and outside the blizzard keeps going, muffled through the walls, present but distant.

“That’s a hard thing to learn,” she says finally.

“It is.”

“Did someone push you before you were ready?”

I consider that. “A few people tried.”

Her eyes come up to mine. Something in them has shifted, some layer of the careful professional distance she maintains thinning out at the edges. She recognizes something in what I’ve said.

She recognizes a wound that took a long time to stop being fresh.

Neither of us says anything for a while.

The silence in this room is different from the silence on the roof. The roof was open and cold, and the city was spread out below us, and the space between us was wide enough to be safe. This room is small and warm, and we are close enough that I can see the smoke still caught in her hair and the color her eyes go when her guard comes down. It’s not a color so much as a quality, something that opens.

She shifts slightly on the bench.

I stay where I am.

“I haven’t celebrated Christmas since I was eight,” she says, which is what she said on the roof and she knows I already know it and she’s saying it again anyway, differently this time. Not as a deflection. As the beginning of something she isn’t sure she’s ready to say yet.

I wait.

She looks at me for a long moment, and whatever she’s deciding seems to resolve itself, because she closes the small distance between us.

I don’t move away.