Page 73 of Christmas with Three Firemen

The room holds all of it. The radio upstairs turns over another song.

Wes doesn’t offer wisdom, and I don’t offer absolution, and Mateo doesn’t ask for any, and the three of us just sit in the equipment room among the hanging gear with two dead children’s worth of grief out in the open air between us for the first time, and we stay.

Mateo reaches over with his good arm and takes my hand. A while after that, without a word, Wes moves from the floor to the crate beside me, shoulder against mine, solid.

Upstairs, faint through the floors, Ella Fitzgerald, if it’s her, sings the same twelve songs toward morning. The storm is loud against the little window, and I sit between two people who are not letting go of me, and I won’t either.

Chapter twenty-two

Chapter Twenty-Two: Noelle

Danny hands me an envelope at dinner.

“Vestibule,” he says, around a mouthful of rice. “Wedged behind the take-out menus. Got your name on it.”

It’s a plain manila envelope, letter size, my name across the front in block capitals. NOELLE MEADOWS. No address. No stamp. No return corner.

No stamp means no mail carrier. No mail carrier means a hand. Somebody walked up the front steps of this station, past the reindeer and the inflatable snowman, opened the vestibule door, and tucked this behind the menus.

“When does anybody last remember checking that shelf?” I ask.

Danny shrugs. “Must’ve been there since Thanksgiving.”

I carry it upstairs unopened. I already don’t like how light it is.

At my desk, I slit the top with a letter opener and tip it, and photographs slide out in a stack, glossy, printed on cheap drugstore paper.

The top one is the front of Firehouse 23.

I stop breathing for a second. Then my training catches up with my hands, and I drop the stack, pull a pair of nitrile gloves out of my kit, and pick the photos up again by the edges, one at a time, laying them out across the desk in a grid.

Fourteen photographs.

The station from across the street, shot from the bus stop; I can see the shelter’s frame at the edge of it. The bay doors open, both rigs visible, the crew coming down off a call. Danny and Callum on the front steps carrying grocery bags. Wes at the corner hydrant. Mateo laughing at somebody out of frame with a toy drive box on his shoulder.

Me.

Crossing the apparatus bay in my leather jacket with a folder under my arm, shot straight through the open doors from the street. I remember that folder. I remember that afternoon. I was taking the Delaney summary to Grant’s office, and I walked across the bay thinking about a handshake at a fundraiser, and somebody stood at a bus stop forty feet away and pressed a shutter.

Each photograph has a timestamp burned into the corner. Small orange digits, deliberate, the kind you have to turn on in the settings.

He wants me to know when.

I read the corners one at a time and build the calendar. The earliest is eighteen days old, three days after I moved in. The latest is from this week. And in the middle of the grid, one exterior shot of the station at night, snow coming down heavy through dead streetlights, every window dark except a faint gold shiver low in the bay windows.

Candles.

The timestamp is the night of the blackout.

He photographed the light of the candles we lit, on the night the four of us… on that night.

My skin goes cold from the scalp down, and I sit back from the desk, put my gloved hands flat on my thighs, and make myself breathe as Wes taught me, without ever calling it teaching.

Fourteen photographs. Eighteen days. He hasn’t been circling the pattern.

He’s been standing outside this building, watching it live, because I’m inside it.

I bag the photographs and the envelope in evidence sleeves, label them, log them, and sit looking at the neat stack of plastic for a long time.