Chapter 24

The early February morning dawned gray and chilly outside, but quite warm from beneath the covers of Lisa’s bed. I had spent the night with her as she had long ago scheduled today as a day off.

I, unfortunately, had to work.

After some cuddling and kissing, I dragged myself out of bed to get dressed. After sharing a light breakfast and some coffee with her, I kissed her goodbye before heading off to work and she prepared for a day of relaxing and binge-watching a couple of shows on Netflix.

An hour or so after arriving at the office, I got up and went to refill my coffee, pausing in the break room for a brief conversation with one of our nurses.

As I returned to my desk and positioned myself in my chair, my phone beeped with an advisory of a missed call. I picked up the phone, unlocked it, and saw that there had been four missed calls from Lisa in the short time I had been away on break.

A ball of ice suddenly appeared in my stomach as I began assessing the possible reasons for her to call four times in a row. None of them were good.

Before I could dial the number to call her back, my phone rang again.

“Hello?”

“Cmmoooohhhmmm!” Lisa was hysterical on the other end.

“Honey, slow down. Say again?”

“Come ... come home. Please come home,” she sobbed.

After a moment of assessment, I decided that while there would be a time to try to get more information about the situation, this wasn’t it. I sent an e-mail to my boss explaining that I had a personal emergency and would be leaving for the day.

As the clock turned to the bottom of the hour on my drive home, the familiar voice of the morning-drive show’s newscaster soberly intoned, “Firefighters have spent the last two hours fighting a four-alarm blaze at an apartment building in Cincinnati...”

Cincinnati.

Fire.

Oh, no...

“ ... multiple injuries and five people are presently unaccounted for, including one of the firefighters.”

I looked at the open road in front of me. Seeing surprisingly little traffic, I pressed the pedal to the floor as hard as I dared and made record time getting home. I ran, possibly faster than I had ever run before, into the building and up to Lisa’s apartment. I burst in and found her sitting on the couch, weeping as she watched a horrific scene live on CNN.

She pointed at the TV. “Mom called me. We don’t know where R.J. is but we know a few of the firefighters from his house were hurt.”

After staring impotently at the screen for a few moments, I mentally shifted into gear.

“Give me your phone,” I ordered. I found the phone number for her boss in her contacts and called him to inform him that Lisa would be out for a few days. I also sent a text to my boss in Phoenix with the same information.

I marched into her bedroom and pulled a few outfits together, which I threw into an overnight bag I found in the closet. Then, with assurances that I would be right back, I ran up to my apartment and packed a few days worth of clothes for myself, and printed out directions to Jerry and Diane’s house.

Back in her apartment, I could visibly see Lisa’s mind starting to withdraw into itself as the carnage continued to play out on the screen. I turned off the television and nudged her on the shoulder, telling her to come with me. I led her to my car, helping her into the passenger seat. After hastily throwing our bags into the trunk, I peeled out of the parking lot and soon found myself on Interstate 40, knowing but not really caring that I was breaking the speed limit.

As we passed through Winston-Salem, Lisa’s phone rang. R.J. was the firefighter trapped inside the building, but he was now safely out and en route to the hospital. However, there was no clear word on his condition. As he and his rescuers emerged from the inferno, half of the building had collapsed, which was the department’s current focus. However, all the other first responders on scene were accounted for.

On the outskirts of Mount Airy, near the state line, I looked off to my right and saw, blessedly, that Lisa was asleep. Somewhat ominously, however, the next sound to enter my consciousness was the music playing from my phone:

“Lately I’ve been thinking / I should move away / No reason left to stay / This house is haunted anyway...”

I sometimes thought that Eddie Money remained on my playlist to satisfy some sort of masochistic tendency. This song will always and forever be associated with driving to the airport in Denver at 4:00 in the morning to fly to Rhode Island after my grandmother passed away. Not terribly unlike now, I had been lost in my own little world, processing my thoughts, for much of the drive, and the final verse of “I’ll Get By” was the first thing to bring me back to the present.

It had seemed almost oddly comforting at the time. Grandma had been diagnosed with breast cancer during my freshman year of high school, undergoing a double mastectomy and several months of chemotherapy before being declared in remission. Four and a half years later, the cancer returned, at which point she decided to put herself in God’s hands. She remained with us for another 14 months, and by all accounts, she was outwardly in good health up until the last two weeks.

At the time, I chose to interpret the song coming into my consciousness at that moment as a message of reassurance. She had done everything she needed to do. She had made sure her family was okay. And there was no more reason to keep fighting with the “haunted house” her cancer-ridden body had become, so she simply decided it was time to move on.

I was not reassured this time.

My mind and heart willed a message out into the universe, destined for R.J. “Uh-uh, pal. You can’t move anywhere. If those kids aren’t enough reason to stay, you’ve got a little sister who I’m pretty sure wants to dance with you at our wedding.”

Four hours turned out to be the limit of my brain’s ability to keep me from thinking while also keeping me from getting into a wreck at 70 miles an hour. On the approach to Beckley, West Virginia, I noticed a sign for a gas station and a Firehouse Subs. I decided the karma of supporting a firefighter-owned business couldn’t hurt, and pulled off of that exit for a few minutes to grab one of their sandwiches and some gas.