Into the Inferno - Earl Emerson [19]
“Tell me about your friend.”
“I . . .”
“I know how this works, Jim, and you need to talk this one out. I know exactly what you’re going through. Tell Aunt Marge all about it. I’m not going to take no for an answer.”
I told her about our alarm to Joel McCain’s house, about his choking, about the family’s religious objections to medical intervention. At one point I must have mentioned Stan Beebe’s disjointed theories, because she homed in on it. “Syndrome? You say somebody out there thinks there’s some sort of disease going around that all these people are catching? And it’s a syndrome?”
“Stan Beebe. One of our full-time department employees. He’s a good firefighter, but every once in a while he comes up with something a little wacky.”
During our chat I watched the door to Holly’s room down the hallway, lest Stephanie come sprinting out to rip me a new asshole. I’d been an idiot to drive all the way down here.
Maybe it was the way she listened or the way her gray-blue eyes stared up at me so relentlessly, but talking to Marge DiMaggio made me feel much better. Strange how tragedies can unite comparative strangers.
10. TAKING IN THE BIG PICTURE
It was not quite dark when I got onto I-5 and began driving north. Beyond the water park I took Highway 18 and headed east by northeast, the Douglas firs on either side of the narrow highway opening up to an occasional view of a housing development or shopping mall.
It occurred to me that had Holly been considering suicide, she would have used the threat during our last phone conversation to lever concessions from me.
But she hadn’t.
At least not while I was awake.
I’d made the mistake of telling someone at the firehouse I’d drifted off during that last phone call, and now whenever I got a call at work Click or Clack would announce over the station intercom, “Telephone for Jim Swope. Lieutenant Swope? Nap time.”
I felt enough guilt over that call without finding out I was the last person Holly spoke to.
She deserved better than me. Better than that bed in the hospital. Better than her angry sister even. When you thought about it, most of the women I’d been seeing in the past couple of years deserved better than me. Maybe Stephanie Riggs was right. Maybe her sister tried to kill herself because of the way I’d treated her.
It was mind-boggling, because underneath I was basically a pretty decent guy.
Today had been a double whammy. Joel’s predicament had been a jolt for us all. Joel and I, at fifteen years and twelve years of time in the department respectively, had known each other longer than any of the other full-timers. Having made lieutenant a year before I did, he often joked that he was my superior, though in fact we’d worked as equals until he was obligated to take over the department’s administrative duties following Newcastle’s death.
Never one to volunteer for extra paperwork or meetings, Joel hadn’t been happy holding the reins of the fire department. When he fell off his roof, I’d made a bad joke that he’d done it on purpose in order to get out of running the department.
Now the whole enchilada rested on my shoulders.
After our call to Joel’s house, Karrie had wept openly. Stan Beebe had gone home sick. I might have done either or both, but at the time I was too upset about my meeting with the cannibal to think straight. You meet a man-eater like that, it disturbs you.
What happened to Joel and Holly was the type of thing you could put off thinking about if you were thirty-four like I was. You could tell yourself you didn’t need to think about it for another forty years. I didn’t even have a corner of my brain where I kept problems like that.
Three years earlier when my father had a stroke, I’d calculated that I had forty-six years before I needed to worry about it myself. Now I faced the inescapable fact that people my age were not exempt—were, in fact, dropping like flies.
I was not exempt.
It was something you always knew but tried not to face, in the same way teenagers knew they could die if they drove recklessly