Mallory’s stomach rumbled. It confounded her how she could still be hungry when her sister might be dying behind those double doors up the hall.
Another sob fought its way past her hammering heart.
You might have all the time in the world to eat yet. If she tells you that Katelyn’s gone.
The couch groaned as the old man turned on his side, burrowing deeper into his nest of blankets. For a moment, Mallory found herself wondering about his story. What calamity had brought him to this place?
Down the hall, the crowd grew still louder, as one family member ratcheted up the volume level to best another’s. More people had come in to join them, and Mallory could see them greeting one another with hugs and back slaps.
This time, she didn’t even have a scared twelve-year-old sitting beside her in the waiting room. When her parents had died, there’d been no one left of their family except a hard-of-hearing great aunt on her mother’s side they’d never met, and two states away at that. Mallory remembered begging the social worker from the department of family and children services to please, please not put Katelyn in foster care. She could do it—she could take care of her sister.
And see how you’ve screwed that up.
She pulled her winter coat around her, wincing as the lining ripped in the shoulder seam. The coat was three years old and much mended, but the whole lining needed replacing. She’d been planning on doing it this weekend, in fact...but she wouldn’t now.
She had more important things to worry about than a tear in a coat lining. She needed to be grateful she even had a coat.
Is Katelyn cold?
Katelyn hated the cold—it had always been a battle between them over the thermostat, Mallory turning it down to sixty-five to save money, Katelyn slipping behind her and jacking it up to seventy-two.
I’ll turn it up to eighty if you’ll just come back to me.
Another wail pressed up, out, like a caged animal testing its bars for weakness. She’d just managed to stifle it when she spotted a tall dark-haired guy, shoulders broad in a denim jacket, push through the crowd.
He smiled at the family as he passed, spoke for a few minutes, gestured with the hand holding a big brown paper shopping bag to the cooler he was pulling with his other hand.
He was about her age, and he had a kind smile, the guy did. It seemed so much warmer than the room’s chilly, sterile air. She wondered how he was connected to the family, wondered what he had in the cooler. With that many people, they’d need a lot of snacks and drinks. They looked as though they were camped out for the night.
Like me. They’re not going anywhere, like me.
He continued on from the crowd, closing the gap between himself and the door to the waiting room with a few easy strides of long denim-encased legs. Mallory realized with a start that he was coming to join her. He must be planning on leaving the cooler here for the family.
The door creaked open. “Hi...are you with the Blair family?” the man asked.
“Uh—yes.” She stared at him as he entered, trying to figure out if she knew him from somewhere. Had the stress of the day made her fail to recognize him?
No. She’d never forget his easy smile, the cleft in his chin, the bright blue eyes that seemed to bring a summer sky’s joy into the chilly waiting room. His dark hair was closely cropped, but it had grown out enough since his last haircut to have a cowlick right at the crest of his head. Mallory’s fingers itched to smooth it down.
“You’re Katelyn Blair’s...sister?”
“Yes.” She struggled to a standing position and extended a hand. She’d been sitting so long and so stiffly that her knees threatened to collapse on her. “I’m Mallory Blair. You must be one of Katelyn’s friends.”
He dropped the handle of the cooler and gripped her offered hand with a big strong hand of his own, one with long square-tipped fingers that swallowed hers. “Andrew Monroe...and, no, I don’t know your sister, exactly. I was one of the firefighters who was at the fire this morning. I wanted to see how she was doing.”
Tears stung her eyes at his thoughtfulness. She gripped his hand with both of hers and pumped it with a fierce energy. “Thank you, thank you—thank you so much for getting her out, for giving her a chance—”
She had to drop his hand to swipe at her eyes. “I’m sorry—I’m just a—a mess.”
Andrew guided her back to her chair and eased her down in it. He sat in the chair beside her. “I can imagine. She’s going to be okay, then?”
“Oh—I don’t know. They haven’t told me much. They said...” Mallory drew in a shaky breath and knotted her fingers in her lap. She noticed a chip in her nail polish—polish she’d carefully put on just the night before, when all was right in the world.
“Yes?” Andrew prompted. The way he said it was full of patience and encouragement, as though he knew she didn’t want to say the words lest they finally seem real.
“She’s on a vent. And her feet and legs—they’re badly burned. She has twenty percent of her body...burned. The pants she was wearing...and the shoes... They melted in the heat of the fire. How hot does it have to be to melt shoes?” Mallory shook her head and closed her eyes tight in a vain effort to banish the image from her head.
“They were bedroom slippers,” Andrew said. “Some sort of pink furry ones.”
She looked up in surprise. “Bunny slippers. They were bunny slippers. You saw her, then? When they pulled her out?”
His cheeks flared with color, and he ducked his head. “I—er—me and another firefighter, we were the ones who pulled her out. And you’re right. It was a really hot fire. This place—” he waved one long arm to encompass not just the waiting room, but the burn center itself “—it’s great. They can do miracles here.”
“You know it, then? It’s a good place?”
“Yeah, oh, yeah. My dad...”
A spasm of pain crossed his face as his words trailed off. He chewed on his bottom lip.
“Your dad what?” Mallory said. She needed to hear something hopeful.
“Well, he was here. There was this warehouse fire, see, and he got trapped in it—”
“Oh, so that’s why you’re a firefighter,” she guessed, laying a palm against his forearm. She should have realized it would be something like that, him giving back after seeing a family member hurt.
“Well, sort of, I guess. He was the fire chief. He—he went in to help rescue another firefighter.”
“He’s okay now?”
“Uh...no, I’m afraid not. He didn’t make it. But—” He turned to her, his own hand covering hers where it lay on his arm. “He was a lot worse than Katelyn sounds—he had burns on nearly three quarters of his body, and, well, it would have taken a miracle for anybody to survive that.”
Mallory sagged back into the stiff, unforgiving chair. It wasn’t quite high enough to rest her neck, and too straight to find a good position in. “Oh. I’m sorry. This has to be hard for you to come here.”
She couldn’t have done it—gone to the hospital waiting room in Macon, back home, where she’d heard the news of her parents’ passing. Maybe she should have been strong enough, but ever since then, she’d given a wide berth to hospitals of any sort, especially that one.
Andrew’s face creased into an aw-shucks-it’s-nothing smile. “No. I wanted to come. When you’re part of the club—this awful, awful club—you know what somebody else is going through, and you... Well, you want to make it better. I’m just sorry you haven’t had more encouraging news.”