3000 Degrees (24 page)

The family room was opposite the kitchen. Paul's room, big and airy, with skylights cut through a vaulted ceiling to let in the sun. Paul did all the interior work, the wiring, sheetrocking, and finish. A professional carpenter had framed it, a man named Bill Riggieri. They'd gotten to be friends, Bill and Paul, and Bill hired him whenever he needed an extra set of hands. That's where Paul had been that morning, working for Bill out in Shrewsbury.

Denise took another sip from her beer. She was dying for a cigarette. She slipped out the door to the garage, lit one up. Paul and Denise always snuck their smokes in the garage, out of sight of the boys. They called it the GiGi Lounge, which was the name of a bar on the cruise ship that floated them around the Caribbean the year before, their first vacation in years. She didn't know when they would be able to afford another one. Until then, they could pretend in the garage.

It was ten o'clock. The news was on the television in the corner of the family room, where Paul had rebuilt his mangled thumb playing video games with his sons. Worcester Cold Storage roared on the screen, flames shooting up from the roof, engines and aerials spraying impotent streams into the heat. The anchor announced the official toll, six men missing. “All the families,” she said, “have been notified.”

Denise exhaled, a deep sigh, all of her muscles uncoiling at once. There had been no knock at her door, no chief's car in her driveway. Paul was okay. He'd gotten out. She closed her eyes, leaned her head back, let a wave of relief wash over her.

She heard the purr of engines in front of the house, the soft squeak of brakes, then a car door slam. She snapped her head forward, eyes wide now. She sucked in a short breath, her chest and stomach clenching. She looked at her friend Kim. “Well,” she said, “I guess I'm the sixth.”

A
ctually, Mary Jackson ended up being the sixth. At ten o'clock, she didn't know anything was burning, that anyone was lost. Hopedale was twenty-five miles south of Worcester, too far away to be able to see the rusty glow of the flames reflecting off the winter sky or smell the bitter smoke drifting on the wind. And she'd been out all evening, so she hadn't been near a television or a radio, either. She was happy, even smiling when she made the turn off Mendon Street at her yellow bungalow, Tim's blue spruces standing in the front yard like sentries.

She'd had a fine day. She spent the afternoon Christmas shopping with Tim at a mall near the Rhode Island line. They stayed longer than they'd meant to, running far enough behind schedule that they wouldn't have time to brew their regular four o'clock pot of coffee before Tim would have to leave for the station. They stopped at a Dunkin’ Donuts instead, got two cups to go, and sat in the car, talking and sipping through plastic lids.

They drove home and Tim hurried to get ready. He told Mary, “I'll see you in the morning,” gave her a quick hug and a kiss, and went out the back door. Tim always kissed her goodbye and hello. He expected it and went into a playful pout if he didn't get it right away. In the morning, she knew, he'd come through the back door, kick off his shoes and put on the slippers he kept in the foyer. “Honey, I'm home,” he'd say, only exaggerated and goofy, like it was a line from a sitcom. And then he'd linger near the door, waiting for his kiss.

After Tim left, Mary went back out to pick up some small gifts for him. She'd already bought him six videotapes of a public-television series on gardens. She could imagine him sitting in the family room, birch logs burning in the fieldstone fireplace while, outside, snow drifted against the pergola where the yellow roses would bud in the spring, watching hollyhocks and hibiscus bloom across the television screen. Six tapes would carry him through the worst of the winter. She also decided that Tim needed a second pair of slippers, one that he could wear in the house and another for when he wandered his greening yard. After all, it defeated the point of wearing slippers in the house if he was tromping through the mud in the same pair.

She got home at quarter past ten. There were several messages on her answering machine, all of them asking if Tim was working, all of them sounding worried. That struck her as odd. Mary never worried about Tim when he went to work, if only because she had no idea what, precisely, he did. She knew the general outlines, that he'd been on the job for twenty-seven years, that he used to work Rescue 1 before he transferred to Ladder 2, where the pace was slightly slower. But he never gave her any details. He gave her a hint once, pointing up to the roof of a burned-out triple-decker, showing her where he'd chopped a hole through the shingles. “All the way up
there?”
Mary had said. “And you think this is
easier
than rescue?” Other than that, though, he sheltered her from the dodgier realities of firefighting, and even the stylized Hollywood version, like
Backdraft.
“You don't need to see that,” he'd told her more than once. When he worked nights, he always had the same report for Mary the next morning when she asked how his shift went. “Long and hard,” he'd say with staged weariness.

“Tell me about it.”

“I don't even want to talk about it,” he'd say.

Mary would flash a knowing smile. “You slept all night, didn't you?”

Tim would nod. It didn't matter if he'd waged a six-hour firefight or drank coffee in front of the TV. “Yeah,” he would tell her. “It was pretty quiet.”

Mary played back the messages on her answering machine, then turned on the television. The warehouse fire was on all the newscasts, reporters announcing six men were missing and that all the families had been notified and that most of them were gathering at St. Stephen's. She was horrified and relieved at the same time; a terrible tragedy, yes, but no one had notified her. Tim must be all right.

She called Grove Street. No one would tell her anything, only that there was a fire, that Tim had been part of the team fighting it.

“Okay,” she said. “Well, tell him I called, and have him call me on my cell phone.”

She grabbed her phone and her keys and got back in her car, figuring she could find out more at St. Stephen's, maybe offer some comfort. She pulled onto Mendon Street, turned the wheel toward Worcester, pressed down on the accelerator. Her cell phone chirped before she crossed the border out of Hopedale.

It was Randy Chavoor. “Mary, where are you?”

“I'm driving in,” she said. “I'm on my way to St. Stephen's.”

“Go home. Please, turn around and go home,” Randy said. “We'll come and get you.”

She gripped the wheel harder with the one hand that was on it.
Why do they have to come and get me? Why can't I drive in?
She took her foot off the gas, slowed the car. “What's wrong?” she said, her voice cracking.

“Mary, just go home. We'll be there in a few minutes.”

“What's wrong?”

“Mary. Please. Go home.”

She turned around, drove back along Mendon Street, turned into the access road to the Hopedale Village Cemetery, which led to her driveway. Her pulse was racing, and her hands trembled as she opened the door. She was inside for only a couple minutes when the phone rang. Her daughter, Diane, was calling from her home in Pennsylvania.

“Is Tim working?” she asked. Word of the fire was spreading across the country, by word of mouth—Diane's sister-in-law had called her husband from Worcester—and now by microwaves and satellite uplinks.

“Yes,” Mary said.

“Is he all right?”

“I … I don't know,” Mary said.

Diane could hear the fear in her mother's voice. She absorbed it, started to panic. She was an adult when Tim and Mary met, already married and the mother of a newborn son, but over the past fourteen years she'd come to consider Tim as more of a father than Mary's first husband, who'd moved out when she was a teenager. To her children—she'd given birth to a daughter in 1990—he was Papa Tim, the grandfather who came to dance recitals and built birdhouses and ran through the sprinkler on the lawn on hot summer days and played Santa Claus for Amanda's Brownie troop. Tim always reminded Diane of Santa, the same ruddy cheeks and twinkling eyes, only not as fat. Maybe he would dress up again this year when he came to visit for Christmas. He'd put in for the vacation days, but hadn't told Mary yet. It was going to be a surprise, spending the holiday with Diane and the grandkids.

Mary could hear heavy footsteps outside. Randy Chavoor was at the door. Mary could see it in his face, his eyes moist and sad. She was being notified, just like they said on television. She dropped the phone. Diane heard it hit the floor.

A
fter he watched Patrick Spencer ride off in a police cruiser, Mike McNamee went to St. Stephen's. He had to pay his respects to the families and the other men, offer whatever token of comfort that he could muster. He knew there was nothing he could say, but he had to show up. It had been his fire, his operation, his men. He belonged with them.

The room at the church was crowded with off-duty firemen and their wives, all of them clustering around the families of the missing men, Kathy, Michelle, Linda, Mary, and Jim and Joan Lyons. The mayor was there, as well as the city manager, and Chief Dennis Budd had just finished explaining how awful the night had been. In a weary voice, he told them, “We hold very little hope.”

Mike walked through the door just as Budd was finishing. He scanned the room. He spotted Denise Brotherton, sitting in a chair by herself, her skin pale and ashen against her wrinkled blue scrubs.

He went to her, got down on his knees, a supplicant, took both her hands in his. He didn't say anything, just let Denise stare down at him for a moment.

She spoke first. “Mike, Paul always comes home,” she said. “Tell me he's coming home tomorrow.”

Mike blinked, instinctively holding back tears. He realized his eyes were dry, that he didn't have any emotions left in reserve. “Denise,” he said, “I'm sorry. I can't tell you that.”

Denise held his gaze. She seemed to be pleading with her eyes, but her voice was composed. “Mike, I have six sons,” she said. “Please tell me he's coming home. Please.”

Mike squeezed her hands, looked away, then back again. “I can't, Denise,” he said. “I'm sorry, but I can't.”

18

T
HE DELUGE CONTINUED INTO THE NIGHT, GREAT FOUNTAINS OF
water arcing from the nozzles on the aerial scopes and ladder trucks and showering down on Worcester Cold Storage. The flames were aggressive, belligerent, as if they'd been emboldened by having forced mortal men to flee for their lives. They feasted on the innards of the warehouse, chewed through the massive timbers and joists that held each floor in place, melted the cork and polystyrene, consumed the partition walls and scraps of trash. Once the fire had pierced the roof, burned wide and ragged holes through the tar and the asphalt, it was able to inhale more oxygen, blow it back out bright and hot.

Mike stood on the street at midnight, after he'd told Joan Lyons her boy was missing and Patrick Spencer his dad was lost and Denise Brotherton he was sorry. He watched the fire rage through smudgy spectacles. A black rain mizzled from the sky, droplets of ash that had risen on clouds of steam and liquefied particles of insulation and roofing, all of it mixing into a charcoal mist that speckled Mike's coat, his helmet, his eyeglasses.

He didn't have to be there. Most of his men, the guys who had fought the initial stages of the battle, had been pulled out, relieved by fresh troops and sent back to their stations to rest and grieve. Counselors were waiting for them, fellow firefighters and psychologists who specialized in disaster, to talk to anyone who wanted or needed their help. Mike didn't want to talk to anyone, not then. There was nothing he wanted to say, nothing he wanted to hear. What could anyone tell him anyway? That it wasn't his fault? That six men—good men,
his
men— choked to death because they had lousy luck or because God was in a particularly vengeful mood that evening or because, the worst thing of all, sometimes bad shit just happened? That he hadn't made a mistake, that there was nothing else he could have done, no decision he should have made sooner or later or differently? That it just wasn't his fucking fault? Would anyone say that? Would it matter? And would he believe it?

Mike wiped his glasses, smeared the soot, put them back on the bridge of his nose. He glowered at the warehouse.
The Building from Hell,
he thought, as if it were the demonic villain in a low-budget thriller. “You've got them in there,” he muttered, talking under his breath, cursing the building as if it were alive. “You've got six guys in there.”

The night rumbled, a concussion pulsing through the warehouse. Embers and sparks exploded into the sky, cascaded over the walls, fell to the street like fireworks, and the flames leapt higher, glowed more brightly. Mike guessed that one of the floors had collapsed, the impact throwing the cinders into the air, the rush of fresh air fanning the fire like a giant, clumsy bellows. He was fifty yards from the building, across Franklin Street in a parking lot where Car 3, his Expedition, had been stationed as a makeshift command post, yet he could feel the heat, a gust of warm wind that drove the temperature into the eighties.

Mike watched the men arrayed around the building. He saw firefighters from Paxton, Millbury, and Boston, men in blue windbreakers with “ATF”—for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms—stenciled in yellow on the back. The night strobed with red, white, and blue, the lights from fire trucks and, farther out, police cars blocking the nearby streets, diverting traffic from the area. A mile or so to the west, out of view, state police troopers parked their gray and blue Crown Victorias across the eastbound lanes of Interstate 290, blocking traffic. In the lot opposite the warehouse was a van from the state medical examiner's office in Boston. Mike knew there would be six body bags inside.

He replayed the night in his head. It came back to him in shards of memory, each clear and precise, but out of sequence, disjointed. The view from the highway, pale smoke drifting lazily from the roof. Flames swirling toward the elevator shaft. Three identical doors on the third floor. The plunge into darkness. Sully in front of him.
I can't find Jay and Joe.
Calling in the second alarm, being cautious, gathering reinforcements before he needed them. Paul Brotherton on the radio.
Mayday, mayday!
The shriek over the phone when he told Kathy Lyons her brother was missing. Jimmy Pijus behind him.
We couldn't make the third floor.
All those men in front of him, angry, bewildered, horrified, screaming.
They're still up there, goddamnit!