The Last Shift

The night I met Eli, I'd been on shift for fourteen hours and I'd already told Delia I was done with this job twice. Three times if you count the part where I said it into a vending machine.

"You can't quit in the middle of your shift, Mare," Delia said, leaning on the charge desk. "Quitting happens at home, in pajamas, with wine. Everybody knows that."

"I'm serious this time."

"You were serious last Tuesday."

Tuesday I'd been serious because a guy bit me. Tonight was worse. We were short two nurses, one of our rooms was flooding because maintenance still hadn't fixed the sink, and a bus from the county home had just dropped off six elderly patients at once, all of them confused, one of them wearing two different shoes and carrying a parakeet in a shoebox.

"Is that bird licensed?" I asked the driver.

"Lady, I don't even think it's alive."

It was alive. It spent the next hour glaring at me from the nurses' station while I triaged its owner, a tiny woman named Dot who told me she was eighty-nine and that the bird's name was Luther and he was a bastard.

I'm Maren, by the way. Thirty-four, ER nurse, divorced, tired in a way sleep doesn't fix. My ex Cole went to prison last spring for stuff I still can't say out loud without my jaw tightening, and the divorce papers came through in January. Eleven years, done in a folder. My life these days is work, the apartment, and a cat named Chair because she sleeps in one.

So anyway. Fourteen hours in, that's when the truck came through the bay doors.

* * *

They brought in two of them. Volunteer fire guys off a brush call on the ridge road, one with a burned hand and one with a gash over his eye who would not sit down.

"Sit down," I told him. "Sir. Sit down."

"I'm fine." He was not fine. He was six foot something, built like a woodpile, and bleeding through a wad of gauze he'd pressed to his eyebrow with a hand as big as a dinner plate.

"You're fine the way that sink is fixed. Sit."

He sat. Delia came by with the suture tray and grinned at me like she knew something, which she always does, and it's always nothing, and it's always annoying.

"I'm Eli," he said.

"I know. I read your name off the intake form." I numbed the cut and started cleaning it. "What were you doing up there, the whole ridge is posted."

"Backburn. Small one. Got away from us a little."

"A little?"

"A little." He winced when I hit the lidocaine with the needle, which told me the block hadn't taken all the way, so I stopped and gave it a minute. Most guys flinch and talk through it. He just sat there, patient as furniture.

"You do this a lot?" I asked. "Stitches?"

"Enough. Woodworking. I slip with the chisel maybe once a year."

"Maybe find a different hobby."

"Maybe. But I like the one I've got."

I put in six stitches. Seven. His hand was a whole other thing, second degree across the palm, and I dressed it and told him he was done swinging hammers for two weeks and he laughed like I'd told him a joke.

"I've got a deck half built," he said.

"Then it stays half built."

"You always this bossy?"

"Only when people are bleeding."

He looked at my badge. "Maren. That's a nice name."

"It's on the badge so you don't have to charm me. I'm off in forty minutes."

"I wasn't charming."

"Then you're bad at it, and I'm still off in forty minutes."

Delia, walking past with a specimen cup, snorted loud enough to wake the parakeet. Luther the bird squawked. Eli smiled, and I hated that I noticed.

I need you to understand that I did not go looking for any of it that summer. The county had been dry since June, the ridge was a tinderbox, and every volunteer department within forty miles was running calls half the week. Which meant the same faces kept coming through my ER, and his was one of them.

Second time, it was smoke inhalation, a rookie of his who'd left his mask loose. Third time, heat exhaustion, one of Ray's crew, Ray being the firehouse captain, white mustache, boss of everybody. Fourth time, Eli himself, with a nail through his boot, and he had the nerve to look happy about it.

"Miss me?" he said from the gurney.

"I miss peace and quiet. You are neither."

He grinned the whole time I pulled the boot off, which involved a fair amount of swearing on his part and none on mine, I want that noted. Tetanus shot. Antibiotics. He asked if I wanted to get coffee sometime and I said no, and he said okay, and the weird thing was he said it like it was actually okay, no push, no pout, just "okay, well, offer stands." Then he hopped off the gurney with a hole in his boot and a boot-shaped hole in my good mood.

"Don't look now," Delia said, appearing beside me with a clipboard. "But you watched him walk out."

"I was watching the door."

"You were watching him walk through the door."

"Delia."

"Maren." She leaned in. "Honey, you've been a rolled-up sock since Cole. I get it. But that man has come through this ER four times and every single time he lights up like a gas pump when he sees you."

"That's an insult and a compliment at the same time."

"I'm a complex woman."

Cole got out of prison that same week, by the way. I found out from my sister, who found out from my mother, who apparently still keeps tabs on him like he's a stock she's sad about. Six texts in two days, all of them starting with baby or Mar or hey it's me, the way a man who had never once in eleven years remembered my birthday without a phone reminder would text. I didn't answer. I'd learned what answering costs.

So no, I wasn't in any mood to be lit up at. I was in the mood for the vending machine and a protein bar that tasted like drywall.

* * *

The wildfire started on a Thursday.

I remember because Thursday is trash night and I'd dragged the bin out to the curb at nine and the sky was the wrong color. Orange in the north, and it wasn't sunset, because the sunset was behind me. My phone went off at eleven, the county alert, evacuation advisory for the ridge roads. Then at two in the morning the hospital called and asked if I could come in early and I said I was already in, because I was, because a bunch of us had just stayed.

By dawn the ER was full and the highway was a crawl of trucks and trailers and dog crates. Delia had coffee IV'd into her arm, practically. Ray's crew was shuttling folks out of the pines, and Eli, I heard, had been up thirty-some hours running hose on the north line.

Then the wind changed.

"You're kidding me," Delia said, looking at the window. The sky had gone the shade of an old bruise. "That's the wrong direction. That's completely the wrong direction."

Then Ray's radio, or somebody's, crackled with the words canyon road and cut off and everyone in the room went quiet in that way rooms do when the bad thing gets real.

Twenty minutes later the doors banged open and two guys carried in a third, and it was one of Eli's crew, burned bad, and Eli was behind them, soot to the eyebrows, coughing, holding his side.

"Bed four," I said, and I don't remember deciding it. "Eli, bed four. Now!"

"I'm fine."

"I will hog-tie you. Bed four."

He went. I got him on monitors, oxygen, an IV, and I listened to his lungs and did not like what I heard, and he coughed the whole time and apologized for coughing the whole time, which is the most Eli thing I know.

"You need to be somewhere with air," I told him. "Not this air. Actual air."

"Can't. Truck's needed."

"Your truck is fine. You are not."

"Maren." He caught my wrist, gently, soot-gray fingers on my skin. "The canyon road's cut. Half my crew is on the wrong side of it, including Ray. I'm going back down the ridge road to the Harlan cabin to get them, because it's the only way, and I need you to let go of my arm so I can go do it."

I looked at him for a second. "You're going to die."

"Not planning on it."

"Nobody plans on it."

"Then walk me to the truck," he said, "and I'll come back and tell you off for being bossy."

I let go of his wrist. I got a pulse ox on him, a bottle of water, and a radio off the charge desk, and I walked him to the bay doors, and I did not say be careful because I'd said it to men before and it never once worked.

"Come back," I said instead.

"Yeah," he said. "That's the plan."

Then the smoke took him and the truck was gone, and Delia put her hand on my shoulder, and the sky over the ridge got darker.

The radio crackled for six hours. Static, then Ray's voice, then static. I kept it clipped to my scrub top like it was a stethoscope. Delia told me twice to go home and I told her twice there was no home to go to, which was true, because by then the advisory had turned to an order for the ridge roads and my house was on a ridge road. Chair was at my sister's, lucky thing, and I was sleeping in the break room between ambulance runs like everybody else.

At four in the afternoon the radio cleared up for real.

"Harlan cabin, we got them." It was Ray. "Six of us, all accounted for. Evershaw's coming down the ridge road with the two walking wounded. Tell the ER to quit sharpening knives."

"Tell him himself," I said.

"Can't. His radio took a hit. You got a line to him?"

I did not. So I stood at the bay doors like an idiot for another ninety minutes until his truck came down the highway nose-first through the smoke, two soot-covered guys in the back and Eli driving like the truck was made of his own bones. He climbed out stiff. I checked the two crew guys first because that was professional, and then I turned around and he was right there.

"Lungs," I said.

"Maren."

"Lungs. Now. Stretcher!"

"I walked to the truck and back, I'm okay."

"You drove through a fire corridor. Sit."

He sat. That was the first time he'd ever just sat when I told him to, and I was so surprised I almost checked him for a head injury. His sats were lousy, his voice sounded like a gravel driveway, and I put him on oxygen and fluids and told the charge desk he was admitted for observation and not to let him argue. He argued anyway, from the bed, for an hour, and then he fell asleep mid-sentence with the mask on, and I stood there like a fool watching a man breathe.

Delia found me there. "Go home."

"No home!"

"My couch, then. Or don't, but stop hovering over that man like a ceilin' fan."

"I'm monitoring a patient."

"You're monitoring a patient you like." She didn't say it mean. She said it like a nurse reading a chart. "And the hospital's evacuating noncriticals to County at six anyway, so that man is County's problem in two hours. Go."

***

Except I didn't go to County or Delia's couch, because at five the order expanded and the highway south closed, and I was stuck. We all were. The hospital kept critical staff sheltering in place. I got a cot in the basement conference room and listened to the building hum and thought about my sister feeding Chair tuna and thought about nothing else, on purpose, for hours.

Then at ten a runner from the fire side found me. Eli's radio was dead, remember, and Ray wanted word on him, and the runner was Ray's way of getting it. I walked the runner up to the fifth floor where they'd moved Eli, and he was awake, mask off, sitting on the edge of the bed like the bed owed him money.

"Ray's fine," I told him. "All six accounted for, you heard."

"I heard. Wanted it twice." He looked at me. "You're still here."

"Highway's closed. I live on the ridge."

"Your house is on the ridge?"

"Was. Might be a smoke smell and a foundation now. Don't know yet." I said it flat because flat was cheaper. He was quiet a second.

"I'm sorry."

"Don't be sorry. Be forty pounds of muscle and dumb luck, which you are."

He laughed, then coughed, then laughed anyway. "Maren, they're moving me to County in the morning. Sats are better. Doctor already said."

"I know. I arranged it."

"You arranged it?"

"Somebody has to make your bad decisions safe. It's a growth industry."

He looked at me then, really looked, and the room got small. "Come to County," he said. "Not as my nurse. Just come."

"I can't just come."

"You can. You've got a day off coming that you've refused three times. Take it."

"That's not how days off work."

"Come anyway." He was thirty-eight years old and had run into a fire canyon twice in one day and his hands were shaking a little, or maybe mine were, it was hard to tell whose were whose at that point. "Please."

"Okay," I said, before the smarter part of me could file paperwork. "Okay."

***

County was a gymnasium with cots and a coffee urn that tasted like a burned tire, which after the week we'd had was almost nostalgic. Eli got discharged the second day and there was no house for him either, because his rental was on the north slope, so we both sat in the cots section with duffel bags like refugees with dental insurance. He carved. I didn't know that about him. Somebody had given him a block of basswood and he sat on his cot whittling a bird with a pocketknife, patient as anything, and I watched him make feathers out of nothing.

"You never told me you do that," I said.

"You never asked what I do when I'm not on fire."

"What else do you do when you're not on fire?"

"This. Fish. Fix Ray's porch, which is a permanent condition." He blew a shaving off the wing. "Draw a little. Used to, anyhow."

"Draw?"

"Before the fire service. Community college, art program, two years. Then Dad got sick and a paycheck mattered more than a portfolio." He said it