It Happens All the Time: A Novel

“Hicks!” Mason’s loud voice boomed in the station’s bathroom, echoing off the walls as I stood in front of the sink, washing my hands, mentally replaying the last few hours I’d spent with Amber and our respective families the night before, on New Year’s Eve, watching college semifinals football, playing poker, and toasting with champagne at the end of the night. I could still see her freckled face, the twinkle in her eyes when she laughed as she tried to get her father to believe her bluff. If I tried hard enough, I could almost feel her body against mine as we hugged goodbye.

“Yeah?” I said, grabbing a few paper towels in order to dry my hands.

“We got a call. House fire over on Jefferson.”

“How many vics?” I asked as I tossed the crumpled towels into the garbage. I turned to see Mason standing in the doorway, holding the door open with one beefy arm. My partner was a thirty-two-year-old man of Colombian descent with broad shoulders and chiseled flesh built up by regular doses of protein and two workouts a day. When I stood next to him, I felt pretty much invisible to any woman in the immediate vicinity. Those women would be sorely disappointed, however, if they thought they stood a chance of getting anywhere with Mason. He was happily married to Gia, a short and curvy firecracker of a woman who had, as I told Amber, recently given birth to their daughter. I was pretty certain if another woman tried to make a move on her husband, Gia, despite her size, would slam said woman to the ground.

“Not sure yet,” Mason said, smiling and smacking the wall with an open palm. “Git your butt in gear, boy! We got lives to save!” He lifted his chin and began to croon the chorus of the Fray’s “How to Save a Life” in a high-pitched falsetto.

I chuckled and shook my head, trying to erase thoughts of Amber from my mind so I could focus on doing my job. Focus was key, my first instructor had told me when I entered the EMT program at Bellingham Tech. If you weren’t focused, people died. It was that simple.

“So. Did you have fun last night?” Mason asked, once we were in the front seats of the rig and the engine had roared to life. My partner knew that I’d requested the holiday off for the specific purpose of being able to spend it with Amber, since she would head back to WSU the next day. It was rare for me to confess my feelings about her to anyone, but over the last year, spending hours of downtime with Mason, waiting for a call to come in, I’d started talking about my friendship with her—how we met, how close we were back in high school—and my partner simply guessed—correctly—that I had a thing for her.

“How’d it go?” Mason turned a corner sharply enough that I had to throw out an arm to brace myself against the dash.

“Okay, I guess,” I said, not wanting to tell him how my heart had squeezed with longing the instant I saw Amber standing in the kitchen last night. How just the smell of her made my muscles feel weak, and how, whenever she touched me, my breath stopped, wondering if her feelings for me might have finally—miraculously—developed into something deeper. For my partner’s sake—and my own—I needed to pretend that being Amber’s friend was enough.

“She still with that other dude?”

“Yep.” My voice clipped the edges of the word as it left my mouth.

“Sorry, man,” Mason said. The tires on the rig screeched as he blew through a stoplight and took a left onto Jefferson Avenue.

I stayed quiet, keeping my gaze locked on the red trucks with their bright lights spinning already at the scene, bracing myself to be around the flames, grateful that I wasn’t the one who had to fight them. I had originally thought I might follow in my father’s footsteps and become a fireman, but only because when I was young, he made it seem that I had no other choice.

“You have to grab this world by the balls, Son!” my dad used to say, wrapping a thick forearm around my neck in a fake headlock. “Teach it who’s boss! We’ll teach it together! Team Hicks, to the rescue!”

Before we moved to Bellingham and my parents divorced, I would nod enthusiastically when my father would make these kinds of proclamations, but even as I did, my stomach churned, fearing I could never live up to my dad’s expectations. I was the boy who carried dying bees out of our house into a shady place in the yard so the insects could spend their final moments peacefully, in their own habitat. The boy who had to force back tears when I saw a skinny, collarless dog wandering across a busy street. The boy who’d give my favorite turkey and cheddar sandwich to the homeless man sitting alone on a bench in the park. The boy whose father, seeing how anxious I always seemed to be, was constantly telling him to toughen up.

I flinched as I recalled the day that I decided there was no way I could do the same job as my dad. I was thirteen, and he took me to go see my “uncle” Curtis in the hospital. Curtis was my dad’s best friend, and they were both fighting a warehouse fire in the Georgetown district of Seattle when one of the walls of the building caved in. My dad wasn’t too badly hurt, but Curtis suffered third-degree burns on over eighty percent of his body. I still remembered the antiseptic stench of the burn unit as my dad and I stepped off the elevator. I remembered the other firefighters in the waiting room, the sobs of Kristin, Curtis’s wife, as they gathered around her. She was huddled in a chair, her face in her hands, but looked up when my dad and I entered.

“Hi, honey,” she said to me, reaching out with both arms. I took a few hesitant steps over to her and let her hug me. I had spent many afternoons at her house with Tracy, Curtis and Kristin’s daughter, when my parents both had to work. I liked hanging out with Tracy, especially when she went into the closet with me and let me lift her shirt so I could touch her barely budding breasts. She was the first girl I ever kissed.

Now, Tracy sat next to her mother with tear-streaked cheeks. She stared at the floor, black hair pulled into a messy ponytail, her tiny shoulders shaking. I wished I knew what to say.

“Can I take Ty in to see him?” my dad asked Kristin, who told him he could.

I gave her another hug, feeling awkward when she dug her fingers into my back. She clung to me; it felt like she was desperate for a comfort I didn’t know how to give.

“Come on, Son,” my dad said, and I reluctantly followed him down the hall and into a glass-windowed room.

Curtis—or what remained of him—lay in a bed, unmoving. His hair and eyebrows were gone; the only skin left on his body was in red, ragged patches. The rest of his flesh was blackened and peeling, shiny and slick with some kind of ointment, other spots covered with gauze. His eyes were closed; various tubes pumped medication into his veins and oxygen into his lungs. He looked like a monster.

“Hey, buddy,” my dad said, stepping over to stand next to his best friend. He swallowed hard. “It’s me and Ty. He wanted to come say hello.”

I hung back by the door, shaking my head when my father gestured for me to come closer.

“Get over here,” my dad said, through clenched jaws. He glared at me, and I was scared to defy my father so blatantly, but the air reeked of scorched meat, and without warning, my stomach heaved and I raced to the garbage can, where I vomited until there was nothing left inside me.

When I was done, I looked at my dad. “Sorry,” I muttered. My eyes watered and the back of my throat burned. I didn’t look at Curtis, worried I’d start puking again.

My father strode over to me, gripping the back of my neck with tight, thick fingers. “Damn it,” he hissed under his breath as he led me out of the room. In the car on the way home, my dad preached to me about the responsibilities of brotherhood. “Be a man, Son,” he said. “That’s all I want for you.” Even today, I could hear the disdain in my father’s voice; I could feel the shame that settled inside my chest.

“You ready?” Mason asked now, interrupting my thoughts. He parked as close as he could get to the address on the GPS screen. I nodded, looking down the street at the target house, which was already completely engulfed in flames. Seeing this, I wondered if the structure would be a total loss. I wondered if the people inside had found a way out, or if the firefighters at the scene had rescued them. I hoped their smoke alarm had warned them. I hoped the only thing turned to ash was their home. Over the years, I’d realized that my reaction to seeing Curtis in that terrible state wasn’t about being unable to handle its gory extremes but, rather, my fear that if I did his job, I’d end up just like him, burnt to a crisp in a hospital bed, dying three days later. It turned out that helping people like him, the victims of disaster, was something I was better suited to do.

After letting dispatch know we had arrived, Mason and I raced around the back of the ambulance and opened the doors, pulling out the gurney and grabbing the rest of the gear we’d need. Jogging down the street with my partner, I called out to one of the nearby fighters. “How many?”

“Just the one,” the fighter answered, pointing with a gloved finger toward the front yard of the neighboring house. Eight other crew members stood around the burning house, four of them on two hoses, trying to extinguish the blaze from the top down as the flames reached into the night sky with long, jagged arms. Another fighter kneeled over what looked to be a petite young woman lying on the neighbor’s grass on top of a yellow backboard.

“What we got?” Mason asked as we approached.

“Smoke inhalation. Female, unconscious, early twenties. Airway is clear, but breathing is rough. Neighbors say her name is Mollie. No one else on the premises.” The fighter moved out of the way for me to take over, and I slipped into work mode, checking for her pulse: strong and steady. A good sign. Then I took the oxygen mask Mason offered me and put it over the woman’s nose and mouth.

“She’s got slight burn demarcations around her nostrils,” I said. I checked the rest of her body for burns and saw several around her feet and ankles, a few big ones on her shins. They were red and blistering—likely second degree. I performed the rest of my ABC checks—airway, breathing, and circulation. “Skin color looks good.”

Mason slipped the blood pressure cuff around Mollie’s arm, and suddenly she began coughing, reaching up with a frantic hand to claw at the mask on her face. Her eyelids flipped open and she twisted her head back and forth hard, trying to gauge where she was.

“It’s okay,” I told her, touching her arm with the tips of my fingers to settle her. I needed to keep her calm. “You’re all right. You were in a fire, but you’re safe now. Try and lie still.” She thrashed a bit more, but seemed to have heard me, because she stopped moving everything but her eyes. I put my hand on her shoulder while Mason expertly slipped a needle into the crook of her right elbow. “We’re going to get some IV fluids and pain meds going for you.” I knew the membranes in her lungs and esophagus were inflamed; my first concern was making sure the levels of carbon monoxide and possibly cyanide, depending on the kinds of materials inside the house, in her system weren’t lethal. The fact that she was alert was a positive sign, but we needed to get her hydrated and straight to the ER so the doctors could run all the appropriate tests.

“You suffered a few burns on your feet and shins. Don’t worry, the burns look pretty superficial. We’re going to take care of you,” I told her. She nodded again, keeping her eyes on my face. I gave her what I hoped was a reassuring smile. “I’m just checking for broken bones,” I explained as I moved my hands down her arms, ribs, hips, and legs. Everything felt intact. I looked to Mason, who had finished putting in the IV. “Good to go?”

“Yep,” Mason confirmed, and jumped up to pull the gurney closer to us, then lowered it. “Hold on, sweetheart,” he said. “We’re just gonna lift you onto your magic carriage. You never know . . . Tyler here might be your Prince Charming.” He winked at Mollie, who was too disoriented to register the joke. Mason was determined to set me up with every cute, single victim we came across in the field, which occasionally got under my skin, but I knew my partner just wanted me to have as much happiness as he had with Gia. I wanted that, too, but it seemed like no matter what kinds of women I met, my heart compared them to what I felt when I was with Amber, and they all came up short.

I knew I wanted to become a paramedic the night nine years ago when Amber’s parents were out of town and I’d found her unconscious in her room, facedown on the fluffy blue rug next to her bed. I remembered crying as I told the 911 operator that she wasn’t breathing. I remembered riding in the ambulance while the paramedics shouted her stats into their radio, telling the ER what to expect. I watched, hand over my mouth, as they performed CPR and managed to restart her heart. I remembered thinking that this—saving people—was what I wanted to do with my life.

Tears stung the backs of my eyes as I recalled the terror I’d felt that night. Losing Amber was one of my greatest fears—a fate I’d only avoided by pushing down my feelings for her so deeply that I hoped she couldn’t tell they were still there. When she’d told me about Daniel back in August, they’d risen up before I could stop them, and her words—“you’re just jealous”—were not only painful, they were true. They also made me realize that I wasn’t as good an actor as I had thought. The only way I managed to hold myself together in that moment—to prevent myself from dropping to my knees and begging her to love me the same way I loved her—was to tell her to leave while I locked myself in my bedroom and punched the side of my hard oak dresser until my knuckles were bruised.

I was happy that she and I had managed to smooth things out, because the truth was I couldn’t imagine a life without her. Something had forever changed in me that first day we met, and I hoped that someday, maybe, that same exact something might change in Amber, too.

•  •  •

At six a.m., four hours after Mason and I safely delivered Mollie to St. Joseph’s ER, it was finally the end of our shift. Tired and silent, we headed back to the station to clean and restock our rig. When we were done, Mason checked his phone as we walked to our cars. “Want to come over? Gia says she’s making waffles.”

“Really?” I asked, knowing full well that Gia’s culinary talents were mostly limited to boxes of macaroni and cheese and Bagel Bites.

Mason grinned. “Yeah, probably toaster waffles, but it’s the thought that counts. She might even manage to not burn them.”

I laughed, thinking it was a good thing that in order to maintain his beefed-up physique, my partner basically subsisted on protein shakes and the cooked chicken breasts he bought in bulk from a local butcher. “Sorry, man, but I’m wiped. Think I’m just going to head home and crash.”

“All right,” Mason said. “See you later.”

“You know it,” I said. I climbed into my truck, and pointed it toward home.

As I accelerated onto the freeway, I wondered if, despite my fatigue, I’d be able to fall asleep. I often felt wired after work, an electric panic buzzing through me, and there were few things that sanded down that anxious, jagged edge. My training had taught me that the fits of anxiety I’d struggled with since I was a kid were functions of brain chemistry, linked to emotion via the limbic system. My response to stress was, for lack of a better phrase, simply the way I was wired. But as I’d gotten older, especially after I started dealing with the often nerve-racking circumstances of my job, the symptoms I experienced had become acutely physical—shortness of breath, aching muscles, hot, angry pinpricks traveling in raging currents over my skin. I’d never told anyone—not Mason, not my mom, not even Amber—how bad it sometimes got. I simply pushed it down as best I could, doing whatever I had to in order to keep it from controlling me.

Now, I gripped the steering wheel, the muscles in my legs tensing as unthinking, I pushed my right foot down harder on the gas pedal. Without signaling, I changed lanes at the last moment before I might have rear-ended a white sedan, then put even more pressure on the gas. My shoulders hunched and I thought about whether or not I could beat my record of getting from the station to my apartment in under ten minutes. I’d have to hit 100 miles an hour in order to do it, and a glance at the speedometer told me that I was already at 80.

I felt the tension in my body rise even further as I hit 90 miles an hour, then whipped in front of a red Jetta and crossed over another lane in order to keep from missing the Lakeway exit. Horns honked and I heard tires screeching as I jammed on the brakes, my heartbeat beginning to slow down as my vehicle did, too. That hard and fast rush, followed by a sudden drop of adrenaline, was the only thing that relieved the internal pressure I sometimes felt, that helped me relax.

My apartment was just a few blocks off the freeway, a one-bedroom place on the first floor of a converted house at the bottom of High Street. There was barely enough space in the living room for a small, slightly ratty couch that I’d picked up for fifty bucks on Craigslist. But I had a flat screen hanging there and one in my bedroom, where my bed consisted of a box spring and mattress on the floor, and that, coupled with a functioning bathroom and the tiny galley kitchen, was all I really needed.

At twenty-five, I sometimes felt like I should move into something more adult—whatever that might mean—but the apartment was cheap and my neighbors were mostly college students, which worked well for my weird schedule. They tended to be on campus when I was home during the day and needed to sleep. My shifts were typically overnight, which were the peak partying hours for the young people in my building. They all knew I was a paramedic, though, and a few times I’d awakened to pounding on my front door when one of the students had passed out from having too much to drink, and their friend wanted me to make sure no one was going to die.

After parking in the small lot behind the building, I opened my front door and stepped inside, heading immediately for the kitchen to search out something to eat. I found only a lone pizza in the freezer and stuck it in the microwave to cook while I headed into my bedroom to change my clothes.

After wolfing down my freezer-burned meal standing next to the sink, I drank a big glass of water and took the few steps back to my bedroom, where I collapsed onto my bed, propping myself up with a few pillows. I clicked on the TV, more for the background noise than anything else, and when the news showed a clip of a house fire somewhere down in Tacoma, I wondered how Mollie was doing. That was often the hardest part of my job: not knowing the end of the story for the people I treated. I liked to believe she was fine. I had to tell myself that so I could continue doing my job.

I wondered what Amber was doing right then, if she was with Daniel or if she was already at the gym for work. I grabbed my phone, thinking I would send her a text, but then remembered that I’d promised myself to wait at least a few days before contacting her after she’d gone back to school. I didn’t want her to assume that I was just sitting around, thinking about her. Which I was, but she didn’t need to know that.

Instead, my mind wandered back to her almost three-month-long stay in the hospital during her sophomore year, where doctors had immediately hooked her up to a feeding tube so she wouldn’t die from malnutrition. I remembered overhearing a nurse say that Amber was one of the worst cases of anorexia he’d ever seen. That some cancer patients weighed more than Amber did, even after they’d been through several rounds of chemo.

“What’s the last thing you remember?” I’d asked her, when she was finally conscious long enough to have a conversation. I was there every day after school, sitting next to her bed, whether she was awake or not. I watched her sleep—her eyes twitching beneath closed lids, her emaciated limbs sticking out of her hospital gown, unmoving.

But that day, she was awake, and only a week into her hospital stay. She rolled her head to one side in order to look at me and pulled the oxygen mask from her face. “Walking up the stairs to my room, feeling dizzy,” she said. “And then . . . waking up here.” She glanced down at the PIC line in her chest that was delivering the nutrition she so badly needed. “I can’t wait to get this thing out of me. I can totally feel it making me fat.”

“Are you kidding me?” I demanded. I stood up from my chair and gripped the rail on the side of her bed. “Not eating is what landed you here, Amber. You can’t fuck around with this shit anymore, okay? It’s going to kill you. It almost did.”

“Getting fat will kill me,” she whispered, and then I couldn’t help it, I started to cry. Not the quiet, silently weeping kind of crying, either. I sobbed. My shoulders shook and tears dripped down my cheeks and landed on her arm.

“You can’t die,” I said, my voice broken. “Okay? You’re the only person who gets me. You have to get better.”

She closed her eyes then, and rolled her head away so she didn’t have to look at me anymore. “You should go,” she said, but I didn’t listen. I just sat back down and tried to get a handle on my emotions.

“I’m not going anywhere,” I said, still sniffling, but with defiance. “You can’t make me.”

At this, she finally laughed, a dry, cackling sound. “What are you, six? Don’t be such a baby. I’ll be fine, okay? I’ll get better.”

“You promise?”

She turned to look at me again. “Yes. No. I think so.” She sighed. “I don’t know. I’m too fucking tired to decide right now.”

“I’ll make you a deal,” I said, suddenly struck with an idea.

“What kind of deal?” she asked, her voice full of suspicion.

“If you do what your doctors tell you to—the whole group therapy thing, talking with the psychologist, trying to eat—everything, I’ll take you to prom. I’ll wear a tux, rent a limo, the whole thing.”

“Well, now. This just got interesting,” she said, raising her right eyebrow. Her breathing was labored as she spoke; the doctor had told her parents that Amber’s heart was still in distress after the heart attack she’d had the night I found her on the floor. With her extreme weight loss, the muscles of her heart, just like the rest of her body, had weakened and wasted away. She’d missed so much school since the beginning of the year due to her health—her parents had taken her to multiple doctors and a few different counselors, desperate for help, to find a way to get her to eat—that it looked like she would need to repeat her entire sophomore year, which would mean she wouldn’t graduate until she was nineteen and, because of her late September birthday, wouldn’t start college until she turned twenty. “You haven’t ever been to a dance. You said they’re only for idiot jocks and cheerleaders.”

“I know. Which should tell you just how serious I am about you doing whatever it takes to get well.” She was right; I tended to think that school dances were just for the more popular kids, not guys like me who would much rather spend a Friday night watching a documentary on the Learning Channel than in some dark, sweaty gym, pretending to have a good time. Amber, on the other hand, loved to dance. And if I had to go to my senior prom, there was no other girl I’d rather be with. I held out my hand. “Do we have a deal?”

She stared at my hand for a minute, a small flicker of light having returned to her eyes, then gave a short bob of her head. She reached her bony hand out to shake mine. “Deal. But you actually have to dance when we’re there. No standing by the wall bullshit, watching everyone else.”

I agreed, and when she began to get better physically, her mood started to follow suit. She’d entered the hospital in early January, and wasn’t released until late March, because at one point early in her treatment, despite the bargain we’d struck, she’d pulled out her feeding tube, and more than once, she was caught throwing up the nurse-supervised meal she’d just eaten. It was far from an easy process, and she only put back on twelve pounds while she was there, but when she got home, she continued to see a therapist and attend a support group for people who suffered from eating disorders. By the time prom came around, she was still thin, but she almost looked like herself again, like the Amber I knew and loved.

As I lay in my bed now, my thoughts returned to prom night itself—what Amber had said to me—and suddenly, that jittering, electric feeling I’d had in my truck on the drive home from the station took me over again. I forced myself to think instead about Whitney, who was likely upstairs in her apartment. I remembered what it felt like to be inside her, to have her young, firm flesh pressed against mine. And though my entire body burned with exhaustion, I turned off the TV, grabbed my cell phone, and tapped out a quick text, inviting her to join me. “I can’t stop thinking about you,” I wrote. “Come over.” Not a request, a demand, knowing that, however I worded it, she would comply.

“I’m not even out of bed yet,” she answered just a few seconds later.

“Perfect,” I replied. “Neither am I.” I added a winking smiling face, and then waited a moment. When she didn’t text back right away, I typed more. “Come on. You know you want to.” I couldn’t ignore the barbed, erratic pounding in my head—the tightness in my chest, making it difficult to breathe.

I needed to do something. I needed relief.

“OK,” came Whitney’s reply, and my body instantly began to relax, knowing that sex would do for the moment, quieting the torturous discomfort that I suspected would only be cured by one thing.