It Happens All the Time: A Novel

“She called it a date, huh?” Mason asked as he pulled out of the station parking lot onto the street, flipping on the lights and siren of our rig. “Sounds like you might actually have a chance with the girl.”

“Maybe,” I said, trying not to get my hopes up too high. Spending time with Amber since she’d come home from school was everything I’d wanted it to be. Even though we worked opposite hours—my swing shifts to her early mornings into the afternoons—we still found a few evenings a week to go on runs together and then grab sushi for dinner, or just hang out at her parents’ house or mine. We talked and laughed like we had when we were in high school, before the night my confession of being in love with her threw up a wall between us that had never quite gone away.

There was no sign of that wall yesterday, when I went to see her at the gym. She was bubbly toward me—flirtatious, even—and when her eyes locked on mine, I couldn’t deny the arousal I felt, or the heated flush I saw rise in her cheeks. Maybe being away from Daniel was exactly what she needed to figure out how she really feels, I thought as I left her on the gym floor with her client. Maybe spending so much time with me is showing her that marrying him would be a mistake—that she would be happiest if she chose me.

Now, it was just past eight on Saturday night, and dispatch had called for all units at the station house to get to a multicar accident on I-5 near the Fairhaven exit. Several other firefighting and medic teams were already on the scene—my dad’s likely included—but there were so many injured, they needed more. A tanker truck had jackknifed when the driver in front of it slammed on his brakes; the domino effect of crunching metal and broken windshields quickly took over all of the southbound lanes. Multiple car fires and possible fatalities had been reported—not a great way to begin a shift, even on the best of days. And today certainly didn’t fall into that category. Despite how well things were going with Amber, I’d still woken up that morning with what felt like a giant stone settled on top of my sternum. My entire body was shaky; my hands trembled, and I had no idea why. There was no rhyme or reason to when anxiety would hit me—no inciting event or emotional precursor. It just showed up, dug in its claws, and threatened to take over.

Mason turned a tight corner, carefully edging his way around the inattentive drivers who didn’t pull to the side of the road to get out of the ambulance’s way, finally managing to get on the onramp heading south. The freeway was a parking lot; we’d have to drive along the shoulder. My partner flipped the siren on and off a few times to encourage the cars in front of us to pull to the side so we could change lanes and get where we needed to be. “Out of the way, dumbass!” he yelled. Every minute we weren’t on the scene, another life could be lost.

The thick ache in my chest pulsed as I looked down the road and saw the enormous plume of black smoke rising up from where we were headed. “Damn,” I said. “Looks bad.” The words stuck in my throat and came out sounding strangled.

Mason gave me a quick, worried look out of the corner of his eye. “You okay?”

“Yeah,” I said, drumming my fingers on the tops of my legs.

“You sure? You seem kinda jumpy.”

“I’m sure. Ready to get to work,” I said. Calm down, I told myself, curling my hands into fists, digging my nails into my palms. Just do your fucking job.

As we inched down the side of the road, we listened to the scanner for more information from dispatch, but none came through. “Unit forty-nine, approaching the scene on I-5 south,” I said into the radio.

“Heard, unit forty-nine,” the operator said. “Firefighters extracting multiple vics right now. Do not approach the vehicles. I repeat. Do not approach the vehicles. Fighters will bring vics to you.”

“Copy that, dispatch,” I said. “Unit forty-nine, out.” I glanced at Mason, who had gotten us as close to where we needed to be as we were likely going to get, about a hundred feet from the tanker, which was now lying on its side. Behind that, I saw the source of the black smoke: at least five cars in flames, countless yellow-jacketed fighters spraying water and chemical fire retardant everywhere, in an effort to prevent gas tank explosions. I knew one of those fighters was my father, but it was impossible to tell which he might be. My heartbeat thudded in a wild rhythm with the added pressure of possibly running into him, having to perform my work under his scrutiny. He’ll be too busy doing his job to care about yours, I thought. Get over yourself. Get your head in the game.

“Let’s hit it,” Mason said, jumping out of the driver’s side door and running toward the back of the ambulance. After a deep breath, I followed him. We grabbed the gurney and our supply bags, weaving through the cars trapped by the blocked lanes. The thick gray clouds that filled the sky began to spit raindrops; I hoped it would pour and help extinguish the flames.

“Over here!” one of the firefighters yelled, spotting the two of us coming their way. He pointed and, as we approached, I saw a young man lying on the cement, half of his face burned away. His skin was red-blistered and scorched all the way down his right side, ending just below his knee.

Oh, Christ. My stomach lurched, and my mind immediately flashed on the memory of being in the burn unit with Curtis. The smell of roasting flesh. The way his nose and both ears had turned to ash. I’d been around other burn victims since then, but something about this one—paired with the anxiety-spiked adrenaline already raging through my blood—made me feel dizzy and weak.

“You got him?” the fighter yelled as Mason dropped to his knees next to the young man and began taking his vitals.

I gave the fighter a thumbs-up sign but didn’t speak. Damn it. Get your shit together, Hicks! I swallowed and tried to steady my breathing.

The fighter ran back toward the smoldering cars, and I saw several other paramedic units on the other side of the disaster. They must have come from the south.

“Ty!” Mason yelled. “You need to get a line in, now!”

I realized I was still standing there, staring at the burning cars, leaving my partner to fend for himself. I dropped to the ground, kneeling on the other side of the young man Mason was treating. I heard my father’s voice, echoing inside my head: Man up, Son! The victim’s eyes were closed, but he was moaning, rolling his head back and forth. The rest of his body didn’t move or respond to stimulation.

“We need to get him on a board,” Mason said. “Could be a spinal.”

On a three count, I rolled the man carefully onto one side so Mason could slip the yellow backboard beneath him. The man shrieked when we eased him down, startling me so badly, I almost dropped him.

“You sure you’re okay?” Mason asked again, his dark brows furrowed.

Hands shaking, I bobbed my head once. “Sorry.” I grabbed what I’d need for running an IV from my black bag while Mason checked the man’s pupils. The victim screeched again, a howling, animalistic sound. Thunder cracked, the sky opened up, and the rain began to pour.

“He needs pain meds and fluids,” Mason said. “Hurry up. We need to get him stable.”

I nodded again, but the smell of the man’s cooking flesh rose up and I was thirteen again, standing in Curtis’s hospital room in my father’s angry presence, feeling like a disgrace. The anxiety that had been coiling tightly within me, stockpiling inside my chest all day long, began to unwind, gaining speed until it spun out of control.

Before I knew it, I had dropped the tubing and the needle onto the wet cement. “I can’t do it,” I whispered, shaking my head. “I can’t.” My heart jackhammered and the contents of my stomach twisted. I felt certain I was going to vomit. Again, my father’s voice: Only newbies and pussies puke.

“What the fuck?” Mason said. He grabbed the necessary tubing and needles from his own bag and came around to the man’s undamaged side, pushing me out of the way.

I watched my partner work, my own skin feeling as though it was peeling away from my body, as the victim’s had, all his nerves exposed. I felt too disoriented to stand, but I forced myself upward, groping and grabbing on to the back of my partner’s shirt for support, which almost toppled both of us over.

“Get off me!” Mason said, pushing me away. “Jesus, Ty! What’s wrong with you?”

I couldn’t speak. I could only feel the terror pushing through my blood like a toxin, poisoning every cell.

Mason stood up, grabbed me by my biceps, and squeezed them, hard. “Tyler!” he shouted. “Look at me.”

I blinked heavily, then lifted my gaze to my partner’s. My body trembled and my chest heaved; I could barely catch my breath.

“I don’t know what’s going on,” Mason said, giving me a quick, violent shake. “But it needs to stop. Right. Now.” He let go of one of my arms and grasped my chin instead. “Do you hear me? I need you to help me get this man to the ER.”

I shook my head, unsure if I could do what needed to be done. My partner’s voice sounded distant, muffled and cloudy inside my head.

“Goddamn it, Hicks!” Mason smacked my cheek with his thick fingers. The sting of that impact was finally enough to jar me out of my foggy state, enough to get me to stumble over to the injured man’s feet and lift him, with Mason’s help, onto the gurney. Though I was still trembling, I met Mason’s steely gaze with my own. I can do this. Just try not to breathe in too deeply. Ignore the smell. Save this man’s life. My heart still pounded.

“All right then,” Mason said, guiding the gurney back through the maze of cars to our rig. Once we got the gurney secured in the back of the ambulance, Mason radioed ahead to notify St. Joseph’s that we were on our way with an accident victim. Then he held the keys out to me. “You drive. Okay?”

I looked at Mason, then allowed my eyes to dart back toward the injured man. There’s no way I can treat him, I realized. Not when I’m feeling like this. I’d probably make a fatal mistake. I could kill him. I snatched the keys from Mason’s hand and jogged around the vehicle to the driver’s side, steeling myself against any thought but the need to deliver this man safely to the hospital.

I started the engine, glancing behind me to make sure Mason was inside and ready to go. “Punch it,” my partner said as he wrapped a blood pressure cuff around the man’s uninjured arm. Fortunately, the pain meds Mason had administered had kicked in, and the man was finally—mercifully—silent.

I put the vehicle in reverse, and the cars around the ambulance shifted out of the way so we could turn around and drive north in the southbound lanes. With the tanker truck still blocking the road, it was the only way off the freeway. I gripped the steering wheel as tightly as I could, taking in deep breaths through my nose and blowing them out through my mouth to try to steady my erratic pulse.

My right foot longed to press down hard on the gas pedal, to push the ambulance’s speed up and up and up; to feel that sense of relief when the adrenaline in my bloodstream finally dropped, then leveled off. But with all the cars around us, there was no way to go faster than five miles per hour. There was no way for me to get relief.

“You doing okay up there?” Mason yelled over the sound of the siren.

“Yeah!” I managed to reply. I hunched over the steering wheel, maneuvering around the last few cars that were preventing us from reaching the exit. I drove the wrong way up the ramp, staying perilously close to the edge of the shoulder, honking the horn and swearing at the few drivers who still would not get out of my way. “Move, goddamn it!”

“We’re almost there,” Mason said, sensing that I needed some reassurance. “You got this, brother. Everything’s cool.”

Buoyed by my friend’s support, I felt a surge of confidence. My jerky pulse slowed, and my breathing began to regulate. Less than five minutes later, I pulled into the ER ambulance bay, jumped out of the rig, and helped Mason deliver the burn victim to the doctors and nurses awaiting us there.

Walking back to our vehicle a few minutes later, Mason clapped a hand on my shoulder, then let it go. “You had me worried back there, man,” he said with a frown. “What’s going on?”

I shrugged, unsure how to articulate a proper response. What would my partner think of me if I told him the truth? That I was riddled with anxiety, and had some sort of PTSD flashback when I saw our burn victim?

“I’m fucked up,” I finally said, thinking that was as honest as any other statement I could make.

“All right,” Mason said as he climbed into the driver’s seat of our vehicle and I settled into the passenger’s. “So what’re we going to do about that?”

I managed a small smile at my partner’s use of the word “we.” “I’ll figure it out,” I said.

Mason gave me a wary look. “I won’t tell the captain that you lost it,” he finally said. “As long as you promise to find a way to deal with whatever caused it.” He paused. “You got me?”

I nodded.

“Seriously, bro. If I see even a hint of that kind of shit again, I’m reporting it.”

“Right. Absolutely.” While my partner had my back, I knew there was no way Mason would risk putting another victim we were treating in even further danger.

“I’ll get a handle on it,” I said, having every intention of doing just that. I’d go for more runs—I’d make them longer and more intense, every night before work, draining my body of the same excess adrenaline that, for whatever reason, had sent me over the edge today. If I was going to have the kind of life I wanted, I needed to wipe out the weakest parts of me. I needed to become the kind of man a woman like Amber deserved.

•  •  •

I woke up the next morning to the sound of pounding on my front door. My eyes creaked open, my lashes sticking together as I peered at the clock on the nightstand. It was just past noon, and I’d only been asleep for five hours. My shift—the rest of which, to my relief, was much less eventful than the rollover accident—had ended at three a.m. And while I’d been exhausted when I got home, I still had a hard time winding down, the residual stress hormones in my body serving up the worst kind of emotional hangover there is—my head pounded and my limbs trembled, my heart thumped a disturbing, discordant rhythm inside my chest. When I finally did drift off, it was into a restless slumber, filled with vivid images of bodies on fire—of flesh melting away from bone.

The person outside my apartment pounded again. “Coming!” I shouted as I pulled on a pair of shorts and a T-shirt, and then stumbled into the living room. I yanked open the door, surprised to see my father standing in front of me, his right arm raised, hand in a fist. “Dad,” I said, keeping my hand on the doorknob, blinking fast in order to bring my eyes into better focus.

“We need to talk,” he said, barreling past me, not waiting for an invitation.

“Come on in,” I said, unable to keep the sarcasm from my voice as I shut the door behind him. The last time he had been to my apartment was when I first moved in, two years before, and I needed to borrow his truck, before I had bought my own. I hadn’t seen him since the brief, tense conversation we’d had at Amber’s graduation party three weeks ago. Now, I watched as he dropped onto my couch and crossed his arms over his broad chest.

“You got any coffee?” he barked. “None of that prissy latte-mochaccino shit, either. The real thing.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Hold on.” I headed into my small kitchen, grabbed a mug from the cupboard, and popped a French roast pod into my Keurig machine, gripping the edge of the counter while I waited for it to brew, wondering what the hell was so important that my dad needed to come over and wake me up on a Sunday morning. Despite my best intentions to remain calm, my heartbeat sped up, and I felt my face get hot. Once the first mug of coffee was done, I made another for myself and carried them both back into my living room, handing one to my father. He took a short sip and then set the mug on the small table in front of him. “I heard you worked the tanker accident last night.”

“I did.” I sat in the chair opposite him, and my first swallow of coffee burned the roof of my mouth, all the way down my throat to my belly. I coughed, sputtering a bit when I continued. “I think most units in the area were called, weren’t they? I figured you were helping put out the car fires.”

“You figured right.” He stared at me intently. “What you didn’t figure is that one of my boys delivered that burn victim to you and your partner. Or that he watched you stumble all over the goddamn place instead of doing your fucking job.”

I froze, my mug in midair, and forced myself to hold his gaze. “It wasn’t that bad,” I said, instantly set on the defensive, thinking this was the absolute last thing I needed right now—my father tearing me down. You’re not thirteen anymore, I told myself. You don’t have to put up with his shit.

He narrowed his eyes. “Not that bad, huh? You got the line in right away? You didn’t sit there doing nothing, leaving the victim to lie there writhing in pain? How do you think I felt, being told my son looked like a pussy?”

I dropped the mug I held to the table, not caring when the hot liquid sloshed over the side. “What the hell does it have to do with you?” I demanded.

“It has to do with me because what you do, however you fuck up, reflects right back on me.”

“Oh, I see,” I said, curling my hands into fists, trying to control the rising tide of my anger. I couldn’t believe he had the audacity to criticize me like this. Or maybe I could. It was what he’d always done. The stormy rage I’d felt toward him for years rose up and I wanted to call him out on every bullshit thing he had ever done or said. I wanted to make him pay. “It’s always about you! About you and what you want! Never me or Mom. No wonder she divorced you!”

“I don’t know what you’ve been smoking, Son, but that’s not what went down. I’m the one who divorced her. And now she can’t stand the fact that I don’t have to put up with her crap to get laid.” He gave me a look so full of pride, it took everything in me to not punch his smug face.

“You’re disgusting,” I said in a low voice. “You think it’s something I aspire to, sleeping with the skanky women you date? You think that makes me jealous?”

“I think you’d do just about anything to get into your sweet little Amber’s panties.”

I glared at him, my jaws clenched. “Don’t talk about her like that.”

He leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees, fingers laced together, and smirked. “I see the way you look at her. The way you’ve always looked at her. You’d give your left nut to get a piece of that ass.” He shook his head. “It’s never going to happen. Not with a girl like her. You’re too fucking scared to step up and be anything but a whiny little lapdog, following behind her. Yap, yap, yap.”

“Shut up,” I said with as much venom as I could muster. I stood, knocking into the table with my shins. My entire body quaked as I pointed to the door. “Get out.”

He didn’t move. Instead, he calmly reached for his coffee and took another sip, then looked up at me after he set the mug back down. “What do you think your captain will do when he hears how you fucked up? That partner of yours might keep his mouth shut, but he’s not the only one who saw what happened.” He paused, and then stood up, too, his gaze locked on mine. “My guess is you’d be ordered to talk to the department shrink. Maybe get put on leave. Even lose your job, if they find out you don’t have the balls to do it.”

“You need to go,” I growled. Hatred coursed through me. I couldn’t believe that this man, the one person I should be able to look up to and go to for support, was threatening to destroy my career for the sake of his own ego. Because he thought my failure might make him look bad.

He took the few steps to the door and put his meaty hand on the knob, pausing before turning it. “You know what, Son?” he said, looking over his shoulder. “I’m glad you didn’t decide to become a firefighter. Because no matter how hard I tried to toughen you up, you never had it in you. You just don’t have what it takes.”

Before I could respond, he slammed the door behind him. I didn’t move, his words banging their way through my entire body. I listened to the ragged edges of my own breath and the rumble of his truck’s engine as he drove away. Would he go straight to my captain and tell him how I’d screwed up, or was he just playing a power game with me, putting on a show? My work was everything to me—I loved helping people in need, being there for them in the midst of the worst moments in their lives. I loved having an experienced partner like Mason to show me the ropes. I’d worked hard to get where I was, and I worried that just when things with Amber seemed to be going well, a suspension—or even the loss of my job—might send her right back into Daniel’s arms.

I worried about these things, but mostly, as I stood in the silence, my heartbeat throbbing like an open wound inside my chest, I worried that my father might know me better than I knew myself. That all the horrible things he’d said about me, the painful jabs he’d thrown, might just end up being true.