sight of Will and Rick in their helmet and bunker gear sent it racing away at top speed.
“I hope like hell this barn is used for storage, not livestock,” he called to Rick.
“I hear you.” Rick, a young volunteer just out of training, squinted a little fearfully at the building.
“I’m going to have to do a search of the premises,” Will said, reminding himself that not so long ago, he’d been as green as Rick McClure. By the time the engine arrived, Will had donned his SCBA, though he didn’t hook up the mask. He hoped he wouldn’t need to put himself on air.
He went around the perimeter, radioing a report to his battalion chief. One good sign—he couldn’t hear any sounds of trapped livestock. That kind of thing—it tended to etch itself on a firefighter’s soul. With no rescue involved, saving the building wasn’t the goal here; it was going up like tinder. But they needed to kill the fire to keep it from spreading to the surrounding wildlands.
The plan was to vent the blaze through a large panel door on sideways rollers. Will radioed task assignments to the engine crew. While the helmeted firefighters were pulling hose, he signaled for Rick to open the door and stand ready with the portable extinguisher. The goal was to vent in order to delay flashover—the transition from the fire’s growth stage to the explosive eruption of the entire structure—until the hose line was in place. Then the fire would be pushed out through the front of the building. The blast of heat was always expected, yet always a surprise. When he was a rookie, it used to scare the crap out of him, that pressure pulsing against his face, an invisible force like the hammers of sound at a loud rock concert.
The fire was at the rollover stage, with lightning flashes of flame through the smoke. He heard a hiss and figured his air bottle was blistering in the heat. Cathedral-like, the tall Nordic-style barn was bathed in unholy light, the stacked bales of hay burning like a giant funeral pyre. I’m okay, he said, as he always did in these situations. I’m okay. In his mind, he made a clear picture of Aurora, his best reason to survive.
Birdie went to the window and lowered it to keep out the noise of a distant siren. Then she sat back down and leaned her forearms on the desk. “Sarah, I don’t understand. Why do you say your decision to delay starting a family almost killed your husband?”
“If I’d agreed to try to get pregnant right away, like Jack wanted, we would have realized sooner there was a problem.” Sarah cleared her throat. “How much detail do you need here?”
Birdie seemed to understand. “Don’t worry about detail for now. Unless you think it’s information I need in order to help you.”
At some point, Sarah knew she would be forced to reveal the most intimate details of her marriage, opening them up like an unhealed wound to expose the raw nerves. She knew enough about divorce to realize this was part of the process. Knowing this didn’t make it easier, though. Exposing her private pain behind the guise of her comic strip was one thing, but discussing it openly was quite another.
“Eventually, I wanted kids as bad as he did. Both of us seemed to be in fine health. So when we didn’t get pregnant for a whole year, we checked things out. For some reason, we expected to find something wrong with me, not him.” Determined to leave the wedding set alone, she picked up a pen and rolled it between the palms of her hands.
“I think it’s a fairly common assumption,” Birdie said. “No idea why, but it is.”
Once it was determined that there were no problems with Sarah’s fertility, Jack agreed to be checked out by his uncle, a urologist. Sarah braced herself for a report of low sperm count or poor motility or impaired delivery. In fact, the tests had revealed something far worse.
“Testicular cancer,” she told Birdie. “It had metastasized to the lymph nodes in the abdomen, and to his lungs.”
The oncologist’s can-do attitude was reassuring. “Statistics and projections aren’t going to turn this around. Fighting with everything we’ve got—that’s what’ll turn it around,” the doctor had said. Jack was also lucky to have supportive friends and family. His parents and siblings had rallied around him the moment the diagnosis was made. People who had known him since nursery school came to see him, to hang out and add their good wishes to the seemingly bottomless pool of support.
“You have to understand,” Sarah told Birdie, “when something like this happens, the whole world stops. You drop everything. It’s like joining the military, and the disease is your drill sergeant. We started treatment right away, aggressive treatment. Thanks to his age and general good health, they went at it hard.”
“Interesting that you say we started treatment. Not Jack started treatment.”
“We were a team,” Sarah explained. “The disease invaded every moment of our lives, waking or sleeping.” She flicked the pen tip in and out, in and out. “Actually, I’m not sure if this is important now or not—we took care of one small detail before we started treatment.”
“And the one small detail?”
“It was the doctors’ suggestion. Jack and I were too panicked and scattered to think of it. Jack was advised to preserve some sperm samples. The treatment carried a risk of infertility so this was a precaution.” She smiled a little. “Jack was always a bit of an overachiever. He preserved enough sperm to populate a small town. And up until last week, this story had a happy ending.” More or less, she thought. Jack’s performance at the sperm bank had been far more productive than his performance had been with her.
“Sorry, I need to clarify. You were his chief support during the treatment?”
“Financially, no. Fortunately, Jack and his family are extremely well-off. I barely had a career.”
“The comic strip you mentioned earlier?”
Agitated, she continued clicking the pen up and down, up and down. “Yes. It’s called Just Breathe.”
Birdie leaned back in her chair. “It sounds terrific, Sarah. Really.”
“It’d be better if I was actually making a living wage. For the time being, I’m self-syndicated, which means a lot more work for me but ultimately, more independence and a bigger share of the earnings. When Jack was sick, I put aside the syndication work and did advertising art and greeting cards. I never stopped drawing my strip, though. In fact, during the worst days of the treatment, I did some of my best work. But I can’t honestly say I contributed financially in any major way.”
“How about moral and emotional support? And in the area of his care?”
“I did things I never thought myself capable of.” She stopped, surprised to feel a wave of emotion as she was swept back to the endless, anguished postchemo nights, when even love and prayers were not enough to comfort him, when she held him while he shook with chills, when she cleaned up his puke and changed his bed as he moaned in agony. “I’ll spare you the details of that. Suffice it to say I was steadfast, and anyone who tries to deny that I supported him is a liar.”
“And the happy ending?”
“Before all this happened, I would’ve told you our happy ending was the day he was found to be cancer free and his treatments were stopped. I guess there’s no such thing as a happy ending. Life is too damned messy for that. Things don’t ever end. They just change.” She looked down to see that she had completely
