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Connections
Captain Hartfield
Josh walked in and dropped his bag by the door. He stood there a second longer than he needed to.
“Hey. Wasn’t expecting you tonight,” Ben said. “Rough day?”
“I lost a patient today. We worked her for almost thirty minutes, and she just—she didn’t make it.”
“I’m sorry. The first one is always hard.”
“You’ve been doing this for years. Does it ever get easier?”
“No. You just get better at carrying it.”
“But how? How do you keep going back?”
“I don’t have a good answer for that. But I can tell you what it looks like. Come here.”
Josh moved to the couch. Ben put an arm around him and pulled him in.
“There was a building collapse, back when Matt and I were still on the same rig. Downtown. Renovation job. They pulled a load-bearing wall on the upper floors and the whole middle section dropped. There was a daycare on the ground floor.”
“Wait—the daycare thing? That was you?”
“You know about that?”
“It was on the news for a week. I was like fifteen.”
“Then you know how bad it was.”
It was terrible. Most of the victims were kids.
“Matt was the lieutenant running the scene. Spotted something the rest of us missed. Read the way the stairwell had twisted and figured out there was a pocket behind a service wall. We pulled two kids and an adult out of that void.”
“My mom cried when we saw that.”
“We got five out total. Twenty didn’t make it. Anyone would tell you those were exceptional saves. But for Matt, it wasn’t enough. Never was.”
The debrief was in ten minutes. Matt wasn’t downstairs.
Ben went straight to the roof. He walked past the vent prop, around the base of the hose tower, to the corner behind it.
Matt hid there with his face buried against his knees, arms braced tight. He must have heard him, because he lifted his head.
No one else ever saw him like this.
He sat down next to him. Put an arm around his shoulders.
Matt didn’t make a sound for a long time, and then he did, and it was worse.
Ben held on. The shaking wouldn’t slow.
Five saves. Matt counted twenty failures. Carried every one like it was his fault.
He had to ask.
“The accident… does he also blame himself for that?”
“That was different. He doesn’t even remember it.”
“What happened to him?”
Ben’s arm tightened around him.
“High-rise construction site. Worker trapped in an elevator shaft. Matt went down to secure him into a rescue harness. That’s when the secondary collapse hit. The elevator car gave out and fell. His safety line didn’t hold. Dropped fifteen meters.”
Damn. You don’t package someone alive from that.
“He crash-landed on his right side. Took the full impact. His ribs, his leg, his arm… all of it. Almost didn’t make it to the hospital.”
For a moment, Josh forgot he was the one who’d come home hurting.
“What about the worker?”
“He made it out safely. Matt made sure of that.”
The man in the wheelchair. The bad hand, the leg that was always braced. The dry jokes about his own body.
“And he doesn’t remember any of it,” Josh said softly.
“It’s for the best. No one should have to relive something like that.”
Ben had ended things with him because of Matt. Josh had spent a long time being angry about that. Part of him still was. But he understood it now.
“So that’s why you’re always around him.”
Ben’s smile didn’t quite reach his eyes.
“Yeah. Turns out I am bad at leaving.”
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