Things You Save in a Fire

by Katherine Center

“I barely know her. She’s practically a stranger.” “Bullshit. That woman made you. She gave you life.”

In some funny way, I was still standing up for my teenage self. Because if I didn’t, who would?

“Nobody’s perfect,” he said. What was he doing? Was he trying to model behavior for me? Was this some kind of teachable moment about growth and change? It seemed so patronizing. I might not know everything about forgiveness, but I sure as hell knew you didn’t get there by pretending earth-shattering betrayals had been no big deal. Your wife cheating on you is a big deal. Your mom abandoning you is a big deal. I wasn’t going to insult my teenage self and all she’d been through by just shrugging and saying, Nobody’s perfect.

“Did he really say, ‘Women are the worst’?” She squinted. “He doesn’t seem to have much of a filter.” “Did he realize that he was talking to a woman?” “If he did, he didn’t care.” “Did he realize he can’t discriminate?” “If he did, he didn’t care.”

“New rules: Never admit to being hurt. Pain is for the weak.” I wrote down PAIN = for the weak.

“And don’t talk too much, either. Remember: What women think of as sharing, men see as complaining.”

“Don’t have feelings?” “Don’t talk about them, don’t explore them, and for God’s sake, whatever you do, don’t cry.” “I never cry.” “Good. Keep it that way.” I wrote the word “feelings,” circled it, and drew a line through the circle. Feelings: bad.

That’s how life is. Things happen. Lives get broken. Some people never can put themselves back together.

I knew the truth. No amount of painted flowers could cover the truth. She was still the person who’d left us. She was still the person who had disappeared when I really, really needed her. She was still one of the greatest disappointments of my life.

Of course, our parents get an extra dose of importance in our minds. When we’re little, they’re everything—the gods and goddesses that rule our worlds. It takes a lot of growing up, and a lot of disappointment, to accept that they’re just normal, bumbling, mistaken humans, like everybody else.

My mom had married my dad, she’d once told me, because he’d told her she was fascinating. “Who doesn’t want to be fascinating?” she’d said. But they weren’t much alike. She was a dreamer who had trouble keeping straight what day of the week it was, and he was a high school math teacher with a buzz cut—all practicality—who coached basketball. Still, he was kind, and fair, and loyal.

“I’m just not really a joiner. Of clubs.”

“Love makes people stupid,” I said at last, hoping to cut to the chase, “and I’m not interested in being stupid.” “Not always,” she said. “Women especially,” I added, not bothering to hide my impatience. “It makes them needy and sad and pathetic. And robs them of their independence.” “Independence is overrated,” my mom said. “Love is overrated,”

“Love is for the weak.” I needed that on a bumper sticker.

“Choosing to love—despite all the ways that people let you down, and disappear, and break your heart. Knowing everything we know about how hard life is and choosing to love anyway … That’s not weakness. That’s courage.”

Now she pinned me with her stare. “It’s my fault,” she said, after a second. “For leaving.” “It’s not your fault,” I said, but there was that anger again, swirling itself into the mix. It kind of was her fault. She had been the first person to show me how terrible love could be.

“There’s conquest, and there’s status, and there’s porn. Love is something girls invented so they could feel better about it.” I’d shocked her. Good. “If that’s what you truly believe,” she said, “then I feel so sad for you.” “I feel sad for all the women out there dragging their boyfriends to Bed Bath & Beyond and making them shop for throw pillows. They want the fantasy more than they want the truth.” “What’s the truth?” she challenged. “The truth is that love doesn’t exist.”

“Sounds like you just threw down a challenge to the universe, lady.” I narrowed my eyes. “What does that mean?” “It means,” she said, looking a little triumphant, “that you clearly, obviously, any second now, are just about to fall in love.”

I was having a reaction to the rookie. A romantic reaction. The dumb kind. A full-body reaction, too. Like someone had lit a Fourth of July sparkler inside my chest. It was so terrible. So humiliating. So … girly.

“Forgiveness is about a mind-set of letting go.” She thought for a second, then said, “It’s about acknowledging to yourself that someone hurt you, and accepting that.”

“Then it’s about accepting that the person who hurt you is flawed, like all people are, and letting that guide you to a better, more nuanced understanding of what happened. Flawed, I thought. Okay. Check. “And then there’s a third part,” she went on, “probably the hardest, that involves trying to look at the aftermath of what happened and find ways that you benefited, not just ways you were harmed.”

“I’m just saying that … pretty much every time I see you, all I want to do is to put my arms around you.”

“This is the decoy girlfriend, huh?” she asked, smiling. “We’re not pretending she’s my girlfriend,” the rookie corrected. “We’re just using her as a distraction.” The sister—Shannon—looked me up and down. “She is distracting.” Where was my bunker gear? Then she pointed at me. “Don’t break his heart.” “Shut up,” he said to her. I marveled. Was I passing for a heartbreaker? “I’m kidding,” the sister said. Then back to me, “But seriously. Don’t.”

I’d wanted to die for so many years. But I didn’t die. I survived. More than that, I thrived. Before the awards ceremony, I would have told you I was completely recovered. Until Heath Thompson showed up on that stage and dared to touch me—and then we both found out exactly how strong I’d become.

I’m not even sure I could’ve told you what they were for. There were so many different emotions making up their alchemy, I had no idea how to separate them out. There was sadness in the mix, for sure. And anger.As well as relief and joy and longing and anxiety. Tears of everything, I guess. They were tears of intensity. Tears of coming back to life.

But now I knew what I was missing. Now I remembered what it felt like not to be alone. And now that I knew, it was unbearable. But I bore it anyway. That’s what we do, isn’t it? That’s the thing I always love best about the human race: how we pick ourselves back up over and over and just keep on going.

You know, like when you take a nap, but when you wake up you’re somehow sleepier than you were before? That was me, all the time—with humanity.

when I started thinking about who I could trust—you were at the top of the list. Actually, you were the list. Just the whole list.” The whole list? I squinted at him. “Parents?” “Not for this.” “Sisters?” “Nope.” “Friends?” “You’re my friend, aren’t you?” “Friend-slash-enemy.” “Fair enough.”

“Could we go upstairs and sleep together—actually sleep?” He smiled bigger, all teasing. “Firefighter Hanwell, are you proposing that we snuggle?” I gave a barely-there smile of my own. “I guess that’s one way to describe it.” “I’ll take anything. I’d sleep on a bed of nails to be next to you.” I turned and started pulling him toward the house. “That’s actually perfect, because my bed is made of nails.” “Sold,” he said. “I’m in.”

“Not in the bedroom of a superhero.” “I’m not a superhero.” “You’re pretty damn close.” “I’m the opposite, in a lot of ways.” “It’s possible that you don’t fully know how awesome you are.” “That’s distinctly possible.”

“You scare me.” He let out a laugh. “I am far too lovesick to scare anybody.” I had to clarify something. “Are you lovesick?” I asked. He met my eyes. “Horribly.” “About me?” I asked, just making sure. He gave me a look like I was adorable and ridiculous and lovable, all at once. Then he nodded and got serious again. “Every single minute of every single day.”

Yes, the world is full of unspeakable cruelty. But the answer wasn’t to never feel hope, or bliss, or love—but to savor every fleeting, precious second of those feelings when they came. The answer wasn’t to never love anyone. It was to love like crazy whenever you could.

the waiting room was packed standing room only with Owen’s extended family, the entire guest list from his parents’ party—from sisters to cousins to friends called “uncle”—plus about fifty retired firefighters right out of Central Casting in their FD shirts and dad jeans. Friends of Big Robby’s, I supposed. I remember it now as a blur of navy-blue station shirts, overgrown mustaches, Dunkin’ Donuts cups, and cigarettes. Could you smoke in the hospital waiting room? No. Did those ornery old firefighters give a shit? Hell, no. The wives were all on one side of the room, sitting in chairs, leaning toward each other, talking and gabbing and worrying. The guys were all crammed in the hallway, standing close, faces somber.

“Um,” I said, counting off on my fingers, “the building was still there, the people were still there. Even the porn was still there.” He pointed at me. “But it was hidden. We never had to hide the porn before.” “That’s what drove you to the dark side, man? Because you had to hide your porn?”

I do it because I believe that human connection is the only thing that will save us. I do it because I believe we learn empathy when we listen to other people’s stories and feel their pain with them. I do it because I know for certain that our world has an empathy problem with women, and this is one brave thing I can do to help fix it.

Now, it’s not just me baking cookies alone. Now, I always imagine my sixteen-year-old self there, too—right beside me. When the cookies are ready, we pull them out, sit side by side on the sofa, and eat them—still warm and gooey—and drink glasses of ice cold milk. Sometimes I put my arm around her. Sometimes I say compassionate, understanding, encouraging things. Sometimes I lean in and promise her with all the conviction I possess that what happened to her won’t destroy her life. That in the end, she will heal, and find a new way to be okay. She never believes me, but I say it anyway.