Fog

I had only two days of having my sister back in my life, and much to my surprise, I desperately missed her now that she was gone. I couldn’t believe that the end of our silence, and the ultimate return to it, could have such an effect on me. But I wrote part of it off to hormonal surges after the miscarriage and tried to ignore the emotional emptiness that I felt.

I wandered through the next few days in a fog, half-blind to the world around me. I went through the motions at work, not even minding the fact that I was still stuck at the info desk. People asked stupid questions, and I just smiled and did my best to answer. Suddenly, the job was easy. I didn’t even freak out when the man came to ask if I had a copy of “that vampire book by Dan Rice.” I admit that I clenched my teeth and muttered, “Anne” under my breath, but he didn’t notice so it didn’t matter. Overall, it was entirely too calm and easy. I got angry about nothing.

It was two weeks after the miscarriage when the bizarre and unthinkable happened. It was early evening on a Thursday night, and I picked up a shift from one of the college kids who was clearly faking illness when he called. How could I tell? Perhaps it was the sound of the party in the background while he faked a cough. But I didn’t care. I could use the money. I was again working the info desk when I thought I smelled a familiar smell. Nah, I thought. It can’t be. But the smell became unmistakable. I called for a coworker to report to the info desk.

“Do you smell that?” I asked.

“Aren’t you supposed to have all the answers, info girl?” He laughed as he said it. He laughed at nearly everything he said. I thought it was nice that someone found him to be funny.

He stopped for a moment, and his eyes grew wide. “Hey! Someone’s smoking!”

“Not just smoking, genius. They’re smoking something special.” I rose from my chair. “Sit here. I’m going hunting.”

I followed my nose from aisle to aisle. The sheer number of shelves, combined with the ventilation system in the building made it hard to track down the origin of the smell. They were in the cookbooks section, of all places, trying to come up with recipes to address their munchies problem. To me, it seemed so much easier to just go to the convenience store. I found the three of them huddled on the floor, reading recipes for desserts. A shorter guy was fixated on the photo of the baked Alaska.

I wasn’t exactly sure what the store protocol was for dealing with this. Normally, I would have asked them to leave, but obviously a woman with only one good arm wasn’t going to wrestle three stoned students out of the bookstore. I went off to look for the night manager who, like most night managers, was nowhere to be found on the sales floor. By the time I found him in the break room and brought him to the cookbooks section, things had gotten out of control.

While the carpets in most businesses are treated for flame-resistance, they can’t do much for the books. And a carelessly-placed joint can send a cookbook up in flames pretty quickly. Unfortunately, when you’re stoned, you don’t react very quickly, so when we got to the aisle, they were staring, dumbfounded, at the sight of half-a-dozen cookbooks engulfed in flames. One girl was nearly in tears. “My cookies!” she cried. “I loved that recipe!”

The night manager screamed an impressive array of profanities and ran for the break room to get the fire extinguisher. The taller of the stoned guys stood up, and proceeded to trip over the burning stack of books and land in the middle of the aisle with his ankles in the flames. Within seconds, his pants were on fire. Can you imagine the rest? Yes, rather than helping, his friend started laughing and chanting, “Liar, liar, pants on fire.” I tried to convince the human torch to stop, drop and roll, but he wasn’t hearing it. I wanted to try to squelch the flames with his jacket, but with one arm strapped to my chest in the sling, I was afraid of doing more harm than good.

The manager returned, breathless, with the fire extinguisher in hand; he doused the stoner and his cookbooks, leaving the aisle covered in white foam that looked like a bastardized version of the holiday Santa display at the mall. By this time a small crowd had gathered to witness the book-burning bonfire in aisle 17, so there were plenty of people offering their “oohs” and “ahhhs” at the scene. When the fire was out, they applauded and whistled. I asked if anyone had called for an ambulance, and someone said that they had. The guy was fairly seriously burned, and he was going to need medical attention. The books were reduced to a charred heap, and his friends were left in a wide-eyed, slack-jawed state of shock and horror, not entirely believing what they had just witnessed. I wanted to hope that they would have the good sense not to smoke again, especially in a bookstore.

I tried to make the guy as comfortable as possible as I heard the ambulance approach outside. I had his head in my lap and I stroked his hair, which was greasy enough to make me cringe and want to run for the antibacterial lotion behind the desk. But I tried to think of his pain and I stayed, trying to comfort him. His friends were clinging to each other, trying to make sense of it all through the marijuana haze.

“Please step aside,” I heard someone tell the crowd. And there he was. Nick. Our eyes met for a moment, but I looked away, humiliated.

“Jesus, those are some nasty burns,” he muttered. “What’s his name?”

”I don’t know.” I looked up to find his friends, but they were gone. “Did anyone see where his friends went?” No one had. The guy was crying in my lap, and hadn’t spoken a word yet.

“Hey man,” Nick said to him. “What’s your name?”

He didn’t answer, just continued to cry. “We’ll look for ID after we get him on the gurney,” he told me. I nodded.

He dressed the burns and eased him onto the stretcher. His partner, an older man this time, wheeled him out to the ambulance. Nick pulled off his latex gloves and reached out a hand to help me up. I took it.

“How are you?” he asked, as he packed his triage kit.

“I’m fine, thanks. How are you?” I still couldn’t really look at him.

“Good. Busy.” He paused, as if to decide whether he should ask more. “Have you found a good doctor yet? You really need to take care of the little one.”

I shook my head. “No. I… I don’t need one.” He looked at me with a knowing look. “No, not like that. Miscarriage.”

“I’m sorry,” he said quietly. “When?”

“Fifteen days ago.” I was shocked to realize that I had been keeping track of the days.

He reached out and touched my broken arm. “And how’s this feeling?”

I smiled. “Better. Three more weeks with the cast, then I’m back to normal. Whatever normal might be.” He laughed. He had a beautiful laugh.

We stood and talked for a moment while his partner took vital stats and info from the patient. “Shouldn’t you be going?” I asked.

“He’s not critical. You have to finish the paperwork on the stable patients before you can take them to County.”

“Oh.” I thought for a minute. “Is he going to be ok?”

“Sure. The next few weeks will be unpleasant, and he’ll have some scars, but more or less he’ll be fine.”

I nodded. Sometimes the scars are ones you see, and sometimes you get burned on the inside. I didn’t know which was preferable.

He walked halfway to the ambulance before turning around. “Angela?”

“Yes?”

“I’m sorry.”

I looked confused. “For what?”

“For not being able to stay with someone I found so charming and funny.”

“Oh!” I said, cheeks flushing with embarrassment.

“Until we meet again,” he called.

I smiled. “Until then.”

I watched the ambulance pull away. I hadn’t noticed the police arrive, and I was ushered into the break room to give my report of the incident. I knew I was supposed to take it seriously, but my mind was on other things. I felt light and alive, like the fog had lifted and the sun had come out to warm the world.

They asked me to help them make composite sketches of the guy and girl that accompanied our guy, now nicknamed Burning Man. I suggested that it might be easier to just ask him what their names were, but they were certain that he was too savvy to give them that information. I wasn’t so sure.

I did a fairly accurate composite of the woman, but for the life of me, I couldn’t remember the features of the guy. I felt bad. I didn’t want him to be left out of the fun police experience, but I just couldn’t remember anything more than a short, skinny guy in a ski cap.

I suggested that they hit the local eateries to find these two, but I don’t think they took me seriously. Too bad, too, since I’m reasonably certain that they could have found them quickly at either the 7-11 or the local supermarket. Not my choice to make, though. It’s their investigation, not mine.

I got back to my info desk with about an hour left until closing. The crowds had long-since dispersed and it was a quiet Thursday night at the store. I slouched in my seat, made myself comfortable, and counted down the last 53 minutes of my extra-long day. And I thought of Nick and smiled. Sure, I knew I had screwed up any chance I ever had of dating this guy, but he was still charming and still made me smile in his presence. Some days, that’s enough to carry you through.