Chapter Text
“Looks like you’ve got yourself a cat, hero.”
Myka keeps hearing those words echo in her head as she stalks through the neighborhood, armed with “found cat” flyers and a roll of duct tape. “Don’t call me hero,” she’d said to Steve Jinks, once she’d got herself down from the tree. Herself and the kitten, who was starting to yeep in a startlingly high pitch. “Where are those kids, anyway?”
“Ran off the minute you started climbing,” Steve chuckled.
The truck was out only because of a false alarm anyway, but then the kids yelled to them about the cat—kitten—in the tree, and there they were, and they were firefighters, for heaven’s sake, so they stopped—and now there’s this tiny cat at the firehouse, and Trailer’s whining and giving it looks that say “tapas?” and so Myka’s making her way around this neighborhood—which, she’s now noticing, is starting to gentrify: that bookstore, hadn’t it used to be one of those dark, run-down places? Myka thinks of those as more interesting, really, but she also has to concede that this one seems more inviting, now that it’s brighter. There’s a window display of children’s books, another of young adult novels, and Myka thinks that’s good, that’s smart—and then she thinks bookstores, people who like books like cats, right? And she thinks she’ll step in—not to buy a book, she admonishes herself, because there are too many piles of those in her house already, ones that she’s in the process of reading, ones that she saw and just had to have, ones that she keeps meaning to get through, honestly, at some point (there’s this one about the history of table manners that she just knows is going to be fascinating, but she never has time)—anyway, not to buy a book, just to ask if she can hang a flyer by the register or maybe there’s a bulletin board or maybe she could even put it in the window—but that display is lovely, and she would hate to block it with her slapped-together flyer.
And so she goes in. A bell jingles as she pushes at the door. Her first breath inside, it smells right, and that’s a little surprising—there is paper here old enough to break down, despite the newness of the store’s façade and display.
She hears, “One moment!” from somewhere in the back of the store. A woman’s voice—a British-accented woman’s voice, and Myka thinks, just at the edge of her mind, that it’s somehow familiar?
Then the woman emerges from behind a shelf, and Myka gulps.
It’s H.G. Wells. And though Myka doesn’t, or didn’t, have as much history with H.G. Wells as most of the others at the firehouse did—still, Myka was already there when it happened, and she remembers it all too well. And she is now feeling like a fool for walking in here (even though how could she possibly have known?) because H.G. Wells had—okay, well, implicitly, at least—made it very clear that she wanted nothing more to do with any of that. With any of them.
H.G. sees Myka. Then H.G. sees that it’s Myka. “Lt. Bering,” she says. It isn’t quite cold, but it’s very, very neutral.
This is not my day, Myka thinks. This is clearly somebody else’s day. She says, “Hi. I’m… I had no idea you worked here. I’m sorry. I’ll leave.” And she’s trying to back out, but she bumps into another display, this one containing stuffed-animal versions of characters from children’s books. One animal tumbles off its shelf immediately, and Myka hopes that’ll be the end of it, but she watches in almost morbid fascination as every single one seems to make up its own mind to teeter and then fall… oh, look, a pig; now a bat; now an elephant, bear, giraffe… surely there can’t be that many different kinds of animals?… Myka dares a look back at H.G.
H.G.’s got her hand up at the crown of her head, pulling at her hair a little, like she’s trying to get her brain tuned correctly. Myka registers, then, that her hair is down… Myka’s seen it down only once before, because just like firefighters, EMTs can’t afford to have anything obscuring their vision. H.G.’s hand is still in that hair when she repeats, “Lt. Bering.” The hand drops. “Myka. Why are you here, then?”
Myka starts to say, “Because…” but then she realizes the mess she’s made. She starts picking up stuffed animals, trying to place them back where they’d been before she blundered around like the clumsy giraffe she is. H.G. comes to help her, but she’s limited in what she can do, because she’s holding a book gingerly in one hand. A very old book, from the looks of it… Myka catches a glimpse of the cover, and she has to catch her breath. “Is that… the Forster biography of Dickens?”
“Just the second volume, nearly restored now,” H.G. says, distractedly, but then she looks more closely at Myka. Not quite suspiciously, exactly, but she’s clearly not comfortable. “How do you know that?”
Myka tries not to sound too eager, or more accurately, she supposes, too crazy: “I’m a Dickens fan. That sounds silly, but—” And Myka doesn’t know what to say next. She’s looking at a book restorer, in a bookstore, and she’s sure she came in here for a reason that had nothing to do with that, but…
“So can I help you?” H.G. asks after a moment.
“With what?”
“With a book?”
“Right. A book. I have to say, that Forster looks amazing… but no, I promised myself I wouldn’t.” She finally kicks back in. “I actually came in because… well, I got a kitten out of a tree today, but the kids who told us about it—they probably put it up there anyway—disappeared. Just a few streets away from here, so I figured I would try to find out whose it is.”
“I assure you, it isn’t mine. I don’t even—”
“No, no, I’m just—” Myka leans down, picks up her flyers and duct tape—she dropped them during the stuffed-animal fiasco—and then offers a flyer to H.G. “Maybe whoever he belongs to, maybe they come in here and would notice a sign? Somebody’s probably missing him. He’s just a baby. They can call, or they can drop by the, uh—” She fumbles and is sure she’s making everything ten times worse.
“Firehouse. You can say it. I know it still exists.”
Myka drops her eyes. Wants to drop through the floor. “Of course you do,” she says softly.
And she’s ready to slink away when the flyer leaves her hand: H.G. has taken it from her. “I’ll put the flyer up,” she says. “And we’ll see about the cat.” She’s looking at Myka in a way that suggests a minimal thaw.
Myka is eminently relieved. It gives her the ability to start talking again, though once she does, she’s horrified at what comes out: “And hey, if it turns out he’s a stray, maybe you could even consider taking him, because bookstores and kids and cats, right?”
H.G. pauses, then says, “Right. I’ll let you know.”
This is a dismissal; Myka can feel it. All right. Fine. She’s being sent away. As she’s heading for the door, she says, “Okay. Well. Nice to… see you. Because it’s been a while, so… and so. Probably will be a while again. Unless you want the cat.” She doesn’t look at H.G. again as she pushes her way out.
Once she’s on the sidewalk, she leans against a light pole. She thinks she might as well just hit her head repeatedly against it. H.G. Wells doesn’t want the cat. H.G. Wells doesn’t want anything to do with anything that’s ever touched the firehouse. H.G. Wells had left the firehouse; left her place in the ambulance alongside her partner, William Wolcott; left everything about fires and rescues and saving people, when she’d lost her daughter, Christina. Wolcott has since told Myka that H.G. had been meticulously certain that she could have saved Christina, with her EMT skills, if she had only been home, if she hadn’t taken an extra shift, if she had left immediately when that shift ended, if if if. Wolcott said she’d recited those ifs, perfectly rationally, for the short time she’d tried to keep working, after it happened—clearly pretending that she, and her entire life, hadn’t changed. Then she was gone.
“She’ll be back,” Steve had tried to reassure Wolly.
“No,” Wolly told him.
“No,” their chief, Jane Lattimer, had agreed.
And “no,” Myka had said quietly to herself. She hadn’t known H.G. all that well, before, but she’d liked her. She’d liked, in particular, how she’d talked about her daughter. Myka had looked forward to hearing her talk about her daughter, about anything at all, really, because H.G. was smart and would mention what she was reading or her thoughts on emerging economies or airport security or that Trailer really should reconsider his decision to occupy her spot on the sofa, and Myka could focus on that and not have to think about why she herself was at 13 in the first place. It wasn’t a reason to get up in the morning—fighting fires was still her reason to get up in the morning, no matter what—but Myka did like how H.G. talked. And what H.G. had become, afterward, how she’d talked then… no, she wasn’t coming back.
And Myka, bumbling around just as much with her words as with her body, has just reminded her of that horrible time. Brought it all up, probably made her relive it. Yes, hitting her head repeatedly against a light pole sounds like a really good idea. She wishes she could send H.G. an apology card or something… but that would be yet another boneheaded reminder. She decides that the best she can do is to stay as far away from this neighborhood, and certainly this bookstore, as she possibly can. And then she wonders, just for a moment, why that thought feels so very, very wrong.
TBC