Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

If I'm lucky enough, I will get through hard things

And they will make me gentle to the ways of the world

If I'm lucky enough, I'll have the courage to leave and go

Wherever my beatin' heart told me to go.

—Lucky Enough, Zach Bryan 

Present Day

Her name was Annabelle.

She was so small, Tommy worried that if he looked away, she'd be lost in the crook of Evan’s arm forever.

But before Annabelle, it was a Tuesday, early afternoon, the sun breaking through the clouds of a blue sky—and it was a bad shift. 

Tommy's cell phone rattled against his nightstand, waking him from his nap, interrupting the sleep he'd been catching up on during his 48 hours off. 

It was Captain Nash calling—just Bobby, come on now, Tommy, nowadays, when he clasped Tommy on the shoulder to say hello on sunny days in his and Athena’s new yard, as he leaned back in his chair at Tommy and Evan’s dining room table. Until now, when Tommy answered and Bobby said his name in a tone of voice that forced him up from bed and at attention, like he was in his twenties again and back at the 118, still learning that Bobby and Captain Gerrard weren’t cut from the same jagged cloth.

Today, Tommy pressed his phone to his ear and closed his eyes and it was Captain Nash he saw on the other end of the line, still standing at the site of the 118’s last call, looking worn down in his turnouts, boots scuffing the ground. 

Bobby gave Tommy the abbreviated story. In the space between his words, the scene unfolded: a two-story house fire in the suburbs of Burbank, spread to the neighboring homes around it. The 118 called in for extra relief. Multiple casualties. All civilians. All families. 

“Buck is being transported for smoke inhalation,” Bobby said. In the background, Tommy could hear the sirens, quiet and then loud, loud and then quiet. 

He sat at the edge of the mattress and felt the same as he did in the moments after the alarm went off at the station, like he was driving a speeding car through a narrow tunnel. There was no time to think, only steps to take, procedures to follow. There was a place to be and a person who needed him. 

Tommy needed to get dressed, put on clothes. A shirt, shorts. He needed to pack a bag for Evan. There was that sweatshirt he liked, old and gray with the faded Dodgers logo across the front, folded up on the top of the dresser. Evan wore it on lazy days, lying on the couch or eating cereal at the kitchen table in his boxers. 

There were steps to take, things to do.

He pictured Evan on his back on a stretcher, pale and wheezing, Hen or Howie gripping his hand, counting down the minutes until they made it to the hospital. 

Tommy's brain stuttered and stalled.

In the army, in firefighting and flying, in the way Tommy lived his life, he followed a cardinal rule: go towards the danger first, and ask the questions later.  

But Tommy was unable to move as he asked Bobby, “how is he?” 

“He was experiencing shortness of breath and dizziness. Some nausea and coughing,” Bobby told him. “Eddie is with him in an ambulance to Valley Presbyterian.”

The knot in Tommy’s stomach loosened, if only just a bit. Valley Presbyterian was a good hospital, close by, and Eddie knew how to take care of Evan better than anyone. Tommy pictured him again in the back of the ambulance, this time with his eyes bright and his hair threaded with soot, making a dumb joke, making Eddie roll his eyes and laugh. 

“I’ll be at the hospital in twenty minutes,” Tommy said, finally able to kick his ass into gear, to stand up and shake out his legs. He found a t-shirt and pulled his phone away long enough to tug it over his head. 

“—just a precaution, Tommy,” he heard Bobby say when he returned to the call. “Buck was stable and doing okay.”

Tommy exhaled. “Thanks for calling, Cap.” 

Evan would need his toothbrush, and socks, and a book to read if he did end up being admitted for the night. A snack, maybe, if he wasn’t NPO. There was half a bag of that terrible Smartfood popcorn still in the pantry that Evan always snuck in the cart when they went grocery shopping.

As Tommy tucked his phone between his ear and shoulder to step into a pair of shorts, he realized that Bobby was still on the other end of the line, silent. 

“I'll let you get back to it,” Tommy said. 

“There’s more to tell you,” Bobby finally admitted. Tommy paused, wondered if he should sit back down on the bed again. “But it will be easier for Buck to explain at the ER.” 

The knot in Tommy's stomach tightened again. “Is Evan—” 

Tommy wasn’t sure what question he was trying to ask. 

Another voice passed through the phone’s speaker, interrupting his chance to finish his question. Bobby murmured a response, then said to Tommy, “I have to go. You’ll understand when you get to the hospital. It’s all going to be fine, Tommy.” 

“If you say so,” Tommy said, even though he felt like he was choking down a wad of sandpaper. “Bye, Cap.” He cleared his throat. “Bobby.”

They hung up, and Tommy tried not to think about what Bobby could’ve meant as he packed a duffel bag with Evan’s clothes, as he washed his face and swished his mouth with mouthwash and then hurried down the stairs. In the living room, he shoved on the first pair of sneakers that were sitting on top of the shoe rack.

You’ll understand when you get to the hospital.

It was when he scooped his keys out of the bowl sitting on the side table by the front door that he stopped, frozen again. The bowl was ceramic, with a dark blue, wobbly rim and a mess of yellow and purple dots. Maddie and Jee-Yun had painted it together during a Mommy-and-Me night and then gifted it to Evan and Tommy as a housewarming gift a few months ago. Evan had loved it, so he’d wanted it in a spot where anyone who visited or left their house would see it.   

It’s all going to be fine, Tommy.

Tommy’s palm stung. He blinked and loosened his grip on his keys. He needed to go.

When he finally left the house and unlocked his truck, headlights flashing against the driveway, he wished he were at Harbor, wished he had a helicopter to land on the rooftop of Valley Presbyterian. Day or night, rain or shine, he would fly to Evan, if only he could.

Instead, he sat in LA traffic, panic itching beneath his skin. It wasn’t a feeling that happened to him often, not since he was younger, but he wasn’t immune to it anymore, either. Last summer, an especially bad wildfire had spread just north of Santa Paula, ripping through the Ojai Valley. It had almost reached Santa Barbara when Tommy had flown over the flames, cooling an edge so the ground crew could clear the line. It’d been past midnight and the earth had flashed up at him, a scorching orange so endless that Tommy was half-convinced the world was coming to an end. He'd felt panic then.

But he hadn’t felt this way about Evan—not yet. It wasn’t as though Tommy hadn’t known this was coming. He and Evan had been together for a year-and-a-half now, living together for months, seeing each other off before shifts, kissing goodbye and reminding each other be safe before they went.  

Another lightning strike, another blown-up fire engine, another tsunami, another trauma—it was always in the back of Tommy's mind.

There had been close calls: when they'd first started dating, Evan had bruised a rib after a stair had given out beneath his foot during a house fire, and just the other month while he was responding to a car accident, Evan had ended up with an especially ugly burn on his ankle when the pant leg of his turnouts had tugged loose from his boot and he’d caught it on an exhaust pipe. 

But this was the first time Evan hadn't convinced Hen to wrap him up in a few bandages and let him limp home. He'd never been shipped off in an ambulance and unable to call Tommy himself, to sheepishly tell Tommy what had happened to him this time.

Tommy thought that, when the time came, he would be able to handle it better, but he realized now that he was wrong. When he parked at the hospital, his foot was too heavy, too jolting on the break. His thumb slipped twice on the FOB trying to lock his car. The walk to the main entrance of the ER was a ten mile long trek, and he steeled himself when the automatic doors swept open. 

Somewhere along the way, like that Santa Paula wildfire, Evan had become Tommy's world, and he was terrified for it to end. 

2001

Tommy was wrench-deep beneath a 1997 Honda Accord, halfway through an oil change, new filter just tightened up as he hummed along to an Alan Jackson song blaring from the radio, “‘where I come from, tryna make a living,'” when a foot nudged him in the leg.

He sighed and pushed out from under the car. 

Manuel saw it was him and rolled his eyes. “Aren’t you supposed to be in school, kid?”

Tommy planted his boots on the ground, sitting up on the creeper. “It’s Senior Skip Day.”

“Great excuse, Tommy,” Manuel huffed, “except you’re a junior, and that’s what you said last week.” 

So fucking what. Manuel was the owner of the garage, Garcia’s Auto, in his mid-forties and getting a little old for the whole thing: he fucked his back up a few years ago after he slipped on a patch of ice, and now he spent most of his day bothering people when they were in the middle of working. He should have been happy to have some cheap, teenage labor, but they did this song-and-dance at least once a week.  

Tommy raised his eyebrows. “I gotta get this undertray screwed back on. Did you need something?”

“Yeah, I need you to not be the reason this place gets shut down for violating half a dozen labor laws.” Manuel threw Tommy a grease rag, tilted his head towards his office. “Now get your truant ass up and follow me.”

He made Tommy sit down behind his desk that was scattered with work orders and invoices and receipts, a coffee from Dunkins and an almost empty carton of Pall Mall Reds next to the phone hanging off its base. 

Manuel leaned back in his chair and gave Tommy a look. An annoying one. Manuel was too into being the boss, thought that he had some sort of authority because he took over for his dad who took over for his grandpa who came over to Massachusetts ages ago, had settled in Springfield from Mexico in the fifties and set up the whole shop. And when it came to Tommy, Manuel thought being the boss translated to treating him like he was Manuel’s own son. He sure as hell wasn’t.

“Where’s your dad at?” Manuel asked—case in point. “He was supposed to come in an hour ago.”

Tommy picked at the grease under one of his thumbnails. “Haven’t seen him. Probably passed out drunk in a booth at O’Brien’s. What, you lose track of him?”

Manuel didn’t take the bait. “And how’s your mom doing? Still working the deli at Stop & Shop?”

Jesus. Tommy should’ve just gone to school. 

“What’s up, Manuel? Cause it sounds like you’re about to be the one calling up my teachers to let them know I’m skipping class.”

Manuel shook his head. “I’m not trying to get into your business, okay?” Yeah, right. Asshole. “You’re seventeen, right? You’re young, and it just doesn’t seem like there’s anyone looking out for you.”

When Tommy rolled his eyes, Manuel’s mouth pressed into a thin line, going way serious all of a sudden.

“I tried to do your dad a favor, but it’s not looking good for him here, Tommy. So I’m saying, you should think about getting your shit together, if no one else is going to be helping you out.”

Tommy flushed red hot. He could hear the phone beeping from where it still wasn’t hung up, an air ratchet and the clang of bolts in the bay behind him, rattling around in his skull like rocks.  

“Keep me, then,” Tommy said, like a desperate loser, and fuck. He’d been showing up at Garcia’s for six months, since his dad had dragged him along to pick up his paycheck one day. Tommy had ended up staring down the hood of a cool as hell 1990 BMW E31, then got roped into a whole conversation about the engine, then what he was learning in shop at school, and then asked if he knew how to change a brake light. After that, he’d never wanted to leave. 

“Your guys all trust me, don’t they? I’ll do the grunt work. Whatever shit you throw at me. I don’t care.” 

Tommy had probably shown up to work more than his dad ever had, and this was what he got for it: to grovel. Pathetic. 

“Tommy. I get that you’re smart, and you care about the work, I can tell. But…” Manuel started shuffling all the papers on his desk around, like he felt bad for saying all of this to Tommy’s face. “We can’t have any more guys like your dad here. Missing shifts, drunk on the clock. It’s bad business.”

“What’s my dad got to do with me?” Tommy said, like he hadn’t been asking that question his whole life.

Manuel avoided answering him. “Come on, now. If you ain’t into high school there’s still other options. You can get a GED, or you can enlist.”

Tommy laughed and stood up. “Cool. Thanks for the advice.” 

He snatched up the cigarettes on Manuel's desk, a final parting gift to himself before he turned and left the garage for good.

Present Day

Tommy scanned the chairs in the ER waiting room but didn't find Eddie sitting in any of them, the knot in his stomach tightening yet again. 

Tommy sent him a text, I’m here. What’s going on? while he stood in the line to speak to the front desk. By the time Tommy had explained himself to the nurse at check-in, Eddie had appeared, waiting to escort Tommy behind the glass doors.

“He’s fine,” Eddie said, before Tommy could even ask, still sticking his visitor’s pass to his shirt. Eddie’s hair was flat with sweat and his turnouts were covered in dust, but his shoulders were relaxed as he walked with Tommy to Evan’s triage room. “He needs a chest x-ray, but I doubt they’re going to admit him. He’ll probably have a nasty cough, though.”

“Bobby said there was something else,” Tommy said, just as they stopped by a curtain that was drawn shut. It reminded him of those early days of being on the way to a call, jostled around in the back of the engine as they veered towards an accident. It might’ve been a car wrapped around a tree or a pileup or a gas-leak-turned-false-alarm or just a kid with his head stuck in the railing of a staircase. But he never knew what they were going to find until they got there.

Eddie’s mouth quirked up, but he didn’t seem happy, an expression Tommy had learned to read a lot in the past year. “Yeah, you can see for yourself.”

Tommy slipped into the room. Evan was sitting up on the hospital bed, angled away from the curtain. His jacket was stripped off but he was still wearing his turnout pants, as dirty as Eddie’s—the hospital was going to have to send them a cleaning fee, at this rate. 

Evan's skin was tinged gray, his eyes red-rimmed and his head hanging low. 

Tommy frowned and stepped forward. 

“Evan?” He asked.

Evan turned and looked up. A baby was resting in his arms.

Evan’s lips pressed into a thin smile. Voice cracking around the edges, he said, “Tommy, hey. Meet Annabelle.”

2003

In March there was a sandstorm in Iraq that lasted three days. Tommy was weeks out of basic and days into the war when the sky turned reddish-brown like the tail end of an especially good sunset over the Connecticut River, except he woke up choking on dust. 

They were staged in Kuwait, some four-hundred miles of desert between them and Baghdad, where Tommy would be stationed as resident mechanic, and the Army was all but grounded until the storm passed. There was nothing to do except listen to the radio. It reminded Tommy of snow days back home, the weather putting the world on pause. It wasn’t something he knew could happen during a war.

“Hey, Springfield,” Rhodes said. Like an asshole, he shook the pack under Tommy’s head that he was using as a pillow, jostling him. He opened his eyes, saw that Rhodes was dealing cards to Barnett and Mullins, who were all sitting around an empty cot. “Ante up.” 

Tommy sighed and swung upright, his knee knocking against Rhodes’ as he threw in three loose cigarettes. The filters were so full of sand he couldn’t smoke them anymore, anyways, so he wasn’t that disappointed when he got a shit hand. 

“So, Springfield,” Mullins said after he’d folded, derailing the whole fucking game. “Why the fuck’s it called Cape Cod, anyways?” 

“Why are you so shit at poker, Mullins?” Tommy said. Mullins frowned and threw himself over the cot, stealing away Tommy’s cards before he could avoid it. 

Mullins whistled, fanning them against his face. “Someone’s got a nine to five, boys,” he said, his voice high-pitched, girly.

Barnett rolled his eyes. “What the fuck’s that mean?” 

“It's a Dolly Parton, Barnett. A nine of spades and a five of hearts.” Mullins threw Tommy’s hand onto the cot, face-up. “Springfield was bluffing.”

“Only a fag like you would know shit like that,” Rhodes said, shaking his head as he gathered the cards back up, shuffling them together. 

“Don’t motherfucking ask, don’t motherfucking tell,” Mullins said, eyes bright blue like the exact opposite of the sky. He blinked at Tommy, then away.

“I gotta take a piss," he said, and stood up and left. 

*

When the sand settled, they kept on moving.  

Their humvee was kicking up dust one hundred miles northwest of the border of Kuwait, the Euphrates a blistering blue through the windshield, when they took on fire. 

“So you’re saying you wouldn’t have fucked your English teacher?” Mullins jeered in Tommy’s ear, smelling like cigarettes and sweat, his shoulder bumping against Tommy’s as they raced down the uneven road. “What if she came on to you?”

“She was like fifty fucking years old,” Rhodes said to his left. “Is that what you’re into, Mullins?”

Mullins sucked his teeth. “I’ll try anything once. Right, Springfield?” 

“I dropped out of high school,” Tommy said. “Thought I could do better.” 

“That’s my man.” Mullins smirked. “A damn connoisseur of getting your dick wet.” 

Rhodes threw his arm out, elbow digging into Tommy’s stomach as he reached past him to smack Mullins on the chest. “Ms. Cooper. Junior year. My world history teacher. It wasn’t just the globes in the classroom I wanted to touch, if you know what I mean.” 

“You’re a fucking dog, Rhodes.” 

Tommy laughed when Rhodes started to bark and Mullins joined in, shaking their heads and growling at each other like two big, dumb dogs.

“Would you shut the fuck up back there?” Barnett yelled from the front seat. “Where the fuck are we?” 

Mullins jerked up, staring out the window. “What, did we take a wrong turn?”

The window by Rhodes' head cracked, shattering Tommy’s view of the world outside it. 

“Shit! We’re hit!” Barnett shouted. 

Bullets thump thump thumped like a drum against the left side of the humvee as they picked up speed, jolting, pressing Tommy up against the back of his seat.

“Shit, shit, shit,” Mullins hissed.

The right side of the windshield burst. 

“Turn!” Barnett yelled. He wrenched the steering wheel out of their driver's hand, to the left, Rhodes losing his balance, falling into Tommy, his fingers a bruising grip on his shoulder as the humvee careened onto a highway ramp.

The gunfire stopped. The city of Nasiriya grew larger as it appeared over the road’s shoulder. Tommy's hands shook as he set his pack upright between his knees, the humvee silent save for their panting breaths, the chorus of Courtesy of the Red, White, and Blue by Toby Keith crackling from the radio's speakers.

“There were a lot of codfish,” Tommy said. Mullins whipped his head around, his face pale. “When the pilgrims showed up. That’s why it’s called Cape Cod.” 

“Well.” Mullins swallowed, his throat bobbing. "I’ll fucking be. Never would have guessed.” 

Present Day

Annabelle was three-and-a-half months old. She had endless blue eyes and a fine layer of soft, light brown hair, babbling high-pitched sounds up at Tommy as he balanced her head against his arm.

They didn’t know her last name.

“Once the bottle is warmed up,” Maddie said to Tommy, turning off the kitchen tap and shaking the bottle dry from where she’d held it beneath the water, “put a couple of drops on the back of your hand to make sure it’s not too hot.”

“Lukewarm,” Tommy confirmed after Maddie had squeezed out a dab of formula against his free hand. 

Maddie offered him the bottle. “Great, now you can feed her.”

Tommy hesitated, looking down at Annabelle. She smacked her lips and kicked her foot against his wrist, as if to say, hurry up and feed me! and Tommy thought, an attitude with me already. Evan will love that. 

She weighed next to nothing and he was nervous about holding her and the bottle, if it would be too hard to support her head and make sure she didn’t choke at the same time, and then he worried again, for the thousandth time, about dropping her—

“Tommy,” Maddie said and he blinked, found a soft smile on her face, like she somehow knew all the thoughts bouncing around in his head. That was an older sister for you. “Let’s go sit on the couch.”

It did feel safer sitting down. Maddie walked him through how to prop Annabelle up against his chest, that he should hold the bottle to her mouth at a horizontal angle to avoid air bubbles. Annabelle made quiet suckling sounds as she drank, her cheeks mottled red and her tiny hands squeezed into fists. 

Inexplicably, Tommy was overwhelmed.

What Bobby hadn’t told him on the phone was this: Evan was performing CPR on a woman when she’d woken up and gripped at his coat so tightly he’d fallen forward. She’d whispered something in Evan’s ear. Five minutes later, he’d emerged from a burned-up, blackened home, half-extinguished flames licking at his back, with a baby in his arms, his SCBA over her face. Tommy was absolutely going to give Evan heat for that later, because he’d made it half-way to the paramedics before he’d started to cough so hard he could no longer stand, falling to his knees.

The woman, Annabelle’s mom, hadn’t made it. 

At the hospital, Evan had whispered to Tommy, “her mom called her Annabelle, before she…” He’d trailed off. “I promised that I would protect her.” 

Evan had smelled like ash and antiseptic, like tragedy. As the ER had inhaled and exhaled its chaos around them, Annabelle’s eyelids fluttering, Tommy had pressed his lips to Evan’s forehead. 

There’d been nothing for him to say.

Instead, he'd called Hen who'd called Athena who had called DCF and pulled more than a few strings, and when Evan had been brought back from his x-rays and Annabelle from the attending pediatrician, they’d signed the forms stamped across the top with Emergency Foster Home Application against the plastic tray table next to the bed.

When Evan and Annabelle’s scans and tests and blood work came back clear, after Annabelle was prescribed plenty of rest and Evan a course of antibiotics and an inhaler, they said goodbye to Eddie, who was still needed at the station, and they went home. All three of them. 

Maddie had been parked in the driveway when they’d pulled in, wringing her hands together as she stood next to her car. 

“Eddie called me,” she’d explained when they exited Tommy’s truck. He watched her cup Evan’s cheek before she’d pulled him into a hug. Tommy had been next, and then she’d gone teary eyed as she looked down at Annabelle in the car seat the social worker from DCF had given them. “Her mom—?”  

Evan had only shook his head.

He’d been swaying on his feet and Tommy had to resist the urge to sweep him up and carry him across the threshold, to tuck him into their bed. But he'd been sure Evan wasn’t in the mood to accept the gesture or make a joke about Tommy doing a fireman’s carry, not then. A bridal hold probably wouldn’t have gone over well, either. They’d spent almost four hours at ER and during the car ride home Evan had sat awake in the backseat to keep a close eye on Annabelle. 

As Tommy had drove, hands ten-and-two, refusing to let the speedometer go higher than twenty-five, he’d run through a checklist in his head. Other than the outlet covers and baby locks for Jee’s visits, their house wasn’t set up for a baby. They had no supplies. They would have to go shopping. Tommy had no idea what a three month old needed but they could just buy the entire baby aisle at Target. Except Evan was sick and needed rest, and Tommy didn’t want to leave Evan and Annabelle alone. If something happened—

“Well,” Maddie had sighed, persevering in a way that Tommy had learned by now was a Buckley trait. She'd opened the hatchback, and something in Tommy’s chest had shifted and settled, like touching down after a long flight: there had been boxes of diapers and tubs of formula, containers full of bottles and clothes and blankets and colorful toys packed in the back of the car. “I brought what I could. I even found a portable bassinet in the hall closet! Someone gave it to us during my baby shower and I never ended up using it.” 

“Maddie,” Evan had choked, pulling her into another one-armed hug. “Thank you.”

Now, as Tommy and Maddie sat side-by-side on the couch, watching Annabelle drink her bottle, Maddie tilted her head at him. “You’ve really never done this before,” she said with something like disbelief in her voice, and it pulled on Tommy, hurt like a bad stretch of a tight muscle. 

Upstairs, Tommy heard Evan shut the shower off, like he’d heard this conversation happening below him and was on the way to Tommy’s rescue. If only. 

“Never really had the chance,” Tommy said. He looked away from Maddie, focused on Annabelle instead.

It should have been an innocent question, a funny coincidence that Tommy was forty years old and had no idea how to take care of a baby. His sister Marci’s son, Owen, was born the year Tommy’s tour in Iraq ended and he’d met him not long after he was born, but Marci lived all the way out in Connecticut, so Tommy mostly knew his nephew through phone calls and if they saw each other during the holidays. Sal had a daughter a few years after being reassigned from the 118, but Tommy hadn’t spent much time with her, either. 

The reality was, Tommy didn’t have a big family. No little nephews or nieces or cousins running around to take care of. Tommy wasn’t like Evan. He didn’t have an infinite number of people who cared for him, who would fill up the back of their car at the drop of a hat and drive to his house just because they wanted to help.

“Well, you’re doing great,” Maddie said with a gentle smile. “The first time Buck babysat Jee, I swear he called me and Chim every five minutes. We couldn’t even get through dinner.” 

Tommy smiled back at her. He'd seen Evan with Jee and Chris, had helped watch them on the odd days he and Evan were both off-shift: Evan spoiled them rotten, but Tommy had also seen how careful Evan was with them, how he would never, ever let them end up hurt.  

Maybe that was the crux of it. Tommy looked at Annabelle, and he was sure that he’d never held something so precious or so fragile before in his life. 

“You’re doing a great job, aren't you?” He said to Annabelle, which was when she decided to pull her mouth away from the bottle and wrinkle her brow at him, like he just said something especially dumb. 

“Looks like she’s getting a little fussy,” Maddie told him, handing him a towel from one of the bins they’d carried in from her car. “You should try burping her and then see if she's still hungry.” 

Tommy was holding Annabelle over his shoulder and patting her on the back when Evan finally came down the stairs. He rounded the corner into the living room the moment Annabelle burped, wetter and louder a sound than Tommy knew such a small baby could make. 

“Woah,” Evan laughed. “That's one way to say hi to a guy.” 

He was wearing one of Tommy’s old t-shirts from a 10k he’d run a while back and a pair of shorts, his cheeks still flushed from the shower. As he dropped onto the couch beside Tommy and pressed a quick kiss to his mouth, his eyes were brighter than they were at the hospital, but Tommy could see the the slouch of his shoulders, the tiredness tugging at the corners of his mouth.

Evan stroked the back of Annabelle’s head, a rasp in his voice when he asked, “how’s she doing?” 

“Drinking and burping like a pro,” Tommy said. “She's fitting in just fine.”

“There's still a little bit of formula left.” Maddie waved the bottle. “Do you want to feed her the rest, Buck?” 

Evan brushed his hand down Tommy's arm. “I think Tommy's got it,” he said, eyes soft, and for a minute, Tommy forgot that Maddie was even sitting on the couch next to them. 

Then Evan pulled away and coughed, rough and painful, a second followed by a third that sounded even worse, his back shuddering as he gripped the armrest. Each time he tried to inhale his breath caught, a wheeze turning into another choking exhale.

“I'll get your inhaler,” Maddie said. She jumped up from the couch and hurried towards the kitchen just as Annabelle began to wail, struggling in Tommy’s arms. 

The noise in the room grew, Evan coughing harder and Annabelle crying louder, a nightmare of a feedback loop. Tommy thought about panic again, about a wildfire creeping towards Santa Barbara and the earth a never-ending flame. 

Maddie shook the inhaler as she crossed the room, holding it against Evan's mouth and pressing down on the canister, reminding him to breathe.

He pulled back and fell against Tommy's shoulder, panting but finally able to catch his breath. Tommy shushed Annabelle, gently bouncing her. She quieted, snuffling against Tommy’s neck.

Maddie sighed, blowing a piece of hair away from her forehead. “All better.”

2003

Tommy was in the meal hall on 24-hour relief when he was pulled away from his dinner. 

Three days later he was on emergency leave, sitting in the pew of a church only ten minutes from his childhood home, attending his mom’s funeral. 

Tommy’s base in Baghdad had no electricity and by the time the call had come through, Marci had been trying to reach him for a week. It was a stroke, she told him, her voice marred by tears and static. Their mom was only forty-seven. 

Tommy missed the wake, landed in Logan and hopped on a Peter Pan bus, made it back to Springfield with only hours to spare. It was enough time for Marci to hug him hello and his dad to squeeze him on the shoulder on the front steps of St. Michael’s before Tommy had to help carry the casket inside.

During the Mass he sat between Marci, a pack of tissues clutched in her hand, and his dad, who sighed heavily and shifted uncomfortably in the pew for the entire hour. They were shitty Catholics and Tommy couldn’t remember the last time he’d even been to church. It was maybe when he was little, after his grandfather had died. 

He tried and tried not to imagine his mom in the casket as the priest blessed it, holy water to begin and incense to end it, the pale taste of the Eucharist on his tongue and the Lord’s Prayer in between. 

Lord fucking help me, his mom had said when Tommy had told her he was going to enlist not long after 9/11.

His mom was going to be cremated so there was no burial service after. The funeral had cost them an arm and a leg, Marci had told him, so they didn’t have much to offer those who wanted to come by after the service. They had a get-together back on the third floor of the triple-decker Tommy had grown up in, organized by Marci as best she could. Their mom’s co-workers from Stop & Shop brought a couple of platters of food, and Tommy’s uncles brought the beer, and they made-do.  

Tommy settled onto the couch, still in his dress blues, holding a can of Bud Light. He hadn’t had a beer since a few days before he shipped out for basic training and his first sip was euphoric, literal bliss. It was on par with that first time he’d changed into fresh socks after wearing the same wet and muddy pair for a week back in March, definitely better than when he lost his virginity to Jessica Klein in her bedroom when he was fifteen. 

Tommy took another sip and almost missed it when his Uncle Nick said, “so Tommy, how much longer they gonna have you boys out there?” 

Uncle Nick was his mom’s older brother. He looked a lot like her: same nose and same brown hair, same head tilt when he asked a question. Tommy had to swallow twice before he could answer. “Not sure, sir. We’re there as long as they need us.” 

“Sir!” Uncle Pat, his mom’s younger brother this time, barked. “They got you licking their boots out there, don’t they?”

“Yes, sir,” Tommy said, felt good when Uncle Pat scoffed and sipped his own beer like the answer annoyed him. 

His dad sighed and mumbled into his half-empty glass of whiskey and coke, “not sure what the hell you were thinking, going to a county like that, full of those sorts of people.”

“It’s not like it’s a vacation, dad,” Tommy said, all eyes in the room falling on him.

“Well, it feels damn well like you’re on vacation when we need you here and you’re nowhere to be found.”

“Oh, so that’s why Marci had to plan mom’s whole damn funeral by herself?” Tommy said. He could see her through the doorway of the kitchen, rushing back and forth, tearing open veggie-and-dip platters and putting drinks in the cooler, keeping their mom’s friends company. “You couldn’t help?”

There was a satisfied spark in Tommy’s chest when his dad’s face went red, even though he knew that if his mom were here, she would’ve hated it. She always hated it when Tommy and his dad fought, even though she never said much when they were going back and forth with each other, never wanted to be in the middle of it. When his dad was being too much of an asshole and the heat between them boiled over, she always retreated to somewhere else in the house and let them throw their words, and sometimes their hands, at each other. Afterwards, when Tommy would go and find her, she’d be upset, sometimes crying if it was an especially bad fight—and there were a lot of those. 

Why can’t you two just get along, she’d say. Haven’t you put me through enough?  

His dad opened his mouth just as Marci swept into the room. “I’ve got chips and dip! It’s the good kind of guac!” She announced, stepping between Tommy and their dad to set the plate down on the coffee table with a clatter. 

She sighed and fell onto the couch. “What are we talking about? Are we telling stories about mom?”

His dad looked away and took a sip of his drink, and Tommy let it go. 

They sat and shared, and he learned things about his mom he never knew, the trouble she got up to when she was younger, how she and his dad met and maybe actually had a good thing going for a minute or two. 

It reminded Tommy of this past summer, when he’d spent long days with a convoy traveling through the streets of Baghdad, taking care of the humvees when their engines sputtered out or their breaks started to stutter. There was a translator in the group from Barsa named Sadiq who Tommy got to talking to. 

One day as they’d eaten lunch, standing in a patch of shade, Sadiq had told Tommy about a Muslim tradition called aza, the mourning period after someone has passed. A family spends three days at home, women sitting together in the living room, barefoot and drinking tea while the men gather together under a tent outside. They pray and accept visitors who cook and take care of them. They talk about the person they lost, about the acts of goodness they took part in during their life.

“It’s an obligation to take care of others in times of sadness,” Sadiq had said. “People need each other most in those moments.” 

Tommy hadn’t had the chance to say anything back. They’d been distracted by shouting across the street: Rhodes was arguing with the owner of a shop about some graffiti that needed to be covered up and Sadiq walked off to deal with it. 

Tommy wondered what Sadiq would think about all of this, the handful of Tommy’s family and friends crowded together in their stuffy living room, not quite talking about acts of goodness but maybe something close. 

Later, after everyone had left and their dad shuffled off to bed, Tommy and Marci sat out on the balcony together. It was October and chilly out, orange Halloween lights strung up on the gutters across the street. They watched the sun go down, smoking and drinking the last of the beers. Marci showed Tommy pictures of the house she’d just bought down in East Hartford, told him about her boyfriend and complained about the traffic during the commute to her office, about some of her co-workers that she didn’t like very much. 

She kicked her feet up onto the railing, the last of the light catching on the curls of her hair. She was twelve years older than Tommy and got most of her looks from their dad, which Tommy knew she hated—they got along as well as he and Tommy did, like two feral cats in the same narrow alley. By the time Tommy was old enough to get to know her, she’d already left for college and he hadn’t seen her much after that. She came by for holidays and visits here and there, mostly to see their mom. They were closer than she and Tommy were and now that everyone was gone, he could tell that the day was getting to her. Her hand shook as she tapped her cigarette against the edge of the ashtray.

“Can’t believe mom stole Uncle Nick’s dirt bike when she was a kid,” she laughed. “A wild child. She wasn’t like that when I was growing up.”

Tommy hummed and pressed his beer bottle against his thigh, felt the cold seeping through. “Yeah, hard to imagine.” 

“Yeah?” Marci exhaled and side-eyed him, like maybe she didn’t want to look at him straight on. 

“Yeah. Mom was…” Tommy paused, thought of the last time he’d seen her. It’d been early in the morning, the sky still a deep, dark blue as he’d left for the airport to catch his flight to Fort Jackson for basic training. She’d stood on the front steps beneath the porch light, barefoot and chewing on the inside of her lip, watching him go. “You know. It was always something. Trying to find a job she didn’t hate, or dealing with Dad.” 

“You don’t always have to egg him on, you know,” Marci said, like she didn’t end up in her own shouting match with him every single Christmas and Thanksgiving. “He’s bored. He likes to hear the sound of his own voice.”

Tommy raised his beer. “I’ll try to remember that for next time.” 

“Yeah, me too,” Marci said, tapping her beer against his. They both laughed and then faded into silence. Tommy was halfway through his second cigarette when Marci spoke again. “So, you gonna be okay out there?”

“I don’t know.” When he closed his eyes he saw endless brown desert, endless agony. He felt Marci’s gaze heavy on the side of his face and decided to admit it, what he’d been thinking about since she called from six-thousand miles away. “Mom didn’t want me to go. We got in a fight right before I left. A big one.”

“Well, shit,” Marci said, and nothing else. Tommy took another drag of his cigarette. A car rolled down the street, the bass of a rap song vibrating up at them from its speakers. “Sorry.”

“I don’t think she liked me very much.” 

Tommy wouldn’t have said it, normally, but he’d had a little too much to drink and his cheeks were warm against the dropping temperature, the crickets out and chirping, their sound like a shield of white noise surrounding the balcony, holding his words there.

Maybe it also had something to do with how Marci looked more like their mom than he’d thought, the line of her jaw and how she held herself, her shoulders pulled inward as she stared off the balcony at the world going by.

“I think she liked you fine,” she whispered, and then Tommy regretted that he’d said anything at all, because he wanted to know what Marci meant by that, if she had more to say, but she dropped her feet back to the porch and stood up. “Long day, huh? I'm going to crash on the couch. I'll make sure I catch you before I leave tomorrow.”

Tommy stayed outside for a while longer before he stubbed out his cigarette and finished his beer and went to bed. He didn’t expect to be able to sleep, his old bedroom so silent he could hear his ears ringing, but he hadn’t had any rest in over thirty-six hours and he passed out when his head hit the pillow.

He dreamt of Sadiq and the moment he’d walked towards Rhodes and the owner of that shop, and he dreamt of three days later, of being on patrol on Haifa Street when an IED in a median strip detonated beneath the humvee two trucks ahead of Tommy. Of the moment the explosion flung Sadiq into the road, the noises he made as he’d tried to hold his mangled leg together. 

Tommy was still asleep when Marci shook his shoulder to say goodbye. He woke up gasping, choking on nothing but air.

Present Day

Maddie had a late shift at the dispatch center and had to leave not long after. 

When she’d hovered by the front door, Evan had said, “it’s okay, Mads,” and pulled her in for a hug. “It’s only temporary. DCF said they’ll reach out to the rest of Annabelle’s family by tomorrow to find the right person to take her in.”

Maddie had nodded and hugged Evan back, then she’d wrapped her arms around Tommy, too. “You got this,” she’d whispered into his ear before she ducked out the front door.

Tommy had finished feeding and burping Annabelle and now she stared up at him with tired, slow blinking eyes, not unlike Evan, who was wrapped in a blanket and half-dozing on the couch. 

Tommy thought that Evan should be in bed and Annabelle should be in her bassinet and they both should be asleep, but Tommy was reluctant to put her down, which meant Evan was reluctant to go upstairs. 

Instead, Tommy tucked Annabelle close to his chest and Googled how to clean a baby bottle. He explained out loud to her what he was doing as he filled a pot with water and dropped all the parts of the bottle into it, setting it to boil on the stove. 

“Did you know that salt makes water boil faster?” he said to her. It was something Evan told him once, early on in their relationship when Evan had started teaching him how to cook. “It lowers the heat capacity of the water.” 

Annabelle gurgled. 

“Exactly.” Tommy bounced her. “You get it.” 

“It might be a little too early for science lessons,” Evan said, leaning against the doorway with the checkered throw still draped across his shoulders.

“No way. Today, chemistry. Tomorrow? Physics.” 

Evan laughed, his entire face brightening.

“Physics,” he repeated. “Next thing you know she'll be flying a plane out of Harbor.” 

“She's got time,” Tommy said. The water was finally boiling, and he made a mental note to turn it off in five minutes. “She can do whatever she wants to do.” 

Tommy meant it as a joke, mostly, but as he brushed a hand over the top of Annabelle's head, an unexpected ache ran through him, like knuckles rubbing against his sternum. He imagined being just-born, so young, having his entire life in front of him, the good and the bad and all the crap in the middle. He thought about having to do it all over again, about it all going completely different. 

Evan stepped into the kitchen and came close, brushing a thumb across Annabelle’s cheek, looking and not looking at her at the same time. 

“I'm glad she'll never remember any of it,” he whispered.

“Hey." Tommy reached out and took Evan’s hand, ran his thumb along Evan’s knuckles. “I love you,” he said, and this time, he thought about his life going exactly the same. “Let's take care of her while we can.”

2003

On his second and final night of leave after his mom’s funeral, Tommy visited Sammy, his best friend since middle school, who’d been renting a house in Feeding Hills with four other roommates since graduation. It was in the middle of nowhere, except for the hulking sprawl of Six Flags ten minutes away, but it had four walls and running water, so it was better than anywhere Tommy lived for the past year. 

He wore a t-shirt and jeans and felt unmoored without the weight of his uniform. As he knocked on Sammy’s front door, he was tempted to look over his shoulder, expecting Sergeant Fitzer to sneak up behind him and yell in his ear about not zipping up his jacket. 

Instead, Sammy swung the door open and roped Tommy into a hug. ”Kinard, in the motherfucking flesh,” he said, pulling away with a final slap on Tommy’s back. “Get in here.” 

Sammy tugged him over the threshold and into the small entryway. The last time Tommy had seen him was a few weeks before he'd left for basic training. He hadn’t changed much, the same dark skin, same half-an-inch of height taller than Tommy. The same look in his eyes, the one that he loved to give Tommy in high school when he would show up to Sammy’s parent’s house in the middle of night after a fight with his dad. Like he was checking Tommy over, his face serious but earnest at the same time, in a way that Tommy himself has never been able to pull off, never able to look so intently at another guy and not feel weird about it.

“Sorry about your mom, man,” Sammy sighed. “How's it been?”

“The usual.” Tommy tucked his hands into pockets, shrugged. “But my dad wasn't smited by God when he walked into the church for the funeral, so that’s a win, right?”

“Or a loss.” Sammy smirked and smacked Tommy on the arm. “Come on, everyone’s out back.”

He led Tommy through the house and past the kitchen, wrenching open a screen door to the backyard. It was small, the grass covered by wet leaves, and it was fenced-in, which Tommy appreciated: there was no way to get into the yard other than being let in through the front door. Then Tommy shook his head at himself, feeling ridiculous. There was no reason to worry. 

A few people were standing around outside, Sammy’s roommates and a couple other friends that Tommy also grew up with who hadn't gotten out of dodge yet. They sat by the firepit, drinking the Narragansetts that one of Sammy’s roommate’s older brothers brought. Tommy caught up with everyone, learned that Nicole was in cosmetology school and wanted out to move to Boston once she was done, Ethan was in construction, was maybe thinking about becoming a real estate agent. Jason was still taking care of his sick mom and he’d just got a job at a bank. They were all a little more mature than the last time Tommy had seen them, grown up a few inches, and it was all fucking boring in a way Tommy should have been thankful for. 

Except he couldn’t stop from glancing over at the screen door, convinced that each flicker of light was someone in Sammy’s kitchen, walking by. Tommy didn’t notice that he was even doing it at first, not until the conversation had faded and Jess had shifted her chair closer to him, until their calves were pressing together. She asked him about his mom and then told him about community college and a trip she had planned to New York after Thanksgiving. 

She was throwing out signals like a beacon, brushing their hands together as they shared a beer, holding onto Tommy's arm as she tilted her head back and laughed. Tommy didn’t miss it—he wasn’t an idiot. After they had sex back when they were sophomores, he and Jess had drifted apart, but their friend groups overlapped, so they had still ran into each other every once and a while during school. Jess liked to seek him out whenever that happened, but it never amounted to anything. Tommy wasn't really interested. Whenever he saw her, it reminded him of their first time, fumbling and nervous and awkward. Jess had been into it, but afterwards, as she'd cuddled up to his chest and talked about going to prom together, Tommy’s skin had felt too tight, like he’d done something wrong. He liked to avoid thinking about the whole thing.

But he considered it now: they were older, they weren’t dumb kids anymore. Maybe it could work out. When the light of the fire passed across her face, he could see how pretty she was. She had a nice smile. A few of the boys in Iraq had girls back home. Barnett even had a two-by-two photo of his girlfriend that he kept in his uniform pocket like he thought he was in the fucking Vietnam War. It gave them something else to think about, something to look forward to when there was nothing but burning heat and the boredom or fear or both keeping them awake. Maybe Tommy could use a distraction like that. 

He thought he saw another shadow pass by the screen door. He scanned the yard, but everyone at the party was in Sammy’s backyard. 

“Sorry.” He’d missed the last thing Jess said. His heart was pounding, all of a sudden. “I'm going to use the bathroom for a sec.”

He went inside and checked that the front door was locked, then turned on the lights in the kitchen. It was galley-style so he stood with his back against the wall and listened. It was almost laughable: the house was silent. He was just losing his goddamn mind. 

He stayed there and breathed for a while, surrounded by the sink full of dirty dishes and the overflowing trash and a clicking noise coming from the fridge that it probably shouldn’t have been making. He kind of wished Mullins was there to call him out for acting like this, that Rhodes was close by, laughing like a fucking idiot, like he always did. 

Instead Tommy chugged a glass of water, had another. He was wiping at his mouth when Jess came through the door. 

“I was wondering where you went,” she said. “I was getting lonely out there.”

“Sorry.” Tommy put the glass down on the counter, turning as Jess stepped close enough that he could smell the burnt firewood in her hair. “You found me.” 

“Don't be sorry.” She trailed her fingers across his wrist, catching his hand. She was a few inches shorter than him and had to tilt her chin up when she said, “you know, you’re looking good, Kinard,” when she leaned in to kiss him. 

Yeah, Tommy thought. He could really use a distraction like this. 

*

When Tommy got back to base, Rhodes looked like he'd aged twenty years. 

Mullins and Barnett were dead. They were out on detail, riding to Camp Victory on Highway 8 when they were ambushed. Tommy might’ve been with them, if he hadn't left. 

It was a shitshow, Rhodes told him, and Tommy felt like there was a mortar combusting inside of his own body, reverberating through him, rattling his bones. He blinked and saw his living room in Springfield, blinked and saw the pulpit at St. Michael’s, saw Marci with her feet up on the balcony railing, saw Sadiq squinting up at the sun. Mullins and Barnett, sitting around a cot, swearing, playing cards.

Tommy blinked and there was Rhodes again, sitting beside him on his cot, head ducked between his shoulders.

“I’m sorry,” Tommy said, even though he wasn’t sure what he was apologizing for. He just couldn’t think of anything else to say.

“Fuck,” Rhodes hissed. When he looked up at Tommy, he was crying. He jerked sideways and pressed his face against Tommy’s arm, exhaling a wet, shuddering sob, his fist twisting at Tommy’s sleeve. In the next breath he shoved Tommy away, standing up so suddenly the frame of the bed rocked.

“Rhodes—”

“Don’t, Springfield,” Rhodes choked, turning and walking away. “Just—don’t, Tommy.” 

Present Day

Annabelle cried.

Tommy jolted awake in the middle of the night with a confused curse, his leg bursting into pain as Evan’s foot jerked and kicked him in the shin. “Ow—shit—” 

Evan struggled out from under Tommy’s arm around his waist and scrambled for the nightstand, shoulders heaving, caught in another vicious coughing fit. 

Tommy turned on the lamp, bathing both the bedroom and Evan, inhaler pressed to his mouth, in a soft yellow glow. Annabelle shrieked from her bassinet at the foot of the bed.

Tommy shifted onto his elbow and leaned over, running his hand up and down Evan’s arm, feeling the goosebumps prickling there. “You okay?” He asked over Annabelle’s cries.

Inhaling deep, heavy breaths, Evan nodded, on the edge of frantic. When Tommy’s eyes finally adjusted to the low light, he could see the tears on Evan’s cheeks, the sheen of sweat chilling his skin. It was when Tommy caught the flash of pain in Evan’s eyes that he sat up straighter and held his palm flat to Evan’s chest. His heart was pounding hard beneath Tommy’s hand. 

He pressed his own hand against Tommy’s and squeezed. “Just check that Annabelle’s okay,” Evan breathed. “I’ll be fine, Tommy.” 

Tommy frowned but got out of bed. He could hear Evan’s breathing start to even out, but once Annabelle stopped crying, he would still dig the blood pressure cuff out from under the bathroom sink and call Hen or Howie or Eddie, definitely Eddie, who could convince Evan to go back to the hospital if he really needed it. Tommy lost his train of thought, his plan of action faltering when he padded over to Annabelle’s bassinet. 

He would rather retire early and never fly again than see her like this, her face bright red and scrunched into a terrible wince, her arms and legs flailing like she was overwhelmed and trying to escape from her own emotions. Tommy knew the feeling.

“Annabelle,” he murmured and scooped her up, resting her cheek on his shoulder. Her tears and snot stuck to his skin as he rubbed her back. He shushed her, rocking her back and forth, but it only seemed to make her cry harder and louder.

Evan pushed himself up from bed and hovered by Tommy’s shoulder. He was still flushed from almost hacking up a lung, but he looked a bit better now, his brow wrinkled in concern rather than in pain, so Tommy asked, “do you want to try to calm her down?”  

Evan reached for Annabelle and then, strangely, dropped his hand like he’d changed his mind. 

“She might be hungry,” he said, his voice hoarse. “We should make her a bottle.” 

“If you think so,” Tommy said. Evan was probably right. Annabelle might’ve just been hungry. “I’ll change her diaper first.” Tommy patted her bottom. Better cover all the bases. 

Evan kissed Tommy’s cheek and then disappeared from the bedroom, the hallway light flickering on as his footsteps hurried downstairs. Tommy shushed Annabelle while he set down a towel on the bed and changed her, dodging her kicking legs to avoid getting a black eye from a foot so small it didn’t have a shoe size yet. Tommy caught her ankle and blew a raspberry against the bottom of her foot, something that Evan did last night that made Tommy want to wrap him up and keep him for forever and also back him up against the nearest wall at the same time. 

But Annabelle jerked away, not having it. 

“It must hurt to cry so hard, huh?” Tommy said. “Poor girl.” He wiped the tears from Annabelle’s face, even as more spilled out, and lifted her up off the bed. “Your mom loved you. I’m sorry she’s not here.” 

For a moment, Annabelle’s face relaxed. She blinked her wet eyes up at him, like she was considering his words. He felt sized up against her gaze, waiting. Then her mouth trembled and she let out another wail. 

“Yeah,” Tommy sighed, and carried her downstairs. “Me too.” 

*

They settled on the couch to feed her, Evan slumped against Tommy’s arm, half-awake, his birthmark shadowed by the single lamp lit up in the corner of the room as Tommy held Annabelle’s bottle up to her mouth.

“I knew you just needed something good to eat,” Evan said as Annabelle ate without any fuss. He yawned. “Then it’ll be right back to sleep.”

It should have been peaceful, Annabelle finally calm as she ate, Evan recovering from his coughing fit. But as Tommy watched her reach out and wrap her entire hand around just one of Evan’s fingers, Evan laughing back at her, and a dullness spread through Tommy’s chest, a sense that something was off. 

He thought of Annabelle’s mom, that she’d spent her final moments reaching out for her baby, and he realized that he didn't know the last thing his own mom had said before she’d died. If she’d been thinking of him, if she’d been worried, wondering about him out in Iraq, not knowing if he was okay. Maybe she hadn’t thought of him at all, or maybe she’d thought of him too much. 

Evan turned to look at him. Tommy wasn’t sure what was showing on his face but Evan clocked it, like he always did, his smiling fading. 

“You okay?”

Evan smelled like formula and sweat and Tommy wanted to rest his head on Evan’s shoulder and sink into it—but he couldn’t. Tommy could hear the scratch of his voice in his throat, see the shadows under his eyes, knew it wouldn’t be right to ask him to deal with Tommy’s own problems on top of everything else. 

Instead Tommy answered, “yeah, I’m okay. She’s almost done eating. I should burp her.”

Evan gave him a discerning look, pressing his lips together, but Tommy pulled the bottle away from Annabelle and a sob exploded from her mouth, and Evan wasn’t able to ask about it again. 

Annabelle was inconsolable.

They tried everything: pacing and bouncing, sitting down and rocking her, playing music on the TV— "don't play country music, Tommy, that will make her cry more” —and even setting her down in her bassinet and leaving the room to let her cry herself out and self-soothe, an idea Evan found in a Reddit thread that lasted all of five minutes before she was back in Tommy's arms again. 

It was two in the morning when Evan called the pediatrician who’d seen Annabelle in the ER. When her temperature read as a perfectly normal 97.6, her doctor said it may be the stress of her new environment that was upsetting her, to wait it out for a few more hours and then call back if nothing changed.

When Evan called the pediatrician again at four in the morning, she suggested giving it more time, to try the letting-Annabelle-cry-in-her-bassinet-until-she-fell-asleep method, and Evan looked close to tears himself as he hung up the phone.

Tommy was also starting to feel worn thin. He knew how to function on little to no sleep, how to run on fumes and still muddle through, but this reminded him of the type of high-strung exhaustion he’d felt in the Army, or when he worked a too-long, too-busy shift, being shipped out to one emergency after another without a break, thinking there was finally a moment to breathe, only for the alarm to sound again, sending him running.

They’d paced the house during the night and had finally ended up in the kitchen. Only the lights beneath the cabinets were turned on, illuminating the frizz of Evan’s curls and the tight curve of his frown. Tommy watched him fiddle with his phone in his hands, listened to the way Annabelle’s cries had given way to small, breathless sobs. He couldn’t think of a way to fix it. Waiting it out like the doctors suggested didn’t feel right. It was the opposite of how Tommy had been taught to help his entire life.

Before Tommy realized it, Evan was dialing another number, the call ringing out over speakerphone.

“Buck? Tommy?” Bobby answered, and Tommy almost felt bad about calling him so early in the morning, the 118 on the tail-end of the end of their shift, but mostly, it was just a relief to hear his voice again. “What’s wrong?” 

Evan recapped their night to him, described Annabelle’s non-stop crying, the fruitless calls to her pediatrician, his words laced with equal parts urgency and desperation.

“She doesn't have a fever, her diaper is clean, she ate a few hours ago and we burped her afterwards,” Evan listed off. “We don’t know what to do, Bobby.” 

“Sounds like she could be colicky,” he said. “It can start around Annabelle’s age.” 

Evan sighed. “It doesn’t seem like colic. It’s like something’s wrong and we can’t see it.” 

“Then I think you should take her back to the ER. I know you don’t want to hear it, but it’s possible that the doctors missed something when they looked her over after the fire,” Bobby said, and Tommy held Annabelle closer, resting his cheek against the top of her head. If she’d been sick or in pain this whole time, if they had wasted the entire night doing nothing, he wasn’t sure he’d be able to forgive himself.

“It’s better safe than sorry,” Bobby added.

“You’re right, Bobby,” Evan nodded. “We’ll take her back to the hospital.”

Bobby reminded them to call him later, to let him know how it turned out. When Evan thanked him and hung up, Tommy shifted Annabelle around so he could hand her to Evan. “Why don’t you take her? I’ll go pack us a bag.”

But Evan stepped back and held his phone up to his chest with both hands like a shield. “I shouldn’t hold her. Not when I could have another coughing fit.” 

Tommy looked at Evan more carefully then, saw the way he was holding himself slightly off-center, the same way he stood when his bad leg was acting up or a fresh injury from work was bothering him, like he was hurting but would be hard pressed to admit it.

“Are you not feeling well? Does your chest hurt?”

Tommy should have checked him over sooner. Annabelle might be sick, and maybe Evan was worse off, too, but Tommy had been too distracted to notice, to help either of them.

“No,” Evan insisted. “I just want to be careful.” 

Tommy frowned but chose to believe it, even if something about him still seemed off. “Why don’t you take her and go sit on the couch, then? I’ll be quick. I think she’s sick of my ugly mug.” 

Evan didn’t move, and all at once, Tommy felt the past day catch up with him: he was tired, caked in tears and snot and formula, not sure he’d even used the bathroom once tonight. He just needed a minute to himself. 

“Please, Evan.” 

“I can’t.” Tommy watched as his face flickered and a heaviness washed over him, his shoulders dropping in defeat, a facade fading away that Tommy hadn’t even known was there. “I lost her, Tommy. We brought her back, and then when I came out of that house, she was gone.” 

It was a minute before Tommy understood that Evan wasn’t talking about Annabelle—he was talking about Annabelle’s mom.  

Tommy had been reading it all wrong: Evan’s stiff posture, the anxious calls to the pediatrician, the insistence that something must be wrong. When Evan had whispered, I'm glad she'll never remember any of it, when he’d reached out for Annabelle only to drop his hand. It wasn’t just worry, it was something far beyond it. 

Tommy wasn’t sure how he’d missed it. 

“I said I would protect her,” Evan said.

“You did protect her,” Tommy said. “You saved her, Evan. Look at her.” 

Evan’s eyes were wet as they traced over Annabelle’s round and ruddy cheeks, her clenched fists and her curled toes. Each breath she took was a deep inhale and an exaggerated exhale through her tears. She was so, so alive. “You’re the reason she’s here.”

“I’m the reason she’s alone, Tommy!” Evan’s words were ragged, torn straight from his chest, so definitive, so sure, they made Tommy freeze. “I won’t let anything else happen to her. I won’t hurt her.”

Tommy heard Maddie’s whisper in his ear again, you got this, and he knew then that she’d been painfully wrong: he’d been failing Evan and Annabelle both, this entire time. Because, as Annabelle hovered there between their chests, cradled in Tommy’s arms, he came to a sinking realization: Evan hadn’t held Annabelle once since they came home from the hospital.

Tommy knew guilt like the one hundred different wrinkles on the back of his hand. Bad calls were a special kind of reckoning. He remembered the first person he’d lost and he remembered the last, their memories intertwined with the incessant, overwhelming urge to blame himself. It was easy, every time, to feel like he’d made a mistake, to tell himself that maybe, if he’d done something different, better, if he’d done just one more compression, ran from the truck faster, flew his helicopter against the wind smarter, he could have saved them. It was less easy for Tommy to tell himself it wasn’t true. That sometimes, accidents just happened. People died, and there was no way to save them.

His old therapist—Eileen, she was kind of a hardass—told him once that if he didn’t learn to feel his feelings, he was only going to make himself suffer. So Tommy learned to sit with them: a head injury from a bad fall, internal bleeding after a car accident, a drowning in the deep end of a pool. A stroke, an ambush in Iraq. It was a ball made up of different strings that sat tangled up in his chest. He felt it while he sparred and changed the oil in his truck, when he watched shitty TV, drinking one too many beers on the couch. He carried it with him, but he tried not to mull on it, as best he could. Sometimes it worked. But in the end, if he was being honest, he didn’t dare tug on any one of those strings. 

Evan wasn’t much different than Tommy. After bad shifts, he came home with shaking hands and a half-empty look in his eyes. He came home quiet. He told Tommy once that all they could do was put it away and save the next one—something that Bobby had taught him, but Tommy wasn’t sure Evan actually believed it. It was the most tragic accidents, the worst outcomes that turned Evan still and silent. When it happened, Tommy steered him into the shower, or reminded him to eat something, to sleep, to take an aspirin, and Evan usually let him, but after, Tommy could tell that he was still thinking, still replaying the memories back in his head.

Tommy knew guilt, his own and Evan’s, too, but not like this. Evan was taking the shame and the loathing and he was running with it, a one hundred yard sprint down the field, faulting himself so deeply for losing Annabelle’s mom that he’d turned it into an inevitability that there would be more harm, more loss—and that it would be his own fault. His fault. Evan, who tucked Jee into bed like she was as precious as the air they breathed, who Chris looked up at with stars in his eyes. Evan, who sprinted back into a burning house to save Annabelle without a second thought.

“Jesus, Evan…” Tommy stepped forward to bridge the distance between them, cupping a hand around the back of Evan’s head. He pressed their temples together and said, “I love you, okay? It’s okay. None of this is your fault.”

For a moment, Evan was tense, body angled away from Annabelle, until his arm reached out, gripping at Tommy’s shirt. Tommy pressed his mouth to the side of his face, the curve of his eyebrow, his cheekbone, over and over. 

Too quickly, Evan backed away.

“We can talk about this later.” He ducked his head and sniffed, wiping the tears away from his jaw. “I love you, too, but we need to get Annabelle to the hospital. I’ll get a bag packed.” 

He turned and disappeared down the unlit hallway before Tommy had a chance to respond.