What No One Else Can Hear (25 page)

We both dressed as fast as we could, and headed outside. I saw Dottie’s kitchen light on, so we went in there instead.

By then Dottie was up and dressed too, and we all had a sense of dread. We jumped in my car, and I drove as fast as I could to get to the center, all the while hoping to see the two fire trucks parked somewhere else on the way, even if that was wishing ill on others.

They weren’t.

I pulled into the outer part of the center’s parking lot and rushed toward the knot of children and staff on the grassy area fairly far from the building, with Drew right on my heels. I saw three of the nighttime staff members from 3-B and ran to them, looking around for Stevie, knowing with the emotions running so high, he was bound to be going nuts.

I didn’t see him. I asked all the staff, and no one knew for sure where he was. All I could find out was that Molly had gone back in to help Gary with Stevie and Evan, and they hadn’t come out.

Meanwhile I saw firemen scurrying in and out of the building. They shouted that the stairwell was engulfed in flames and called for another truck. They made a quick check to see if anyone was missing. All were accounted for except for two staff and two children from Hall 3-B.

By then I saw one of the firemen point to a second-story window and was relieved, yet terrified, to see Molly. The nearest fire truck extended its ladder toward the window, and in moments first Evan, then Molly, was down.

“God, Drew.” I grabbed onto him for fear of falling over. It felt like I was holding my breath until they were down, until I could find Stevie. “Is Stevie up there too? Can you tell?”

“I see someone behind Molly,” he answered. “It has to be Gary or Stevie. If Gary wasn’t there, Molly would have sent Stevie down first, and Gary won’t be there if he doesn’t have Stevie.”

Stevie appeared at the window with Gary behind him. Stevie looked terrified. With all these emotions flying around, he had to be in pain, and he’d be genuinely scared in his own right. Added to all the fear and confusion from everyone else, I was surprised he was even upright. I didn’t know if he’d done a really good job of building walls or if he was learning to handle everything better, but we weren’t out of the woods yet. Stevie still had to get down.

The firefighter went back up for Stevie, and Gary was helping him out the window. Stevie gingerly stepped onto the ladder, and the firefighter wrapped him in a one-armed hug. Second floor doesn’t sound very high, but at the center, there was an entire ground floor on this side of the building, then first, then second. So the window was more than two full stories above the ground floor. I thanked all that was holy that Stevie wasn’t afraid of heights.

Unfortunately a third fire truck chose that moment to pull up, sirens blaring, and even I could feel the surge of emotion from the crowd. Stevie and the firefighter were still about one-and-a-half stories up when Stevie grabbed his ears and started to struggle. The firefighter had to have been phenomenally strong to hold on to the squirming boy so well, but they were obviously not going anywhere.

I could hear Gary try to talk to Stevie about his wall, but by then, Stevie was wound up tight. Any hold he had on the situation was gone by now. He started pushing at the firefighter while clawing at the man’s hands, kicking against the ladder and thrashing within his grip. The firefighter held on for dear life to Stevie with one hand and the ladder with the other.

I had been attempting all this time to reach Stevie, but the firemen wouldn’t let me through. I tried calling to him, but either I was too far away or he was too preoccupied with the voices in his head and the physical symptoms that came with that.

“God, Drew”—I was so thankful to have him at my back, giving me silent moral support—“what can I do?” He recognized the rhetorical question, so he didn’t answer. He just wrapped his arms around me.

I will never know what the final straw was for Stevie, but he suddenly yelled and got his feet under him, bracing them against the rung that was at his waist level. He pushed with all his might, and it was finally too much for the firefighter’s tenuous one-handed grip on the ladder. They fell. From nearly two stories.

To give the firefighter his due, he managed to hold onto Stevie the whole way down. He used his body to cushion Stevie’s landing as best he could, but they landed with bone-jarring force. From where I stood, I couldn’t tell what their condition might be, but neither was moving.

O
NCE
AGAIN
I tried to get to Stevie, but a firefighter held me back. This time that wasn’t going to stop me.

“
I’ve got to get to Stevie
,” I all but screamed at him. “He’s got special needs that are going to make it hard to treat him if I’m not there to help. Plus I have power of attorney from his dad to be able to sign for medical treatment.”

The firefighter tried to reiterate why it wasn’t safe for me to go any closer, but I ignored him. “Let me in there, or I’ll wait till you’re busy and sneak in.”

He was thinking about it when the ambulance crew pushed past. I just sidestepped in line with them, and the firefighter admitted defeat. I could tell Drew had started in behind me, but the firefighter did stop him.

I was on my own.

The first thing I noticed was a lot of blood coming from under Stevie’s head, pouring down onto the firefighter’s face. Stevie was lying on top of the supine firefighter, still wrapped in the man’s now lax arms. His right leg was partially under the firefighter, positioned at an impossible angle. But, most worryingly, Stevie still wasn’t moving.

The EMTs were carefully moving Stevie off the firefighter and laying him nearby on the ground so they could treat both patients. In the background, I could hear someone calling for another ambulance, and eventually I heard Gary’s voice coming from nearby, so he must have gotten down from the burning building, but all I was really focusing on was Stevie.

Finally I heard the best sound ever. Stevie started to groan. I knew he’d be in horrible pain—from that leg alone if nothing else—and would still have trouble with his empathy, but at least he was waking up. I could help with most of the other things.

He started to thrash around weakly even before he was completely conscious. I was at his side in an instant, trying to get him to lie still. I started to help him work on his wall. He was going to need all the shielding he could manage in this emotional crowd. He could still barely hear or understand me, but I kept talking. Sometimes just my voice helped.

Finally a weak “Bear?”

“Yeah, buddy. You need to build your wall quickly, okay?”

“Too tired, Bear.”

“That’s because you hit your head. But you gotta try. Okay, big guy?”

“’Kay.” He was still barely awake, but obviously attempting to control everything as well as he could. Probably pain alone was keeping him reasonably still. Every time he moved, he groaned. Aside from his leg, which was obviously broken, he had to be stiff and sore all over from the impact. He had definitely hit his head. The EMT who was examining him said that most of the blood on the back of his head wasn’t his. He had banged his head into the firefighter’s face either during the fall, or on impact, or both. That was most likely what had knocked him out for a minute.

He still looked like he was about to go to sleep at any moment. The EMTs worked on immobilizing his leg, checking out his other limbs, his ribs, and his head. I heard them say he probably wasn’t bleeding internally, but they would let the doctors at the hospital decide for sure. His pupils reacted well, so probably no terrible head injury, maybe a small concussion.

By then they were ready to load him into the second ambulance. They weren’t going to let me go with him. I tried every argument I could think of, but it wasn’t going to happen. Drew was suddenly taking my shoulders and leading me toward his car.

O
NCE
WE
arrived at the hospital, it was all I could do to keep Stevie calm. The deluge of smells and sounds and bright lights even bothered me, but add to that the strong emotions of a crowded emergency room, and we had lots of work to do on building his walls. Additionally, the poor kid was in terrible pain. They didn’t want to give him painkillers until they found out whether or not he had a brain injury.

I stayed with him through the exam, the X-ray, the stitching, and the casting process.

The diagnosis was a lot better than it could have been. Stevie had basically knocked the wind out of himself, and just the jarring of the sudden stop at the bottom of a two-story fall pretty much made him sore all over. He had broken his right leg and had a small gash on the back of his head. The doctors wanted to keep him overnight for observation, but they were pretty sure his head injury wasn’t serious. He had gotten off comparatively easy.

B
Y
FIVE
o’clock in the morning, we were finally settling Stevie into a room. It was the first opportunity I had to ask the nurse to check on the firefighter’s condition for me. He hadn’t been quite so lucky. By making sure he landed first so he could shield Stevie, he had taken the brunt of the impact, which I guessed was his intention once he had realized they were falling. He not only landed on the ground at the same velocity as Stevie, but Stevie then landed on him. Stevie’s head had crashed into the firefighter’s face, breaking his nose, fracturing his lower jaw, and breaking several teeth. The doctors speculated that Stevie had actually cut his head on the firefighter’s broken teeth.

Stevie got the better deal with the head injury too. While having his head hit the man’s face was enough to knock Stevie out for a minute, bashing his head into the ground, even with a helmet, caused the firefighter to still be unconscious. He also had three cracked ribs. All in all, the firefighter had gotten pretty banged up just to keep my Stevie safe, and as soon as the guy woke up, I was going to make sure he knew how grateful I was.

For now, I could do nothing but settle in beside Stevie’s bed and wait out what little there was left of the night. They wouldn’t let both Drew and me stay in the room, and I could see no point to Drew staying in the waiting room, so I told him to go back to the center. They were going to need help.

Drew didn’t want to leave me alone, but he finally saw reason. He bent down, gave me a kiss good-bye, and was off.

D
OTTIE
HAD
stayed at the center to help with damage control. The three-to-one student-staff ratio was usually plenty, but all the children were uptight because of the commotion. Tara had made the same assumptions as we had when she saw so many fire trucks heading toward the center, so she was already on hand to help. Sara had been notified and had called in a lot of the off-duty staff regardless of whether they usually worked day or night shift. Calming the children was only the first of the hurdles they needed to overcome that night.

The firefighters finally got the fire put out, but there had been considerable damage to some sections of the center. All three offices in the administrative section were gone, and a good bit of damage had been done to the walls between there and the stairway. The stairwell itself didn’t appear to be structurally damaged, but was so engulfed in soot and smoke, it certainly didn’t come out unscathed.

The B-wing halls themselves weren’t really damaged, but the lingering smoke made sleeping there that night impossible, even if the firemen would have let anyone back into that part of the building. Sara started orchestrating “Project Move Hall B Students into Hall A.” Hall A was a separate wing that didn’t have any structural damage at all, or even any smoke.

Sleeping bags magically appeared, donated by staff or their friends and family. Staff from both halls used their extensive knowledge of the individual students to pair them up for the night and started the arduous task of relocating the students.

With his typical dry wit, Drew had remarked, “Great. We get to move kids who have trouble with transitions into rooms with children who don’t like change.”

A sure recipe for disaster, but those were the only kinds of students we had at the center. All our children were resistant to change. They needed multiple reminders when transitions were coming up and didn’t do well with sudden ones. They craved routine and schedules and liked things to be predictable. None of them, on any wing, did well with this type of situation. This was not going to be pretty.

None of the kids really got back to sleep that night…. By then I guess it was more like morning.

B
Y
EIGHT
that morning, Dottie and Drew, along with the rest of the staff, had things as under control as they were likely to get. Classes were called off because the kids had been up most of the night and many of the classrooms were in the same wing as the administrative offices and so they were too damaged to use. Any day-shift staff not called in during the night were asked to be on duty that day even if they had originally been scheduled off. Sara figured more staff would be necessary to help the children deal with the changes and the day-shift staff who had been up all night would require at least half a day off.

By the time Drew and Dottie got to the hospital to check on Stevie, he was asleep in the room the doctors insisted he occupy overnight. Stevie hadn’t wanted to stay, and it took all the persuasion I could muster to get him to go along with it. Doctor Brown had been called in, and even though he knew Stevie was struggling with the emotions in the hospital, he agreed Stevie should stay the night.

They had put him on the far side of Pediatrics. The nurses were used to speaking quietly and thinking calm thoughts. Between the medicine and the fact that Stevie was exhausted from all the commotion, he was still conked out by the time his visitors arrived the next day.

While he slept, they filled me in on exactly what had happened the previous night. Everything had been going well, and all the kids were asleep, when suddenly the fire alarm went off. Obviously no drill would have been scheduled at that hour of the night. All the kids started to wail. Molly, Mark, and Karen escorted out eight students who, while upset, seemed willing to walk with them. Molly left them with Karen and staff from other halls, while she and Mark went back inside to help with the others.