Things You Save in a Fire

Cassie believes she is dreaming and is still in shock as she walks up to the stage to accept her award. She decides that the only thing she can do is take her plaque and walk off stage, not looking at or touching Heath. Yet when she accepts the plaque, Heath grabs her hand and poses for the cameras, and Cassie becomes enraged. She sees that Heath remembers her, and while the cameras can’t see it, Heath gropes her behind. Cassie beats him over the head with her award, knocking him unconscious.

In a new section, Cassie begins to explain what led her to become a firefighter, a job she hadn’t always wanted. She was studying medicine to become an ER doctor when she was recruited to be an EMT for her university during her freshman year. Cassie fell in love with the job, recognizing that she had a talent for performing well in an emergency. She was soon recruited to work as a paramedic and then as a firefighter. She talks about the qualities that make a good firefighter—most of which she admits are typically considered masculine qualities—and the most important is the ability to remain calm when everyone else panics. All firefighters have this instinct, but Cassie knows hers is different than everyone else’s as she feels the most clarity in her life during these emergency situations.

Cassie continues to beat Heath even after she has cracked his head with her plaque. She and Heath are whisked off the stage and the police come, but Heath doesn’t press charges, and nothing about the incident appears in the papers afterward. Hernandez comes to Cassie’s apartment that night to return her phone and plaque, which she left at the ceremony, and asks if Heath is the reason she doesn’t date anybody. Cassie rejects his sincere offer for company and ushers him out of the door as her phone begins to ring.

Cassie answers the phone and is surprised to hear the voice of her semi-estranged mother, whose calls she has been avoiding for weeks. Cassie’s mom—whom she has been calling Diana since she left her and her father 10 years prior—says she wants her to come live with her in Boston for a year while she gets used to living without vision in one eye. Cassie is shocked not only by the request but also by the fact that Diana didn’t even tell her she had been having issues with her eye that led to surgery and blindness. Cassie tries to explain to Diana that she can’t just move away for a year, as she would lose her job, but Diana tries to convince her by asking her what else she would lose by moving away from Austin. Cassie’s dad, Ted, calls her 10 minutes later and asks her why she said no to Diana when she needed her. Ted thinks she needs to move on from the abandonment, as he has by remarrying, but Cassie can’t completely forgive her. Ted eventually concedes that he can’t make Cassie forgive Diana, but he tells her she needs to go anyway because her mother raised her to do the right thing.

The only other woman at Cassie’s fire station is Captain Harris, with whom she meets first thing in the morning after the award ceremony. Harris tells Cassie that she just passed the lieutenant’s exam with the best score in the city and that the mayor and fire chief want to include her in a public relations campaign to show the progressiveness of the city’s fire department. Cassie jeopardized this the previous night at the award ceremony, but they are willing to overlook the incident and promote her to lieutenant if she formally apologizes to Heath. Harris asks why Cassie beat Heath, but when she tries to explain herself, no words leave her mouth. She is only able to tell her captain that she knew Heath in high school and that he is “a very, very bad person” (60), which Harris seems to understand instinctively as a woman. The fire chief has told Harris that if Cassie doesn’t apologize to Heath, her contract must be terminated, but Cassie refuses and stands her ground. As Harris is in the middle of firing her, Cassie proposes that she be relocated instead, explaining the situation with her mother to bolster her proposition. Harris agrees to look into it, but Cassie is nearly overcome with emotion as she contemplates losing her coworkers and the position she has worked so hard to achieve.

Harris manages to find Cassie a position at a station in Lillian, Massachusetts, a short distance from her mother’s home in Rockport. She tells Cassie that she talked her up to the station captain, a man named Murphy, before breaking the “bad news” that she is a woman (69), a first for the Lillian fire department. Both Cassie and the Lillian fire department are desperate. She is about to lose her job in Austin, and the Lillian fire department just had two firefighters retire. Though neither side is enthusiastic about the match, the department offers Cassie a job, and she accepts it. Harris cautions Cassie about how tough it will be to work in an environment where she isn’t wanted, as Cassie has been recruited for all her previous positions. She gives Cassie an exhaustive list of challenges that will come with working in such a patriarchal environment, noting that she will need to mask her femininity and put more effort into her job than any of the other male firefighters. Cassie knows Harris has gained all this information first-hand as one of the few Black women in the Austin fire department since the 1980s, but she wonders if the sexism Harris experienced could still be this bad outside of her current department. The most significant things Harris tells Cassie are that she cannot have feelings and she cannot have sex with anyone even remotely related to any of the other firefighters.

On her drive to Massachusetts, Cassie considers her choices and wonders whether her refusal to apologize to Heath helped her or hurt her. To avoid making herself feel any worse about her decision, she resolves to keep her distance from her mother. She finds the town of Rockport, where her mother lives, uncannily charming and idyllic, showing an uneasiness that parallels her uneasiness toward her mother. Diana reveals that while she only needs Cassie for things like driving and getting her groceries, what she wants is to spend time with her daughter.

At dinner, Cassie and Diana have trouble talking to each other. Cassie contrasts this awkwardness with the easy conversations she remembers having with her mother when she was young. Diana invites Cassie to join her crochet club next door to have some fun, but Cassie has no interest in fun, dating, falling in love, or any of the other “girly” things her mother suggests. Diana blames herself for ruining Cassie’s views of love by walking out on her and her father the night of her 16th birthday. She remembers that Cassie was in love around that time with a boy named Heath Thompson and asks what happened with him, unable to see the rage Cassie is barely containing. Cassie thinks that romantic love doesn’t exist, but Diana is determined to persuade her otherwise and convinced that she is right on the verge of falling in love.