My Sister’s Keeper

At work, Brian responds to a call in the middle of the night. He and his coworkers arrive at a house completely engulfed in fire. A woman runs over to him in tears, explaining in Spanish that her three-year-old daughter is trapped on the second floor. Brian gives instructions to his men, then tells them that he’s going to try and retrieve the girl. But he can’t guarantee it; he has to prioritize his own safety as a rescuer over that of the victim, so if the structure is too dangerous to enter, he’ll have to let her go.

Brian admits to being a coward due to his tendency to stay longer than necessary at the station. Although it’s a hectic place, he takes comfort in the fact that it’s supposed to be a place for emergencies, unlike his home. The morning after the house fire, he’s making breakfast when Julia comes to speak with him. She introduces herself and helps him make breakfast: pancakes and eggs. As they cook together, he thinks of the times when he’s had to back out of a burning structure to save himself and considers how nowadays he’s fighting fires on every side of his family between Kate’s illness, Anna’s lawsuit, Jesse’s delinquency, and Sara’s anxiety. Lost in thought, he accidentally burns the pancakes and doesn’t notice until Julia gets his attention.

Back at the burning house, Brian enters the house while the other firefighters hose it. He follows the mother’s directions to the girl’s room, but he doesn’t find her anywhere. He tries to think of where a little girl might go in a fire and theorizes that she might have gone to her mother’s room for comfort. The master bedroom is already overwhelmed with smoke and fire, but Brian enters anyway. He calls for the little girl, Luisa, and eventually finds the closet and knocks against it. Faintly, he hears a knock back.

In the present, Brian tells Julia that he and Sara are lucky because they have Suzanne to watch the kids and Jesse and Anna are old enough to look after themselves. As soon as he says this, he worries that it makes him look negligent. Julia asks him if he thinks Anna’s okay; he responds that she wouldn’t have filed her lawsuit if she was, but that Sara just thinks she wants attention. Julia asks him if he agrees with this, but he avoids the question and asks her if she has siblings, to which she answers that she has six brothers and a twin sister, but none of them fell through the cracks. Brian asks her if she feels her parents ever played favorites, suggesting that he has a favorite child of his own. He then asks if she has time for him to introduce her to someone.

Brian recalls a time last winter when the station got a call for a man in a rural area who slipped the night before and froze to the gravel, staying there the entire night. The man had been outside for over eight hours and had no pulse. They brought him into the ambulance and warmed him up, and by the time they had the hospital paperwork ready, the man was sitting up and talking. Brian tells the reader that he mentions this to show that miracles can indeed happen.

Back in the fire, Brian emerges from the house with Luisa in his arms and brings her to the EMT. When he sees the girl’s mother collapse to her knees with joy, he takes solace in that he’s done his job well. He congratulates his men on a job well done; his own rescue would have been better if Luisa had been in her room, but kids are unpredictable. He muses that parenting is just a matter of trying to track your children’s next moves. Luisa’s mother comes up to him and takes Brian’s hand, raising his knuckles to her lips in thanks. On the way back to the station, they go the long way so that they can pass his house. He thinks to himself that he became a firefighter to save people.