It was not a bell, exactly, not anymore — it was a long electric clangor from a red box on the kitchen wall, so loud and so sudden that a plate slipped out of Nora's hands and broke in the sink. Then a voice crackled out of a speaker in the ceiling, flattened and metallic, reading off a box number and an address. Structure fire. Quarry Road. Residence. Possible entrapment.
Cal was already moving. It happened so fast that she did not see the change; one moment he was a man with a dish towel in his hand asking her to dinner, and the next he was something else entirely, the towel dropped on the counter, his whole body turned toward the door, his face gone smooth and blank and focused as a blade. All through the building she heard the same thing happening — chairs scraping, feet pounding, Captain Ruddock's tugboat voice shouting names, Danny Fitch yelling something, the big diesel of the pumper out on the apron coughing to life.
At the kitchen door he stopped. Just for one second. He turned and looked back at her standing at the sink with broken china in her hands.
"Saturday," he said. "Think about it."
And then he was gone.
She went to the door of the kitchen and watched. She couldn't help it. She watched the men pulling on their heavy turnout coats and their boots, which stood ready by the trucks with the trousers already folded down around them so a man could step in and pull them up in one motion. She watched Gus Amato, sixty years old with his ruined hand, climb up behind the wheel of the pumper. She watched Cal swing up onto the back step of the ladder truck with his helmet under his arm, and she watched him look once toward the kitchen, and she did not know if he could see her in the doorway against the light. Then the sirens started, rising, that terrible lovely sound that she had heard in her sleep for sixteen years, and the trucks pulled out onto Mill Street with their red lights wheeling across the snow, and the sound went up Center and faded toward the east, toward Quarry Road, and was gone.
The firehouse was suddenly enormous, and very quiet.