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Abby loved Little Women. We’re talking, Tommy had to watch the movie three years in a row because it didn’t feel like Christmas to Abby if she didn’t watch Winona Ryder singing carols in the snow. That was their deal, back when Tommy and Abby were Tommy-and-Abby: she got to make them watch Little Women once every December, and Tommy got to follow it up with Love Actually, because fuck it, one made her cry and the other made him cry. (For him it was Emma Thompson listening to Joni Mitchell. Jesus.) The part Abby always cried at was Laurie explaining to Amy that he'd always wanted to be part of the March family, like it didn't matter if he got there by marrying Jo or marrying Amy or marrying Beth. Tommy didn't get it. Well, Tommy didn't get a lot of shit, back then.
Tommy thinks he gets it now.
He left the 118 before he—became himself? Yeah. Before he became himself, or felt comfortable being himself, or whatever. He'd done so many performances of Tommy Kinard over the years—Army pilot Tommy Kinard, Sal's partner Tommy Kinard, Abby's fiancé Tommy Kinard, doesn't-make-a-thing-of-it Tommy Kinard—and by the time he got to Harbor, he was just fucking tired. It wasn't because he trusted them more, or felt particularly bonded to them, he was just—too tired.
And while he was gone, the 118, like. Something happened there. He didn't get it. How could he? He was somewhere else. Doing other stuff. But he heard the stories—the pipe bombs, the tsunamis, the cave-ins, the shootings, the giraffe on Hollywood Boulevard, yeah, all of that, but also the barbecues, the weddings, the commendations, the badge-and-ladder bars where you couldn't hear one name without the rest of them. Nash-Wilson-Han-Buckley-Diaz. Like a fucking incantation. Like a family, a thing Tommy’s still somehow never figured out how to have.
By the time Evan tugged him back into the warm 118 orbit, Tommy was self-aware enough to know he wanted it. A captain like Nash? A partner who had his back as effortlessly and seamlessly as Evan and Eddie had each other’s? A team who loved you that much, who had family dinners and a shared group text and who were all comfortably, cozily incestuous? Who waited for you in the hospital even though waiting was the only thing left to do, and they all had families to get home to?
Yeah, and, you know. Self-awareness was kind of a bitch, because Tommy also knew he was never going to get to keep it. Hen and Howie knew the kind of person he used to be, when he was actually part of the 118. And sure, it was a long time ago, and they’d all gotten past it, but they weren’t ever going to be the kind of friends Hen and Howie and Evan were. Tommy had to prove he was trustworthy all over again every time they asked, because they knew he owed them, and they knew there was a version of Tommy who was gonna let them down anyway. All true.
So for those six months, Tommy got to be a March sister. He went with Evan to the family dinners, arm wrapped around Evan’s waist like it belonged there, drank beers with Howie and Eddie, answered Nash’s questions about how Donato was doing, laughed at Hen’s jokes, bought little presents for the 118 kids that were only sort of bribes to make them like him.
“Hey,” Evan said once, when they were lazing around in bed between rounds, Evan tucked up against his side, making idle little patterns in Tommy’s chest hair. “I wanted to ask you about something.”
“Shoot,” Tommy said, and made it sound easy, and not like ice was pooling in his gut at all. In his experience, that wasn’t the kind of question that led to a good conversation. But Evan was still loose and relaxed next to him, and Tommy wasn’t going to be the one who ruined the mood.
“So,” Evan said, “You kind of come to the rescue a lot, huh?”
Tommy blinked. “What?”
“I mean, first of all, you stole a helicopter to fly us into a hurricane,” Evan said, smiling. “A-and obviously, like, we all were disobeying orders, but—I mean, you weren’t even part of the team.”
“Hah,” Tommy said, stomach still cold. “Guess I wasn’t.”
“And before that, you saved our asses a few years ago,” Evan said, still drawing circles over Tommy’s chest, playing his thumb idly over a nipple. Tommy could barely feel it. “That time you dumped water on that cul-de-sac fire, when there were all those gas explosions during the dispatch outage. Eddie was, uh. I mean, without you, Eddie might not have made it.”
“Uh huh,” Tommy said. He’d dumped 700 gallons of water on a residential home, knowing there were people inside it, because Howie asked him to. 700 gallons can collapse a roof. 700 gallons is more than enough to kill a person. Let alone a little kid. His captain showed him the picture later, the little kid who’d been inside.
“But you must have gotten shit for that,” Evan continued, frowning. “I mean, I know the hurricane was sort of a—a freebie for all of us, because it turned out so well, but you didn’t know that at the time. And before, like, nobody ordered you to do that, it was just—you saving the day.”
“Yeah,” Tommy said. He’d gotten chewed out, his captain threatened to fire him, and then the brass intervened, because nobody died, and arguably Tommy’s actions did save a firefighter and a little kid, and someone in the union suggested that the dispatch outages meant the chain of command had been a little murky, and yeah, Tommy got to keep his job. Also his pilot’s license. Yay.
Evan tilted his chin into Tommy’s chest, looked up at him with big, adoring eyes. He did that sometimes, looked at Tommy like he thought Tommy was—not just wonderful, but amazing. A brand-new invention. The guy who invented gay sex. “You weren’t afraid of getting in trouble?”
“Look,” Tommy said, trying to figure out what to give Evan that would make him drop the subject. “Howie saved my life.”
“Yeah, the thing—when he was a probie, right?”
“Yeah,” Tommy said, like that was the whole story, instead of months of treating the new guy like shit only to wake up in the hospital and learn that the new guy was the only reason he was still breathing. “The thing when he was a probie. So. When he asks me for help, I listen.”
“That simple, huh?”
“That simple,” Tommy lied, and decided to distract Evan in more of a hands-on way.
Time passed. Evan figures it out, eventually—that Tommy’s the guy you let in for a minute, not the guy you ask to stay. Here for a good time, not a long time. He’s not sure Evan really ever figured out the rest of it, though.
So when Evan calls him up, a couple weeks out from a hookup so disastrous Tommy found himself flinching anytime someone so much as mentioned the word Texas, and says, in a frantic babbling monologue, that he needs Tommy’s help, and Chimney could die, and he knows it’s not fair to ask because it’s literally domestic terrorism probably, but please, Tommy, it’s Chimney —
Tommy thinks about the game he used to play with his cousins as a kid, where they’d take turns throwing a pocket knife into the dirt by their feet, trying to make it stick in the ground without stabbing anybody’s toes. Low-budget kid-friendly Russian Roulette. Tommy’d killed at that game. His cousin Dominic used to say oh my god, man, you’re crazy, this kid is crazy, look at this, and Tommy would drop the knife again, queasy with nerves, somehow kind of hoping he’d win and hoping he’d lose at the same time. What would even happen if he lost? A trip to the hospital. Everybody yelling at him. Worst case, he’d lose a toe. Maybe everybody would be sad for him, too. The weird thing was, the only place Tommy’d ever seen anyone talk about that game before was in this low-budget sequel to Little Women—Little Men, about this no-good kid that gets adopted into the March family and immediately ruins the good thing they’ve got going. Abby saw it pop up on Netflix, insisted she remembered it from when it came out and it was great, and then it was a generically bad nineties movie. Abby hid her face in his shoulder when the kids played the knife game. He doesn’t actually think they finished it.
“Fuck,” he says to Evan, getting up and trying to walk casually over to his bird without tipping his captain off. “Okay.”
“You’ll do it?” Evan asks, fragile with worry.
“Yeah,” Tommy says, scrubbing a hand over his face. The adrenaline’s already starting to kick in his chest. “Yeah, I will.”
“Thank you,” Evan says, with this big explosion of breath, like he really thought Tommy would say no. “Thank you, thank you , Tommy, thank you.”
Tommy gets close, again. There’s the big sick thrill of blowing up his life, flying so close to disaster you could reach out and skim the surface with your fingertips, and then spinning back up to the safety of the sky. There’s a little glow of March-family warmth. Evan smiles at him like he invented helicopters. Evan and Athena treat him like part of the team, close ranks against the military like they’re not even questioning Tommy’s place on their side. Chimney wakes up, and they all cheer over the radio.
It’s almost a good day.
Another thing about Little Women: there’s a bait-and-switch with the love story. Laurie and Jo are the ones you root for, but when Jo says they’re not going to work out, Laurie believes her. He goes after Amy instead, desperate to be let back inside the March family, and manages to miss the letter Jo sends him asking if he wants to try again. The next time they meet, he’s married to her sister, and you know it’s the wrong thing, even if Jo does have a German professor waiting in the wings. Tommy always hated that part, even though Abby loved it. “It’s a grown-up love story,” she insisted, gesturing with her wine glass as they sat together on the couch. “It’s not about puppy love, it’s about—sometimes you love somebody but the timing is wrong. Or you love them but not the way they want you to love them.”
Tommy looked at her, big glasses and bright tangerine hair, her legs slung over his lap. “Sure,” he said. “But don’t you want them to be happy?”
“They’re happy!” she said. “Jo loves the professor!”
“Uh huh,” he said. “No way is Amy and Laurie’s marriage lasting.”
“Ouch,” she said, laughing at him. “Why not?”
“He’s in love with her sister!”
"He chose Amy!"
"And I'm saying, divorce."
“Well, I don’t think they had divorce back then.”
“Guess they all had to live together in misery,” he said lightly, and she rolled her eyes.
“He got to be part of the family,” she said. “That’s the thing he really wanted.”
Tommy pressed a kiss to the side of her head. “For a while, anyway,” he said, just to give her shit. She laughed at him, and put the wine glass down, and Tommy drifted away somewhere inside his head as she shifted to climb all the way into his lap.
It’s pathetic, is the thing. To always be pressing your hands up against the windows of somebody else’s happiness, somebody else’s home, especially when you know, deep down in your gut, that you don’t belong there. Tommy knows that.
It’s hard not to want inside, though.