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right?” the woman asked, and then I realized that the chief had put me in the rig with her mostly because we were so close in age. She was wearing a dark sweater and her face was startlingly pale with the black glass behind her, red patches high on both her cheeks. Beautiful in the haunting way that young women often are, thin, fine lips and a narrow face that seemed to be drawn all out of vertical planes and lines. Light brown hair, straight on both sides of her face like a frame.
    â€œShe’ll be fine,” I said as reassuringly as I could, even though I wasn’t sure.
    I was lucky that time—it turned out I was right. You learn eventually to take those questions sideways, so that you don’t actually give anyone anything to hang false hopes on. “They’re just taking their time, being careful,” is an easy answer, because it’s always both true and false. Regardless, they’d be careful—but that didn’t mean anything.
    I had trained on all the tools by then, knew their heft and how awkward many of them were to hold for any length of time, and I recognized the thudding, heavy beat of the compressor out there in the dark. I knew they would start by breaking out every single window in the car, and then they’d take the cutters and start on the doorposts. You train by labelling them A , B and C so you never forget which ones to cut first. Then they were going to pull the steering wheel back away from her, and it would make disturbingly loud screeches and moans, the occasional pistol-shot bang as some piece of metal reached its bursting point and failed all at once. Sometimes it happens so sharply that the vehicle shudders with the force and the sound startles everyone.
    The firefighters were going to violently destroy what was left of the car, cut it completely apart so that they could ease the half-backboard down between the girl and the seat, and then strap her tight in place before lifting her out. The chief had called for a second pumper, and I didn’t understand why until it rumbled up behind us and I heard the rattle of the come-along chains. They parked the pumper across the road and ran all the chain—and a length of the heavy rescue rope, too—out across the top of the marsh, managing to loop it around one back wheel of the car in the mud.
    The rope might not hold the full weight of the car—even a heavy kernmantle rope will stretch and snap under enough weight—but it was better than having the car start to move. I know now that the chief was counting the financial cost too: stretch rescue rope even once and it comes out of service and gets thrown away. It’s absolutely guaranteed to its certified weight—but only for the first use. Once the roof of the car was off, there would be as many as five firefighters inside the destroyed vehicle, and the chief decided not to take any chances.
    â€œShe only just got it,” the woman said to me.
    â€œGot what?” I said, drawn back all at once from the sounds outside. “The car. Carla only just got the car. It’s used, but she just bought it.”
    From the river, down in the mud and the water and the big circular puddles of spotlight, there was suddenly screaming again.
    Loud.
    â€œIs she all right? Is she going to be all right?”
    I tried to judge from the screaming, a mug’s game because everyone is so different, tried to guess whether she had snapped out of the shock and was just frightened or actually in a lot of pain. I heard the compressor engage and knew the hydraulics were working, and that the cutters were taking their first clean bite through the car. But I couldn’t find a way to push out any words to answer her questions. My head was trying to find its way onto solid ground, and I was slipping in my own deep mud. I wanted her to refine the question, to ask her, “What’s ‘all right’? Alive? Walking? Spine-injured? Rehab?”
    Then