One evening, while I was leaving my mother’s apartment, an ambulance crashed into the oldest tree on the block. It was between late afternoon and evening, rush hour, a deep orange sun preparing to make way for a harvest moon. Commuters screamed as the ambulance railed into the tree, the sound deep and damp from the century-old trunk. People dashed around the crash after the initial shock, glass and debris crunching under the soft rubber of gym shoes, calling out to strangers on the other side of the wreck.
As I watched the disorder and mayhem grow, a neighborhood boy, who was always getting chased out of the corner stores for shoplifting, helped an elderly woman to safety on the other side of the street. The crowd was frantic, panicked, but empathy flowed through them. Strangers hugged. A woman grabbed tissues from her purse, dabbing a drip of blood from the head of a man who was lounging on a bus stop bench next to the tree, nursing a High Life wrapped in brown paper. The man protested he was fine, and the woman shushed him like a mother.
I thought there was something about great acts of violence that—when witnessed—could bond people who would otherwise never acknowledge each other. The bond was deep and emotional and spiritual. The passersby seemed to link almost instantaneously. An innate connection already formed. The cliché in the movies or on television was people fucking right before they died. But as the ambulance crashed, and the driver sat pinned behind the steering wheel, and people shuffled around helpless to stop whatever was going to happen next— focused on smoke that billowed from the front of the ambulance– they didn’t want to fuck. They wanted the type of comfort that was only possible from another person. They wanted to love.
Its siren was still at full force, but the frequency turned to a low groan, almost guttural. The lights still worked, a strobe of red, chaotic and disorienting.
The tree the ambulance crashed into lurched, fracturing at its middle, about six feet above the pavement, creaking and moaning along with the siren.
The tree had been there since I was a child, dropping samaras to cracked cement under a hundred summer suns. As the tree split, the ambulance wedged at a steep angle on its body, people started to scream and back away, the smoke thick and dark. There weren’t any flames yet, but a heat flowed over the street, and it was only a matter of time before everything got worse.
A woman pushing a stroller stopped next to me, staring in horror, a ribbon in her hair. The baby cooed at the violence with ignorance, wringing her hands together. The woman crouched to the child, eyes watering, and whispered gently as the ribbon danced in a soft lake breeze.
The ambulance’s siren continued unapologetically. The horn began a long, sorrowful drone as the driver had presumably fallen unconscious on the steering wheel, like a drunk who’d only managed to drive safely into his garage before collapsing.
The woman with the baby covered the stroller with a mesh sun visor, a vain attempt at protecting her child from the smoke.
“I called 911,” I said to the woman. I don’t know why I lied. I only knew I wanted her to feel safe, and I didn’t want to be alone. She looked at me with deep brown eyes.
“Can I help you across the street?” I asked. “It might not be safe for you and your baby here.”
She shook her head. “No. We need to get there,” and she pointed to the building right in front of the crash. I could see the front door was blocked by the ambulance.
The trunk of the tree cracked, falling closer to the sidewalk, and the crowd gasped. The woman shuffled her stroller closer to me.
“How long have you lived here?” I asked.
“Just a couple of months,” she said, her eyes focused on the flames that danced from the engine. “We aren’t from Chicago. I left my husband, and we came here. We came to the city so he won’t find us.” she looked back at me, fiery red hair falling across her face, freckles bright in the sun. “Why am I telling you this?”
I shrugged. “I’m from here. I don’t live on the block anymore. I was visiting my mother,” and I motioned back toward the apartment I just left, where my mother still sat in her chair by the window, oblivious or uncaring to the misery unfolding outside, surrounded by pill bottles scattered around the apartment like glasses after a cocktail party.
The woman picked up her baby from the stroller. The child squealed, her mother placing her against her chest, rocking her gently.
“This tree has been here since I was a boy,” I said, and the woman looked at me with confusion.
“There’s at least one man dying in there.” she said.
“When I was eight years old, a girl named Amber kissed me under that tree.”
She stared at me with the same confused look on her face, sighing, trapped in the bond.
***
Before any of this, when I was eight years old, Amber kissed me under the oak tree on the corner of Irving Park and Clarendon. It was my birthday, and my mother bought me a new Schwinn. It was a blue two-wheeler, chrome shining, Gremlin printed in white across the top tube. I cruised the sidewalks on Clarendon.
Amber stood in her Sunday dress, which she hadn’t changed out of since church that morning. The ribbon in her hair had come loose, blowing in the wind like a kite’s tail. She stood under the oak that was now dying from the ambulance’s weight, holding a piece of paper, meticulously folded into a cone.
I pedaled hard, racing toward her. I was sure she’d squeal as I got near, slamming my feet backwards when I got close, skidding the tires, leaving streaks of black rubber on the cement. She stood motionless, unafraid, holding her folded paper.
We stood for a moment, smiling gapped teeth.
“Did you get a new bike?” Amber asked. Her feet shuffled in white flats.
“Yeah, my mother got it for me. It’s my birthday.”
“Happy birthday!” she said, her eyes widening, the sun reflecting her green iris.
“What do you have?” I said, pointing to her hand, to the paper she was holding.
“It’s a fortune teller,” she said, holding it up, proud of the perfect folds. “It really works, too.”
“Yeah, right,” I rolled my eyes.
“No. Really. I wouldn’t lie about something like that,” and she wrinkled her nose. “I’ll prove it. I’ll tell you who I’m going to marry.”
I looked back to our apartment, the one-bedroom my mother and I shared. She was sitting in her chair by the window, a cool breeze moving the curtains just enough to expose her face, tired and vacant. She lit a cigarette, a cloud floating out the window, disappearing in the wind.
“Pick a color,” Amber said, holding the fortune teller. Each side of the cone had been colored differently with crayon.
“Blue.”
“B-L-U-E,” she moved the paper with her fingers as she spelled the color. “Now choose a number.” Four numbers were written inside the cone.
“Three.”
She smiled, her breath whistling through her missing baby teeth. She unfolded the paper under the number three.
“I’m going to marry…” and she became silent. As I looked down at the paper, I saw my own name written in cursive. We stared at each other for a moment. “I’m going to marry Michael,” she said.
I let myself become buried in her green eyes as she leaned her face close to mine, the cicadas singing and the streetlights beginning to flicker. I could smell cherry ChapStick as she pressed her lips against my face.
Before I could realize what happened, she was running back to her own mother in her own apartment—only a block away– the ribbon in her hair dancing behind her. The fortune teller laid on the sidewalk. I picked it up, unfolded it, and saw all four numbers had Michael written underneath in perfect cursive.
***
The woman stared at me, her baby calm, eyes soft and beautiful.
I couldn’t make out if the ambulance driver was alive. I could only see a silhouette slumped over the steering wheel through the smoke, his girth pressed against the horn. A breeze blew between the high-rises, creating a funnel that normally took the hats off Cubs fans as they walked to the ballpark. The wind picked up, a gap in the smoke, and for a moment I saw the driver was old, graying hair, jowls hanging low, blood bubbling from his mouth, dreaming of his own first kiss, or maybe his last.
“You never married her?” the woman said, brushing hair from her face.
“Amber’s family moved a few months later. I never saw her again.”
People screamed, the lights still flashing, and as the fluids poured the flames began to rage. A few men pretended to make their way to the door to drag out the driver. The tree slumped lower, splinters widening. The sirens had stopped completely, but the tree moaned and shifted again. Someone managed to get close enough to the back doors to pull the latch. A gurney and a myriad of bandages fell out of the back, spilling along the street, completely useless to save the driver.
I heard sirens in the distance still blocks away. I looked up and, through the smoke, I could see the window to Amber’s apartment, where—days after she kissed me, weeks before she moved to a new city—I snuck out one night, my mother’s snoring loud with stupidity, sat at the playground where we both attended elementary school, and thought about her lying in bed, the whistle of her breath through her missing baby teeth, the deep green of her eyes I’d never see in that same way again.
The sirens in the distance came close, but as the flames consumed the cab of the ambulance, I thought they’d never make it in time.
The baby woke up, coughing from the smoke. She had bright green eyes.
“Can I hold her?” I asked.
The woman looked at me, eyes watering, mouth parted, and just as the tree fell, crashing to the sidewalk among screams and shattering glass from the parked car it landed on, she gently handed me her baby.
I held the child close, the firetrucks pushing through the crowd to the scene, the flames eating their way through the tree, spreading to the crushed parked car, consuming everything they could touch. I looked into the child’s deep green eyes, reflecting the late summer sun. I heard my mother cough from the apartment window, where she had just lit a cigarette.
The baby laid her head on my shoulder. The woman grabbed my hand, interlocking our fingers, and we watched as the trucks stopped, the first responders hooking up hoses, pushing people back, jogging around for show. Everyone knew it. The ambulance driver was already dead.
I stood, watching, reveling in the tight grasp of the woman’s hand, the baby’s shallow breaths, thinking it was only a matter of time before we were all consumed by the flames.