Surviving both a fire and the shock of an old secret

My office is tucked away in a corner and has no windows, but it does have a skylight. I’d gotten to work at the San Francisco Sheriff ’s Substation for Field Operations early on July 28 and sifted through emails. At 6:51 a.m., I heard sirens in the background, but that’s not unusual for South of Market Street.

Then I heard a yell, “We’re evacuating!” Part of me thought, “Who’s pulling a drill at 6:51 in the morning?” The other part snapped the gun into the holster, clicked on the radio and checked door to door that people were getting out of the station.

We cleared the building in minutes. Fire engulfed the six buildings around us, flames reaching three stories in the air. Black smoke billowed, and ash smudged down in flakes. The heat came in waves. We moved out ammunition, evacuated the cars out of the lot and set up incident command.

And if you think deputies are brave, more than a hundred firefighters drove their trucks to the area and got out their hoses. More than a hundred million gallons of water rained down that block.

Crazy Mike showed up, making sure that everyone had coffee and a bagel. This is Crazy Mike. He lets it slip that he stashed “emergency cash” in his gun locker (which may or may not have been on fire), but he’s not worried because “all the humans are safe. What’s inside that building are only objects.” I tried to be Zen, but I had

a lot of objects in that office, including 10 uniforms, four pairs of boots, three utility belts, a laptop, Alex Ross comic art and antique Batmobiles.

There are also two framed paintings in my office. My son Zane drew the first when he was in kindergarten, a portrait of me as a ninja cop, looking just a little like Edvard Munch’s “Scream.” The other Aidan had drawn after I visited St. John’s School for career day, me wearing the Stetson hat, with the caption, “He is responsible for 182 deputies and takes care of the deer and mountain lions.”

This was the one and only A that Aidan ever got in elementary school.

“I know that they’re only objects, but right now they’re the objects I miss most,” I said to Crazy Mike.

I called my husband, Brian, and told him that I was OK, and he asked if we were all safe. I said I was sorry about losing all those objects in the fire and he said, “Well, at least you know what next week’s article will be about.”

Here were the best parts of the day:

1. This was the first time that I ever got pure oxygen! Turns out that it’s just like air, only cooler.

2. After the fire was mainly out, the firefighters let us into the building to grab a few essential objects. We waded through about 6 inches of standing water but managed to save some expensive equipment. Smoke filled the hallway, but Rob, one of the firefighters, followed me when I made a dash for my office. I grabbed the two paintings. Rob said, “Well, we got to get your Captain America shield out, too,” and we ran into the misty air of San Francisco. I was grateful just to breathe and to whatever force in the universe had reunited me with those objects.

Many hours later, I drove home. Brian and Aidan came and hugged me. I opened the car and showed them the two drawings. Brian almost teared up, as did I, but Aidan glanced sideways in what I recognized as his guilty look. “What?” I asked. “Dad, you do know that Maliya drew that picture. I just wanted you to think that I had an A.”

There’s a lesson there somewhere: The object you save from a fivealarm fire might turn out to be some other child’s A.