Final Breath Read online

  Sydney was profiled in Sports Illustrated and had a page and a half in People during the fall of 1993. The Seattle Times wanted to do an interview. They planned to put her on the cover of their Sunday magazine section. Hoping to look decent for her first magazine cover, Sydney made an appointment at a chic beauty salon downtown. She kept thinking Donna Loftus might see that magazine cover--and be sorry as hell.

  It was a beautiful, crisp, sunny autumn afternoon, and she'd decided to walk to the beauty salon from a friend's apartment on First Hill. Tall trees lined the residential area's parkways, and as she strolled along, Sydney gazed up at the leaves--so vibrant with their autumn colors.

  That was when she saw the smoke.

  It came from a slightly dilapidated, beige brick apartment building a half-block away, close to a busy intersection. Yet she was the only one on the street who seemed to notice something wrong.

  Black clouds billowed out of an open window on the fourth floor. Sydney thought she heard screams.

  She ran across the street--almost smack into a moving car. The car's brakes screeched and its horn blared. The driver continued down the street, screaming out at her, "Stupid idiot! Want to end up in the hospital?"

  But Sydney was gazing up at the building. Smoke continued to belch from the open window. In one of the windows next to it she saw the curtains on fire and flames licking at the glass.

  Sydney tried to wave down another car for help, but the driver sped past her. Panic-stricken, she raced back across the street to the building's entrance. She pressed random buttons on the intercom. "Hello?" she said loudly. "Is someone there?" Finally, two or three people answered at once. "There's a fire on the fourth floor!" Sydney said, the words rushing out.

  "What?" one person said.

  "Who the hell is this?" another tenant replied.

  "There's a fire on your fourth floor!" Sydney repeated. "Call 9-1-1!"

  They all seemed to reply at once: "Is this a joke?"

  "What?"

  "Hello--"

  But someone buzzed her in. Sydney pushed open the door. The tiny lobby was a bit seedy and neglected. She could smell the smoke even down here. She saw the fire alarm by the old-fashioned mailboxes. There was no glass to break; it was just a lever in a red box with the words, FIRE--PULL, on it. Sydney tugged down on the switch, and suddenly a shrill alarm rang out.

  For a second, she wasn't sure she'd done the right thing. She'd never in her life pulled a fire alarm. Would she somehow get into trouble for this?

  Past the alarm, she could hear doors opening in the first-floor hallway and people lumbering down the stairs. She found a rubber door-stopper on the floor near the front entrance and used it to prop the door open. Then Sydney hurried outside. She kept wondering if she'd overreacted. Maybe the smoke had subsided. She ran across the street for another look.

  By now, two other pedestrians had stopped to see what was happening. A car had pulled over, too.

  The smoke continued to pour out of that fourth-floor window. Sydney noticed a phone booth by a small parking lot on her side of the street. She frantically dug into her purse for some change. Did she have to deposit money to call 9-1-1? She didn't know. Her hands shaking, she pushed thirty-five cents into the slots and punched 9-1-1.

  Across the street, people started to wander out of the old building. They appeared annoyed and confused. One of them, an old woman swaddled in a bathrobe, gazed up and then her mouth dropped open. She pointed to the smoke for one of her neighbors.

  On the phone, the 9-1-1 operator answered on the second ring: "Police Emergency."

  "Yes, hello," Sydney said, trying to keep calm. She glanced up at that same window again. "I need to report a fire on the--on the fourth floor of an apartment building on First Hill. I just went into their lobby and rang their alarm. It's--um, on the corner of Terry and--and--" Sydney fell silent as she noticed another window open up beside the one emitting smoke. A young boy started to climb out to the ledge.

  "Oh, God, there's a kid...I think he's going to jump!" Sydney told the operator. "Th-th-the building is two blocks north of Madison--on Terry. Please, hurry!"

  "Your name?"

  "Sydney Jordan," she said. She meant to hang up the phone, but the receiver fell off the hook and just dangled there. Sydney didn't notice. She was already racing across the street.

  More tenants had drifted out of the building, but they just milled around by the front entrance. A few wandered across the street to look at the fire. But no one seemed to know what to do about the poor boy trapped on the ledge.

  Sydney ran up to a gaunt young woman who had a pierced nostril and short, spiked green hair. She stood near the front door, gnawing at her fingernail and looking up at the boy.

  "Do you know what apartment he's in?" Sydney asked her, shouting over the fire alarm.

  She shrugged. "He's Aidan Somebody on the fourth floor someplace. I don't know for sure."

  Sydney started to brush past her toward the door.

  "Shit, don't try to go up there," the girl said. "Are you nuts?"

  Sydney hesitated, then looked up at the boy. Flames shot out of the window beside him. He recoiled in terror and almost fell off the ledge.

  Pushing past the dazed tenants, Sydney made her way along the narrow lawn in front of the building until she was directly under the boy. He was thin with dark hair and a handsome, almost angelic face. He wore jeans and a long-sleeve denim shirt that looked too big for him. Soot covered the shirt, and smudge marks marred his forehead and cheek. Sydney guessed he was about ten years old. He precariously stood on the tiny ledge, his back pressed against the beige brick edifice. Sydney could only imagine how hot those bricks were. Just a foot away from him, flames lashed out of the window, along with thick, black clouds of smoke. Trembling, he stared down at her.

  "Aidan?" she called to him, over the incessant alarm. She thought she heard a siren in the distance. "Aidan, is there anyone else in the apartment with you?"

  Frozen on the ledge, he just gazed down at her. He opened his mouth to speak, but it seemed he couldn't get any words out.

  "Honey, hang on!" she called. "I think the fire department's on the way! Do you have any brothers or sisters? Is anyone else in there?"

  Finally, he shook his head.

  The smoke started to obscure her view of him. But she heard him coughing--and then the shrieks.

  "Aidan! Can you hear me, honey?" Sydney glanced over her shoulder. She didn't see the fire trucks yet. The building alarm nearly drowned out the sirens--still too far away.

  The smoke cleared for a moment, and she saw him up there. His shirt was on fire. Choking and screaming, he tried to pat down the flames. He went to grab on to the side of the open window to keep his balance. But his hand went right into the flames.

  "Let go!" Sydney called to him. She automatically put her arms out in front of her. "I'll catch you, honey! I'll break your fall! Aidan, let go!"

  His shirt was still on fire. He pushed himself from the ledge--away from her.

  But Sydney ran under him, her arms outstretched. She didn't know what she was thinking--or doing. She acted on sheer gut instinct. She just needed to break his fall.

  Sydney saw the boy's thin body as it plunged toward her.

  Someone screamed. Sydney didn't see who it was. She was already blinded.

  All of his weight came crashing down on her. Something snapped in her neck--or her spine--she wasn't sure which. But she heard it--a loud, horrible crack.

  Then there was nothing.

  For a very long time, there was nothing.

  Later, they told Sydney that when she'd briefly regained consciousness in the hospital that night, the first thing she'd asked had been: "Is the boy alive? Is he okay?" Sydney didn't remember; she'd been doped up on painkillers and medication that first week. For a while, she was on a respirator, and the doctors thought the injury to her spinal cord might leave her paralyzed. Emergency surgery helped save her punctured lung, and they inserted a rod
and some screws for her shattered femur. The other leg was fractured. She'd also broken her left arm, sprained the right one, and dislocated her shoulder. It seemed no organ or appendage escaped injury--from spleen trauma to a sprained ankle.

  The doctors still weren't sure she'd ever walk again. One thing for certain, her skating days were over. Sydney's dream of competing in the Olympics and all those years of sacrifice and hard work had been snuffed out in just a few moments. It was all gone.

  Sydney kept telling herself the boy would have died if she hadn't broken his fall.

  Eleven-year-old Aidan Cosgrove had it even worse than she did. In addition to his crippling back injuries, he suffered second- and third-degree burns on his arms, torso, and neck. After two days, they moved him from Swedish Hospital to the University of Washington Burn Center at Harborview.

  It turned out that Aidan's mother had also been in that fourth-floor apartment. Sydney remembered calling to him and asking if anyone else was in there; but he'd shaken his head. She figured the poor kid was probably confused--and terrified. He probably hadn't even heard what she'd been saying to him.

  According to The Seattle Times and the local TV news, the fire had started in the mother's bedroom. Miraculously, Rikki Cosgrove survived, and her burns were minor. But she'd sustained respiratory damage from smoke inhalation. An unemployed single mom on government assistance, Mrs. Cosgrove admitted to the press that she might have fallen asleep with a cigarette going.

  Only two other apartments in the building were damaged by the inferno, and no one else was injured. Yet the fire made national news. One passerby had a video camera with him. He'd caught Sydney's valiant rescue on tape. It was just the kind of harrowing, dramatic stuff the public ate up.

  "Mom and Dad cry every time that home video is played on TV," Kyle told her during a visit. "So that means they've cried like--seventy-eight times just this week. It's a regular waterworks at home. Don't you feel sorry for me, having to put up with it? You can't possibly know my anguish. I'm really suffering."

  "Huh, I'll pray for you." Sydney murmured. Lying in the hospital bed, she cracked a smile. "Don't make me laugh, you dip-shit. It hurts too much."

  Kyle had visited her every day, but this was the first time she was lucid for more than just a few minutes. "Seriously, when are you getting out of here?" he asked. "The phone hasn't stopped ringing. You're all over the newspapers and TV. I taped the programs for you and saved the clippings. Anyway, you're famous, Syd. About a zillion people want to interview you. In fact, someone from Oprah even called us this morning. They want you on the show. So I repeat, when are you busting out of this joint?"

  The doctors told her it would be at least six weeks. Sydney surprised them all by getting around in her "touch-control" wheelchair by the second week. She'd made up her mind not to feel sorry for herself. There were so many people in this hospital who were worse off than her. The fifteen-year-old girl in the room next door had fallen off her bicycle and landed headfirst in a ditch. Her name was Carol, and she would spend the rest of her life a paraplegic. Next to her, Sydney's shattered dreams seemed like pretty small potatoes--at least, she told herself that. She spent a lot of time visiting Carol and others in the intensive care unit.

  Updates on her remarkable recovery made the news. Someone on the hospital staff leaked that she spent time boosting the morale of other patients, and the press ate it up. All the attention embarrassed Sydney. The reports made out like she was Mother Teresa or something. The truth was, she visited her fellow patients to forget her own pain and agony and to help boost her own morale. It must have worked, because she was healing a lot faster than the doctors had expected.

  Sydney's story became an inspiration for others. While still in the hospital, she had three different publishers wanting to handle her autobiography--with the help of a ghostwriter, of course. If one more agent described her tale as a "lemonade from lemons" saga, Sydney thought she'd throttle them with her crutches. At first, she turned down all the offers.

  But her parents had gone into debt paying her trainers, and her medical bills were already staggering. So Sydney finally accepted one of the publishers' deals. They wanted a rush job, because a quickie, unauthorized biography was already in stores, selling quite well: Picking Up the Pieces: The Sydney Jordan Story.

  Her advance was $125,000, and Sydney donated $25,000 of it to Aidan Cosgrove and his mother. After a while, Rikki Cosgrove became a real pain. She seemed to be a strong believer in the old Chinese proverb that once you save someone's life, you're responsible for them. She was forever asking Sydney for favors and hitting her up for money. And Rikki wasn't exactly Mother of the Year either--as the ghostwriter for Sydney's autobiography discovered while doing her research. But none of it was included in the book.

  Sydney discovered that publishing a book meant making a lot of compromises and concessions. She loathed the title the marketing people came up with: Making Miracles: My Own Story. But the book spent three weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. A made-for-TV movie was quickly thrown together.

  By the time Making Miracles: The Sydney Jordan Story aired on Lifetime, Sydney was out of the hospital and walking with a cane. Hired to do color commentary for a televised figure-skating event, she made such a great impression that the network put her in their broadcast booth for other women's sports tournaments. Sydney ended up going to the Olympic Games in Lillehammer after all.

  She won raves from viewers and critics for the short films she put together and narrated about certain athletes, coaches, and even the people working at the event (a woman who ran a concessions stand in the main auditorium, a maid at a nearby hotel, and the man who operated one of the scoreboards). Pretty soon, the network assigned her to make her video shorts about interesting people for their nighttime news magazines. That was how Movers & Shakers got started.

  One of her Movers & Shakers pieces was about a handsome young, Chicago cop named Joe McCloud. While off duty and on his way to a Cubs game, he'd restrained a man who had gone berserk on the El. The man had shot his girlfriend in front of dozens of horrified commuters on the train. He had then taken a child hostage and threatened to execute her--as well as everyone in the car. "I thought we were all going to die," one middle-aged woman commuter testified in Sydney's video short. "People were crying and getting sick. And then this--this good-looking guy stepped up and started talking to the gunman, and he distracted him..."

  Joe McCloud managed to overpower the deranged man. He even gave mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to the man's wounded girlfriend, saving her life.

  Joe was six feet, three inches tall, with straight blond hair and soulful green eyes, and Sydney was smitten. On top of everything else, he was a hero. During the interview, he confessed something to Sydney: "When the network said they wanted to interview me, I told them okay--as long as they sent you to do it."

  "Why me?" she asked.

  With a crooked little grin, he shrugged. "Well, ever since I first saw you on TV about a year ago, I've had a little crush on you."

  Her parents weren't crazy about her marrying a cop, and it meant her moving away to Chicago. But they ended up falling in love with him, too. It was just the kind of story they would have had her cover for Movers & Shakers: the handsome hero cop and the semicelebrity correspondent who profiled him were now getting married. Photos of their wedding ran in People magazine.

  The doctors had warned her that the spinal injuries might cause some fertility problems. So finding herself pregnant five months after they were married took Sydney by surprise. Oddly, she had trouble conceiving after Eli. Joe helped her get through the huge disappointment when the doctors said her chances for another child were less than five percent. Sydney really leaned on Joe again when her father died in 2002, and then again when her mom passed away three years later.

  Sometimes Joe caught flack at work from certain fellow cops, because his wife was on TV. "Mr. Sydney Jordan," they called him.

  "Oh, they're just jerk
s," Joe said. "They don't bother me." At least, that was what he told her.

  Eli openly hated it when Sydney's Movers & Shakers stories took her on the road for days at a time, and so did she. Joe didn't hold it over her head that he often had to be mom and dad to Eli while she was away. Sydney kept busy on these trips, running herself and her crew ragged during the day. Yet she'd still have a tough time falling asleep alone in her bed at the Hyatt, Marriott, or Red Lion. She missed having Joe beside her, spooning her. She was always worried something might happen to him while she was on the road. As a policeman's wife, Sydney knew she had to prepare herself for the possibility that she could lose him at any time and without any warning.

  But she didn't lose him that way. It didn't happen that way at all.

  As she lay alone under the covers, Sydney figured she might as well have been in a strange bed at the Hyatt, Red Lion, or Marriott. She felt lonely and homesick. She missed Joe. Down the hallway, her son was sleeping--with his night-light on.

  She heard another pop in the distance. People were still setting off firecrackers.

  With a sigh, Sydney threw back the covers and then switched on her light. She padded down the hall to use the bathroom. This was one of those nights when the extra presence in the apartment scared her. Sitting on the toilet, she warily glanced over toward the tub. The closed shower curtain fluttered a little. She told herself that it had moved when she'd shut the bathroom door earlier. There was nothing on the other side of that plastic, map-of-the-world curtain. She was alone in here.

  Staring down at the tiled floor, Sydney thought about Leah and Jared. A grisly image crept into her head of two corpses lying there on the tiles, a pool of blood beneath them.