“I do it. I think that I wipe my hands off enough, and then I get James down the dirt road to the car and turn around. I see the house. It’s just… kindling that is going to be gone in seconds. I can’t believe how fast it’s burning.” Now my memories yield perhaps the worst confession. “And it is only now that the sirens start. And it is only now that I think about my parents.”
My knees give out and Chris catches me yet again. He turns me to him, and for the first time since this started, I look at him. I am back in the here and now. I am not there anymore. I don’t know which is worse.
“Why, Chris? Why didn’t I think about my parents until then? I forgot them. I fucking forgot them!” The absolute atrocity of this consumes me. My eyes ache and the tears are stinging and painful, but they don’t stop. “What the fuck is wrong with me? How did I forget them?” I am pounding my hands into his chest.
He wraps his hands around my wrists and holds me still so that I’ll hear him. “You didn’t forget them. You didn’t forget them, Blythe.”
He’s right.
I didn’t forget them.
I can’t say it, but he does. “You knew they were dead. When you went for James, you knew they were already dead. The fire was that bad.”
“Yes.” Later, when I can talk again, when I am buried into the wet shirt that covers his chest and the crying has subsided, I tell him the end. Drained and exhausted, I can now finish this story more calmly because I have no hysteria left to give. “I went back to the house anyway. I left James bleeding in the dirt by the car, and I went back. I remembered that there was a ladder by the side of the house. I found it and stood it up.”
I feel his hands against my head as he starts to wash my hair. He is gentle, but he makes sure to get out the imaginary blood because he knows that I need it gone.
“Because my left arm was so fucked up, I couldn’t get the ladder to extend at first. Then finally I made it work, and I walked up to the house. It was just… it was all flames. But I had it in my head that I’d just… what? Climb up and tell my parents to jump out to safety? I wasn’t thinking. I just kept moving. So I found a section of the house on the first floor, under one of the windows to their bedroom, where there weren’t any flames, and the house still looked like a house. I leaned the ladder against it. I started climbing up, and the metal was heating up under my hands, so that just made me climb faster. I don’t remember where I was looking. If I was looking up to their room, or at my feet that were somehow moving, or at the ground. My vision was messed up. Probably from the smoke. I think that I only got up a few rungs of the ladder. Couldn’t have been more than eight steps up. I found out later that I had stopped moving. I was just standing on the ladder while the fire was working its way down to me.”
I can see again. I feel like me again.
I almost manage a smile. “And then he saved my life.”
“A firefighter showed up,” Chris says. He tips my head back and rinses the shampoo.
“No,” I say. “He wasn’t a firefighter. From what I understand, because we were in the middle of nowhere, and the roads there were such a nightmare, it took forever for the trucks to get to us. They had to park at the top of the dirt road and send a water truck of some sort down to the house. And James and I had left the car blocking the road, and the EMTs had to get James out of the way before they could move the car. I remember hearing a huge crash. I didn’t know it at the time, but they drove the water truck into the car and pushed it the rest of the way down the road. It would have saved time if I hadn’t let James drive that day. The car wouldn’t have blocked their way. Maybe something would have been different.”
“No,” Chris tells me. “The fire was moving too fast, wasn’t it?”
“I’m not sure.”
“Yes, you are. Think, Blythe. You said it yourself. The house was basically a premade bonfire waiting for a spark. The house was virtually gone when you woke up.”
I nod cautiously.
“There was nothing you could have done that would have made them get to you faster.”
I nod again.
“Do you believe that?” he asks.
I’m not sure, so I tell the one part of this story that I cling to and that I have always remembered well. “I was on the ladder when I felt this huge arm fly around my waist. He lifted me so effortlessly… and then threw us both onto the ground. I landed hard on top of him, and I saw the ladder fall forward into the fire as the side of the house collapsed.” I can breathe freely now as I recount the only moment of salvation in the otherwise unrelenting tragedy. “He’s the only reason that I’m alive. He wasn’t a firefighter. Just some guy in regular clothes. Probably renting one of the houses near ours.”
I don’t tell Chris about how that man’s face is embedded in my memory. The small scar above his eyebrow, the gray around his hairline, and the sharp jawline that added to his overwhelming aura of fortitude. Nor how this man scooped me up from the ground and ran with me in his powerful arms, taking me away from hell. About how I didn’t take my eyes off him while I continued to cough and reach for air as he got me to the ambulance. And how he stopped me from kicking and fighting the medics when I became wild to know if James was dead or alive, and helped me to calm down and breath into the oxygen mask after telling me that James was on his way to the hospital. That I’d see James there.
These are details that I keep to myself.
“Someone came to help me,” I say. “I wasn’t alone. Even in the chaos of the sirens and shouting, I could easily hear my savior as he told me that I was safe. He said to me,You are safe, sweet girl. Over and over he said that. You are safe, you are safe, you are safe, sweet girl. Twenty times he told me that. I counted.Finally, I wasn’t alone anymore. Ironic, though, because after that night, I became lonelier than I could have imagined. Everybody left me. All my friends, my parents’ friends, nobody knew what to do or how to act around me, and so they left. But I never wanted to die. Not that night, not even after. That one man, that heroic man, saved me.”
Chris smoothes his hands over my shoulders and down my arms. Then he puts a finger under my chin and lifts my face to his. “And so he saved me, too.”
For just a moment, he brushes his lips against mine. I stand on my tiptoes and throw my arms around his neck, surprised that I have the strength left to hold him this tightly. I don’t know how to thank him for what he just did for me, for what he let me unleash, so I just hold him.
I think he knows what this means to me.
“You were very brave,” Chris says. “That day and today. And youaresafe, sweet girl.”
15
