“Do you want the water warmer?” he whispers.
I nod over and over.
“I keep wiping my hands, but I can’t get the blood off, and it’s impossible to get us away from the house fast enough. Far enough. I’m not going to be able to move James.” My voice is broken with terror. “You have to get the blood off me. Then I can help him. You have to get the blood off.” I lunge for my bottle of soap, but I’m shaking so much that it’s impossible for me to open it.
Chris takes the bottle from my hand and pours soap into his.
“Get it off me! Get it off me!” I am panicked and out of my mind. I know that. “Please, Chris.”
He washes my palms and fingers first—so that I can save James—and doesn’t stop until my shaking begins to lessen. His hands go everywhere, covering my body with soap, and I watch while he washes invisible blood from my skin. As I lean to the side and dry heave, Chris’s hands don’t leave my shoulders. I reach for the walls and, with his help, weakly push myself to a stand. “My hair. There is blood in my hair,” I tell him. My throat is sore and my stomach still rolling.
“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 for the second time today. 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 them 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 T-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 rationally and calmly. “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 pre-made 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 breathe 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 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 you are safe, sweet girl.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
The Illusory Power of Black Friday
My dorm room is perfectly quiet when I slip back in after the shower. Sabin is flat on his stomach with his arms and legs spread out, hogging more than his share of my futon. Estelle, Zach, and Eric are also still asleep. I am still unnerved from the shower and glad to have silence,
but I also want to revel in the absolute relief I feel now that I’ve purged myself of that fire story. Later, I’ll have to examine every detail, but for now I want to take the high and run with it because I’ve had too much angst for today.
I settle in next to Sabin, and when he lets out a loud morning yawn, I clamp a hand down over his mouth. “Shhh!”
“What time is it?” he whispers.
I lean down and put my mouth by his ear. “Still early.” He starts to snore, and I have to stifle a giggle. “Sabin, Sabin, Sabin!” I pat his shoulders.
He rouses slightly. “What is it, baby?”
“It’s Black Friday.”
“Oh.”
“Wanna go buy an unnecessarily big TV?”
“Totally.” He rolls over and beckons, so I crawl onto him and pin him down by putting my knees on either side of his belly. Sabin rubs his eyes and then blinks up at me. His voice is scratchy and raw, but he once again sounds like the boy I know and love. “Can we get one of those breakfast station thingies, too?”
“I don’t know what a breakfast station thingy is.”
“You know. It’s a combo toaster, coffeemaker whatchamahoozey with a teeny fold-down skillet.” He yawns again. “For half a strip of bacon and one small fried egg. A quail egg or somethin’.”
“Yes, we can get one of those.”
“And maybe a pair of roller skates?”
“If it’s a good bargain, yes.”
“Awesome. Let’s go.”
He sits up, pulls me closer so I’m grabbing onto him like a koala baby, and scoots us to the end of the futon.
“Chris’s room,” I direct him. “He’s making coffee to go.”
“Yes, ma’am.” He carries me easily, opening the door with one hand and holding me with the other.
He takes us down the hall, with me plastered to his chest and my arms and legs wrapped around him. I rub my nose against his. “It’s gonna be a really giant television, okay?”
He rubs my back. “Obscenely so.”
We get to Chris’s door and Sabin pauses before he turns the knob. “I’m so sorry. Last night was fucked up. Really fucked up. I love you, B.”
I am not going to cry again today. I’m not. “I love you, too,” I tell him.
***
An hour or so later, after stopping at a diner for breakfast, Chris, Sabin, and I pile back into the truck. I feel more than ready to shop. After what I just went through, and what I put Chris through, something more mindless seems direly necessary.
Sabin throws himself into the small back cab and lies down, giving me the front passenger seat.
“Which mall are we going to?” I ask. Chris pulls out of the parking lot and drives for a minute. “I was thinking the one in Reinhardt.”
I look at him. “Isn’t that, like, two hours away?”
“Yeah.” He takes a right turn and heads toward the highway. “It is.”
“Why that one?”
He shrugs. “Do you have anything else to do today?”
I smile. “No.”
“Good. I thought we could just drive.”
Sabin, who I’m guessing is horribly hungover, falls asleep the minute we hit the highway. I suppose that I should be exhausted, too, but I don’t feel it. All I feel is such a shocking level of tranquility that I can’t imagine sleeping right now because I want to enjoy this new feeling.
Chris turns up the radio and then takes my hand as he settles in for the drive. We say nothing for the first hour. Occasionally he drops my hand to change the music, but then immediately takes it back in his. Perhaps I should find this confusing, given that we are not anything other than friends. Friends don’t go around holding hands all the time. I mean, it’s not like Estelle and I sit around our room holding hands while we do homework. I wonder whether I was wrong to think that we are meant to be more. Then I decide to focus on what I know for sure: that I have found a friend, this spectacular boy, who has saved me from drowning.
Chris turns down the radio. “Blythe?”
“Yeah?”
“Whatever happened to the summerhouse that your parents bought? The one you never got to stay at?”
It seems like such a funny question to me, maybe because I haven’t thought about it in so long.
“Oh. Well, James and I own it, I guess. The last I heard, it was pretty much shut down, and a maintenance guy checks in on it a few times a year. My aunt has been paying the taxes and stuff from our account.”
“You haven’t been to it since that summer?”
“No. It … this is going to sound crazy … but it’s never occurred to me. It wasn’t even officially ours yet when my parents died. They’d bought it, but we’d only walked through it; we’d never moved in.”
“But you haven’t sold it.”
“No, I haven’t.”
“How long has it been? Four years?”
“Four years last July.”
“July?” Chris squints into the bright sunlight. “Huh.”
“What?”
“Nothing. Just … It’s nothing. Well, maybe you’ll go to the house one day.”
“Maybe.”
For a moment he takes his hand from mine and moves his fingers over my forearm. “How badly were you hurt? You said your arm was bleeding a lot, and with all the smoke … Were you in the hospital long?”
I like that he’s not afraid to ask me more about that night. “I was treated for smoke inhalation, but it wasn’t too bad. My arm was … messy. No permanent injury except for the scar, of course. We were not exactly in the big city at a top hospital. I was stitched up and otherwise put back together, but James needed more help than I did.”
“James? So he was really hurt,” Chris says.
“Yes. He severed a vein—or, I guess, I severed his vein—and some muscle, which is why there was so much blood.” Even though I’ve just relived the trauma of that night a matter of hours ago—and I now have new, sharp, graphic memories—the clarity and full understanding of what happened makes this easier to talk about. I have the complete story and the complete truth, and that is already freeing me. “They were concerned about shock because of all the blood loss.”
“You said that he hates you because of that night. Why?”
“So many reasons. He nearly bled to death and was in the hospital for weeks. Before, he’d been a serious soccer player. Incredibly talented, and it seemed clear that he’d go on to play professionally. It seems crazy that he was only going into his sophomore year of high school and going professional was already something on the table, but that’s how that stuff works.”
“Yup,” Chris agrees. “I played sports in high school, and a couple of guys on my team were good enough to attract that kind of attention.”
“You did? What’d you play?”
“I ran track. Not very well, but I liked it.” He flips down the visor to keep the sun out of his eyes. “So after the fire, your brother’s soccer career was blown, I assume.”
“Yes. Months of physical therapy. Months of pain. Some muscle damage. He was devastated. He was the one who was good at something, not me. I was never good at anything. I don’t have a … a special skill or talent. An injury like his wouldn’t have been as big a deal for me.” I realize it feels so good to talk about it. I’ve spent four years having conversations with myself, and now I get to have them with someone else. It’s a relief because there are no longer secrets. “So he lost his parents and his potentially amazing future in soccer. He thought that I was stupid and careless in getting him out of the house.”
“That’s not fair.”
“No, maybe not, but he wasn’t that coherent for most of it, so I don’t think he can understand. He thinks he would have had the sense to get us out safely. It’s easier to think that way when you weren’t the one responsible. All he remembers is that I fucked up in every capacity, and he cannot forgive me.”
“It’s probably easier to blame you, because then there is somebody to blame.”
>
“He’s welcome to blame God,” I say, half joking. “If he still went to church, our priest might insist that he forgive me because that’s what a good Catholic should do. ‘Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.’”
“You grew up Catholic, too?”
I nod. “Well, my dad was Catholic, and so we all went to church mostly to keep him happy. James and I never took it all that seriously, but … I guess there were pieces of it that we liked. Mom was more agnostic than I think my father knew,” I say, laughing. “She was famous for flashing major eye rolls to me and James during Communion. Dad caught her once, and she pawned it off as being irritated by an especially dry Communion wafer. She and I secretly shared a wish that they’d instead feed us small bites of the delicious bread from the French bakery down the road.”
Chris laughs. “Very sensible. So you hated every minute?”
“Sort of. I guess I liked the idea that … well, that there might be some kind of larger meaning to life or whatever. My mother was into that. She had a nonreligious spiritual side to her, if that makes any sense. She believed in the idea of fate and destiny. An interconnectedness and purpose in life.” I fidget with the zipper on my jacket. “Do you believe in that?”
“Not at all,” he says immediately. “Estelle was hooked from the first time she went to church. Which was mostly after my mother died, by the way. My father took us on holidays and whatnot, but Estelle made me take her every Sunday. I’d wait outside. Here’s the truth: We want to read too much into life because it’s convenient. Or fun. But there’s no imaginary, invisible man in the sky who makes things happen. There is no magical reason that we’re dealt what we’re dealt.” Chris has the same unromantic view of the world that I do. I suspect that neither of us wants a predictable march through life that includes marriage, kids, and a white picket fence. We both have histories that preclude us wanting to seek out tradition.
“Take this man who brought you off the ladder,” Chris continues. “I know you well enough to say that you don’t think he was sent by God to save you.”