As quietly as I can, I turn the handle to the back door and open it, surprised the hinges don’t squeak. I’m not sure the crazy cop with a gun pressed into my baby’s skull would notice it, anyway. I look around the man’s shoulder and get a good look at my daughter. She’s so pretty, even with tears runnin’ down her cheeks, that it makes my damn chest hurt. I shoulda seen just how perfect and pretty she was when she was little. I watched her so much lately that I memorized every beautiful feature of her grown-up face, even though I could never get close enough to really look at ‘em.
I turn off the sappy shit when I see the cop pull the slide release on the gun and I whisper a prayer into the quiet night.
“Lord, forgive me.”
I aim, and pull the trigger.
I realize I’m not dead when I hear screaming. My eyes fly open and I see Jackson standing in front of me, staring at the ceiling. I glance up and find it covered in flames, quickly spreading towards the back door. Something out of the corner of room catches my eye and I see the ghost from my past waltz through the open back door with a gun in his hands. He’s aged a great deal and his brown hair is now white, but I would recognize him anywhere.
“Hi, baby,” he tells me with a smile. “I was aiming for his head but I guess I’m a little rusty in my old age. Guess I should have recognized the smell of gas before I fired.”
I immediately start fighting against the ropes, twisting and turning my body as hard as I can, screaming for someone to help while the fire quickly spreads across the cabinets, licking against the walls.
Jackson takes off running in the direction of the living room and I watch in shock as my father flies across the room, much faster than I would have ever thought possible considering his age. He jumps over my legs and tackles Jackson with his arms around his waist right in the doorway. Both men crash to the floor with a loud thud and immediately start wrestling. I turn away from their fight as the crackle and snap of the fire spreading echoes all around me. Smoke fills the room and I try to take low, shallow breaths as I pull so hard against the rope that my wrists burn and I can feel blood dripping down my arms.
The blast from a gun makes me scream and I whip my head back to where my father and Jackson were fighting.
My father straddles Jackson, still holding the gun towards him. I glance down and see a bloody hole blooming on Jackson’s shirt right over his stomach. I look up and my father’s eyes meet mine for the first time in fifteen years and I can’t stop the scream that flies out of my mouth. I know I said I wanted him to just fucking show himself after all these weeks of notes and threats, but I immediately want to take it all back. When I look into his eyes, I see him coming after me with a gun in his hand the day I saw him murder someone in his bedroom. I see him charging towards me, wanting nothing more than to end my life and relieve himself of the burden that was me. I see the hatred when he glared at me across the courtroom the day I testified against him and I see every single time he dragged me out of my hiding places, held me against the table and burned me with his cigarette.
As he gets up from Jordan’s body and walks towards me with the gun while the fire rages out of control around us, I’m not quite sure which is scarier. He quickly steps over my legs to get to the other side of my body, putting himself in between the fire and me as he squats down next to me. I pull my legs up to my chest and bury my face in my knees so I won’t have to look at him when he kills me. I don’t want my last sight to be his face. I hear something click, feel my arms jerking back and forth and then suddenly, they drop down to my sides. I look up in confusion to see my father holding a pocketknife in his hand.
I quickly scramble away from him, my arms screaming in protest as I move my feet and legs as fast as I can, coughing from the smoke as I get to my feet and jump over Jackson’s body, refusing to look down at him.
“Seraphina, wait!” my father shouts as I make it to the doorway to the living room.
I slowly turn to face him even though every instinct inside of me is telling me to run. Run from this house and never look back.
My father stands and takes a step towards me, stopping when he sees the fear on my face. His frame is silhouetted by fire as it spreads along all of the cupboards and most of the walls and ceiling.
“I’m so sorry, baby. I’m sorry for everything I ever done to you. You never deserved any of that shit. You were a good girl. God blessed me with the most beautiful little girl in the world and I never appreciated it.”
My eyes fill with tears from his words and the smoke making its way towards me. Is this some kind of joke or a dream? Why is he saying these things to me?
“I know you never read none of my notes, but I wrote you one every couple of months just to tell ya how sorry I was. God is good and He made me see the light.”
The phone call he made to me suddenly makes sense now. The notes he was talking about were the ones he mailed to me in prison and the burn in hell comment clearly had to do with his newfound religion. My father did nothing but curse God my entire childhood.
I hear a groan and I look down at the kitchen floor ten feet away and scream, jumping back and throwing my hands over my mouth. Jackson opens his eyes and coughs, blood dribbling down the side of his mouth.
Just then, a fully engulfed beam from the ceiling rips away and crashes down in front of me, blocking me off from Jackson and my father. I jump back as sparks and cinders swirl around the room.
I watch through the flames as my father quickly turns around to go out the back door, but it’s now completely surrounded by fire. The ceiling above it, the frame around it and the door itself are raging out of control. He’s completely trapped. He turns back towards me and shouts over the roar of the fire.
“You go on and get out of here now, ya hear? I’ll make sure this little fucker doesn’t go anywhere,” he yells, pointing to the floor in front of him where I know Jackson still lies.
Even though I can barely see him through the smoke and fire, something makes me stay right where I am. Something makes me look at him, really look at him for the first time in fifteen years. The fire is getting too close and I feel it on my face and skin, my body dripping with sweat from the heat. I take another step back to get some relief, but keep my eyes locked on my father.
“I’m really sorry, baby. If I could take it all back, I would. You get the hell out of here and you go have a good life. You forget all about me because I’m not worth another second of your time and neither are all the bad memories in this house. You deserve to be happy. I’m gettin’ what I deserve and it’s okay. It’s okay as long as I know you’re happy.”
I sob and choke as I move back further into the living room and away from the fire. I stumble over a piece of musty furniture and fall on my ass as I watch more pieces of the burning ceiling rain down on top of Jackson and my father. I cry harder when I hear my father scream out in pain, knowing that he’s burning to death. It was what I always wanted. I wanted him to feel the burning agony of fire and ash and I wanted him to regret every time he forced me to feel the same. I hate that I want to run back into the room and try to save him, even though I know it’s useless. I can’t see anything inside the kitchen but the orange glow of angry fire. I hate that he chose now to say all the words he should have said to me a long time ago.
Flipping over on my hands and knees to try and stay below the smoke that is billowing above me, I hack and cough and cry as I crawl through the living room where I used to dream about having a father who loved me enough not to hurt me. I can barely see anything in front of me when I get to the front door and I run my palms blindly up the wood and feel for the handle. I turn the knob and fling the door open, stumbling out onto the front porch, trying to take huge gulps of fresh air.
I hear a horrifyingly loud crash behind me and I grab onto the railing, staggering down the stairs, running as fast as my legs will allow to the woods bordering our old property. I don’t know anything about house fires aside from what I’ve seen on TV. On TV, th
ey usually explode, and I’m not going to take any chances. I clear the first cropping of trees, tripping over vines as I try to put as much distance between the burning house and myself as possible. My body wracks with coughs and I stumble over a large tree root, face-planting right into the ground. I can’t stop coughing and I can’t stop crying. My lungs burn with smoke and my eyes are so swollen I can barely see out of them. The shadowed woods quickly grow darker and darker and everything around me starts spinning like I’m on a tilt-a-whirl. I close my eyes and drop my head to the ground.
I see an orange glow of flames in the sky a few miles in the distance and panic ricochets through my body. Dax floors it, the speedometer reaching a hundred, but it’s still not fast enough. Phina’s childhood home was the furthest away from all of us when we were in school – twenty minutes by car and an hour and ten minutes by bike. Not that I was ever invited over…or rode my bike past her house a million times, searching for a glimpse of her.
Dax finally pulls up to the burning house at the same time as two additional fire trucks, joining the one that is already here fighting the fire. Dax slams on the brakes in the middle of the street and I jump out of the car before he puts it in park, racing towards the house. I’m tackled from behind halfway across the yard and my body slams against the ground as Dax shouts in my ear.
“WILL YOU STOP DOING STUPID FUCKING SHIT?! Let them put some of the fire out and get in there before you try to be a damn hero! We don’t even know if she’s in there!”
I shove him off me and get back up on my feet, not giving a damn about what he said. Firemen are racing around me, dragging hoses around to the back since the first truck has already started spraying down the front. I begin walking towards the house again when a loud explosion booms all around us. I instinctively duck and cover my head as debris and ash rain down around us and men start shouting. When I look back up, I see part of the front of the house is now missing, the skeleton inside the house completely engulfed in flames as the firemen work tirelessly to put it out.
“NOOOO!” I scream, the flames growing so high that I have to take a step back when I feel the heat of them licking my face. “OH, GOD, DON’T LET HER BE IN THERE!”
I feel helpless. I feel useless. I’m a goddamn fireman, but I know I can’t go in that house right now. It’s minutes, maybe even seconds from collapsing, but everything inside of me is telling me to just run in there. Who cares if I burn? Who cares if I don’t make it back outside? I know if anyone is in that house, there’s no way they’re making it out alive, and if she’s in there, I don’t fucking care what happens to me. I will go in there with her and I will never leave her side again. As I stare at the house, the images that flash through my mind are like the worst horror movie ever made. Her gorgeous red hair burning away, her smooth skin melting from her body, her full, pink lips that kissed mine so many times pulled back and frozen in a scream of pain.
Oh, God, I can’t take it! It hurts too much!
Dax tugs on my arm, pulling me further away from the fire, and I stare powerlessly at the house where Phina grew up as it burns to the ground. She’d be happy about this if she were standing next to me now. She’d be overjoyed that the place of her nightmares was finally going to be gone for good and she wouldn’t have to think about it ever again. I can almost hear the sound of her laughter telling me it’s about fucking time someone torched this place to the ground. I try to laugh, but it comes out as a sob. I need to hear her laugh again. I have to hear her laugh again, there’s no other option.
The cop from earlier at Phina’s house runs up to Dax and I force myself to turn away from the fire to hear what he has to say.
“Sir, we found Castillo’s cruiser parked next door. We already checked inside and canvased most of the houses in the vicinity. A neighbor across the street said she saw a man carrying a woman inside about thirty minutes ago.”
The confirmation that she was in that house a half hour ago doesn’t mean anything. I won’t let it mean the worst. I hear shouts coming from the back of the house and I head off in that direction, refusing to believe that she’s anything but okay. She’s strong and she’s a fighter. There is no way she would put up with fucking dying. She’d stomp her foot, look death in the face and tell it to fuck off.
Dax runs after me, shouting my name, but I ignore him. I come to a dead stop at the edge of the lawn when I see two firemen covered in black soot carrying a body bag between them as they race away from the house.
I won’t panic. I won’t fucking panic!
It could be Jackson. It better fucking be Jackson in that bag.
Please, God, don’t take her from me.
I hold my breath and stare around the corner of the burning house, waiting to see a glimpse of her gorgeous red hair and her beautiful, unhurt body being carried in a fireman’s arms. My heart beats erratically and I clench my teeth to keep my screams at bay, squeezing my arms as tightly as I can to the sides of my body to stop it from shaking. Seconds pass, but they seem like hours before I finally see the bright yellow reflective stripe of someone’s turnout gear. He’s walking backwards in this direction and I start moving towards him. I watch as one man suddenly morphs into two when they both turn their bodies sideways, another black body bag suspended between them.
My legs give out from under me and I don’t even feel Dax’s arms go around me to stop me from hitting the ground. My screams finally let loose and I close my eyes, turning my face towards the sky as I let the sound of my heart breaking in two fill the night air.
I killed her.
The beautiful, smartass firecracker that exploded into my life with the force of an atomic bomb – she’s gone because of me.
All those moments spent fighting with her were a waste of time. Time that could have been better spent getting one of those rare laughs that were just for me, memorizing every freckle on her nose and showing her just how much she meant to me even though I fucked it all up in the end when she needed me the most.
From the very first time I tasted her lips, she was mine. With that cherry red lip-gloss and her hands on her hips, all sass and snark and attitude – she was mine but I fucked things up with her that time too and that damn graduation party.
Who the fuck knows at eighteen-years-old that the girl he felt up at a party would turn out to be his entire world years down the line? I sure as hell didn’t. I drank too much and I didn’t even get to remember what should have been the best fucking night of my life. I kissed those perfect lips, slid my hands up her tight shirt and tried not to blow my load when she moaned into my mouth. Then, I blacked out, forgetting all of the important things and walked away the next morning like the cocky little punk I was and tried to forget about her. I thought I’d done a pretty good job of it until four and a half months ago, when I saw her again. All that bullshit I’d spouted off to my best friend about how it’s unnatural to spend your life with one woman…fuck, what I wouldn’t give to go back and beat the shit out of that stupid asshole who thought he knew everything.
Eighteen weeks spent fighting her continued brush-offs and fighting with her when I should have been on my knees begging her to never leave me.
Eighteen days spent learning about what made her into the woman she was and trying my hardest to prove to her that she was worth more.
Eighteen minutes spent praying to a God I’d never believed in, begging Him not to take her from me.
Eighteen seconds too late.
It seemed like an eternity waiting on that front lawn for one of the firemen to carry her alive out of that house, but it only took eighteen seconds. Eighteen seconds between the first body bag and the second that ended my life as I know it.
I’ve counted each and every minute with her these last few months, the good and the bad. 181,440 minutes that I would give anything to do over. Sitting here with a half-empty bottle of whiskey and some dive bar I don’t even remember the name of, I count the drops of condensation on my glass as they slide down, each one fading away
and disappearing into the napkin underneath it just like every moment I spent with her. I had her and I let her slip through my fingers. I should have held tighter, fought harder, gotten there sooner.
I’ll never run my fingers through the long, crimson hair that reminded me so much of fire when the sun hit it. I’ll never feel the heat of her body pressed to mine again or the way she’d whisper my name against my lips right before she came.
Fuck, that goddamn sigh…it was like she just breathed my name, as if it were the oxygen in her lungs that gave her life. I can still hear that fucking sound every time I close my eyes and it completely guts me.
She branded her name on my heart and I know I’ll never be the same. I’ll never get the chance to tell her that I don’t fucking care about the scars on her body. I don’t care about anything but seeing her smiling and hearing her laugh.
Staring up at the clock on the wall behind the bar, I realize it’s been eighteen hours since I last saw her alive. In my mind’s eye, I see her standing there, a flush on her cheeks and determination in her eyes as she told me to go. I did as she asked because I was angry and I knew she was hurting. I couldn’t stand the thought of hurting her any more than I already had. It seems that all I’ve ever done is hurt her.
She told me to go, and I did. I left her alone in that bedroom and I didn’t fight for her. I should have stayed in that damn room until she finally talked to me. I let my anger get the best of me and I turned my back on her to be taken by a sick fuck looking for revenge.