“Run, you fool!” Obstinate old prick. But at least now I know where he is.
It’s not a big barn, but it seems huge if you have to crawl through it when it’s on fire and threatening to collapse onto your head and kill you. Dad is somewhere near the center, toward the left wall. He must not be able to move, for some reason, because otherwise he would have beat feet for the door. I can’t keep holding my breath, so I release it and try to breathe in as slowly as I can. The air sears my lungs. It’s so hot in here that I know if I touch one of the tractors the skin will cook and slough right off my bones.
There is more cracking from the ceiling now, and I know I don’t have much time before the whole building falls in on us both.
I think of Aimee now. I shouldn’t, I should keep my mind on immediate things like getting my father out of this burning barn and not dying, but I’ve never been a good manager of my own mental faculties. Especially not when it comes to her. And so suddenly her face is before me, sad and hurt and leaving me. Probably for the last time. I am wracked with a grief so overwhelming that for a moment I can’t even move. Don’t want to. It seems perfectly right to just lie here and let the fire take me.
But on the heels of that grief comes a determination. To not let that be the last thing I see of Aimee. To not let my failure be the last thing she experiences of me. A determination to live and find her, not where she is physically, but to find her where her heart is and show her that she is the whole world to me. That as long as she will have me, I will spend the rest of my life showing her that I am all hers.
But first I have to get myself and my asshole dad out of this fucking barn.
“Dad!” My own voice is hoarse now, smoke choking me.
Behind me, something explodes. The sound is huge, cracking out over the roar of the flame. I jump and look behind me for whatever sudden new emergency might have caused it. I don’t see anything through the wall of heat behind me. Then I remember the tractor tires. One of those must have burst.
As if in confirmation, another roar emits from my front right.
Note to self: don’t touch the tractors or get near the tires.
Of course, this proves not to be an option. When I find Dad, he is lying on the floor, pinned beneath a burning roof beam. The beam lays across his hips. He apparently tried to drag himself out from under it, but succeeded only in wedging himself half under a semi-dismantled John Deere, his shoulder caught under the tread of one of the massive rear tires. The tractor’s spotted green paint is whitening and peeling in the heat, and the rubberized material of the tire is beginning to look…soft.
I belly-crawl over to him as fast as I can. He turns his head, sees me coming his way, and shakes his head slightly.
“Don’t you ever listen, boy?” he wheezes.
“I don’t have time to listen. If I get that beam off you, can you walk?” I have my doubts. That beams looks fucking heavy.
“I don’t think so. Can’t feel much from the waist down. So get the fuck out of here so at least one of us lives.”
“It’s lucky for you the black sheep came to get you. If it had been Eli he couldn’t help but obey.”
I draw in a slow breath, taking as much of the low-lying oxygen as I can. Still enough smoke to make me cough, my lungs burning. Then I get to my feet.
The beam that lays across my father is long and lays across him at an angle. One end has managed to lodge itself under the front end of the tractor and angles across his hips, extending away from him and terminating well past his head. The center is burning merrily, singing his eyebrows and redding the left side of his face, but the ends are mostly free of flame.
It looks goddamn heavy.
I duck-walk to the far end and work my fingers under it. It turns out that “mostly free of flame” does not mean “not hot”. The skin of my fingers and palms immediately begins to sear and blister, and I smell flesh cooking.
“When I pick this up, you crawl your ass out from under there, old man!”
He looks uncertain, but nods.
I heave on the timber, muscles in my legs and back straining as my hands burn. At first I don’t think it’s going to budge, but then it comes up an inch. Then a foot. I roar with the effort, and the beam clears Dad’s hips. “Go!” I yell.
His feet don’t move, but his elbow and hands scrape like crazy against the concrete floor, and he manages to crab-crawl his way from beneath the tractor, and then from beneath the beam. All my muscles are screaming, my hands are screaming, I am screaming, and then he is completely free of the beam, and then he is two feet away from it. I can’t hold it any longer and it slips from my grasp, crashing to the floor where my father’s body just was.
I need to collapse right now, just lie down on the floor next to him to recover from the monster deadlift of a lifetime I just performed.
But I can’t, of course, because this can’t just be an easy day.
Dad is now next to the tire, and the material of the tire is visibly melting. When those things explode, I can’t imagine that they throw material very far. It’s just escaping air. But I’ve heard of people losing eyes when car tires explode. How much injury could come from being near one of these man-sized tractor tires when it goes? I don’t know how much time there is between now and the moment of detonation, but it can’t be much.
I rush to his side, squat down next to him, and get my arms under his shoulders.
“This is going to hurt,” I gasp. He nods.
In my imagination I can hear the deafening roar of the tire in front of me, feel thick strips of rubber whipping out and gouging out parts of my face.
I lift. He is much lighter than the beam, and I am grateful. Of course, I didn’t have to run with the beam.
Dad screams as I lift him, and screams again when I settle him draped across my shoulder, his weight on his injured hips. It has to be agony for him, but I can’t dwell on that.
The fifty feet between us and the door seems like miles. I run.
Somewhere behind me, the tractor tire explodes.
Finding Their Naughty Words
Aimee
A week later
I pull packing tape across the last box and seal the last of my father’s belongings into it. My mother sits on her recliner, watching me.
“It feels like a betrayal,” she says, her voice strained with emotion.
I look up at her and try to smile. It’s hard, because I can’t help feeling the same. “He wouldn’t want us to keep him around as a ghost, Mom. He certainly wouldn’t want us keeping his old shirts and belts.” This is not the first time I’ve said this—and not the first time I’ve tried to make myself believe it—and it probably won’t be the last. “Besides, we’re not getting rid of it. It’s all just going into storage.” That is the compromise we’ve come to. Neither of us want to get rid of Dad’s things—his clothes, his tools, his comb. I had wept over his toothbrush, and the thought of throwing it away was beyond my comprehension. And so we decided, at least for the time being, to rent a storage unit and keep his things there. So we’ll still have those pieces of him around, to visit when we need to, but still have the space to begin to move on.
Mom needs that even more than I do.
I look at her, and I am amazed. Her gaze, though bloodshot and teary, is clear. Her voice is strong and present, not the hollow, almost disembodied tone I became accustomed to hearing from her. A week ago, when Eric brought me here, she made us both sandwiches.
Sandwiches.
Before that she couldn’t take herself to the bathroom without getting lost.
Now she stands up, her feet firm beneath her.
“You’re right,” she says, her voice more steady. “Your father was a strong man, and he wouldn’t want us mooning around here like lost puppies looking for him in every corner.” She nods, seemingly to herself. “We’ll keep living our lives.”
It’s the first time she has said anything about that. About continuing. About a “her” that will fo
rge through life without a “him” next to her. Tears sting my eyes.
She has come back from the woods. She is once again alive, and she is once again my mother, the one I’ve known since before I knew anything.
“I’m afraid you’ll have to do most of the lifting, getting these boxes into the car,” she says. “My arms and back still aren’t up to speed. Too darn much time in bed!”
“No problem.” I stand. What I want is to help my mother. To stay with her. To enjoy being around her now that she is once again the woman that I’ve know for so long. But.
“After we drop the things off at the storage unit, I need to get back to the hospital.”
I have only been able to be with my mother for hours at a time, rather than the twenty-four hour, round-the-clock surveillance that part of me suggests she still needs. Or maybe it’s just you that needs that, my irritatingly rational mind suggests. Instead of being with her as much as I perhaps should have, I have been splitting my time between her house and the Tulsa Hospital.
This has caused a lot of changes in my life. For one, I’ve had to remotely request incompletes in all my classes for the semester. I hated to do it, but it was either that or fail all of them, because no way was I going to make it back to school before the end of the semester. Not with everything that’s going on right now.
Another thing that’s changed is, well, being around my mom all the time. One thing I had forgotten about my mom is that she has opinions. Lots of them, and most of them about me. Somehow her temporary dementia did not alter that in the slightest.
“You know what I think about that.”
I do. She’s not too keen on it, to be frank.
“That boy has a perfectly rich family to take care of him. He doesn’t need you over there mooning over him.” I open my mouth to protest, but she raises her voice a notch and just keeps right on going. “More importantly, you don’t need him.”
“I’m not mooning over him, Mom. I’m just going to the hospital to be with my friend.”
I haven’t been exactly forthcoming with everything that happened between Cameron and me, but my mother has zeroed in on some key facts in our relationship and its immolation with an intuition bordering on the paranormal.
“I think that’s bullshit,” she says. It’s a word my mother doesn’t use, along with a score of other words that are in my common vocabulary. Words like “fuck” and “shit” and even on down to “piss” are all on my mother’s “unutterables” list. My mouth falls open a little. I feel like a little kid who just heard their mom say a naughty. Halfway delighted, and maybe just a little scared. “I think the two of you finally figured out what everybody has always known about yourselves, and you invested too much or yourself in it, and you got hurt. Which I would have predicted.” Mom has never liked Cam, and after all that has happened I can’t help thinking she might have been right all along.
But that doesn’t change the fact that, before he was anything else to me, Cameron was my friend. And I can’t let my friend just languish in the hospital alone.
Even if he’s not alone.
And even if he’s not awake to know that I’m there.
I feel my lips compress into a hard line. “I’m not going to fight with you,” I tell her. What I don’t tell her is anything about the money Cam had given me to take care of her, or about the arrangement we had made for it. It would wound her deeply to know those things.
“Don’t you take that look with me.”
“It’s not a look. But I’m going.”
***
It was three days ago that Eric brought me home to see my mother. Eric had always been my mom’s favorite, between him and Cameron, and he had always adored her as well. So he seemed as excited as I was to see her lucid and mobile, and was in no hurry to leave. He was still here four hours later when he got the call. It was from Katy Simons, and as soon as he saw her name on his caller ID he said, “Uh oh.”
He answered, said, “Hello,” and then was silent for a long moment, just listening. After a few minutes he said, “Jesus, Katy, is there anything I can do?”
More silence, then he said, “Okay…Okay…Keep me posted.”
He ended the call, his face drawn.
“Don’t tell me, Eric.” I didn’t want to know. I was with my mom. Really with my mom for the first time in what seemed like forever. I didn’t want the concerns of the Simons family butting in right then. I’d think about them later.
His voice seemed far away. “There’s been an accident. A fire.” I didn’t want him to go on. I wanted to put my hand over his mouth to stop him from talking. “Cam’s hurt pretty bad.”
My heart tore into pieces. Even though my mom had returned to me, even though I was eating a sandwich prepared by her hand—a hand that a week before was not capable of wielding a butter knife—and even though I had every reason in the world not to care about what happened to Cameron Simons, I felt myself shatter like glass, and I put my hands over my face and cried.
***
It was Katy who told me everything that had happened at the barn. She told it to me while we both stood at the fifty-cent coffee machine on the fourth floor of Tulsa Hospital, trying to drive the exhaustion from our eyes with chemistry. Most of the story had been relayed to her from Eli. I grimaced at the source and was inclined not to trust his recounting, but it wasn’t very flattering for him, so I was willing to lend it credibility. It was a terrifying story. Cam finding the barn on fire, going in after his dad. Pulling him almost to safety. That much Katy had gotten from her youngest son.
While Cam was in the barn pulling Jason from beneath a burning roof beam, Eli continued to stand outside, watching. He had the presence of mind to call 911, and then Katy. She came running down the hill, and her heart almost stopped when she heard the sound of an explosion from inside the barn. Firefighters later told her that the sound was almost certainly a tractor tire erupting in the heat, but she said it sounded like a cannon letting loose inside the barn. Directly after that gut-wrenching sound, she saw Cameron, running out of the fire like someone in a cheesy action movie. Her words, not mine. Doesn’t seem matter whose they are, parents are awesome.
As soon as she saw Cam sprinting toward the door with a limp figure draped across his shoulders, she was hopeful that somehow things would be okay. It didn’t sink in that the very fact that Cameron was carrying Jason was wrong, that Jason should be running on his own. That realization came later. In those seconds she just knew that Cam was running full-tilt for the door, down the center of the barn where there was nothing to burn. Free and clear.
Until the roof fell in. It started behind him, a waterfall of flame and debris, in the middle of the barn and then cascaded down, the spine of the roof folding in on itself. Cameron and Jason were almost to the door when burning timbers landed on them, knocking them both to the ground.
It was that moment, apparently, that Eli came back to life. “Cam!” he screamed. Not “Dad!” but “Cam!” And tore into the inferno like a crazy person. Katy tried to call him back, to get her youngest to safety as the building continued to collapse, but he couldn’t or wouldn’t hear her. So she did the sensible thing and went in after him.
“No way,” I said, hearing admiration creep into my voice. I took a sip of my coffee and grimaced at the burned taste.
“Yes way,” Katy responded, looking proud of herself. “It was goddamn family activity night at the Simons house.”
Apparently this has been a week of matriarchs finding their naughty words.
“Holy shit,” was all I could think of to say.
She took a sip of her own coffee and sucked her teeth. “With what they charge in this place I’m certain they could put a Starbucks kiosk on every floor instead of these nasty machines from 1987.” Her face softened, and she put a hand on my shoulder. “I’m glad you’re here, Aimee. I think Cam would be glad, too.” Her voice shakes as she says it, and I can’t help but wonder at the strength of this woman.
; Eli came out of the fire in the best shape. His hands were covered in second-degree burns, and he had other burns scattered across his back and arms, but he had not been exposed to the fire for very long. Still, he was at home recovering from his injuries and smoke inhalation.
Jason and Cameron were unconscious when they were pulled from the wreckage of the barn. They were both badly burned, and doctors didn’t know if Jason would walk again. That was the word on the second morning. By the second afternoon, he did come out of his coma and asked immediately for his wife.
I did not visit Jason.
***
Now I look at Cameron lying on his hospital bed, his head wrapped in a bandage, his burned hands shiny and red on blue absorptive pads. His face should look peaceful, I think, but it doesn’t. He looks troubled, pensive. As if he’s seeing something in his sleep—I can only allow myself to think of it as sleep, cannot think of the word coma—that he dreads. I touch his cheek.
“I should still be angry with you,” I say. “I should still be broken-hearted and furious with you for choosing your dad over me.” I bite my lip. “Something like this, though…I guess it gives me some perspective.” I lean over him, put my lips near the bandage that covers his ear. “I understand, Cameron. I understand fighting for your parents.” I hesitate, but continue, because what can it hurt to bear my heart to someone who can’t hear me, anyway? “I love you, Cameron. I have always loved you, and I probably always will.” By the time I’m finished my voice is trembling and I feel hot tears on my cheeks. “I wish it had worked out between us. I wish that with all my heart.”
When I lean back in my chair, the troubled look on his face has vanished, replaced by the ghost of a smile. The look he gets when he’s played a joke on someone and he’s just waiting for everyone to get it so that he can laugh. I think, for just a moment, that he’s awake.
But he’s not. Don’t die. I can’t bring myself to say it, but the words are loud in my head
All Yours: A Second Chance Romance Page 16
