Love Reimagined

by Delancey Stewart

  I couldn’t just leave. Not if Miranda’s dad was in trouble. What would I tell her? What would I tell her mom?

  I helped Chance load up the equipment, and we stood next to the truck for a few minutes, neither of us feeling right about leaving.

  Chance seemed to make a decision, and he swung up into the cab of the truck. “I’ll drive these out to the lot at the edge of the fire road a mile or so down and park. They’ll be safe there. I’ll be back.”

  That’s how it had always been with my brother—we’d always been of one mind, followed a similar trajectory of thought. We didn’t need to talk about things most of the time because we were almost always on the same page.

  “I’m gonna go see if I can help.” I turned and began jogging back toward the face of the fire, my muscles screaming with fatigue and my mind still spinning in a thousand directions. The only thing I knew for sure was that I couldn’t leave Miranda’s dad in danger. As I approached the spot where the hotshots were watering the ground and yelling back and forth to each other, one of them looked up and saw me.

  “Told you to go back,” he shouted. “But as long as you’re here, grab the end of this hose and pull!”

  The firefighters had a tender parked close to where we’d come in on the fire road, a big truck full of water with a long hose attached, and they’d been working close to the fire to keep the ground wet and the fire back. Now they were trying to make a hole through the arm that had advanced to get to Mr. George.

  I’d been at this end of our firebreak only once all night, when we’d first arrived, but Chance and I had been directed to work back farther, to build the line in case the fire jumped the break the hotshots had been working all day. Mr. George was caught back there somewhere, close to the original line, and I just hoped he was okay. The hotshots seemed to think there was a pretty big pocket, but we all knew eventually the fire would progress to meet itself.

  The noise from the fire and the water bombers dropping over the back lines of the fire was incredible, and I had the sense that this would be what the apocalypse looked like—flame and noise and hopeless fear. I held a length of the heavy hose in my gloved hands, and tried to push it forward, feeding it to the fireman who was spraying down the base of the flames, trying to get to Miranda’s dad somewhere beyond that fiery wall.

  After a while, Chance joined me holding the hose, and I couldn’t help feeling useless, just standing there doing almost nothing. I clapped my brother on the shoulder and ran up the length of the hose to the front, where the hotshots had almost managed to douse the line in a spot big enough to see the pocket behind. It was like a fiery portal in some sci-fi movie, flame burning all around the edges and barely simmering on the ground, but it was a portal all the same. And I would have been smarter, I would have been more restrained—if I hadn’t gotten a glimpse of Mr. George through the smoke and shimmer of flame, lying in a heap on the ground as the fire threatened to close in around him.

  “Mr. George!” Someone yelled, and a minute later, my body was in motion. Heat intensified all around me, and the firemen on the line were shouting in surprise, and I was running directly into the line of flame. I hadn’t thought—I was too tired and terrified for that. I’d only reacted, and by the time I got to Mr. George and was kneeling next to his limp form on the ground, it was too late to rethink it. I realized it had been me who screamed out his name.

  “Hey,” I shouted, rolling him to his back and pulling off a glove to search his neck for a pulse. There was a weak beat in his neck, and relief washed through me. He was undoubtedly suffering from smoke inhalation, and as I watched a hotshot dash through the smoky air toward me, I realized I’d be in the same position soon if we didn’t both get out of here.

  “Hey,” the hotshot yelled at me. “Are you fucking suicidal?” I stared up at him, and realized he was right. I had no business back here. I’d never fought a fire in my life, I’d only known I needed to save Miranda’s dad. The man shook his head at me, the serious face streaked with grime and dirt. “Get him up,” he shouted.

  I did as he said, and we hauled Mr. George between us, prepared to run with him back through the hole in the wall of flames. Only when we turned to go, it had disappeared.

  “Shit!” The hotshot yelled. “Shit!”

  We dropped Mr. George carefully to the ground and stared at where the hole had been. The raging fire was less than a quarter mile from us on all sides, and it was clear it wouldn’t be long before this pocket of cleared ground was overrun. We had nothing to fight it with in here, and the smoke was thick around us. The hotshots had explained earlier that backcountry firefighters didn’t use respiratory equipment. They had enough gear to haul, and there wasn’t a breather on the market that would work for their needs. When I asked how they managed to keep their breathing clear, they looked at me like I was an idiot and said tried to stay out of the smoke. Impossible in here.

  “What do we do?” I asked the man, my voice nearly a scream.

  “We wait.” He pulled a cloth from his pocket and held it over his mouth, dropping to the ground in a crouch. “Get ready to move. The second that hole opens back up. We may not have much time.” The hotshot pulled a heat shield blanket from his pack and unfolded it, draping it over Mr. George to block some of the radiant heat from the fire. “You get one of these?” The guy asked me.

  I nodded. They’d given me a pack when we’d arrived.

  “If the fire’s coming and we can’t get out, cover yourself with it.”

  He was serious. If the fire was coming, I was supposed to cover myself with a blanket and hope the fire would just move over me? I knew I’d end up cooked under that blanket, but I just nodded dumbly and cursed the blazing night around me, which felt like it had gone on forever.

  We crouched in the thick smoke, surrounded by flame on all sides, Miranda’s unconscious father at our feet, and I watched the eerie cast of red dance on the ground before me knowing the shadows moving there were telling the story of how I might die.

  If I did manage to survive, I told myself, I wouldn’t let another day go by without telling Miranda how I felt.

  Chapter 23

  Miranda

  We’d all made up little beds on the cushioned benches in the booths along the walls of the diner. It felt weird to try to sleep in the place I’d worked since junior high school, and as I nestled my head into a borrowed pillow against the back of a booth, I tried not to think about how many different things I’d personally spilled on this exact upholstery. Mom had been given one of the few cots that Adele and Frank had found, and the older couple had finally said goodnight and gone up to their apartment above the diner.

  The place had the feeling of a shelter—I guessed that was what it was, really. We were all trying to get a bit of sleep, waiting for news that we knew would probably be bad.

  As I thought about everything that could happen in the next twenty-four hours, I couldn’t help my mind reaching toward the fire, toward the place where Sam and Chance and my dad were all doing everything they could to help. I hadn’t expected them to be gone so long, and I knew my mom was worried, though she was trying to put on a brave face as the hours ticked by. At one point, she’d helped Adele rearrange the under-counter storage, and freed up a pretty big amount of space down there. She really was good at her job. Maybe it was time to go back on the morning show and demonstrate something else so she could redeem herself, or at least regain her self esteem.

  Angela Sugar had stopped through the diner earlier in the afternoon—she didn’t actually live up here, but kind of pretended to on the morning show. She had a vacation home around the meadow and had come to retrieve things she didn’t want to lose in the fire. The show was actually filmed at a studio halfway down the hill. When she’d been in, my mom had run into the back and pretended to be busy back there. When this was all over, I wanted to do something to help my mom regain her confidence. Maybe Angela would be willing to help.

  I’d finally begun to drift to sl
eep when I heard the diner doors open again, and the crackle of a radio. I glanced up to see Ranger Hammond, one of Dad’s co-workers at the local station. He looked around, a strange expression on his dark weathered face, and then he spotted my mother asleep on a cot. I pushed myself to sitting and motioned to him just before he leaned down to wake her. He walked over and slid into the bench across from me.

  “Miranda, hey.”

  “What’s going on?” I asked him.

  He shook his head and took off his hat, dropping it on the table and running a hand over his almost white hair. He wasn’t bald, but he kept his tight curls cropped so closely that his hairline almost looked drawn on, the bright hair clear against the dark chocolate of his skin. “I’ve got some news on the fire,” he said, sounding like he wished he could be anywhere else. “Think I should probably talk to your mom.”

  I shook my head. “She’s been a wreck tonight. Can you let her sleep? Tell me instead. I’ll wake her up if I need to.”

  He glanced at my mom again, and her peaceful face must have convinced him I was right. “Okay.” His voice was thin and weary. “It’s your dad, actually.”

  Fear crept through me, sinking its teeth into my heart. “Dad?” My voice creaked.

  “The fire’s advanced a bit in one spot where your dad was working, and he got trapped behind it. In a pocket, like.”

  I tried to imagine how that could happen, and felt my head shaking slowly back and forth.

  “There’s a couple other guys back there with him. One of the Palmer brothers and a hotshot, from what I’ve heard. Trying to find a way to get them all three out now.” He didn’t look hopeful.

  The fear inside me compounded and I felt nauseous. Sam or Chance was trapped too? “Which Palmer brother?” I asked, my voice stronger than I felt.

  “Sam, I think. Not completely sure. That wind is pulling the whole thing forward, and the firefighters have their hands full.”

  Sam. And my father. My heart threatened to stop and I wanted to collapse into a puddle of tears. “What can we do?” I asked, standing as if I could run and help, though I knew I couldn’t.

  “Wait.” Ranger Hammond stood up too, still facing me. He stared down at his feet and then looked back up at me, his features softening. “Some of the guys thought we shouldn’t say anything to you or your mom,” he said. “But I know what a shock it is to hear bad news, and I thought it would help if you had a little warning about the possibility that…”

  “That they won’t get out.”

  His eyes slid to the side and he took a deep breath before saying, “Right.”

  I sucked in a breath and fought the tears working their way up my throat. “Thanks for telling me, Hal.”

  “Course.” He looked at Mom again. “Think we should wake her?”

  I stared at my mother’s peaceful face, and imagined how it would change if I told her Dad was trapped by the fire, that he might not come back to us. “No,” I said. “I’ll tell her when she wakes up. Let her have a few more minutes at least.”

  Hal dropped a big hand on my shoulder and squeezed, and nodded over my shoulder at someone. I turned to see Maddie standing there, looking worried. “I’m gonna head back, see what other news I can get,” he said.

  Maddie stepped forward and put her arms around me. “I’ll wait with you.”

  “You heard?”

  “Yeah,” she said, and we walked together to the booth where I’d been sleeping.

  “Think I should wake up my mom?”

  Maddie shook her head. “Let her sleep a bit. Maybe they’ll be out before she wakes up.”

  I lifted one side of my mouth in an attempt to smile, but I didn’t feel confident they’d be coming back. And the idea of losing my dad…and Sam…it was too much.

  Maddie made coffee and we sat in the silence of the sleeping diner for what had to be the longest hours of my life. The world outside the windows turned from an inky black to a smudge of charcoal gray, and finally, as people around us began to stir, a creamsicle orange peeked in through the bottom. We didn’t get another update from Hal—or from anyone else—and I felt like worry was eating me from the inside out. There’d be some vague relief in sharing that worry with everyone else, but I knew it wouldn’t do anything to solve the actual problem. And I didn’t know if my mother could take hours of fear. She was just beginning to wake, and I steeled myself to have to tell her the news.

  “I want to tell you it’ll be okay,” Maddie whispered, staring at the tabletop for a long moment before raising her eyes to meet mine. “But I don’t know what to say.”

  I smiled, but only because I understood. I didn’t know what to tell myself, either. “I know. I just find myself sitting here thinking about all the things I never said, all the things I should have said—could have said. Or done.”

  “Your dad knows how much you love him,” she said.

  And for a second I was confused. “Of course,” I said quickly, ashamed while I was terrified for my father, much of my mind had been focused on Sam, on the idea that I might never get the chance to be honest with him about what I’d only begun to admit to myself. There was something between us. Something beyond childish bickering and constant irritation.

  “You meant Sam,” she guessed.

  “And my dad,” I said. “But yeah. Sam. I think I screwed everything up, Maddie. And now it’s probably too late…I might never get to tell him.”

  She shook her head, sending the dark curls bouncing over her shoulders. “Don’t do that. We don’t know anything yet. All we’re doing is waiting.”

  Waiting. She was right. I needed to wait.

  It was only five o’clock, but Good Morning Kings Grove was on, so Adele switched on the television above the counter and set the volume low. Angela and her latest co-host, Todd Franklin, were discussing the fire, wearing faces that told me they didn’t have any personal stake in what happened. Angela had a house, but it wasn’t her home. And Todd? He was from the valley. I didn’t know if he’d ever even been to Kings Grove.

  When the weather came on, Adele turned the volume up a tick.

  “Winds have been driving aloft for days, part of what’s kept this fire raging forward,” Angela said. “But that’s all changing today. Take a look at this.” The screen flashed to a weather map, showing a massive front moving toward us. “The winds are shifting direction, and bringing with them a certainty of rain,” she said. “That’s good news for all those who’ve been fighting this fire for more than a week now.”

  My heart lifted, and my head snapped to look outside.

  “Rain?” Maddie said, standing and following my gaze to the parking lot, which was still a shade of orangey grey.

  “Did they say it’s going to rain, dear?” Mom was on her feet, at my side with her hair pointing in all directions. I turned to her and tried to tame it with my hands, and then gave her a hug. She hugged me back and whispered in my ear, “Good morning, Little Pudding.” It was what she’d said to me every day of my life since I’d been a tiny girl, and hearing the familiar greeting now made something inside me seize up. I hated what I was about to tell her. “Is your dad back?” She let me go and looked around, worry creasing the little lines around her lips.

  “No, Mom.” I took her hand and led her to the booth where I’d been sleeping. She took a deep breath and slid in next to me.

  “What is it?”

  “Hal Hammond came in late. I told him not to wake you…”

  Mom’s eyes widened and her back straightened. She knew what was coming.

  “I guess the fire moved last night, advanced with the wind and made some kind of pocket, or something. I didn’t really understand, but Dad and Sam…”

  My mother’s eyes widened and she sucked in a quick breath and took my hand, squeezing it tightly.

  “Mom, they’re trapped.”

  She blinked hard and then shook her head. “Trapped?”

  “In a hole inside the fire.”

  “But the hole…�
��

  “Will close up eventually. They’re trying to get them out, but we haven’t heard anything in a few hours.”

  Mom looked past me, out the window, where the sliver of orange had faded and the sky had taken on a threatening cast. “Oh God,” she murmured.

  Chapter 24

  Sam

  The firefighter, Ryan, and I sat back to back, shielding Mr. George from the advancing flames. The spot where we were trapped was clear enough that there was little to burn, but we could see the walls of fire pulsing, reaching toward one another as the tops of those blazing walls danced ever nearer, trying to connect. It was only a matter of time.

  I sat, sweat pouring down my back and my face, my lungs aching as I tried to breathe through the shirt I’d pulled up over my mouth. It was impossible to see beyond the glare of the flames, and after a while I began to lose hope. It felt like all there was in the world was fire. It was all around us, screaming at us, promising a painful, torturous end, and I couldn’t imagine a way out. I couldn’t see the sky, had no idea what might or might not be happening on the other side of that wall of flame. The firefighter’s radio crackled now and then, but it was almost impossible to hear the men on the other side through the noise.

  “Sit tight, we’re coming,” was the last thing I’d heard. They checked in now and then, and the hotshot would confirm we were still alive.

  I thought about Miranda most of the time, her sweet face and bright blue eyes. I pictured the way they’d almost always looked at me—a suspicious scowl, usually—and it made me smile. I was so desperate that even her ongoing dislike of me had become a fond memory. I’d give anything to watch her stalk away from me again, even if it meant having to watch her worship my brother for the rest of our lives.

  I thought about my brother, too. Chance had picked up a heavy burden when Dad died, coming back though it had never been a part of his plan to return to this tiny mountain town. He came back to shoulder the responsibility of running the business, though I suspected part of the reason he returned was to look after me. Maybe I needed it. Mom had died a long time ago—which didn’t mean I didn’t miss her. But I’d grown used to that hole in my heart, and our house had become a little colder, a little messier, and a little more practical. No more flowers in vases, no more seasonal decorations. We just lived there together after Chance had gone to school—me and Dad. And it had been okay. But when Dad died…the house had changed again. It was an empty shell I rattled around in. It was good that Chance came back. And now, to think I might not see my big brother again…