From the Embers

by Aly Martinez

I had to find her and get her out of there and then come back and find Rob and Bree and somehow get them out too.

  In the first few seconds, everything seemed possible. I still couldn’t wrap my mind around what had happened. It was bad, but losing the people I loved didn’t seem like a realistic outcome. Though, as the fire grew, so did my fears.

  Smoke invaded my vision until I was searching blind, furiously patting around the floor where I thought she might have been.

  Where I prayed she might have been.

  Where I really fucking needed her to be.

  A wave of relief hit me like a tsunami, nearly knocking me to my ass, when I finally felt her hand. “Jessica!” I choked, coughing and gagging.

  I had no idea if she was injured or breathing, but I’d found her. Now, I had to get her the hell out of there. In one fluid motion, I scooped her into my arms and took off toward the door, forging a path by memory alone through the pieces of a home that no longer existed.

  We’d almost made it to the front door when I tripped over something, nearly dropping her. Pure determination alone kept me upright.

  One step farther, one second later, one wrong move and I would have missed her completely. Her body was hidden beneath a pile of broken furniture, but her dark hair cascaded across the dirty floor.

  Oh, God. Bree.

  I froze for a beat, juggling Jessica in my arms while trying to squat down to grab Bree too. At six-two, I was a big guy, but one lifeless woman was hard enough to blindly carry from a burning house, much less two. Panic screamed inside me. The smoke was getting thicker by the second. The more I tried and the longer we stayed, the more dangerous it became for all of us.

  Everything changed in the next second.

  My life.

  Jessica’s life.

  Bree’s life.

  Rob’s life.

  Luna’s life.

  Asher’s and Madison’s lives.

  One decision in the middle of the unimaginable and the world as we knew it was irrevocably changed.

  It all came down to one single decision.

  “I’ll be right back,” I choked out.

  Using my arm to block my face, I continued to the door. The knob seared my palm as I yanked it open, but the pain didn’t even register through the adrenaline. The sound of my feet pounding down the driveway echoed in my ears as the fire crackled behind me. Our closest neighbor was over half a mile away, but there was no way they hadn’t heard the explosion. The fire department would be there soon.

  I’d get Bree out. They’d find Rob. Everyone would be okay.

  “Eason,” she croaked in my arms.

  My feet were still moving as I sprinted away, but time stopped as her voice permeated my senses.

  No.

  It wasn’t possible.

  She was covered in soot, and my eyes were caked with ash and what I would later learn to be blood, but I could still make out the large flowers on her yellow—

  “Uh, no. It’s my dress that Jessica borrowed and I had to do an entire Tom Cruise Mission Impossible thing to get it back last week.”

  Oh, God.

  I kept running until the wind changed direction, clearing the smoke. With my heart in my throat, I prayed that my still ringing ears had deceived me. Then I set her down and used the inside of my shirt to clear my face.

  “Eason,” she croaked.

  But once again, she wasn’t my wife.

  “Oh, God,” I breathed, watching as she rose on unsteady legs. Tears carved twin riverbeds through the ash on her cheeks.

  “What happened?” Bree asked, her green eyes focused on the blazing inferno behind me.

  Acrid guilt devoured me. “I…”

  I saved the wrong woman.

  I left the mother of my child in a burning building.

  My final broken promise to the woman I’d vowed forever to was, “I’ll be right back.”

  Bile crawled up my throat. “I don’t know.”

  I glanced back at the house, the heat of the roaring fire scorching me even from yards away. Overwhelming grief hit me as I realized there was no way I could get back through those flames.

  Oh, God. Jessica.

  In the middle of tragedy, it’s strange the things that become engrained into your memories. Years later, I wouldn’t be able to tell you how long it took the firetrucks to get there. I couldn’t tell you what time it was or what I had been wearing. But I would never be able to forget the absolute devastation on Bree’s face when she realized we were the only two standing outside the burning house.

  “Where’s Rob?” she rasped, her voice sounding like it had traveled over a mile of gravel before exiting her throat. “And Jessica. Where are they?” She took an urgent stride toward me.

  “I tried…” I doubled over into a fit of coughing. It was probably for the best. There was no way I could have finished that thought.

  Grabbing the front of my shirt, she shoved me back upright and gave me a hard shake. “Are they in there?”

  “I don’t know!” I shouted, fear and failure mingling into one soul-crushing emotion.

  There was a pause. Neither of us breathed. We desperately tried to rationalize our way out. She’d been unconscious when I found her. She hadn’t seen the inside of that house.

  The destruction.

  The carnage.

  The hell we’d both narrowly escaped.

  No. Bree hadn’t experienced any of that.

  And it showed, because she still had hope.

  “Rob!” she cried, darting past me. She slipped on the grass and fell, the brutal heat like a forcefield stopping her in her tracks. “Help me!” she screamed, giving up on standing altogether. She began crawling one inch at a time. “Eason, help me. We have to get them out.”

  It took every ounce of strength I had left to hook her around the hips. “Bree, stop.”

  She tore at my arms, kicking and flailing. “Let me go! I have to get them.” Her voice echoed off the trees, each reverberation slicing me to the core.

  “You can’t go in there!” I barked. “You won’t make it out.”

  “Then you go.” Her chest shook with broken exhales. “You did this. You did all of this. Now you go in there and get my husband and you fucking fix it.”

  I was in a state of shock, running on nothing more than adrenaline. I couldn’t feel the third-degree burns on my hands or the six-inch gash on my head, but her verbal jab hit me like a TKO. “What?”

  “Get him!” she screamed, her face vibrating with a pain so visceral it rattled my bones. Her anger broke into sobs, but her words were no less venomous. “You left him in there. You have to go get him. He never would have done that to you.”

  I drew in a deep breath, desperate for oxygen I couldn’t seem to absorb. My mind spun in a million different directions, a frantic sprint of my neurons to make sense of the world on fire around me. “I didn’t do this,” I gasped, glancing over my shoulder at the towering inferno, the weight of gravity suddenly more than I could carry. “I barely got you out. I thought you were Jessica. I was going to go back for—”

  That was all I got out before our entire lives exploded all over again.

  Maybe she was right and this was somehow my fault.

  Maybe I’d failed them both.

  But as blinding orange and red flames shot high into the sky, there was only one person left that I could save.

  “No!” Bree screamed as I dove on top of her, pinning her to the Earth. Fiery fragments of my life rained down over us, each one feeling like a rusty blade slicing the heart from my chest.

  She fought beneath me, biting and clawing at me.

  She cried his name and cussed mine.

  As sirens screamed in the distance, she had air in her lungs and a beat in her chest.

  And through it all, no matter how hard I prayed, she never magically became Jessica.

  BREE

  Numb, alone, and utterly lost, I stared at his side of the bed. With my hands under the pillow,
I angled my legs to where only three days ago he would have let out a playful hiss when my cold feet touched his calves. He would have grabbed my hip and dragged me toward him with a growled, “Get over here, woman.”

  And then he would have held me.

  Talked to me.

  Grown old with me.

  “Come back,” I whispered, squeezing my eyes shut, desperate to feel him again. I could still smell his signature scent of crisp lemon and cedarwood on the sheets. His dirty clothes were still in the hamper. A bag of his dry cleaning had been delivered since he’d taken his last breath. Yet my husband, the father of my children—my Rob. He was gone. “Please just come back,” I choked out around the inescapable sadness that had defined my every waking hour since the fire.

  It’s going to be okay. I heard his voice in my head. You and the kids. You’re going to be fine. Let’s be honest, you were always the four-hundred-horsepower engine behind this family. I was just the hood ornament.

  A sob bubbled in my throat. It was such a Rob thing to say. I swear the man could have convinced a mud puddle it was an ocean. He had a way about him that was so calm and rational it soothed my insecurities and left me with a smile in the process.

  God, I needed a smile.

  But most of all, I needed him.

  “How?” I begged. “How am I supposed to do this without you?”

  That was where our imaginary conversations always ended. The ghost in my head never had any answers. I couldn’t wrap my mind around how I’d ended up in this situation in the first place, much less how to carry on in the aftermath.

  Everything immediately before and after I’d woken up in Eason’s arms was splotchy. I remembered the panic and confusion. The anger and resentment. The absolute frustration that the world kept spinning and it was all I could do to hold on. But I’d never forget the earth-shattering pain as a police officer stood in my hospital room, informing me that Rob and Jessica’s bodies had both been recovered—or at least what was left of them. He’d asked me a dozen questions. I’d answered them as best I could, but nothing felt real anymore.

  Not the emptiness in my chest.

  Not the jagged ache in my soul.

  Not even the absolute devastation swirling in my stomach.

  Rob was gone.

  Jessica was gone.

  And people just expected me to carry on without them.

  I’d spent two days in the hospital, crying myself into a state of nothingness.

  The doctors diagnosed me with a concussion. They gave me oxygen for my lungs, antibiotics to prevent infections in the burns on my arms and legs, and even a sedative to help me sleep.

  Nothing eased the pain.

  Nothing ever would.

  It was an accident. While the four of us had sat upstairs, laughing and drinking wine, a faulty pipe had filled the basement with enough gas to take out the entire house. The second explosion was from Jessica’s car catching fire in the garage. According to the well-meaning but completely tone-deaf fire inspector, we’d been lucky to survive.

  I didn’t feel lucky. Though maybe Eason did.

  Eason.

  Jesus…Eason.

  We’d been whisked away in different ambulances to separate hospitals and hadn’t spoken since.

  There was no rulebook on behavior in the middle of a catastrophic tragedy. Desperation doesn’t come with courtesy or kindness. But it shouldn’t have come with this much blame.

  Yet, even as I lay in that bed, there was a conflicted part of me that wanted to rage at the world for what it had taken from me. A lot of the anger was aimed at Eason.

  He was always the loser in my little what-if games.

  What if we hadn’t been there that night?

  What if he hadn’t been trying to get back into Jessica’s good graces?

  What if he hadn’t bought that house in the first place?

  Of all the people, why did he have to survive?

  Why wasn’t it Rob?

  Why wasn’t it Jessica?

  Why…Eason?

  Still, he’d saved my life. Even through my heartbreak, I knew I should have been on my knees, thanking him. My kids still had their mom because of him. I still had a chance to watch them grow up—graduations, weddings, grandkids.

  Because of Eason, I still had a future.

  Though being trapped in a spiral of grief didn’t afford me many opportunities to focus on the silver lining.

  Our neighbor Evelyn, the incredible woman she was, had taken a few days off work to stay with all three of the kids while Eason and I were in the hospital. None of us had a lot of family support. My parents had been dead for years, and Rob’s mother was elderly with dementia. Eason had no one. He’d grown up without a dad, and his mom had died of breast cancer a few years back. Jessica’s family was beyond worthless. They would no doubt show up at the funeral, sobbing dramatically over her casket, but they would be gone again before she was even laid to rest.

  It had never been an issue before. We were the family. Me, Rob, Jessica, Eason.

  And then there were two.

  As if he’d been summoned from my thoughts, the doorbell rang and my stomach knotted.

  I’d gotten home from the hospital the day before, and after I’d told Asher about his father and had a nervous breakdown in my bedroom, Evelyn had insisted on staying one more night. The woman was amazing. I didn’t know what I would have done without her.

  Over a somber breakfast where Asher sat in my lap, absently pushing his food around his plate, and Luna and Madison sat in highchairs playing tug-of-war with a sippy cup, Evelyn had told us Eason had been released from the hospital. She’d smiled and tickled Luna’s stomach, saying something about how excited he was to come get his baby girl.

  And that was how I’d ended up upstairs, lying in bed, having a conversation with my dead husband rather than sorting through the myriad of warring emotions that accompanied the idea of seeing Eason.

  The doorbell rang again.

  “Shit,” I sighed, rolling out of bed, a staggering combination of guilt and panic colliding in my chest.

  Grief was a complex emotion. My brain told me it was just Eason. Rob’s best friend. Jessica’s husband. I’d spent countless Christmases, birthdays, and summer vacations with the guy. But the dark and bitter parts inside my shattered heart told me he was the man who had survived while the charred fragments left of my husband and my best friend lay in a funeral home across town. Yes, he’d saved my life, but in doing it, he’d sentenced them both to death.

  It wasn’t fair and it wasn’t right. But don’t worry—I hated myself for surviving too.

  Be nice, I heard Rob say in my head as I made my way down the stairs.

  “I’m always nice,” I replied, fully aware it was as much a lie as it was unnecessary. There was no one left for me to convince.

  Taking my time to mask my emotions, I slowly walked to the door. I assumed Evelyn had already let him in when I heard his deep, raspy voice in the entryway.

  “Hey, baby,” he cooed. “God, Daddy missed you.” His voice broke at the end, and as much as I didn’t want it to, it cracked in my heart too.

  Eason clung to his daughter, shoulders shaking, his bandaged hand cupping the back of her head. But as soon as my feet hit the bottom stair, his sunken, red-rimmed eyes jumped to mine.

  I froze, unable to so much as breathe under the weight of his gaze. I’d never witnessed such raw desolation before. Not even when I looked in the mirror.

  Dark circles hung under his eyes, which were barely supported by his hollow cheeks. I hadn’t been eating, either, but Eason looked like he’d lost significant weight. Had I not known it was him, I would have had to do a double take. His sandy blond hair, which was usually messy on the top, had been shaved, and a long line of stitches started above his eyebrow, disappearing somewhere at the top of his skull. The sleeve of colorful tattoos on his left arm was covered in bandages, but scabs and burns were prominent on his neck and face.

 
Eason had always been larger than life. But as he stood in my foyer, holding his daughter, his whole body sagged as if it were too much for his skeleton to support.

  “Hey,” he rasped.

  The knot in my stomach twisted painfully. “Hey.”

  We stared at each other for a long second, a million words hanging in the air between us, but we both knew that none of them would change our reality.

  My nose stung as I watched him shift Luna to his hip.

  He’d lost his wife.

  His house.

  His closest friend.

  All of his possessions.

  That little girl in his arms was everything he had left.

  I was as far as one could get from the sainthood my husband had teased me about, but grief, bitterness, and devastation aside, I was still a human looking at another human who was lost in the pits of despair. I didn’t have much to offer him in the way of emotional support, but I had resources Eason didn’t.

  “What are you planning to do?” I asked, crossing my arms over my chest as though the chill were in the room and not inside me.

  He looked down at the tile floor. “Ah, that’s a good question. A guy I used to gig with is going to let us crash in his guest room for a few nights. I need to get in touch with the insurance company and see what my options are for housing, but I haven’t made it that far yet. Luckily, Jessica overpacked for Luna to stay here and my buddy brought me a bag of clothes he’d collected.”

  He paused and drew in a shaky breath. “It’s like this domino effect, ya know? I don’t have my wallet. Which means I don’t have my debit card. But I gotta have an ID to get money from the bank. Not that cash really does you any good these days. Without a credit card, I can’t get a new phone, which is what I need for the insurance company to call me back. Meanwhile, I have no car, no way to get a car, and somehow during all of this, I have to figure out how to bury my wife.”

  He let out a guttural groan filled with more agony than any cry he could have produced. His chest heaved as he lifted his head, those desolate brown eyes once again meeting mine. “Jesus fuck, Bree. How is any of this real?”

  I couldn’t answer that. Part of me still hoped it was just a nightmare I would eventually wake up from.