Walk Me Home

by Liza Kendall

  All seven of the Fire and Rescue team were now there, as far as she could tell. There were two other Silverlake Fire and Rescue vehicles besides the monster fire truck: one an SUV, and the other a medical transport van. She was, frankly, surprised that they didn’t melt in the face of the wall of flames in front of them.

  The heat, even from here, was palpable and horrific. The same heat that had taken her grandmother and her family home. Eaten her life, her belongings, her innocence, and half her memories. Her mouth dried, her throat got lumpy and scratchy, and her palms went damp; her stomach cramped. Her pulse kicked up, and her eyes stung.

  Grouchy barked outside the window, so she absently opened the door and put her hand down to greet him. He bounced and wriggled and licked her; it didn’t take him long to scramble right into the truck. She didn’t try to stop him. He ran back and forth, right over her lap, on the bench seat, seeming distressed at a deep level by the fire. She couldn’t blame him.

  Charlie put her arms around him and hauled him into her lap, where he settled briefly, his fuzzy body shaking. She buried her face in his fur, inhaling the musky, earthy doggie scent of him. Then, without warning, Grouchy sprang up and right out the door of the truck.

  Horrified, she saw a cat, his gray plume of a tail on fire, streaking out of the Old Barn and making right for the live oak she’d parked next to.

  On fire. The poor cat’s tail was on fire.

  Charlie scrambled out of the truck to try to catch the cat, but it neatly dodged Grouchy and leaped for the trunk of the live oak, looking for solace in its branches.

  It was a cat; it didn’t know this was the worst possible thing it could do.

  Grouchy barked and whined, standing up on his hind legs and bracing his front paws against the massive trunk. He wasn’t going to have a lot of luck climbing the tree.

  Charlie ran toward it, but the cat went higher and higher, the poor thing yowling as the fire burned its tail. She could not, would not, let it burn to death. Out of the question. But the higher the cat went, the sicker she felt.

  She cast a quick glance over her shoulder at the Old Barn, to see if maybe one of the guys could peel off and help. But she knew it was hopeless. They had their hands full. She was on her own.

  The cat’s tail ignited dry leaves and branches on its way up. The whole tree could catch fire. She was crazy to go after the animal. But how could she not?

  She couldn’t let it die like this. She just couldn’t. It was too awful.

  Charlie ran back to Progress to get Granddad’s nasty old barn jacket. She grabbed a bottle of water from the floor, shoved it into a pocket of the coat, and tied the coat around her waist as she ran back to the tree. She gauged the lower branches of the oak, found a spot she could get a foothold, and started climbing.

  “Here, kitty!” she called as she went. “Come here. Let me help.”

  Don’t think about the height. Don’t think about the flames. Just climb.

  Climb.

  She looked up toward the cat, barely registering how fast she was going. She climbed like a possessed monkey.

  The cat howled.

  “Oh, baby. Come here. I’m trying to help you.”

  She got within a yard of it. The cat tried to turn to lick its tail, but then recoiled and howled again. Charlie felt tears dripping down her face. “C’mere, baby . . .”

  The animal stared at her, wild-eyed.

  A branch crackled; she made the mistake of looking down. She almost vomited.

  Cat. Focus.

  Should she jump?

  No. She was how high up? Twenty feet? Twenty-five? She’d break her neck, not to mention every other bone in her body. And she’d come to rescue the cat . . . that was the whole point of all of this. So she wasn’t going down again without it.

  Charlie swung her foot over the next branch up, and somehow pulled herself to within about fourteen inches of the poor creature. It flattened itself on the tree, lashing its tail and igniting yet more branches. It wasn’t going to crawl into her arms. There was only one way to help it.

  She untied the barn jacket from her waist and threw it over the cat. The she wriggled up one more branch and rolled the animal in the jacket to smother the flames, wincing as it howled again. She pulled the cat-jacket bundle toward her with one hand while she clung to the tree with the other.

  “Poor baby,” she murmured. “Come here, sweetheart.”

  The cat scrabbled against her, then quieted. Then it began to meow piteously.

  The flames on its tail were out. Thank God.

  Thank God.

  “We’re going straight to the vet,” Charlie said. “We’re going to get you help. Right away.”

  But when she looked down, the tree was almost entirely on fire.

  Grouchy was still at the base, now barking hysterically.

  And she realized that it was impossible to climb while her arms were full of traumatized kitty. Think fast, girl. Think!

  She didn’t want to think. She wanted to vomit. She felt dizzy, on the verge of passing out. But her survival instinct kicked in.

  She clung to the branch with her thighs. She lowered the cat to her lap and eased the jacket from around it; she slipped her arm into first one sleeve and then the other. Then she zipped the cat inside, gathered the bottom of the coat and tucked it into her waistband. She was, for once, glad it was tight.

  The barking below had stopped. She looked down through the branches again and saw that Grouchy was gone. No, there he was: running in a blue streak toward the Old Barn. Stopping there next to one of the guys, barking wildly.

  Charlie did what she could to control her rising panic.

  Deducing Grouchy’s message, the firefighter turned his head toward her and rapidly took in the situation. Then he shouted at the others before hurtling toward her with a ladder, the dog sprinting in the lead.

  Charlie wanted to climb down toward them, but she saw nothing but flames below her. They consumed almost every lower branch of the oak. She had nowhere to go but up.

  Dear Lord.

  Higher and higher. And she could barely deal with climbing a step stool. The treetop didn’t bear thinking of. She already felt dizzy and sick and trapped and terrified.

  Up.

  Climb, Charlie. Get your ass up higher before it gets barbecued, along with the cat. Move!

  She swallowed bile; her hands and knees shook. This made it even harder to trust her own judgment in selecting each next branch. Would it hold her weight? Could she cling to it with her sweaty palms, without her own fear getting the better of her?

  She compartmentalized the fear: shoved it into a box and slammed the lid. She had no use for it in this situation. She had to have faith instead.

  She risked looking down again, which resulted in a different f-word coming to mind as full-blown vertigo kicked in. She had the real sensation of falling, had to tell herself it was a lie. Had to cling to her branch, feel its rough bark scraping her skin, inhale its peculiar oaky, smoky essence.

  You are not falling. Not!

  She hung on. The fireman with the ladder had almost reached the tree. She noticed, almost surreally, that the ladder had orange feet. And aluminum was metal . . . Wouldn’t it get hot? Wouldn’t it burn them both?

  Stop.

  Have faith.

  He’ll get you down from here. He’s a trained professional.

  The cat wriggled against her stomach and meowed again. It seemed more terrified than Charlie. “It’s okay, baby,” she said. “We’re gonna be fine.”

  The cat seemed to know she was lying. It tried to burrow into her. She risked letting go of the current branch with her left hand, and stroked its head through the barn jacket. “It’s okay. We’ll go to the kitty doctor next. She’ll make your tail feel better, okay, sweetie?”

  Meow.

&
nbsp; Two more of the firehouse guys, working in perfect coordination, peeled off with a hose from Big Red and aimed it squarely at the oak tree.

  The guy in full gear, with the ladder, pulled off his respirator and yelled, “Hang on! Brace yourself!”

  The guy was Jake.

  She had perhaps two seconds to process this before the hose blasted the branches just below her with a torrent of water.

  The first in a series of irrational thoughts popped into her head: He’s speaking to me.

  Only because he had to.

  “Brace yourself.” Last words he’ll ever say to you.

  And you’re now endangering his life.

  What if a branch breaks and falls on his head? What if he burns to death trying to save your sorry butt?

  “Charlie. Hello? Charlie!” He was yelling in that deep baritone of his, the one that vibrated into her very spine. “Climb up to that branch—the one just to the right! Do you see it? It’s sturdier.”

  She looked up. The cat wriggled inside Granddad’s barn jacket.

  “Do it, Charlie. Now! We’ve got to get the flames out, right where you are now.”

  She followed instructions.

  Half a second later, water blasted the spot where she’d been.

  She looked down and, blessedly, saw no fire. Just hissing, smoldering, smoking oak branches.

  Then the ladder slammed into place against the trunk of the tree, just below her. Jake shot up it in a yellow-uniformed blur. His rugged, handsome face suddenly appeared opposite her: his dark winged eyebrows pulled into a ferocious squiggle of anxiety, his eyes an intense indigo, his mouth a grim slash. “Charlie, what the fu—”

  Then he took her face between his gloved hands and kissed her, hard.

  She almost fell out of the tree. But his hands moved down to her shoulders, and he held her steady, pressing her back into the trunk, such as it was this high up.

  And then he found his words again. They came out in a torrent, much like the water from the massive fire hose. “Are you okay? What in the name of all that’s holy are you doing up this godforsaken tree? Why are you here? I could wring your neck with my bare hands, you crazy—”

  Meow. The cat spoke for her, to her eternal gratitude.

  Jake registered that Charlie’s stomach was wriggling. “Are you kidding me?”

  “Its tail was on fire,” she whispered.

  “You could have died up here! Do you get that? You could have been toasted like a marshmallow! Of all the stupid, idiotic—”

  “On fire. The cat’s tail,” she repeated. “I couldn’t—”

  Jake’s expression softened. He took his hands off her shoulders.

  “I don’t want to hear it,” he said. “We’re going down the ladder now.”

  She looked through all the branches—it had to be thirty feet to the ground. She felt the vertigo again. She tried to moisten her dry mouth so that she could swallow. Her lips were still tingling from that sudden, fierce, possessive kiss. But there was no moisture to be had, and she couldn’t get past a giant lump in her throat, one that felt like maybe it could be the cat’s twin.

  “I can’t,” was all she said. Her whole body started to shake.

  Meow.

  “Charlie, how in blazes did you think you were going to get down with that cat? You’ve been afraid of heights since you were ten!”

  Wordlessly, she shook her head.

  In less than a second, he had her jacket unzipped.

  Meow!

  “Shut it,” Jake said to the cat, but his voice was gentle. He swore softly when he saw its tail, pink and angry where the hair had been singed off and the flesh burned. “Charlie, we’re going down in a fireman’s carry. Got it? But you’ll have to hold the cat. Otherwise it’ll get squashed.”

  “I can’t! No!”

  “You can. You can do this. Don’t overthink it.”

  “But—”

  Jake scooped the cat out of Granddad’s barn jacket by the scruff of its neck.

  It howled.

  “Sorry, buddy,” he said to it. Then, to Charlie, “One, two, three—”

  “No!”

  And his arm encircled her like a band of steel, tossing her unceremoniously over his shoulder like a sack of grain. All of the breath she’d been using to protest whooshed out of her, and her face pressed into the filthy, smoky, wet jacket he wore. Somehow it smelled good, like warmth and safety and . . . just Jake. She hung there, petrified but weirdly reassured, unable and, frankly, unwilling to move. She was simply glad for his confidence, his competence.

  How he was balancing on the ladder with no hands, she didn’t know. Then she saw his booted feet, hooked around the sides. Unable to look at the ground so far below them, she shut her eyes tightly and willed her panic to recede.

  “Here. Take the cat, Charlie. He needs you. And I can’t get us down without at least one hand.”

  She opened her eyes long enough to cradle the cat, who was clearly not eager to travel this way. “Neither of us has a choice, okay, little guy?”

  Her voice seemed to soothe the animal, and it stopped wriggling, just let out a long, woeful kitty moan of distress.

  “Trust me, I feel the same way,” she said.

  Awkward step by awkward step, the three of them descended. When they got to the ground, the other two firefighters cheered. They cheered, at least, until Jake set her on her feet and they could identify that it was Charlie Nash, destroyer of their livelihoods.

  Then their voices strangled in their throats. They turned and walked away, back toward the Old Barn, which was now just a mass of smoldering, hissing wood. The fire there was finally out, too. Thanks to them.

  “Shoulda brought the cat down and left Charlie in the tree,” she overheard one of them say as they trudged off with the hose.

  Charlie hugged the cat to her, miserable. She couldn’t really blame them.

  “Yeah, you’re not going to win any popularity contests around the guys,” Jake said finally, in the awkward silence that ensued. He took off his helmet and stuffed it under his arm.

  She shook her head. “Thank you,” she managed.

  “I can’t really say that you’re welcome, but I’m glad you’re alive. Saving Deck’s wannabe cat doesn’t redeem you, so don’t say another word to me. Got it?”

  If there’d been any anger in his tone, it might have been bearable, because it’d mean that he still felt something for her. But there was none.

  She couldn’t even meet his gaze; she just bent her head and pressed her face into the cat’s fur. She finally nodded.

  “Get that poor animal up to Deck,” he said. Then he turned on his heel and went after the other guys.

  Charlie watched him go while she battled the turmoil of her emotions. She was grateful to be alive, but she wanted to weep at Jake’s callous dismissal of her. She wanted to jump into his arms and kiss him—yet she also wanted to hide away from not only him and the rest of the crew, but from herself. Could she just lock herself in a closet for the next ten years, until everyone forgot who she was?

  “Meow,” said the only creature at Silverlake Ranch willing to speak to her.

  “Meow,” Charlie said back. She took the few wobbly steps required to Progress, opened the driver’s-side door, and fell in. She closed the door, set the cat down next to her, and started the engine. Her hands were still trembling too much to drive.

  But she needed to get the cat to Declan so he could get it to the vet immediately. So she put the truck in gear and rolled slowly down the gravel road, taking in the devastation of the Old Barn as she went.

  It was blackened, sodden, and steaming. The east side of the roof had collapsed, though it looked as though most of the structure was still standing. Well, not the east wall.

  The furnishings were a dead loss. Lila would b
e devastated. Deck, too. All the work they’d put into the place . . . up in smoke.

  Charlie rolled onward, speechless. She took the dogleg in reverse and drove to the back of the main house—she wasn’t sure exactly why she’d gone to the back. Maybe because she’d exited from there with Bridezilla, without saying goodbye. Maybe because right now, she only felt good enough for the back door.

  As she went around to the passenger side to collect the cat, she saw Mick drive Jake up in the fire department SUV. The two men got out and hurried toward the front door.

  Maybe I can slip in and find Declan and slip out again without them seeing me.

  Charlie carried the cat up the back steps, turned the knob, and stepped into the kitchen. She gazed again at the blue walls, willing them to soothe her, to guide her in what to say to Declan. Jake’s all right, no thanks to me. I caused him extra-crispy extra danger! Hooray . . .

  But Declan was already with his brother. She could hear Jake’s voice, rumbling in his deep baritone. Peeking around the doorjamb, she saw Declan, Jake, and Lila huddling together. Charlie stayed where she was, with her sliver of a view.

  “The fire’s completely out,” Jake said.

  “Thank God,” Lila said.

  “Amen,” Deck muttered, wiping his blackened sleeve against his equally filthy face.

  Jake was still in full uniform, minus the helmet, his dark curls in wild, sweaty disarray. His back was to her, and Lila had her arms wrapped around him as if she’d never let him go.

  “Easy, sis,” he said. But he bent his head and pressed his forehead against Lila’s. She was openly crying.

  Charlie felt her own eyes well up at the sight: the Braddocks together, as a family unit. A bond she’d thought she’d broken forever had finally been repaired. A bond that she’d helped to sever.

  She felt like mud on their floor. It was poetic justice, really. For how the Nashes had made Jake feel. The family circle had closed . . . and this time it was Charlie on the outside.

  She, of all people, did not belong here in this circle of love. In fact, if Jake discovered she was here, the Braddock family might well be destroyed all over again. She owed it to Lila to get out of here, as quickly and silently as possible.