He shrugged with a little twitch of his shoulder. “I didn’t know she had run in there after you. And before you ask, no, I don’t know how she got you out. I don’t know how she even knew you were in there. By the time I got back to the barn you were lying on the ground with a wet blanket over you and she was lying there next to you wearing nothing but ashes and soot.” Taylor dipped his head, his mouth pressing into a hard, thin line. “You were both lying mighty still.” He sniffed again and rubbed at his nose. “You oughtn’t to scare a man like that.”
“See her,” I whispered harshly. Taylor’s face went blank. I spoke again very carefully around the gravel and broken glass that lined my throat. “I want to see her.”
Taylor shook his head slightly. “She looks a little rough, Bea. Maybe you should wait until the both of you are a little better.”
I closed my eyes, slipped my hands underneath me and pushed. The pain that shot across my back was intense and nearly buckled my elbows.
Taylor put a hand to my shoulder and pushed me back down. “Hey, now, you can’t get up. You’re hooked to stuff.”
“Have to see her,” I said as all my energy slowly drained away.
Taylor puffed out a disapproving breath. “What is it with the women in this family? Y’all are more stubborn than a whole herd of hungry mules.”
“See her. Please.”
“All right,” he said with an exasperated sigh. “She’s more mobile than you are right now, even with the foot thing. Just lie still and I’ll see if she’s awake.”
“Okay.” I closed my eyes and fell asleep.
• • •
When I opened my eyes again, Meri was sitting in the chair next to my bed, her chin was in her hands and she was staring at me. Her whole head was swathed in bandages. Her forearms glistened with some sort of salve smeared over angry red blisters. A small line of black char ran just below her elbows. She smiled. I tried to smile back, but it must have looked ghastly. She put a finger to my lips and I kissed it. She leaned over and kissed my temple, brushing her lips lightly across my skin. I was surprised that it didn’t hurt.
“The nurses made me promise not to let you talk too much,” she said settling into her chair. “Your throat was slightly singed. On the inside, they said. You have a little damage to your vocal cords, but they should be all right if you don’t work them too hard.” She smiled again. “That’s only just a little weirder than the burn on the inside of my right armpit or the ones between my toes.”
“How?” I asked in my broken voice.
“Which one? The armpit or the toes?”
“Armpit.”
“I have no idea.” She gave me a wry smile. “I can’t imagine what I was doing to get a burn under there. Waving at the parade, maybe? One guess is as good as the next.”
“Toes?”
She smiled wider. “It seems I forgot to put my shoes on before I ran out of the house.” She saw me looking hard at her and the smile faded. “I stepped on a few embers. Some got stuck between my toes. You have a few burns on your legs too where I dragged you through them. They’re not too bad, but I’m afraid your blue jeans were ruined.”
“Show.”
She leaned back in the chair and held up a bandaged foot that was twice its normal size. “I’m supposed to keep it propped up, but it hurts more that way,” she said, lowering her foot again. She was lying, but it wasn’t worth pursuing. She would put it up when the nurses made her.
“Your head?” I asked.
She touched the place where her bandages dipped down over her forehead. “It looks like we might have nearly matching scars,” she said. “Isn’t that romantic?”
“Head, Meri,” I demanded quietly.
Her hand dropped into her lap. “Part of the ceiling collapsed. I was standing in the doorway of the floor when something large and flaming fell on me. That’s where I got these burns, too,” she said showing me her arms.
“Standing over me?”
She reached over and put her hand to my mouth. “Don’t forget what they said about talking too much.”
I moved my hand slowly, inching my fingers across the sheet until I could touch her hand. I grasped her wrist and held it tightly.
“I’m sorry,” I said against her fingers.
Her eyes narrowed just a bit. “Sorry about what, Bea?” she asked. “Sorry about burning my barn to ashes or sorry about trying to leave in the middle of the night without saying good-bye?” Her tone was wry, but her eyes held a deep hurt.
“You know?”
She nodded slowly, almost reluctantly. “I woke up when you went to the bathroom. I listened to you leave, heard you hopping over the squeaky floorboards. You crept quiet as a mouse down the stairs, but I heard the kitchen door open and close. I got out of bed and watched you from the window.” She drew her hand away and I let go of her wrist. “When you went into the barn with your saddlebags, I went back to bed and buried my head under the pillow so I wouldn’t have to hear your motorcycle start or hear you drive away.” She scowled at the floor. “I really hate that sound.”
“I’m sorry,” I said again.
She shook her head sharply. “I stayed under the pillow for a long time. Then I heard Sergeant making an awful racket in the yard. I figured he was upset about you leaving, but then I realized that if I could hear Sarge, I should have heard your motorcycle, too. But I hadn’t, so I got up to look. That’s when I saw the barn burning.”
“Why did you let me go?”
She didn’t answer for a long moment and then she said, “You were doing what you thought was best.” Her face was not pinched but it was pained. She looked at me with sad eyes. “It would’ve been wrong to try and make you stay. That would make me just one more person in your life trying to force you into doing something you didn’t want to do.” She folded her hands together and tucked them in her lap. “It would still be wrong to hold you, Bea, even now.” Her eyes blinked rapidly. “When you get better, you can take my truck if you want to. If you still need it.”
I blinked back at her. “Why would you do that?”
“I want you to do what you think is the right thing to do, even if I don’t agree with you. You need to be able to live with yourself more than you need to be able to live with me.”
“You don’t think I should run anymore.” My voice cracked, and Meri reached for a cup of water.
“No, I don’t,” she said, placing a straw between my lips. “I think you should try to face things head-on. I’ve been thinking about it a lot, you know, in the past few days.” She took the straw away and touched the corner of my mouth where the water had dripped. “Your father’s been bullying you all your life, and all your life you’ve been running from him as if his threats were promises.” She put the cup down on the table. “But they’re not. Just because he says he can do something doesn’t mean he really can. There is some fairness in the world, you know.”
“My father?”
“He’s around here someplace,” she said with a wave of her hand. “He’s been making such an ass of himself trying to push around the hospital staff that they’re starting to get a big kick out of tripping him up. They won’t even let him in here to see you. Don’t worry about him right now, Bea. You’re in a safe place.”
“Am I really?” I asked, looking at my empty hand lying on the sheet in front of me.
Meri gave me that quizzical tilt of her head. “What are you asking me?”
“You still want me, Meri, all burned like this?”
Meri leaned in closer, reached over and brushed her fingers through my hair. “Your face only has very minor burns on it, Bea. Your back will heal in time. You might not want to wear cocktail dresses anymore, but you’re still a very beautiful woman.”
“You?” I asked, looking at the bandages around her head.
She touched the white swath of gauze. “I wasn’t a great beauty to begin with.”
“Are to me,” I said softly.
She looked at
me, not quite believing. “Even now?”
“Cute in a turban.” I tried to smile.
She grinned. “Why, thank you, sweet cheeks,” she said with an exaggerated drawl, patting her bandages with the palm of her hand as if they were a fancy hairdo. “I’m so glad you like it.” The grin faded from her face. Her hand sank slowly and she stared at it. “Bea, I need you to know something.”
“What?”
“The doctors aren’t sure if my hair will ever grow back in some places.”
I made a noise, a small, tight groan. I loved Meri’s hair, the shimmering gold blond of it as it spilled across her pillow, its tickling softness when it brushed across my skin. It was a source of pride for her too, a graceful balance to her angular planes.
“My fault.”
Her hand covered mine. “It’s not your fault,” she said. “And if you can’t deal with the way I look . . .” Her voice caught in her throat. “I mean, you’re still welcome to take the truck for whatever the reason. You don’t have to tell me why you’re leaving.”
“You want me to leave?” I asked, my words sounding more broken than ever.
Meri’s face crumbled. She shook her head and mouthed the word no. No sound came out of her.
I turned my hand over underneath hers and laced our fingers together. “I’m not going to leave you again, Meri, no matter what. I need you to believe that I won’t.”
She wiped at her cheek with the sleeve of her hospital gown. “I don’t know what that means, Bea.”
“I want to stay with you.” I swallowed painfully. “I want you to stay with me.”
“I still don’t understand,” she said sounding confused. “Are you asking me to go with you?”
“No. I’m asking you to marry me.”
Meri’s eyes widened and she sat back in her chair. Our fingers came unlaced. She stared at me, unmoving, barely breathing.
I didn’t like her silence. “I can’t get down on one knee right now, but please believe that the question is sincere.”
“I don’t know what to say to that,” she said. “It’s not even legal in this state.”
“Say yes anyway. We’ll make our promises to each other, not to the state.”
She shook her head slowly, not like she was saying no, but like she was trying to settle the idea in her brain. “Why do you want to do that?”
“I want you to believe me when I promise that I’ll stop running away from things. I don’t want you to worry anymore that you’ll wake up one day and find me gone.”
She raised a hand to her head and touched her bandages. “What about my hair?”
I wrinkled my nose at her. “I don’t want to marry your hair.”
“Bea, I’m serious,” she said sternly. “It’s very possible that I’ll spend the rest of my life looking like the wrong end of an ugly dog.”
“Not to me,” I said moving my hand toward her. “Not to anyone, I think.”
She shook her head and rubbed her hand across the bandages. “Can you honestly say that you would still find me attractive with only half a head of hair?”
“If I could move I’d show you how much.” My longing for her rose above the pain, and I tried to let my face show it. “Right here, right now.”
She smiled at me then, a lazy half smile that built slowly as want filled her eyes. “What would Aunt Beatrice think?”
“I don’t think her poor heart could take it.”
“No, not about that,” she said with a shy wave of her hand. “About us getting married.”
I grinned as best as I could. “We’ll invite some celebrities. She’ll love it.”
Meri rolled her eyes and nodded. “Would we have some kind of ceremony where we invited friends and family, too?”
“Sure, if you want it that way.”
“Would we have a rock band or something?”
“At the wedding?” I asked, not quite able to picture a rock band playing the wedding march.
“No,” she answered with a grin. She probably couldn’t picture it either. “I mean at the reception.”
“Sure,” I said. “If you want one.”
She paused for a second, biting at her lip. “Would you dance with me, in front of everyone, even if I have lumpy scars on my head and no hair? Even if they all scowled at us and called us bad names?”
“Sam can put the pictures in the paper. We’ll sell the video to the Politics and Power show.”
She tilted her head and studied me very intensely. “You’re serious, aren’t you?”
“Yes, I am.” Her eyes were a pale ice blue under her white bandages. “Meri, will you marry me?”
She leaned forward in her chair and kissed the corner of my mouth. “Yes,” she said softly. “Yes, I will.”
“Okay, then.” I smiled and closed my eyes.
People were arguing and it was very annoying. Everything had been so quiet for the last few days with me drifting around in a painful bliss. I woke often to find Meri’s funny eyes staring at me, blue one time, gray the next, depending on the strength of the light or the color of her shirt. Or sometimes I would wake up to find Taylor asleep in the chair next to me, chin on his chest, his ball cap cocked crookedly atop his head, snoring softly. Most often, I woke to nurses politely poking and prodding at me, drawing gallons of blood, sticking tubes down my throat, salving my burns or rubbing cold ultrasound paddles over my stomach. They were still concerned about the baby, but there wasn’t much to be done except keep an eye on it. It would be all right or it wouldn’t, but saying that out loud made both Meri and Taylor frown pretty fiercely.
Even with all that, I rested better than I had in a long time. Something that lived inside me, wound like a tightly coiled spring, had eased. I couldn’t say why because nothing had changed, really. My father was still running around being an atrocious pain in the ass. When he could get in to see me, which wasn’t often, because the nurses wouldn’t let him come in when Meri or Taylor were there, he kept trying to get me to sign papers that gave him legal authority to make decisions for me. Saying no to him got easier each time. Each time I remembered what Meri said to me. His threats were not promises. And so they weren’t.
I shifted in the bed slightly, carefully rolling onto one shoulder to ease the pressure on my chest. Angry words buzzed like gnats around my ears. I turned my head to listen.
“I don’t care who you are. It wouldn’t matter if you were the president of the United States. You are not authorized to make decisions on her behalf.” It was a woman’s voice, a rough, smoky, tough as nails voice that I didn’t recognize.
“I’m her father.” My father answered in his senatorial tone, the one he used for shouting slogans and haranguing the masses. The two voices seemed well matched.
“It wouldn’t change anything even if you were the pope,” said the woman. “You’re not authorized to move her. She’s over twenty-one, an adult and responsible for her own decisions.”
“I keep telling you people that she needs a better burn unit that what you have here.”
“Not now she doesn’t. She’s stable and her back is healing quite nicely.”
“It’s peeling off. She’s going to have scars. I don’t want her to have scars.” There was a slight rise in volume, a subtle shifting of pitch. My father knew he was losing this argument. Now the threats would come.
“It would peel even if she were in the Mayo clinic,” the woman said calmly. “That doctor you’ve imported has done everything possible to minimize the scarring. He can’t do anything more than what he’s already done.”
“I can’t tell you how strongly I disagree.” I couldn’t see him from where I was, but I could picture him crossing his arms and lifting his chin, using his advantage in height to emphasize his disdain. “I’m telling you she needs a better facility, and if I have to have you removed from your position to make it happen, I will.”
“You don’t have that authority, Senator Torrington,” the woman said in a tone of flat finality. �
��Even if you could, the decision still belongs to your daughter. If she decides that she wants to be moved, then she’s welcome to it. But she’s already made it quite clear that she doesn’t want to be separated from her friend, and I don’t hear you offering to move them both together.”
“That other girl isn’t my daughter.” There was a shade of disgust in his voice, and it reminded me of the revulsion on Aunt Beatrice’s face that time in the kitchen. It occurred to me that those two were more alike than either one of them would be comfortable with. I suddenly pictured my father wearing Aunt Beatrice’s blue hair and started to giggle to myself.
“That other girl saved your daughter’s life.” The woman’s voice was saying. “That other girl is someone your daughter cares for very much.”
“Christ.” My father’s voice exploded and bounced off the walls. “Does the whole world know about that?”
The woman laughed. It was a startlingly clear sound to come from such a rough voice, and I smiled to hear it.
“The part of the world that matters knows it,” she said, “and the rest of the world will hear of it soon.”
“What do you mean?”
“That hotshot doctor of yours heard opportunity knocking and called a press conference. It should be happening right about now, and since you’re here, I’m guessing that someone forgot to tell you about it. I have no doubt the subject of your daughter and her friend will be thoroughly discussed, not mention the very mysterious fact that she’s pregnant.”
There was a long pause. “She really is?”
“She really is, Mr. Torrington. About three months or so.”
I didn’t hear him answer, but I heard heavy footfalls receding down the hallway. I recognized them as another storm coming, the thuds of his heels falling like thunder, the sharp slaps of his toes cracking like lightning. When I was young, that specific cadence of footfalls used to terrify me. I would run at their approach and hide in the hall closet, sitting behind the coats, burying my face in the soft furs until the storm had passed. It didn’t mean anything at all to me now, just a strong wind blowing outside the windowpane.
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