Love me ... Again (7 page)

Chapter ten

Hours pass, dragging us from dawn towards early afternoon. Marjorie and I herd the cattle the men drive our way towards the salvation of the river. Six hundred head of hurt and frightened cattle mill noisily around me. I patrol the frighten beasts as they try to break loose and head blindly back up the mountain into danger. Marjorie puts her nursing skills to work and tends to the wounded beasts. Even on the outside of the herd, the smell of charred hide brings bile to my parched, burning throat. I ignore it and with grimy hands I impatiently brush trickles of sweat from my hot brow.

I turn towards the mountain. For the thousandth time. My frown deepens. Colt had said its name was,
Devil’s Middle
, an apt description I think sourly. The bright flames cloaked by a thick cloud of smoke are raging around the tree-lined center. We’re still waiting for air and manpower from the closest town, two hundred miles away. Till then we’re on our own. A group of cattle moos disconsolately as they break through the cover of the trees at the mountain’s foot and head towards me. My heart clenches in my chest as I peer desperately at the horseman, then plummets.

Michael, Colt’s and Jett’s father, is the driver. He urges several dozen cattle towards the river behind me. He pulls level with me, avoids eye contact, which sends a flush up my throat. He tips his hat and hustles over to Marjorie. I’m too far away to hear even a sound of what he’s saying. But I see it. Marjorie’s face goes slack, before she quickly hauls it together. She turns a swift glance at me and looks away even though I’m too far away to read a thought in her face.

Fear screams at me. I gallop over, stop beside her, “is something wrong?” I ask breathlessly.

She won’t meet my eyes, I reach over to Michael, grab hold of his soot covered shirt sleeves, he turns to me slowly as if compelled to. What I see in his eyes terrifies me.

“God. No!” I back away, my hands slip on the reins, horror, followed by a burning tide of anguish so complete, I open my mouth to scream but no sound comes out. The pain has sucked all the strength from me so that I can’t even make a sound.

I turn away and then I’m galloping madly. I push the horse to ruthless speed as I careen wildly towards the burning mountain, behind me I hear Marjorie and Michael’s shout at me to stop.

I won’t. Tears burn my eyes, smoke rushes towards me with breakneck speed, filling my lungs and mouth, burrowing into every part of my exposed skin.

I keep going, up the mountain. The horse tenses beneath me, senses its doom but it’s a tough-mettled stallion and it doesn’t throw me off and bolt. Time somehow freezes as I move into the trees being eaten by the smoke and fire.

I stop and yell, “Colt! Jett!” and force myself to wait. The lick and hiss of wood being consumed is my only answer.

There’s a crash. I scream and spin around and instinctively look up. Through the white smoke, shards of orange burning debris streak through the air, land behind me and immediately that sickening, cracking sound of pine needles being burnt springs to life. Smoke and the thick tops of the pine trees block out the sun and … I realize a little too late, most of the rain that had fallen last night. I’m standing on dry kindling.

I should go back but somehow I can’t. Jett’s face comes back, wounded, defiant and the quiet steel of Colt’s eyes. I push on.

Around me the hissing, cracking sounds gets louder, it’s as if the fire is talking, gibbering madly around me. A blast of hot air flashes past my face, my horse rears and I scramble to stay on top. Another loud crash goes off to my left. I scream in terror. My heart thumps so hard I gasp from the pain twisting the bones of my chest. Beneath me, one thousand pounds of equine muscle quivers in trepidation. Black smoke is billowing down upon me, wrapping and sliding its tentacles through the shadowing branches of pine trees … and something moves within it.

I freeze, search frantically around the closing walls of smoke that inches closer. It’s gaining in speed, its feet pound the dirt with rapid, staccato vibrations. I tense in my saddle, grip the reins. It bursts through.

“Jett!” I jolt from my horse and run to him. His face is black with soot. Blue eyes red and wide with shock stare incredulously at me. “Angie? What the hell are you doing up here?”

My smile isn’t only for him. I wait for Colt to come hurtling out behind Jett. Seconds go by.

Jett grips my shoulders, shakes me roughly from my reverie, I turn irritated at him, “Stop. Where’s Colt?” He doesn’t answer. He grips my hand and tries to hoist me back onto my horse.

I frown darkly at him, repeat myself, “Where is Colt?”

Jett gets up behind me, grips the horse’s reins, imprisoning me. His blue eyes meet mine and with a pang that shatters my heart, I see that his eyes are not only red from the smoke. Fresh tears that he has never shed in front of me wind their way lazily down his cheeks, cleaning away the filth of the soot.

He just looks at me.

I go numb, then explode, “Get your hands off me!” I scream at him, the horse beneath me responds to my panic and rears up halfway, Jett, an expert horseman handles him without breaking eye contact with me.

His begins slowly as if he too cannot quite trust the words coming out of his mouth, “the top of the mountain is on fire, Angie. Colt went to get some young calves that had gone up there, I tried to follow but …. but,” he looks down at his hand and I see that they’re raw and swollen to twice their size, he must be in agony. His voice trails off.

But it doesn’t make sense. I cannot compute what he’s saying with the man that had claimed me so completely hours before. That had made love to me as if his soul would be forever linked with mine.

I rear back and a scream that had every bit of me inside wells up and tears from my throat, “LET ME GOOOO!” I swing back at him, hurting him, not caring that he’s already been hurt. I cannot accept what I see in his distraught eyes.

Jett ropes his strong arms around me, “We’ve got to go or we’ll be trapped,” he says hoarsely.

I snatch at the reins in his hands, he anticipates me and winds them around his thick wrists. Enraged I snarl at him, “You can go back. I won’t leave him!”

Jett explodes with fury, his eyes glitter half-crazed with pain, “do you think I would leave my brother willingly? I love him too!” his voice ends in a broken sob.

“Oh God … Noooo. No,” I hide my face in my hands, and start to tremble uncontrollably. Jett moves and the horse begins to turn around. I throw all my weight sideways to get off but again Jett catches me, an iron clamp around my waist.

“Colt! Colt!” I rage at the forest around me, as if the dying trees will answer, tell me what’s happening to the man I love. I feel as if I’m losing my mind. I claw at Jett’s back as we begin moving downhill, my already broken fingernails rake through the thin fabric of his shirts, I hit skin and I claw deeper down into him, he grunts, stops for just a second and slaps my hands away, his blue eyes are black holes in his haggard face, “Choose Angie, die here … or go back with me,” he casts a despairing glance behind him as if he too still hasn’t chosen.  He looks grimly back at me, “if anyone can survive this, it’s Colt,” he finishes on a strangled breath.

I want to believe. I have to. I slump against Jett and close my swollen eyes. Minutes later we burst out of the tree line and there is a small army of fire rescue team already streaming in. They stare through us, their grim determined eyes blank walls below their helmets. Overhead a small white Cessna is blanketing the hottest sides of the mountain with bright orange fire retardant. Michael and Marjorie run to us.

Jett vaults off the horse and goes to his parents. They fall into each other’s arms.

I turn back to the mountain alone … and wait.

Three days later

I sit on the grass, filthy in the same soot covered jeans and shirt I’d worn the night Colt and I made love. There are more fire crews crawling around the mountain, discussing the few difficult hotspots that they can’t get to. They’ll have to let them burn themselves out.

I close my eyes, in my palms I’m crushing a handful of blackened grass. All around me the valley floor is no longer golden but blackened and gutted, only the river and the herd crowded around it are safe. The mountain is a giant mass of charred wood and stone, still smoking in distance spots. I sniff. There are no more tears. The pain has gone too deep.

I call to him in my heart … but I don’t feel anything. Wouldn’t I know it if Colt was dead? Feel it somehow?

A shadow falls over me, I don’t react as Jett folds his long frame in the grass beside me. I don’t look at him.

He sighs and reaches for my hand, I tug it back but he won’t release it, his somber blue eyes meet mine, “Stop. I want to hold you.”

My mouth trembles, “you wouldn’t if you knew,” I admit not looking at him.

He turns to me, his eyes a dull blue, ravaged by sadness, “Colt’s all that matters now.”

I grip his hand in my own, our intertwined palms vibrate and I can’t tell if I’m the only one trembling. But he doesn’t say anything, just squeezes my hand harder and looks toward the mountain again.

Three rescue crews are searching for Colt. Marjorie couldn’t stand it anymore. Michael took her back to the ranch last night. That hard woman had had to be sedated.

Jett draws me to him and wraps his arms strongly around my shoulders.

I turn to him, try to smile.  He winces and I know I look awful, “I’m so sorry for hurting you. It’s my fault.” It’s the apology I should’ve given him three days ago.

Jett chuckles harshly, and there’s a festering wound in his eyes that I’ve put there. During these last days his boyish cheerfulness has vanished and he’d become more like, acidic grief stings the back of my throat, like Colt.  Hard and unstoppable.

“I-” I stop because four men have broken out of the trees, walking so slowly for a moment I think I’m just hallucinating. A stretcher is between them.

I’m on my feet and running towards them. A guy in front hold up a commanding hand, “Stop!” he barks.

I don’t give a shit. I push towards them, several scowls come my way but I have to see him. I stop. I would’ve fallen if Jett hadn’t been right behind me. It’s not Colt.

It’s the remains of him. Charred and burnt, only his eyes peer out from the blackened cavern of his sunken face beneath the oxygen mask which swallows him up. He opens his mouth and one of the rescue team members, pissed off at me, shoves me firmly back from him. “Stay back,” he orders grimly.

Overhead the distant sound of a chopper blade slicing through the air is coming through.

I reach out to him and stop. His golden eyes are eerie, as if he’s already looking somewhere else where I can’t see.

“No!” the words are torn from me, “don’t leave me!”

He blinks and tenderness wells in his golden eyes, making them soft, untainted by even a thread of agony. He tries to smile, and I gasp as the leathery, dried skin of his left cheek splits, tiny ruby drops of blood trickle down to his chin. I reach out and someone swats my hand hard.

“You can’t touch him,” the fireman closest to me barks, “infection could kill him.”

“Colt,” I cry, and try to stop myself from being so selfish. I’m causing him more pain, forcing him to talk. His tries to move and one shoulder wrapped beneath the white linen sheet over his body shifts ever so slightly. I blanch with shock as I realize he’s trying to reach out to me, to comfort me! When he’s the one charred and broken.

I take the hardest step back which I’ve ever done and then I don’t have a choice because Jett hauls me backwards to him. His own tortured breathing sucks up all the air between us. It’s like I can’t breathe, I claw at my throat, but can’t take my eyes off Colt. We watch in impotent horror as the firemen proceed at a snail’s pace past us, out into the field towards the spot where the Medivac helicopter will land.

Chapter eleven

The hospital bed sits like a funeral pyre in the middle of the room. Raised, sterile. IVs are pumped into the red, pale skin of what’s left of Colt’s arm. They’re dug deep because they can’t find enough veins. The fire had scraped past skin, flesh and in many instances down to the bone.

It’s paralyzed him. He can’t feel, he can’t move and he won’t-

I shove the thought away as brutally as if I’d struck somebody.

He’s asleep and I stand beside his bed. Alone for the first time in the private room of the Burn Care Center of Colorado.

The smell of decay sits bittersweet on the air, wafting up thickly through the floors as though the last person who’d died here has never left.

I walk on soundless feet across the white tiled floor, the whole room is white as if the color will help the doctors heal him.

I stop beside Colt’s bedside. He’s asleep again. After six hours of excruciating surgery where they ripped and peeled the burnt skin from over seventy percent of his body.

His head is elevated. His eyelashes, the only fleck of hair left on him, sit serenely on his cheek, a mock testament to the ruggedly handsome man he once was. Gauze is wrapped around his body from the neck downwards. Machines beep and chirp in the corner, content to monitor his fight for life with disinterested stoicism.

I look down at him, bite my lip to keep in a cry of dismay, his cheekbones are bare, the pale bones show beneath the charred skin.

He blinks slowly, and I watch as he has to fight for the strength to open his eyes and look at me.

“H … h … hi,” he manages, his voice so raw I think that if a sound could feel like blood this must be it.

I smile back brightly, knowing I look hideous, that my horror must show but not knowing any other way to greet him, without breaking down, “Hi yourself,” I mutter bending low to him so that we’re face to face.

He grins, I tense, expecting the skin of his cheeks to split again but it doesn’t, the broken skin is gone and only bright redness remains.

His eyes go from soft to serious, he opens his mouth and tries to say something. It doesn’t work.

I reach out instinctively to try and stop him but he shakes his head, a full complete shake that goes from side to side that I’m astounded at the strength he’s summoning.

I fall quiet.

He sees I’m listening.

He stops and starts to tremble and I sob as he pours all his remaining strength into the words which come out chopped and garbled, “Jett, go … good for you. St … stay with him …” Perspiration beads on his forehead. He slumps back onto the bed and gasps for air. Some machine in the corner goes off.

I rush towards the oxygen mask set on a portable table beside the machines and place it gently on his face.  A nurse barges into the room and runs to Colt. She checks him, secures the mask and stays for several minutes. I fall back. Beyond her shoulder, Colt is trying to look beyond her to me. His eyes shine with intensity. I smile at him and he settles down.

Stay with Jett? I would do anything for Colt right now. But not this. And even if I did, Jett can’t stand to be in the same room with me anymore.

Despite what he’s said just before he’d raced off to find the cattle, he’d avoided me since. Only Marjorie had grudgingly given me the clearance to visit Colt as part of the family.

The door behind me opens and Marjorie walks in followed by Jett whose wearing a white shirt. Michael follows strongly behind him. They come forward and I fall back.

I feel Jett’s eyes on me but when I flick a glance sideways he’s staring at the wall.

Marjorie whispers and coos to Colt as if he’s still a baby and only needs his mommy’s voice to calm down.

Michael stays for a bit by Colt’s bedside then comes back to where I’m standing.

His fatherly eyes, the same color as Colt’s are just as beautiful but more mellow, filled with a lifetime of happy sights.  Even here with his son suffering five feet away, warmth manages to shine from them, “You need to get some food,” he says quietly.

I shake my head, but don’t move. That’s why I’m surprised when he takes my arm tenderly but quite firmly and starts to lead me from the room.  He cocks an implacable brow at me, “I mean now,” he continues.

I open my mouth but shut it as his eyes glint and I see that he won’t be thwarted from doing good.

I manage a weak smile, “I guess,” and allow myself to be led from the room. As the door closes behind me I feel Jett’s eyes again and when I look back I see him watching me. And his eyes are filled with betrayal. I look away quickly, swallow the thick lump that presses on my throat.

Michael takes me to the cafeteria, gets me a club sandwich with limp lettuce and mayo that doesn’t smell fresh. I ignore that and dig into the cup of tepid chili that he places before me with water.

Michael sits opposite nursing his own cup of chili. He breaks the silence, “What’re gonna do?”

I swallow a mouthful of the soup and wipe my mouth, to buy time.  I don’t know what to say but then it becomes clear. There is only one path for me here. I raise my eyes to him and know from the sympathy shining in his that he sees the tears lurking at the back of them.  I nudge my chin higher, he smiles at me.  “Good girl. Keep your chin up.”

I decide to skip his question and go on the offensive.  “Don’t you hate me too?”

He laughs, a hearty, low sound.  He leans to me and grasps my hand clutched around the chili cup in a tight, reassuring grip then releases it. 

He sighs and leans back in his chair, the warmth in his eyes is still there but also disappointment.  It burns me like nothing else as he says, “I thought you were in love with Jett?”

My mouth trembles, I laugh weakly through a cloud of tears.  “This may sound sick, but I do love him,” I shake my head, wipe away some tears from my cheek, “I just couldn’t seem to stop this.”

He harrumphs, pins me with a piercing look.  “Real love don’t die. It changes. It stretches if you’re lucky and it can shrink, but you can’t stop yourself from loving.”

“I should’ve been able to stop,” I burst out bitterly, eyes primed stubbornly on his, “I should’ve left Colt alone and I wouldn’t have broken Jett’s heart!” I flush with embarrassment as I feel every eye in the half full cafeteria switch to mine for a moment, then scatter away.

But I’m past hiding from what I’ve done.  I grip Michael’s hand, my eyes well, “I screwed up. I’m not the person that you like.”

He covers his hand with own gnarled ones, his eyes burn fierce, “Yes you are.”

“Even if I fucked Colt.” There I said it. I watch as his eyes widen, then become thoughtful. I wait, tensed for him to fling off my touch. He does nothing. A shadow wavers at the edge of my vision.

I drop Michael’s hand and get to my feet.

Marjorie. She’s still. Pale. Her mouth pressed into a thin line. Her eyes are so cold.  I wrap my arms around myself to stop from shivering.

She takes Michaels hands, raises him to his feet and buries her head in his shoulders. They collapse into each other.

I know even as I get to my feet, and the sounds around me dwindle into the back of my brain so that I can’t hear them.

I fly from the room running so hard, I feel the pounding of my feet on the floor through my joints.

I burst into the room. There are three doctors there ranged around Colt’s bed, two nurses. They are moving around methodically with no haste. It’s so quiet. So quiet, fresh hope spreads in me. She’s lied. Told a cruel joke to hurt me as I deserve to be.

The doctor in my line of vision moves and I see that it isn’t three doctors but two. The man slump over Colt’s form isn’t a doctor. Jett. He’s hunched, crying. His face buried on his brother’s chest.

I go to him. Fall on him and hold him with all my might. Though it feels like nothing, no matter how hard I squeeze myself to him, I can’t feel it.

He turns in my arms, buries his face in my neck and sobs. I break. We both cry so hard if we hadn’t been holding each other, we’d have fallen.

The doctors and nurses melt from the room. Drop us into complete silence.

Jett continues to hold me, and he looks up. Blue eyes stained with sorrow search my face. Then he shoves me from him, so hard I nearly stagger and nearly fall to my ass.

He steps back from me, looks at his hands, his face is twisted in a sneer that transforms him, disgust burns there and takes me prisoner.

He jabs a finger at me, his eyes flat, “Get up and leave,” he says quietly.

My eyes slam shut. I stumble to my feet. Move past him towards Colt. Fearing every moment he’ll grab me and shove me to the door, I step towards Colt’s bedside.  Jett steps back, as if the idea of touching me is repellant to him.  My vision wobbles as I look down at Colt’s empty face.

It’s uncovered. The thick, black lashes lie quietly on his cheeks. I bend and blink as a tear plops onto his cheek, then another. I reach down to his mouth. Kiss his lips, draw the final scent of him into my lungs and I know I’m hallucinating because somehow I can smell wildflowers on a moonlight night. Bruised by rain. Crushed by our bodies. It’s goodbye.