Chapter 19
“Ricky!” I yelped, pointing at the door. “We’re on fire! The firehouse is on light! I mean, the houselight is on fire! The lighthouse! It burns!”
He looked up from his phone at me, smirking in the face of my panic. “It burns? It burns?”
“Not the time!” I waved my arms around. “We’re trapped! There’s someone else somewhere in here! We have to do something!”
I started pounding on the door with both fists.
“Help! Help! Let us out!” I channeled everything I had through my fists.
I pounded for my life, which hadn’t been long enough, and hadn’t had enough Ricky in it yet.
I pounded for my mom, pounded so I could go home to her in one piece, more truly whole than I’d ever been before in my life.
I pounded for my apartment, which was mostly empty, but which was mine.
I pounded for my job, where, for all I’d been totally distracted from it this week, it felt like I was finally getting the hang of things and finally getting a foot in the next, bigger, better door, and where I had made a true friend in Drea, who had wanted more for me than I had known to want for myself and had brought me together with Ricky.
And I pounded most of all for Ricky, my boyfriend of all of two hours.
Of all the things in this life that an Autistic kid like me wasn’t supposed to want, wasn’t supposed to be able to get, wasn’t supposed to be able to keep—but that I had wanted, that I had somehow managed to get, that I desperately wanted to keep—he was the one that I’d wanted the most keenly, that I cherished the most fiercely, that I wanted more than anything to protect.
I pounded until I felt Ricky’s arms wrap around me, gently pulling me away from the door. “Oliver, the door’s going to get hot. You could burn yourself without even noticing.”
Already I was starting to choke on the smoke, tears running down my face, though whether that was the smoke, panic, anger, anguish, or something else, I couldn’t say.
We stumbled back, landing seated on the wide old wood planks of the floor.
Ricky scooted to rest his back against the wall, but I jumped up again, looking wildly around the room.
Through the thickening smoke, I could see the glow of the fire coming in through both windows in the room, one each directly across from each other on the front and back walls of the cottage.
Each one was caged on the outside with iron bars, but I wondered, on a building this old, how solid the metal, or its attachments to the wall, could still be.
I seized one of Ricky’s crutches, shoving its foot through the front window with a surprisingly loud crash.
Ricky raised his hands to shield his face as glass shards flew to the floor, coughing out, “Oliver, what are you doing?”
“Whatever I can!” I swung the crutch in a spiral out from the initial hole I’d made, clearing as much of the remaining glass as I could.
Then I pulled the crutch inside, spun it around, and used the wide top end as a battering ram against the metal bars outside, thrusting as hard as I could, which wasn’t as hard as I would have liked, given that I could barely breathe. There was no movement.
I repeated the pattern on the second window, to the same result.
I charged desperately back and forth across the room for a minute, hammering on each set of bars in turn, but nothing seemed to give or loosen.
Initially, breaking the windows had seemed to help clear the smoke a little, but eventually the smoke outside was every bit as thick.
Coughing and gagging, worn out from my burst of exertion, I sunk to the floor in front of Ricky and hugged my knees.
It was unbearably hot now, and sweat poured down both our faces. I reached out for his hand, pulling him away from the wall and into my arms. Over the rising roar of the fire, I said into his ear, “Can we count the pretend days?”
He leaned in close, his voice drifting into my ear. “I count them all, since the first day in Washington.”
“Good,” I said. “Then it’s not too soon to tell you I love you.”
Oh, boy. The heat and fear must have melted my brain. Or maybe they had melted my inhibitions, and I really meant it? There wasn’t time to figure it out, but something in Ricky’s eyes as he held me in his gaze slowed the world and extinguished the flames for a split second.
“Oliver, I—”
The world snapped back into terrifying, hot, imminent-death-and-danger focus as he broke off, his head swiveling toward the window at the front of the cottage. His voice was suddenly tense and urgent. “Help me up. Look out there. I think I heard something.”
I scrambled to my feet and helped Ricky up.
I thought I heard it, too, a high whine over the crackle of the flames above and increasingly all around us.
The glow out the window, illuminating the broad, flat lawn and gravel paths between the lighthouse and the edge of the bluff in an eerie strobing fire-yellow, had acquired a flashing red undertone.
Even before enough of the fire engine was in sight for it to fully register, I was yelling again, Ricky joining me this time, both of us sticking his crutches as far out of the window as we could and waving them around. “Help! In here!”
Doors flew open before the wheels had fully stopped, boots hitting the gravel and running our way. A couple of rapid blows to the door of the cottage, and a swarm of reflective bodies descended on us.
“He’s injured,” I coughed, pushing Ricky in front of me. Two of the firefighters picked him up in a sort of makeshift chair and hustled him out, just as the largest person I’d ever seen in my life scooped me up, flung me over their shoulder, and followed them out the door.
An ambulance had rolled up the hill behind the fire engine, and a team of EMTs began taking our vitals as the firefighters ran back toward the burning building.
I tried to call after them, “There’s someone else still in the building!
” But I choked on the words, devolving into a coughing fit.
As soon as I could recover a little bit of my voice, I croaked to one of the EMTs, “There was someone else in there.”
“I’m sure they’ll find everybody,” the woman said. “All you need to do is focus on breathing.”
One of the other EMTs knelt at Ricky’s ankle.
“I’m guessing based on the bandage that this didn’t happen in there,” he chuckled, flashing an appealingly dimpled smile up at Ricky, who shook his head.
We were huddled together in the open rear doors of the ambulance, our legs dangling down, the fire out of sight behind us.
The EMT stood up, stretching a muscular arm up along the side of the door to pull his snug T-shirt even tighter over his well-formed chest. “Need anything else, handsome?”
Ricky looked up at him, incredulous. “Seriously? Right now? I’m taken.”
The EMT coughed, embarrassed. “No, sorry, I meant him,” he said, pointing at me.
I matched Ricky’s icy stare. “I’m the one who took him.”
“Let me get you guys some water,” the EMT mumbled, turning on his heel and disappearing around the side of the truck.
I hopped down and peered around the other side, back toward the commotion of the fire.
Water arced toward the flames, which were now most intense on the roof of the keeper’s cottage where Ricky and I had been trapped moments ago.
Another knot of firefighters emerged from the building, forming a circle as they carried a small figure out onto the lawn several dozen yards away from the building.
The massive firefighter who had carried me out of the building turned from the outside of the circle and waved a summons to the EMTs, who started running up the hill toward them.
In the brief opening created by the firefighter turning to wave, I saw, limp on the ground, illuminated in the glow of the flames and the sirens, a singed red patent leather peep-toe platform pump on the end of a horrifyingly charred leg.
I was briefly stunned, my mind not wanting to believe what I had seen. Finally, slowly, I returned to Ricky at the back of the ambulance.
“It was Tawny,” I said numbly. “She was still in there. They just brought her out, but it … doesn’t look good.”
Ricky blanched. “God. Was it … do we think it was Wiley? He couldn’t have followed us, right?”
“I don’t know what to think. She was definitely scared of him. And he was definitely scary the last time we saw him.”
A pair of headlights underneath a set of flashing red and blue lights rolled up the hill, coming to a stop behind the ambulance. Deputy Duncan stepped out of the cruiser, doing a wide-eyed double take when she saw us.
“Are you friggin’ kidding me? Third day in a row, third dead body, third time you two are the first people I lay eyes on.
And this time you burned down only the most important historical landmark in the county while you were at it.
You two better not move a stinkin’ muscle before I come back to deal with you, got it? ”
“Yes, ma’am,” we both said obediently.
“Well, that answers that,” Ricky said in a low voice as we listened to the deputy’s boots crunch away up the gravel. “Tawny didn’t make it. Tawny, Richard, and Cecilia. Bad week to be a member of that family.”
“I’m not sure there was ever a particularly good time to be in the Rose family,” I muttered, my mind elsewhere.
I inspected my fingers, looking without seeing.
In the glow of the deputy’s headlights, something glittered green under one of my fingernails.
I wondered for a second what it was, before my mind wandered on.