21. Lori
Lori
The drive to his house is a blur of gravel and resolve, Tina’s voice echoing in the cab, pushing me forward until the familiar outline of his porch comes into view.
The gravel under my tires sounds louder in the dark.
Tina’s voice is louder. It is still with me from two days ago.
You go back the same way you came. One step at a time.
I drive twenty minutes and my hands will not quit shaking on the wheel.
I park in front of the only house I know as a home. The porch light is on. I cut the engine and sit for three breaths, maybe four. And then, I open the door before the fifth one turns into an excuse.
The front steps creak, the third board from the top, same as always. I raise my hand to knock and the door opens before my knuckles land.
It is not Carson.
Marisol stands in the doorway in a sweatshirt and leggings, her dark hair pulled back, phone in one hand.
Cadie is on her hip in pajama pants, the rainbow boots kicked off on the floor behind them.
I know Marisol from the Christmas party.
She is the one who takes Junie around the fire engines so that I can dance with Cadie and Carson.
The one Carson calls when Cadie needs somebody who is not him.
Cadie’s face is what stops me. It is not joy. It is the tight, held expression of a six-year-old who already understands what sirens mean when they come from nearby, and she is trying so hard to hold it together that I have to lock my knees to keep from picking her up and lying to her.
“Daddy gets called,” Cadie says, in a voice smaller than I have ever heard from her. “There’s a big fire in town.”
Marisol shifts Cadie higher on her hip and meets my eyes over the kid’s head. “Structure fire on Pecan Street. About an hour ago. He’s there, Lori.”
Everything I rehearse in the truck, every sentence I practice at two red lights and a stop sign, drops straight out of my head.
Through the open door, past Marisol’s shoulder, the TV paints the living room blue with a live newscast. Smoke, thick and dark, rolling from the old cotton warehouse on the east side.
There are crews in front of it and hoses arcing water into windows that glow orange from inside.
I do not say goodbye to Marisol and Cadie. I’m in the truck with the key turned before I hear Marisol say something from the porch. Gravel sprays under my tires when I pull out and I do not look back.
Three blocks out and the road is barricaded. I leave the truck half on the curb with the door open and run toward the crowd.
The street is everything at once: engines idling in a deep metallic groan, water hammering off asphalt loud enough to swallow the voices underneath, and radios crackling from every direction in clipped half-sentences I cannot pull apart.
The smell reaches me at the tape line, wet char, burned drywall and something sharper underneath — chemical, hot enough to taste at the back of my throat. I duck under the tape.
A deputy steps in front of me. His hand comes up flat against my shoulder. “Ma’am. You can’t be here.”
“I’m with one of them.” My voice does not sound like mine. “I’m here for one of them.”
His face changes. In a town this size it takes about a second to place someone: the diner, the woman in Carson West’s truck from the party.
“Carson West?”
I nod.
He glances at the building. Then back at me. “He goes back in. They have a child unaccounted for. He goes back in three minutes ago and we do not have him on the radio yet.”
The deputy is still talking, but I’m not listening to the rest. One fact has replaced everything else: Carson went back inside a building that is on fire, nobody can reach him, and I am standing on a sidewalk with every word I came here to say still in my chest.
I turn to face the building. It is worse than the TV made it.
The whole east corner of the second floor burns open and free.
Windows are blown, flames are rolling out and up into the dark where they fold into smoke.
The roof is moving. The entire flat top lifts and drops, and from the ground it looks like the building is trying to draw one last full breath.
Smoke pours from a second-story window that was dark ten seconds ago.
He is in there.
I have no plan and no speech, nothing except twenty minutes of courage from Tina’s kitchen and a name I have been afraid to say out loud for a week. I open my mouth and I say it.
“CARSON!”
The yell comes from below my ribs and goes out over the heads of the crew, through the wet smoke, up toward the broken window above the awning. It comes back empty.
“CARSON!”
A firefighter turns and starts toward me, both hands up, and I am already pulling another breath when I hear it.
“Lori.” The voice comes from my right. Rough with smoke. The voice he uses with me and nobody else.
There he is. Fifteen feet away. Helmet off.
Soot streaked across his jaw and down his neck, a gash above his left brow bleeding into his eye that he has not wiped.
His coat hanging open, shirt soaked through and gone gray, his hands at his sides in blackened gloves.
Standing and breathing and looking at me like I am the only clear thing in the smoke.
I do not remember crossing the distance. I crash into his chest already crying, and I do not know when I started, maybe at the tape line, maybe in the car, maybe seven days ago at 2 a.m., staring at the empty counter. My hands fist in the back of his turnout coat and I hold on.
“I think you — they say you go — Carson, I am so scared.”
“The crew helps me out — the ladder — on the other side of the building.” His breath is still uneven. “Lori —”
“I’m sorry I left.” The words come out of me now and I cannot stop them. “I’m sorry I left, Carson, I’m so sorry. I don’t want to go. I don’t ever want to go.”
I pull back just far enough to see his face. Soot and blood and those dark eyes, the ones that go quiet for everything that matters.
“I love you. I love Cadie. I want to be Junie’s aunt for the rest of my life. And I want to be your —”
The word is not there. I reach for it and it does not come — not wife, not partner, no word is big enough — and I stop with my mouth open and my hands still fisted in his coat.
It doesn’t matter.
I just have to say it, in a cordoned street, in front of every neighbor, crew member and news camera this town can put on the sidewalk tonight, with my hair wild and my shoes wrong and mascara down my face.
Me. Lori Jones, who once sits alone in a parking lot for forty minutes rather than call someone for a ride. Who keeps a packed duffel in the corner of a guest room for months so she never has to choose to stay. Who drives away at midnight rather than say please ask me to stay.
I just ask. For everything. And I’m not taking it back.
Carson looks at me. The blood runs into his eyebrow and he does not touch it. His soot-streaked hands come up and frame my face, thumbs dragging across my cheekbones, leaving dark tracks through the wet on my skin.
He holds me there, steady and certain, and the corner of his mouth lifts. Not the public grin or the easy-charm cowboy who walked into Jason’s and threw a corny joke. The quiet one. The one he reserves for me, when there’s just the two of us.
“About damn time,” he whispers before kissing me.
Of course. Of course that’s what he says. He gives me three words, and they are more than enough.
Months of restraint break open in that blocked-off street, his mouth on mine and his arm banding around my waist and hauling me onto my toes.
My hands drag up from his turnout coat to the back of his neck where his hair is damp with sweat and smoke.
My legs go soft and I hold on because he is the only thing keeping me upright. His coat is rough against my bare arms.
Somebody behind us starts whooping. Somebody else joins in. Carson does not pull back. His hand goes to the back of my head, his fingers in my hair, and I could not care less that half the town is watching because I am kissing the man I love in front of the fire that nearly took him from me.
It is the bravest, dumbest, and best thing I have ever done.
A radio on somebody’s belt crackles. A voice, flat and official: All clear. All souls accounted for.
I laugh against his mouth. It is a wet, wrecked sound that has no business being this happy. He presses his forehead to mine. The smoke drifts east above us and the cold air is on my neck.
“I do not say thank you,” I say against his mouth. “Properly. For everything you did.”
His eyes look darker. I have seen that look once before, on Boxing Day night, and it still does to me now what it did then.
“You can spend the rest of your life making up for it.” His voice drops. “Starting on my bed tonight.”
“Carson!”
He grins. The real one. He kisses me again, and I let myself have it, all of it, the smoke and the cold and the man and the whole messy spectacle of a woman who used to withdraw into herself but is choosing to stand right here instead.
Later, the medics clean the gash above his brow and tape a white butterfly bandage over it. The boy he saved was already reunited with his grandparents. I watch the grandmother take Carson’s hand in both of hers and mouth thank you through tears. The captain claps Carson on the shoulder.
Then we finally go home.
Home. That word doesn’t scare me anymore.
Marisol is on the couch with the TV low. Cadie is asleep in her room. Marisol takes one look at me in the doorway with soot on my coat and Carson’s hand in mine.
“It’s about time somebody knocked some sense into him.” She picks up her jacket and her keys, then stops at the door. “Welcome home, Lori.”
The door closes behind her, and the house is quiet. The good quiet. I lived here for three and a half months and the sounds have not changed, but I am different in them now.
I’m not a guest waiting for the moment someone asks me to leave.
I’m here because I chose to walk back in.