30. Grant
THIRTY
GRANT
The barn goes up on a Wednesday night.
I'm at the garage when the call comes from Jessika, something’s wrong, there's smoke, she can hear the horses. I don't let her finish the sentence. I'm in my truck and on the road before I've processed the full shape of what she said.
The fire is in the north barn. The old structure, the one that still has the original boards, the one where HE SHOULD'VE STAYED GONE was burned into the wall what feels like years ago now. The roof is going and the east wall and the horses inside are panicked.
I pull in with the fire still climbing.
Jessika is at the north door, trying to get it open, stuck, smoke pouring out around the seal, and Presley is on the phone with 911, and I push past both of them and get the door open and go in.
The smoke is bad. Not yet unsurvivable but moving that direction.
I know where every horse is. I've been in and out of this barn enough times in the last month that the stall layout is mapped somewhere in my body separate from conscious thought.
I take the first two, Callie and the young paint, one rope each, the horses wild-eyed and blowing, but they come when I pull with the particular confidence of someone who is not afraid of them and is also not offering them a choice. Out the door into the pasture, release the ropes, back in.
Second trip: Sullivan and the old chestnut. Sullivan nearly takes my shoulder off going through the door, that’s a bruise I'll find tomorrow, but she comes.
Third trip: the one in the back stall.
By this time the east wall has gone fully and the smoke is a weight rather than a cloud.
I get the last horse out and I'm coming back toward the door when a beam comes down.
It catches my left arm.
Not directly, just grazing, with the edge rather than the full weight, but I hear something give that I'll pretend I didn't hear, and the next ten feet to the door are done on pure forward momentum with my brain already somewhere ahead of the pain.
I come out of the barn and Jessika is right there, I barely register the drop to my knees before she's got her hands on my face.
“Grant—"
She starts crying.
I crouch beside her.
She doesn't tell me it's okay. She doesn't make the sounds people make when someone is crying and they don't know what to do. She just crouches there in the orange light and her hand comes to rest on my shoulder.
The south end of the barn is a total loss. The north end is damaged but standing. All six horses are in the paddock, and one of the fire department volunteers helps me get a temporary shelter arranged for them against the back fence line before the night is over.
When it's over, I sit on the tailgate of my truck with my burned and broken arm held carefully against my body and I stand in front of her and look at her.
There is soot on my face and my jacket is scorched and I look hollowed out with tiredness in the way people do at four in the morning after something terrible, and I look at her and I think about a lot of things at once and then I stop thinking about any of them.
She steps up to me and put her hands on either side of my face and she kisses me.
I go still for exactly one second.
Then my good arm comes around her and pulls her in and she kisses me back and it is nothing like I expected it to be and exactly like I should have expected it to be, because Jessika does everything with her whole self, with total commitment and no hedging, and it turns out that includes this.
When we finally pull back, I rest my forehead against hers.
"Horses?" I hear the distance in my own voice.
"All out. All six. They’re good. Grant your arm. Is it broken?”
"Is it—" I look down. The jacket is dark and the forearm beneath it is at an angle that is not right. "Yeah," I say.
"You're going to the hospital."
"Yeah."
"Right now."
"Yeah." I look up at her. "Jessika. The horses are okay.”
"All six." Her voice is fierce. Her eyes are bright. "They're in the south pasture. They're okay. You're—" She stops. Regains something. "You're okay. We're going to the hospital."
The fire trucks arrive.
Outside, through the window, we can see the glow where the barn is dying. The fire department arrives, two trucks, Briar County volunteers, excellent response time for two in the morning, and I can hear the water starting.
Presley is in the kitchen doorway.
He's in his robe with his cane, with his phone in. His hand, his face pale and tight, watching Grant's arm and the smoke outside and the general disaster with the particular expression of a man who is doing arithmetic on every terrible variable at once.
"The horses," he says.
"All six are out," Grant says. "They're safe."
Presley's breath goes out.
He sits down heavily in the kitchen chair. And then he does something I have not seen Presley Mills do in my entire lifetime.
He puts his face in his hands.
Jessika looks at me. I look at her.
She crosses to her father and put her hand on his back and he straightens quickly, he’s always been too proud for that, the showing of it, but he covers her hand with his and holds it for a moment.
"The barn can be rebuilt," I say quietly.
He nods.
"The horses are safe," I say.
He nods again.
"Grant saved them," I say.
Her father is quiet for a moment. Then he takes her hand from his back and holds it in both of his and he looks at it like he's looking for something. Then he looks at me.
"Thank you," he says. His voice is rough. "For my horses. For my family." A pause. "I owe you more than that covers."
"You don't owe me anything," I say. Which is exactly what I said to Nova, the first night. The same thing, but now I understand it differently, it’s not deflection.
It's the specific vocabulary of a person who has learned to give without attaching debt to it, because debt is how things become conditional, and conditional is not what I’m offering.
The deputies arrive about four minutes after that.
And in a move that does not surprise me, cannot surprise me anymore, in this county, after everything, they immediately walk toward me.
Jessika stands up, with her hand still on my good shoulder, and turns to face them.
"This man just carried six horses out of a burning structure," she says, in the attorney voice, the one that doesn't raise and doesn't waver and leaves absolutely no room for argument.
"He has a broken arm and he is going to the hospital.
If you have questions, you can come to the hospital.
After." She pauses. "Unless you'd like to explain to a state attorney general's investigator why you're detaining a man who just saved six horses from a fire his property doesn't own. "
Silence.
The deputy looks at his partner.
"Ma'am, we just need to?—"
"You need to let this man get medical attention," she says. "That's what you need."
She walks me to her truck.
We drive to the Calwell hospital.
In the truck, with my arm beginning to arrive at the full intensity of what it's doing, I look at her profile.
She's holding it together. The way she holds everything together, from the center out, like the structure is maintained by sheer will.
"Thank you," I say.
"Don't." Her voice is very quiet. "Don't thank me for that. That's just what you do for people."
"Is that what we are?" I ask. Careful.
She glances at me. Her dark eyes very direct.
"Yes," she says. "That's exactly what we are."
The arm is a clean break. Radius, not compound, and the burn isn’t as bad as it looks. The ER doctor puts it in a half-cast pending swelling reduction and tells me to come back in two days for a full cast.
Jessika sits in the ER the whole time.
While the doctor is setting it, which is an experience I would not recommend, I focus on the wall and breathe and don't make noise because there are children in the next bay and I refuse to be the adult who makes the children more scared.
Afterward, when it's set and I'm on the approved-for-discharge side of pain management, Jessika appears beside the bed with the specific expression of someone who has been holding something contained for a long time.
"You went in four times," she says.
"There were six horses."
"You went back in when the east wall was fully involved."
"Two more horses."
"Grant." Her voice does something. "You—" She stops.
I look at her.
She sits on the edge of the bed and puts both hands on my face and looks at me with an intensity that has nothing performed in it at all.
"I am not," she says, very quietly, "losing you."
I hold her gaze.
"You're not," I say.
"I need you to understand that this.” she means the barn, the fire, the arm, all of it. ”this is not the price. This is not what's required. The horses could have, we would have?—"
"Jessika." I turn my hand and wrap it around her wrist. Carefully, with the good arm. "I would do it again."
"I know."
"All six of them."
"I know." She breathes. "I know you would. That's—" She stops. "You are the most?—"
She doesn't finish.
She presses her forehead to mine.
We sit like that in the ER with the noise of the hospital around us and my arm in its cast and the smell of smoke still in my jacket.
"Come home with me tonight," she says quietly.
"Okay," I say.
We go home.