27. Still Here
Still Here
When Harris was nine, Nell made him sleep outside behind the barn because there was supposed to be a meteor shower.
He had complained about mosquitoes, the cold rising through the blanket, and the fact that nothing had happened for what felt like hours.
Nell, ten years old and therefore convinced one additional year had given her a superior understanding of the universe, informed him that he was incapable of appreciating anything requiring patience.
Then a streak of white crossed the sky, followed by another and then three almost at once.
Harris remembered the meteors less clearly now than he remembered Nell beside him in the grass, whispering there each time she saw one first. He remembered dry earth, horses shifting in the dark barn behind them, and the certainty available only to children that the person lying next to you would still be there in the morning.
He had not thought about that night in years.
Now, sometime after midnight on a burned ridge, Harris looked up and saw stars through the smoke.
The fire had moved on without really leaving.
Pockets of timber still burned below them, throwing dull orange light against the dark, and every so often something gave way in the forest with a distant crack that made Harris’s body tighten before his mind had time to identify the sound.
The granite at his back remained cool enough to touch and the air no longer felt hot enough to burn his lungs, but none of that stopped him from listening for the fire to come back.
Jay slept against his chest, though not deeply because Harris would not let him. Every few minutes he roused him enough to get his eyes open. The roughness in Jay’s chest persisted, but the confusion had eased and he no longer drifted away in the middle of an answer.
His hand remained spread across Jay’s ribs, following each shallow rise and fall until the rhythm became more useful than time.
Harris’s own body had started making itself harder to ignore.
His right hand throbbed beneath the bandage, swollen enough that bending his fingers pulled sharply through the burned skin, while the left side of his chest hurt every time he breathed too deeply.
Coughing made the pain flare hard enough to turn his vision briefly white.
He had probably bruised the ribs badly, maybe cracked one, but the distinction could wait until there was somebody around with equipment and better judgment.
Jay shifted against him, and Harris’s hand tightened before he could stop it.
Jay stirred, his eyes opening slowly. “Still checking?”
His voice was hoarse enough that the words barely carried.
“How’s your head?”
Jay considered. “Better.”
“Dizzy?”
“Some.”
“Nauseous?”
“A little.”
Harris pressed the back of his fingers to Jay’s forehead, which told him almost nothing. He did it anyway.
Jay watched him with tired amusement, too drained to sharpen it into a proper joke. “You should sleep.”
“Later.”
Jay let his eyes close again, but his hand moved weakly until it found Harris’s wrist.
For a while neither of them spoke. Smoke moved across the stars in thin bands, revealing and hiding them, and Harris found himself thinking of Nell again—not the hospital this time, but the barn, the blanket, the impatience of being nine years old and unable to imagine a future in which she would not be there to point out the next streak of light.
The memory hurt differently from the one that had opened inside him when Jay went slack against his back. That had been terror. This was grief returned to its ordinary shape, and Harris knew how to live with ordinary grief. He had years of practice.
Jay’s fingers shifted over his wrist.
“You said something before.”
Harris went still. “When?”
“Before I passed out, maybe.”
The fire below them cracked through a stand of damaged timber. Harris kept his eyes on the ridge. “What do you remember?”
“Not much.”
Relief came first, followed by something more complicated that Harris chose not to examine.
Jay frowned faintly, searching through whatever pieces remained. “You sounded scared.”
Harris could have denied it. The lie would have been easy and useless.
“Was.”
Jay went quiet.
The word sat between them without demanding anything else, and Harris was grateful for that. Jay did not ask what Harris had meant or force him back toward the things he had said while he believed Jay might be dying.
Don’t leave me.
Please.
And the thing Harris had not said aloud because it had arrived too completely to require language.
I love you.
He knew it now, and the strange part was how little the knowledge resembled revelation after the fact.
It had not transformed him or clarified New York or solved the problem that Jay’s life moved while Harris’s did not.
It had simply rearranged the importance of those problems. Yesterday, distance had been evidence that wanting too much was foolish.
Tonight Harris would have accepted any distance the world offered if it meant Jay got to wake up somewhere on the other side of it.
He looked down and found Jay asleep again, one hand still resting over his wrist.
The rest of the night passed without anything new going wrong, which felt close enough to mercy.
Jay slept in short stretches and woke coughing.
Harris roused him, gave him water sparingly, and tried the radio until static became more exhausting than hopeful.
At some point Jay’s head ended up in Harris’s lap, and Harris rested one hand in his hair while telling himself the position helped his breathing.
There was nobody around to call him on the lie.
Harris must have slept eventually, though he would have sworn he had not. One moment he was watching dull orange light move through the timber below them; the next, gray morning filled the old burn and Jay was no longer lying against him.
He came awake violently, his burned hand closing around empty fabric and sending pain through his wrist before he found Jay sitting less than two feet away.
“What are you doing?”
Jay turned slowly. “Had to move.”
“Why didn’t you wake me?”
“You were asleep.”
“Should’ve woken me.”
Jay looked at him for a long moment, too tired to argue properly. “I’m here.”
The words stopped Harris more effectively than anything else could have.
He looked away toward the ridge.
Morning showed what darkness had hidden.
Whole stretches of timber stood black above smoking ground, while other sections remained almost untouched—green trees beside charred ones, living brush beside gray ash, with no pattern Harris could identify from where he sat.
The old burn had saved them by giving the new fire less to consume, but even there the landscape had changed overnight.
The route below was gone.
Harris knew every drainage and shoulder of rock on this side of the mountain.
He knew where the stock trail crossed the timber, where the slope eased before the Forest Service road, which gullies held water after late-summer storms and which became treacherous when deadfall collected in them.
None of that knowledge matched what stood in front of him now.
The fire had dropped timber over trails, opened views that had never existed, and erased others. Harris had spent most of his life believing that knowing the land meant he could protect the people moving across it.
The mountain had corrected him in a single night.
They gathered what remained: the radio, first-aid pouch, flashlight, two lead ropes, and the empty bottle Harris had held onto without knowing why. Before they moved, Harris made Jay follow his finger with his eyes, tell him where they were, and drink the last small mouthful of water.
Jay tolerated the examination without protest, which made Harris more suspicious of his condition.
They started east across the exposed ground, avoiding smoking pockets and trees too damaged to trust. Jay managed better than Harris expected for the first half hour, though every incline made his breathing rougher. When he stumbled, Harris caught his arm before he could go down.
Jay steadied himself against him. “I’m okay.”
“You sure?”
A pause.
“I dunno.”
Harris looked at him.
Jay’s mouth shifted faintly. “Better answer?”
“Yeah.”
That was the first real trace of himself Harris had seen since the night before, and relief moved through Harris hard enough to make his ribs ache.
They kept going.
Harris’s own injuries became harder to hide as the morning warmed.
His right hand had swollen beneath the dressing, bending his fingers sent pain through his forearm, and the left side of his chest had tightened overnight until every deep breath pulled sharply beneath the ribs before ending in a cough.
Jay noticed when Harris stopped near a slab of exposed granite and braced himself against it.
“Your side.”
“Got hit.”
“When?”
“Tree.”
Jay stared at him. “You didn’t say anything.”
“Was busy.”
Despite the exhaustion, Jay’s expression sharpened. “That is a terrible standard.”
Harris almost smiled. “Been a bad twenty-four hours for standards.”
Jay looked as though he wanted to argue further, but another cough took the energy out of him. Harris waited until it passed before they started moving again.
They tried the radio every fifteen minutes and got nothing but static.
The Forest Service road should have been less than two miles east, but the fire had erased familiar markers and dropped enough timber that Harris repeatedly had to alter their course.
Each detour lengthened the distance. Jay’s breathing worsened whenever the ground climbed, and Harris began measuring the route by how many steps he managed before the next cough.
Around eight, the smoke thickened again. Jay pulled his collar over his mouth and kept walking, while Harris checked him more often than he intended.
After the fourth or fifth time, Jay caught him.
“I’m still here.”
“I know.”
The answer came rougher than Harris wanted.