28. Ash
Ash
The next thirty-six hours passed in fluorescent fragments.
Jay remembered oxygen being fitted over his face before he fully understood they had reached the hospital, somebody cutting away the burned edge of his shirt, and a nurse asking the same questions often enough that he eventually learned the answers by repetition.
He remembered Harris disappearing behind a curtain with his hand wrapped in gauze and returning later with a proper dressing from palm to wrist.
Mostly, he remembered Harris.
Jay slept too much for the memories to arrange themselves properly.
Sometimes he surfaced to find Priya beside the bed, or Della insisting he drink something, or Eli returning his phone after apparently fighting several people for possession of it.
But whenever he woke after enough time had passed to leave him disoriented, his attention went first to the chair.
Harris had developed an impressive ability to pretend he wasn’t watching him. It might have worked on somebody who had not spent months studying the man for a living.
The mountain came back with less order. Heat against Jay’s face.
Granite inches above him. Harris’s hand around his forearm while Jay tried to remember how breathing worked.
The uneven rhythm of being carried uphill with his cheek against Harris’s back.
Other pieces existed only as sensation: an arm beneath his shoulders during a coughing fit, fingers at the back of his neck, Harris’s voice close to his ear telling him not to talk and to breathe when he could.
And Come on, baby.
That remained inconveniently clear.
Jay had tried once to decide whether Harris had actually said it or whether his smoke-addled brain had improved the dialogue after the fact. The effort gave him a headache, so he stopped.
What he knew for certain was that Harris had been afraid.
Jay had seen him worried, angry, grieving and exhausted without ever seeing him lose the part of himself that knew what needed to happen next.
Beneath the granite, that control had remained, but Jay had finally seen what existed underneath it.
Harris’s hand had trembled against his face.
His voice had changed whenever Jay stopped answering.
Somewhere on the climb, in pieces Jay could not fully recover, the fear had become something raw enough that remembering it left him strangely unsteady.
He did not know what to do with that knowledge yet.
He knew only what it had felt like to wake and find Harris there.
During their first night in observation, a coughing fit brought Harris out of the chair despite the fact that he was supposed to be resting too.
He stood beside the bed with one hand between Jay’s shoulder blades until it passed, then straightened the blanket with the grim concentration of a man completing an unpleasant chore.
“You know there are nurses,” Jay managed.
“I know.”
“They’re employed specifically for this.”
“Go to sleep.”
Jay did, mostly because arguing required functioning lungs.
Several hours later he woke to find Harris asleep in the chair, his bandaged hand resting against his chest. Even then he seemed to be guarding his injured side, his breathing shallower than usual and one boot planted firmly on the floor, as though some part of him had refused to relax even after exhaustion won.
Jay watched him longer than necessary and then closed his eyes again.
By late the following afternoon, neither of them needed anything the hospital could provide better than medication, rest, and instructions they were unlikely to follow properly.
They spent the night at Elise’s mother’s house.
Jay slept badly, woke coughing twice, and once heard someone moving through the hallway outside his room.
The county reopened the ranch road with restrictions the following morning.
Evan drove Harris ahead to meet the fire crews and insurance representative while Jay rode with Priya and Eli. The arrangement made perfect sense. Harris belonged in the first truck because the ranch and everything waiting at the other end of the road belonged to him.
Jay still watched Evan’s taillights whenever smoke or a bend made them disappear.
He caught himself doing it the third time and turned toward the window.
Damage appeared intermittently along the road: a blackened hillside behind an untouched house, fence wire suspended where every wooden post had burned away, pale dead trunks standing beside trees that remained improbably green.
Eli’s camera stayed zipped inside its case at his feet. No one mentioned filming.
Familiarity made the damage worse once they reached Shaw land. Jay knew where the cottonwoods should gather near the lower bend and when the first barn roof ought to appear. Green pasture continued for several hundred yards before ending abruptly at a diagonal edge of wet ash.
The lodge stood, as did the private house, the main horse barn, and the cattle sheds farther south.
The north barn did not.
Its roof had folded inward over blackened beams, and beyond it the northwest pasture was reduced to mud, ash, and isolated fence posts.
Harris’s cabin was simply gone.
Only the stone chimney remained standing. The stove sat exposed beside it, warped by heat, and part of the metal bed frame showed through the debris where the bedroom had been.
Priya stopped beside the lodge. Jay got out slowly and waited for a brief wave of dizziness to settle.
Across the yard, Harris was standing beside Evan’s truck. His eyes found Jay almost immediately, moving over him in the quick assessment Jay had become familiar with over the last two days.
Upright. Awake. Breathing.
Jay’s attention answered before he could stop it, taking in Harris’s bandaged hand, the careful way he held his left side, the rise and fall of his chest.
Priya noticed.
Her gaze moved from Jay to Harris and back again, but whatever conclusion she reached seemed to satisfy her. She touched Jay briefly between the shoulder blades.
“Take it easy.”
“I am.”
She gave him a look that suggested his credibility had suffered recently, then followed Eli toward the lodge.
Across the yard, Evan had noticed too. He said something to Harris that Jay couldn’t hear, received a short answer, and glanced once in Jay’s direction before turning toward the north barn.
Nobody made anything of it. After what had happened on the mountain, Jay supposed they didn’t need another explanation.
Walt came from the house and stopped beside Harris, ash streaking one sleeve. “Could’ve been worse. Lodge is standing. House and big barn too.”
Harris looked toward the chimney. Walt said something about clearing the site and dealing with insurance, his comfort offered in the language he understood best: damage assessed, work identified, the next necessary thing put in order. Harris nodded when appropriate.
Then he began to cross the yard.
Harris had known the cabin was gone. Evan had told him at the hospital, and a fire crew had already seen enough of the foundation to know little would be salvageable.
Knowing had very little connection to seeing.
The cabin had never been much: one bedroom, a narrow kitchen, bathroom pipes that froze in serious cold, and a porch corner that had been sinking for three years because Harris kept finding repairs that mattered more.
The living room had never recovered from Claire’s conviction that furniture ought to be arranged for conversation.
It had still been his.
Damp ash shifted beneath his boots as he moved through rooms that no longer existed except because he remembered where they had been.
The kitchen table had stood beneath the window.
His chair had been beside the stove. The bookshelves had covered most of the back wall, thick pine boards Harris had built himself and overloaded almost immediately.
He stopped there.
Field guides. Ranch records. Veterinary manuals. Paperbacks with cracked spines. Nell’s books mixed with his because she had spent most of their lives treating ownership as negotiable.
Lonesome Dove had been there. So had Middlemarch, left near the bed with his glasses folded over the cover.
There was nothing left to distinguish one book from another.
“Damn it.”
Evan had followed him partway across the yard and now stood several yards behind.
“Books?”
Harris nodded.
Evan waited, perhaps expecting more, but Harris had already said as much as he could manage with Walt. The lodge had survived. The house had survived. The horses had survived. Everybody kept giving him reasons this could have been worse, and they were right.
That did not make this nothing.
“Want help looking?” Evan asked.
“Not yet.”
“All right.”
Evan left him alone.
Harris crouched near what had been the bedroom and began shifting pieces of plaster and burned wood with his left hand.
Most disintegrated when he touched them.
The small metal box beneath his bed should have been somewhere near the foundation wall, and after several minutes he found one blackened corner beneath a fallen joist.
The lid had warped. He was still trying to force it open one-handed when Evan reappeared, took the box without comment, and worked his pocketknife beneath the edge.
Inside, the photographs had fused into a dark block and most of the letters crumbled when exposed to air. Beneath them, Harris found Nell’s silver horse.
It was nearly black, one leg bent and its mane softened by heat, but recognizable. Nell had bought it at a gas-station gift shop when she was twelve because Harris said it looked nothing like a real horse.
She had told him that was why he needed it.
Harris closed his fingers around it.
A brass key lay beneath it, the faded blue ribbon tied through the top partly melted away. Claire’s. It had not opened anything in years, but Harris had kept it because twelve years of his life had not become meaningless when the marriage ended.
The ribbon broke apart beneath his thumb.
Something in Harris went with it.
Not visibly, he hoped. Evan was beside him, and Walt and Della were somewhere across the yard, and there were insurance people and fire crews and a hundred things that needed doing before dark. Harris had become very good at giving grief only the amount of space available.
Then a cough sounded behind him.
He turned.
Jay stood just outside the foundation in the same clothes he had worn back from the hospital, his face tired and pale beneath the lingering traces of soot that no amount of washing seemed to have completely removed.
Harris looked at his chest first.
He knew he did it. He no longer seemed capable of stopping.
Jay noticed too.
For a moment neither of them spoke.
Something in Harris’s grip loosened when Jay was near.
Evan glanced between them, and Harris saw recognition pass across his brother’s face—not understanding exactly, but enough.
Jay had been on the mountain with him. Jay had known what it felt like when the air disappeared and there was nowhere safe left to go.
Whatever odd gravity had developed between them afterward could be explained by that.
Evan touched Harris’s shoulder once before stepping away. “I’ll be at the barn.”
Harris nodded.
Jay waited until he was gone before coming closer.
“Can I?”
Harris looked at the foundation, then nodded.
Jay came to stand beside him. He didn’t ask Harris how he was doing or tell him the cabin could be rebuilt. His eyes settled instead on the damaged horse in Harris’s hand.
“Nell’s?”
“Yeah.”
Jay looked at it for several seconds. “I’m glad that made it.”
Harris swallowed.
“Me too.”
The words came rougher than he intended.
Jay’s eyes lifted to his face.
That was all it took.
Some of what Harris had kept contained around Walt and Evan finally showed—not enough to become tears, not enough that Jay needed to respond, but enough that Harris had to look away toward the place where the bookshelves had been.
“It’s all just… gone,” he said.
Jay followed his gaze. “I’m so sorry, Harris.”
For a while they stayed there without speaking, surrounded by the damp remains of the cabin and the noise of people working elsewhere on the ranch.
Harris could hear a truck backing near the north barn, somebody calling for Evan, the clatter of metal being moved.
Ordinary work continuing around something that did not feel ordinary yet.
Jay sat close enough that Harris could feel the heat from his shoulder.
Walt was still somewhere across the yard, close enough to look over if he chose. A week ago, that knowledge might have been enough to make Harris put more space between them. Right now he couldn’t make himself care enough to move.
Eventually Harris looked toward Eli’s camera case near the lodge. “Fire changes the film.”
Jay glanced at him. “It does.”
“You wanna use this?”
“Only the parts you want me to.”
Harris looked at the chimney, the blackened foundation, Nell’s damaged horse in his palm. “Might as well.”
Jay nodded. “Okay.”
When he stood, his balance shifted. Harris caught his forearm automatically and held on until Jay steadied.
Across the yard, Evan glanced over, took in the gesture, and looked away again.
Jay looked down at the horse in Harris’s hand. “Want me to stay?”
Harris looked back at what remained of the cabin. “Yeah.”
Jay sat beside him again, and for a while they said nothing while the ranch carried on around them.