Left Drowning

I am struggling terrifically for air. Because there is none. All I can taste is smoke.

“Feel me.” He inhales, and his chest presses into me. “Breathe,” he tells me. “Breathe with me.”

I feel the rise and fall of his chest, and I breathe as he does. His arms are around me, but he’s gentle, careful not to add to my suffocation. It is only now that I notice he is still in his clothes, his jeans now waterlogged and nearly black.

I keep breathing.

“There you go. Good girl.”

Slowly, my body cools down. But my mind is still there in the heat and the smoke. I am going to get through this, because even in the state I am in, I can feel how important this is for me.

“I see the fire, and I know I’m not strong enough to move James very far by myself when he’s unconscious. But I have to. I can’t even open the window. It’s jammed. Everything in the house is broken, and suddenly that matters. It’s not fun anymore. Because I can’t get the fucking window open … Oh God, Chris, I can’t open the window. There’s a lamp on the table next to the bed, and I take it and smash the shit out of the window. And I’m bleeding. My arm is pouring out blood, and for this one second I think that is good because it means I am alive. I am still real.”

“It’s not happening now. Blythe, you’re here with me.”

I see that I have started telling this story in the present tense, but I ca

“I can feel the cold air hit me and it means freedom, but there’s no time because it’s coming for us. It’s coming for us.” I hear Chris inhale and exhale loudly in my ear, reminding me to breathe. To live through this.

So I do.

“I take the quilt from his bed. It’s one of those patchwork quilts, and I’m seeing all the colors and patterns. And there are pictures. These stupid pictures that make me so angry. How can I be looking at fabric animals, and trees, and flowers when I am bleeding and James can’t fucking move and we are going to die because I’m not strong enough?”

Chris takes my clenched hands into his, and I dig my fingers into his skin.

Now another confession. Or, rather, a series of them. “I spend too much time looking at this quilt because it’s so normal while everything else is not normal. But I toss it into the window to cover the glass. I don’t do a good job. I don’t pay attention. James is so heavy, and I don’t know how, but I manage to kneel down next to the bed, and I pull him onto my back. I get us to the window, and I have to push my brother through. That’s when he really wakes up, and he wakes up … he wakes up screaming. I’m hurting him so much. Too much. He’s stuck and I can’t fucking get him out. I have to because the fire is almost on us. I don’t look behind me because then I’ll really know just how close it is. James is hanging out of the window, and so I just … push him as hard as I can.

“And the sound he makes … the sound …” I am sobbing hard again now. It’s as though James is right here, and I am hurting him all over. “Chris, it’s too hot. I’m too hot. Make it stop.”

I am escalating again, faster than I can manage. My legs are quivering, my whole body starting to shake. Chris reaches up and slams the faucet so that the water is as cold as he can get it. He moves his hands to my legs, trying to hold me steady, and I do my best to focus on the feel of him against my skin. The cold water is pouring over us, but it’s not enough to put out the fire.

“His leg is stuck in the window. On a big shard of glass. I push James’s body out, and I can feel the rip. Oh, I can feel that I’m … that … I am tearing him apart, but I don’t know what else to do, and there is no one to help me. I have never been this alone. Finally, he is through. Outside, I hear him screaming and coughing. The noise is more than I can stand, and I almost don’t go out the window myself because I don’t want to get closer to that sound. But then I see the fire. Without even turning my head, I can see the fire that is going to engulf me. So I get out. Somehow I get out, and I fall … I fall into his blood. My brother’s blood … is … everywhere.”

“Jesus, Blythe.” Chris runs his hands up and down my legs, then up to my arms, reminding me that I am here with him. That I am not in that house, that I am not drenched in blood.

“I crawl to him and drag him away from the burning house. The screaming does not stop. I take him as far as I can, and I have to stop and wipe my hands on my shirt because … because I can’t hold on to him. My hands are covered in blood. I don’t know if the blood is his or mine, but it is all over us, and my hands are too slippery to hold him.” I shiver against Chris now.

“Do you want the water warmer?” he whispers.

I nod over and over.

“I keep wiping my hands, but I can’t get the blood off, and it’s impossible to get us away from the house fast enough. Far enough. I’m not going to be able to move James.” My voice is broken with terror. “You have to get the blood off me. Then I can help him. You have to get the blood off.” I lunge for my bottle of soap, but I’m shaking so much that it’s impossible for me to open it.

Chris takes the bottle from my hand and pours soap into his.

“Get it off me! Get it off me!” I am panicked and out of my mind. I know that. “Please, Chris.”

He washes my palms and fingers first—so that I can save James—and doesn’t stop until my shaking begins to lessen. His hands go everywhere, covering my body with soap, and I watch while he washes invisible blood from my skin. As I lean to the side and dry heave, Chris’s hands don’t leave my shoulders. I reach for the walls and, with his help, weakly push myself to a stand. “My hair. There is blood in my hair,” I tell him. My throat is sore and my stomach still rolling.

“I get James down the dirt road to the car and turn around. I see the house. It’s just … kindling that is going to be gone in seconds. I can’t believe how fast it’s burning.” Now my memories yield perhaps the worst confession. “And it is only now that the sirens start. And it is only now that I think about my parents.”

My knees give out, and Chris catches me for the second time today. He turns me to him, and for the first time since this started, I look at him. I am back in the here and now. I am not there anymore. I don’t know which is worse.

“Why, Chris? Why didn’t I think about them until then? I forgot them? I fucking forgot them!” The absolute atrocity of this consumes me. My eyes ache, and the tears are stinging and painful, but they don’t stop. “What the fuck is wrong with me? How did I forget them?” I am pounding my hands into his chest.

He wraps his hands around my wrists and holds me still so that I’ll hear him. “You didn’t forget them. You didn’t forget them, Blythe.”

He’s right.

I didn’t forget them.

I can’t say it, but he does. “You knew they were dead. When you went for James, you knew they were already dead. The fire was that bad.”

“Yes.” Later, when I can talk again, when I am buried into the wet T-shirt that covers his chest and the crying has subsided, I tell him the end. Drained and exhausted, I can now finish this story more rationally and calmly. “I went back to the house anyway. I left James bleeding in the dirt by the car, and I went back. I remembered that there was a ladder by the side of the house. I found it and stood it up.”

I feel his hands against my head as he starts to wash my hair. He is gentle, but he makes sure to get out the imaginary blood because he knows that I need it gone.

“Because my left arm was so fucked up, I couldn’t get the ladder to extend at first. Then finally I made it work, and I walked up to the house. It was just … it was all flames. But I had it in my head that I’d just … what? Climb up and tell my parents to jump out to safety? I wasn’t thinking. I just kept moving. So I found a section of the house on the first floor, under one of the windows to their bedroom, where there weren’t any flames, and the house still looked like a house. I leaned the ladder against it. I started climbing up, and the metal was heating up under my hands, so that just made me climb faster. I don’t remember where I was looking. If I was looking up to their room, or at my feet that were somehow moving, or at the ground. My vision was messed up. Probably from the smoke. I think that I only got up a few rungs of the ladder. Couldn’t have been more than eight steps up. I found out later that I had stopped moving. I was just standing on the ladder while the fire was working its way down to me.”