Setting my jaw, I cried out and charged for the door again, not consciously recognizing why I had to get in. My hand was inches from wrapping around the scalding doorknob again when a firm set of arms wrapped around my chest and pulled me back.
“Garth! What are you doing, son? You’re going to kill yourself!”
I struggled, but no amount of fight worked. “Let me go, Neil! Clay’s in there! He’s in there!” The fight slowly faded from me the farther Neil wrangled me away from the trailer. “My dad’s in there!”
Another explosion blasted from inside the trailer. Another propane tank. That’s when I realized and accepted that the father I never really knew I’d never know because he was gone. He’d been gone for a long time, but his body had followed the rest of him.
“No, son.” Neil stopped pulling me away but kept his hold on me. “He’s not in there anymore.”
E.R. VISITS HAD been a pastime of mine for as long as I could remember. I was about as comfortable in a hospital bed as I was in my own bed. Since my own bed was nothing but ash and soot, I suppose the hospital bed was even more appealing than it had been before. The fire department had shown up a few minutes before Neil got me into his truck and booked it for the hospital. He was the second person that night to suggest an E.R. visit, and since I was too exhausted and in shock to argue with him, I went with it.
The nurse had fixed up my hand, and the doctor stopped in a few minutes later to pump me full of pain meds. He’d seen me plenty of times growing up. My dad had threatened him when he’d recommended I take the summer off from bull riding after I broke my leg. The doc was a decent guy who seemed that much more decent as the drugs worked their way into my system. I guessed he’d given them to me more for the mental than the physical pain.
The benefit to having perfected repressing stuff was being able to do it again. My dad had just been barbecued inside our “home,” and I still hadn’t cried a single tear. I hadn’t broken down, punched a hole in a wall, or dropped to my knees. I didn’t face it; I couldn’t yet. So I repressed it. I didn’t think about what tomorrow would bring, and I didn’t think about what the day after that would. I focused on my bandaged hand, still pulsing with pain, the hospital bed I was curled on which, for all I knew, might be the last mattress my body felt for a long while, and the antiseptic smell surrounding me. Those were the realities I obscured real reality with. Those were the things I centered my attention on when my father’s funeral needed to be planned.
I was close to passing out in a drug-induced haze when the curtains whooshed open and a figure slipped inside. “Garth? Oh my god . . .” A sniffling, bleary-eyed person approached.
“Hey, Joze. What are you doing here?” Talking hurt, thanks to the fire singing my throat.
“Neil called Jesse, then Jesse called me . . . He and Rowen are on their way. They were leaving when I was talking to him.” She approached the foot of the bed slowly. “I’m so sorry, Garth. And, wow, that sounded as pathetic and petty as I always thought it would.”
“It’s okay. I get it. You’re sorry, I’m sorry, the whole f**king world’s sorry. But it doesn’t fix anything. Sorry doesn’t bring Clay back. Sorry doesn’t stop that fire from starting. Sorry doesn’t get me to that trailer before the fire started. And sorry sure as shit doesn’t make me feel any better.”
I wasn’t mad at Josie. I knew there wasn’t much else to offer than an I’m sorry when tragedy struck. I’d already heard it a few dozen times in less than an hour, and I’d hit critical mass. If I never heard another I’m sorry again, I’d be good.
Instead of saying something back, Josie came around the side of the bed and crawled in next to me. Her body fit around mine as her arm wrapped around me, holding me close. It was an odd embrace, a foreign one for me, but it felt so exactly what I needed right then that I melted right into her. Screw the drugs.
“Neil told me what happened. About how you were trying to get inside.” Her hand wrapped around the wrist of my bandaged hand and gave it a gentle squeeze. “I always knew you’d be one of those people who’d charge into a burning building to save a person. I always knew you were a superhero in hiding.”
Josie liked to see the good in everyone, and she’d never let go of the idea that some was still left in me. At one time, I’d believed her. I didn’t anymore.
Her embrace became more painful than comforting. “I didn’t save anything or anyone, Joze. I don’t qualify as a superhero.”
“But you tried. That’s what matters.”
“No, that’s not what matters. Saving my dad’s what would have mattered. The only thing that matters now is that he’s dead, my hand is burnt to hell, and I’m homeless.” Too bad the doc didn’t hook me up with an I.V. Then I could have just kept pumping the drugs into me. I wasn’t sure if it was Josie or reality, but one or both of them were forcing me back to a place I didn’t want to be.
“You know you can stay with me and my family for as long as you need to.” Her hold around me tightened when I tried to squirm away. Classic Josie.
“Oh, yeah. That would be ideal. Absolutely ideal. Because we all know how highly your dad thinks of me. If I was the last living creature on earth, he wouldn’t even skin me and use me for his boots, and that’s without him even knowing I slept with his daughter under his roof.” Josie hushed me. Maybe because I was getting a little loud, but probably because I’d brought up being one of the men she’d been with. She hated that. Probably always would. I hated myself for it. That was one of the few things Josie and I had in common. “And let’s not forget your mom, who looks at me like she can’t decide whether to pray for me or pray that the ground opens up and a legion of demons drag me into hell where she thinks I belong.”