Disconnected thoughts pelted Lexi with every step on the rock-hard path.
She knew the mental activity was a coping mechanism. It kept debilitating terror at arm’s length. She knew because the same thing had happened the night of the fire as she trudged through the darkness, lantern in hand like now.
Again with the talk of fire. Before. After.
And now—during ?
Prayers formed again, too, darts flung skyward.
God, keep us safe.
God, keep Tuyen safe.
I really don’t like Tuyen. I wish she hadn’t come.
But Nana . . .
God, keep rattlesnakes away. Mountain lions . . .
Lexi wondered if Nathan Warner would contact her. Should she call him? He was nice. Easy to talk to. Easier than Zak. Zak the fireman was all about that night, that night of The Fire. Zak was during.
They had tramped a different direction that night, to the east, a much farther distance from the house. There’d been no semblance of a path. No stars shone because of the smoke.
“Tuyen!” Max shouted for the umpteenth time.
Like someone in the middle of killing herself would yell back, “I’m over here! South of the big oak.”
She wondered what method Tuyen had chosen. Lexi always figured the easiest would be to drive off the highway, at the last S-curve on the way up into the hills to the hacienda. It would be the fastest at least. The easiest was probably food. Binge and purge. Binge and purge. Year after year after year.
“Tuyen!” Max was relentless.
Her dad had not been there that night. Max was not during. Nor was he before. Why was it he thought he could be after?
For a fleeting while just after, it seemed the entire family slipped into a Norman Rockwell series of illustrations. “The Beaumonts—A Real American Family.” Scene One: Max embraces a soot-covered Lexi as if she was the most important person in the world to him. Scene Two: Joined by grandparents and brother-in-law Kevin, the siblings camp out at their childhood home. Scene Three: Mother bakes chocolate-chip cookies.
By Scene Four, old dad was checking out again. Lexi could imagine his dress-slacks-covered backside in the picture. It would be a shadowy detail poised exiting the kitchen door.
Four scenes. A meager series.
Lexi scrambled now to keep up with her parents. They neared Uncle BJ’s memorial site. She recognized the bend in the path, the point where Papa had neatly laid rocks along both sides. There was the huge oak, damaged but not condemned to death by the fire. And then the outcropping of boulders.
“Tuyen!” Her mother screamed the name.
Even through the bobbing shadows Lexi could make out the letters chiseled out of the boulder’s face many years ago: Benjamin Charles Beaumont Jr.
A dark stain cut through the “Beaumont.”
Moments stretched into eternal expanses.
Tuyen lay on the ground, a motionless heap at the base of the boulder. Max and Claire knelt beside her. Lexi held two lanterns aloft. Blood was everywhere.
Sirens wailed in the distance.
Her mother cradled Tuyen’s head in her lap.
Her father yanked the laces from his shoes.
Unintelligible speech came from both, Claire’s in a begging tone, Max’s in sharp commands. Prayers and pleas, denials and urgings all mixed together.
Please God. Please God. Please God.
Max made quick work of tying tourniquets on Tuyen’s arms, and then he scooped her up. “Lexi, go in front of me. Quickly now.”
The scene embedded itself into Lexi’s mind with the permanence of a branding iron.
They reached the barn behind the house at the same time the medics did, stretcher and equipment in hand. Spotlights blazed, illuminating the area.
Illuminating the deep reds that smudged her father’s cheek, her mother’s gray sweatshirt.
Lexi leaned against the corral fence. Claire and Max stood nearby, her mother in the shelter of her dad’s broad shoulders.
The two young men worked over Tuyen, their movements smooth, coordinated, confident, quick as lightning. They talked to each other and to her as if she were not unconscious.
Lexi spotted Nana in the distance, standing at the edge of the courtyard, but could not summon the strength to go to her.
“Okay.” One guy stood. “Great job on the tourniquets. Did you do it?” He looked at Max.
“Yeah.”
“You probably saved her life.”
“She’s going to make it?”
“Good chance of it. Want to follow us to the hospital?”
“Can I ride with?”
“Are you her dad?”
“Uncle. Sort of a stepdad. Her dad’s . . . dead.”
“Let’s go.”
As Lexi watched them leave—covers tucked neatly around Tuyen on the stretcher, Max beside her, Claire moving toward Nana—a memory presented itself.
She remembered being carried on a stretcher and transported to a hospital. If she allowed herself, she could recall details. But why?
With a shake of her head, she pushed herself away from the fence.
And then she felt something shut down, an essential something deep inside of her being.
It was almost as if she’d slit her own wrists and caused life to drain away until not one drop remained to keep her heart beating.