“I remember the day I met you, Dane Kirby.” Gwen’s slim fingers interlaced between Dane’s on the wrought-iron handrail of the terrace outside Keith’s loft. “You used to hate it that I smoked,” she said.
“I never hated anything about you, Gwen.” Dane looked back through the window at his friends. He wondered how crazy he looked talking to himself.
“Whatever you say, cowboy.” Gwen shook a smoke out of a blue and white box and handed it to Dane.
Dane took the imaginary cigarette and let Gwen light it for him. He tried to remember how it felt to have that rush of hot smoke fill his broken lungs. Even now, knowing what he knew, he still missed it.
“You look handsome standing out here, Mr. Kirby.”
“Thank you, Mrs. Kirby.” Dane pointed down at the building across the street. “You remember that?” he asked.
“Of course I do.”
“I miss stealing kisses from you under that awning.”
“You never had to steal them, Dane. I was a willing participant.” Gwen lit up a smoke of her own and blew the smoke out sideways, away from him, like she always did. Sliding his hand out from underneath hers, Dane turned and faced her. She was wearing a red skirt with a blue sleeveless sequined top that fit her like a second skin. A pattern of white stars danced across her chest. It was the outfit she was wearing that day. The day she died. The day Dane killed her. He could feel the tears swelling behind his eyes as he drank her in.
“You’re thinking about that day again, aren’t you?” Gwen asked, and brushed at his hair. “You always picture me wearing this when you think about that day.” She pulled at the hem of her skirt. Dane said nothing. He looked down at her hips but he didn’t close his eyes. He didn’t want her to disappear, not yet. Gwen tilted his head up until he was looking directly into her black-coffee eyes. “It wasn’t your fault, Dane.”
The tears began to push their way out and Dane’s eyes got wet.
“It was an accident,” she said. “Accidents happen. How long are you going to do this to yourself?”
“I should never have let you and Joy ride in the back. I knew it was dangerous. I knew—I knew it was…”
“You didn’t let me do anything, Dane. Seriously, when did I ever let you tell me what to do?” She took another drag and blew it out sideways. “I was a grown woman. I was capable of making my own decisions.”
“But you don’t know. You didn’t see.”
Gwen tossed her cigarette down over the terrace and they watched the sparks hit the street below.
“Dane, I live inside your head. I know everything that happened that day. Every time you drag yourself through it, I’m right there with you. I see and feel everything you do. You need to stop all this.”
Dane’s eyes glazed over. He didn’t want to see it, but he knew he would. He didn’t even know what they were out doing that day. That memory was lost. The rest was crystal clear. In that moment, they weren’t standing on Keith’s terrace anymore. They were loading up the truck on the Fourth of July.
“Hang on just a second,” Dane said from the front seat of the truck. It was piled high with Dane’s turnout gear. He’d stuck an extra SCBA air pack in there, too, and various other gear—a triage kit, an extra AED, and a whole med-pack still sealed with zip ties. “Shit.” Dane popped the door of the Ford F-250 and tried to catch his helmet as it fell out. He missed and it hit the concrete at his feet.
Gwen picked it up. “Here.” She handed it to him. “Leave all that stuff where it is. We can ride in the back.”
Dane argued, but it was pointless; Gwen had already stepped up on the back tire and begun to pull herself over the fender well.
“Baby, I don’t know. There are a lot of people on the road today. Just give me a second to clear all this out of here.”
Gwen wasn’t having it. She and Joy had ridden in the back of the big brush truck a dozen times before, so it was nothing new. The bed of the truck had a gas-powered pump and a huge plastic tank that carried two hundred gallons of water, along with fifty feet of folded yellow forestry hose. There was enough room for them to sit and plenty of things bolted to the truck bed to hold on to. And Joy liked to ride back there. Her little round face lit up. “Here—hand her to me,” Gwen said, and reached over the side.
Dane stuffed his helmet back into the truck and held it in place while he slammed the door to keep the whole pile of Kevlar and medical equipment from spilling out. He bent over and lifted his five-year-old daughter up into the air. She barely weighed a whisper. She was petite like her mother. Joy had the lightest, finest blond hair Dane had ever seen. He could always spot her right away at a playground or at school because that hair practically glowed. She was the second-most beautiful girl he’d ever seen. He spun her above his head a complete three hundred and sixty degrees before setting her next to her mother on a stack of folded canvas tarps that smelled of ash and burnt wood. The tarps were used to overhaul, cover, and protect property from smoke or water damage during a fire. Hardly the appropriate throne for a princess of Joy’s caliber, Dane thought, but it would have to do. He grabbed at Joy’s soft, puffy cheeks and looked into her big green eyes. When the light hit them just right, he could see flecks of gold in them. “You hold on to Mommy now, okay? And don’t touch any of the stuff on the pump. That’s all Deddy’s work stuff.”
“I know, Deddy. You tell me every time.”
“We’re fine, Dane. Let’s go.” Gwen put an arm around the little girl and pulled her in snug.
Dane walked over to the driver’s side and opened the door. “Hang on tight, ladies.” Dane wheeled the truck out onto White Bluff Road. Dane remembered Nirvana’s “Heart-Shaped Box” was playing on the stereo and Gwen was singing in the back. She was a terrible singer. It was possibly the only thing she wasn’t good at. He remembered the sun sparkling off the blue sequins of her shirt in the rearview mirror and Joy’s blond hair blowing back from her head in frantic strands like the streamers on the handlebars of a bicycle. He remembered his daughter smiling, her big green eyes open against the wind, but that was it.
He’d only made it about six miles down the road before he lost control of the truck. Dane hadn’t heard the shot itself so much as the echo. It sounded like a .30-30. That was the reason he took his eyes off the road. The two-hundred-gallon tank of water in the bed of his truck caused it to be considerably top-heavy, so even at forty-five miles an hour—the speed the investigators concluded that Dane was going—the deer suddenly appearing in the road that made Dane yank the wheel to avoid it caused the vehicle to capsize.
He cracked his head against the back window and blacked out almost immediately, but not before seeing the deer’s insides spatter over the windshield like a bucket of wet purple rags and red paint. There were pinches of hot white light in his vision and then nothing—just full black. He was informed of the rest later.
The truck had tumbled over at least twice, judging by the extent of the damage done to it and the road. The deer had just run right out in front of him. There was nothing Dane could’ve done. That’s what everyone said. Nothing he could’ve done any differently to avoid what happened. But he never believed that. When he regained consciousness, the sun was going down, but from the way he was hanging, it looked more like it was coming up. The skyline was all wrong. He couldn’t keep his head right. Nothing made any sense. He could feel the bits of glass embedded in his face and the blood in his eyes. They stung. He wiped at them but could hardly get his hands to work.
He fumbled at the latch on his seat belt, but when he finally clicked the lever, his full weight fell to the roof below him and pain shot from his neck to his knees. The pain was brilliant but clarifying. It allowed his brain to process what had just happened. He tried to say his wife’s name. He tried to scream her name, but it came out a thick, wet wheeze that sprayed more blood over his chin and dripped onto the roof liner he was folded on. He kept trying to scream. Patches of Dane’s memory were missing from those first few minutes of being awake. He couldn’t remember getting out of the truck, but did remember stumbling in a puddle of mud and water from the tanker. He also remembered Gwen’s red skirt flapping in the breeze. That piece of fabric was the only thing moving when he saw her. That’s when he stopped calling her name. He knew from the unnatural way her body lay, still and broken, that there was no way she could answer him, and she never would again. Dane’s silence turned to screams and cries for help, and he felt as if he were standing outside himself, watching another version of himself go mad. He sat there in the grass, sobbing and holding Gwen’s limp body. There was another gap in his memory here, but he managed to drag her out of the tall grass, slick with both of their blood, and collapsed onto the shoulder of the road.
He blacked out again. A fire in the ravine began to burn its way into the woods as Dane lay still next to the body of his dead wife. When he opened his eyes, he reached over and took her hand. The modest oval diamond ring on her finger sparkled in the sun and the light of the fire. Dane screamed again and faded back into the darkness. Each time he returned to the moment he begged God to have mercy—to make it a dream—but it wasn’t a dream. Dreams didn’t hurt like this. He asked God to let him die instead. He begged.
Dane lay there as the day faded to a light purple, sticky and broken on the asphalt shoulder of White Bluff Road for nearly forty-five minutes before the first car approached and stopped just beyond the spreading fire in the woods. After that first car stopped, it only took another five minutes before the entire county knew what had happened. Fire crews took to the woods to contain the blaze and sheriff’s deputies blocked off the road from rubberneckers. Dane was sedated and put in the back of an ambulance with several broken ribs and a mangled leg. Most of what happened next he had to be told by the people that arrived afterward. It was Ned who found Dane’s daughter. He was the one who thought to start looking up instead of down as they canvased the woods. He spotted Joy’s tiny, twisted body more than twenty feet up, in a cradle of broken branches and moss-covered limbs—in the arms of trees more than thirty yards from where the truck had crashed.
The tanker truck had obliterated the animal that ran into the road. Its carcass was strewn in chunks in the street. There was no way to tell if it had been wounded prior to running in front of the truck or not, but Dane had heard the shot, or at least the faint echo of it.
“It sounded like a .30-30,” Dane said to himself, coming out of the memory.
“Dane,” Gwen said, pulling him out completely. “How many more times are you going to put yourself through that?”
Dane looked down at the street, ignoring her question. “I’m riding out to Hard Cash. I’m going to find this boy. Maybe then I can—”
“Get yourself killed,” Gwen finished his sentence. “I’m sorry, Dane. But I don’t want to be around to see that.”
“Wait,” Dane said, and reached toward her, but she was gone. He gripped the wrought-iron railing with both hands until his knuckles went white. He could feel every set of eyes burning into his back through the window behind him, but he didn’t care. Right then, in that moment, he didn’t care about anything. He considered hopping the railing, but decided against it. It wouldn’t be high enough to kill him anyway.