Taming Cross

“I’m sorry,” he chokes. “I’m so sorry, sweetheart.”

And then my hand is ripped apart. I’m screaming, screaming, screaming. Then I’m floating through the flames.

I break Merri’s hand—on purpose. Before she even gets a scream out, her body goes limp.

I throw her over my agonized right shoulder, holding onto her by her legs as I move through smoke and flames. I try to remember which hand it was: the left or right? Was it her dominant hand? Did I break it in a way that spares her three middle fingers, or will the whole hand be f**ked up—like mine?

I’m so dizzy, the problem of her hand is magnified, so it seems more tragic than the fact that we’re midway down the stairs and fire is everywhere. There’s no way we can pass through that. No f**king way.

I can barely tell which direction is up, but I can feel the stair rail with my left hip, and that’s how I get us back up to the second floor—by pressing my hip against rail as I struggle up the stairs. When the smoke is too thick for me to breathe, I lean against the railing, praying to God and the Virgin that it doesn’t crumple underneath the weight of us. The prayer must have worked, because I make it back upstairs with Merri still over my shoulder. I can hear her groaning, talking nonsense, but I ignore her.

I need to think.

I find a window—big and vertical—but it’s covered with a film of smoke so I can’t see how far it is to the backyard. I turn a circle, but all I see down the hall on either side is flames.

I lean my left shoulder against the wall, worrying about the smoke Merri is breathing, and then there’s a boom from somewhere and the floor shakes. The ceiling to our right, above the hall that way, has caved in, and fire is rushing toward us like a tidal wave.

I need to do something, but all of a sudden I’m paralyzed because I’m about to die. And it never seemed right, it never seemed real before, because it seemed like it would be too much. That I’d be cheated out of too much. But now I’ve met Merri. I have Merri with me, and I’m pulling her down my chest so I can feel her face in the crook of my arm, and I’m damn near crying because I wanted something better for us both.

Merri says, “Cross…” and something else, but I can’t tell what. Her eyes close. I look around me one more time, but it’s an inferno. The only way out is this big, smutty window. I rub a circle on one of the panes and use my limp left hand to make a haphazard cross before I look outside. And when I do, I see the glittering green-blue water of a lit-up swimming pool.

Right before we jumped out, I heard gunfire. Turns out it was Marchant. After running through the building, trying to get all the staff out, he split off from the EMTs and firefighters in the front of the building—where evacuees had gathered—and ran around to the back, where he used his burned hands to push back a thin slab of concrete below which a pool was hiding. He said he thought it would prevent the fire from spreading, at least behind the building.

Usually the concrete was pulled back via remote, but somehow he got the thing to slide, so of the 100-someodd feet of rectangular swimming pool in the deck behind the brothel, I had about thirty to jump into.

Lucky for Merri and me, the Carlsons have always had a pool, and more than once in high school, Lizzy and I jumped out the second-story window of the pool house into the deep end. I knew I needed to get a running start and overshoot it some. I hardly remember doing it, but I know I considered throwing Merri down first, and I discarded that idea because I was worried that she couldn’t swim. Her body was limp, so I jumped with her.

I remember being worried we would hit cement or yard instead, and I remember that at first I thought we had. That’s how bad the impact hurt my burned skin. I remember thrusting Merri up toward the surface as I choked on chlorinated water.

And that’s it. That’s where our story ends, at least in my memory.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

I’m in and out of consciousness for two days at University Medical Center, which, so far, is three days fewer than Merri. I’m a big pain in the ass and get myself discharged early, the third day after admission, just as long as I promise to stay off my fractured ankle and let the ICU nurses coming in and out of Merri’s room put an oxygen mask on my face a few times a day. Apparently my lungs are still fried to shit, but I’m told they’ll heal if I suck back this bitter-tasting breathing treatment. I’m glad to do it if I can sit by Merri’s bed and watch her sleep.

While I like being near her, holding her uninjured hand and playing with her hair, seeing her like this sucks. She was in the brothel longer than I was, and because she was at the top of the stairs, she inhaled a bunch of smoke. No one knows how long it’ll take her lungs to heal, and until the doctors feel satisfied with her progress, they’re keeping her sedated, on a ventilator.

Yeah—can you f**king believe that? Someone else is in the bed and I’m in one of these dinky plastic chairs. It takes me about two minutes to realize how much I prefer being the one in the bed.

I drive the nurses crazy with my questions, and the only thing that gives me any peace is that they’re required to answer me. Lizzy had Merri’s fake passport in her purse, still hanging around from when I was in the hospital in El Paso, and when the fire started, Lizzy and Hunter were heading out to dinner—so she had her purse. So far, I’ve used my husbandly rights to micromanage Merri’s sedatives; to demand that she get lip gloss to help heal her chapped lips; to play music from my iPod for her; and to decline a visit from the all-faith minister and select, instead, the hospital’s Catholic priest to do occasional blessings.

I’m allowed in the ICU almost all the time, and during the two hours they do shift change, usually the nurses let me chill here anyway—on account of my f**ked up lungs. I need to rest.

By the second night, thanks to the sympathies of a nice, elderly nurse named Martha, I’ve got my very own cot right by Merri’s bed. When Martha steps behind the wall to monitor Merri and the other patients via camera, I push it close to Merri’s bed so I can hold her hand through the metal bars.

The days crawl by. Six days turn into seven before the head pulmonologist starts weaning Merri’s ventilator. She does well, so the next day they cut it down even more, and with it her sedatives. That night, she opens her eyes smiles at me. Then she notices the tube in her throat and starts to cry big, silent tears that rip me up. By the time they take the damn thing out the next day at noon, I’m feeling cagey and helpless. Worried about what will happen when she and I finally talk.