Summer of Fire - Linda Jacobs [35]
Clare had looked up from slicing onions, her eyes watery.
Frank pointed with the knife he was using to cut sirloin. The laugh lines around his eyes crinkled. “Don’t let the boys catch you being a crybaby.”
Sage advice, even from a dream, and now upon waking, she planned to follow it. Especially with Sergeant Ron Travis, whose cocky manner said he was always alert for weakness.
In another midnight excursion, she and Frank had been showing a group of Special Olympian kids around the fire-house. As usual, one of the tour heights was sliding down the pole.
Frank waited at the bottom, ready to catch a slip of a girl around eight. Clare demonstrated wrapping legs and arms around the pole and supervised getting the girl in position. “Ready?”
A tight and wordless little nod stirred the child’s strawberry blond bangs.
“Set . . . go.” Clare let her slide.
A joyful trill echoed in the cavernous garage.
When Frank caught the girl, she metamorphosed into a boy of around two with hair like black silk. “He’s with me now,” Frank called, suddenly wearing full turnouts, air pack and mask. The apparatus bay began to fill with drifting smoke.
Every instinct said to slide and rescue Frank and the little boy. From somewhere in the haze, a woman’s voice cried, “My baby! Please help my baby.”
Clare hesitated. In that bare second, smoke blotted out everything. From below, Frank sounded far away. “Once you start down you can’t come back.”
In her bed at Old Faithful, gooseflesh pricked Clare’s arms. With an exclamation of disgust, she threw back the covers and put her feet to the chilly boards. Morning could be frigid, especially with this coldness inside her.
She tried to conjure up Frank’s face. There was his sturdy frame, his tough hands with thick fingers. His head, set atop shoulders strong from weightlifting, was a blur. It was too soon to lose her picture of him. Her Timex’s date indicated August already, just over a month, and if she couldn’t see him now . . .
With pounding heart and a dry mouth, she tried to call up bits and pieces. Frank’s ruddy cheeks bore spider veins from years of subjecting his fair complexion to the outdoors. There was the scar above his left brow, where he’d scoped himself with his Winchester while whitetail hunting with his Dad. All of sixteen, he’d refused to leave the field to get stitches.
No matter how she tried, Clare couldn’t see Frank’s eyes. In her nightmares, they bore the opaque sheen of death.
She’d talked to people whose dreams of the deceased comforted. Her mother Constance had told of awakening in bed with the palpable sensation of her father’s arms around her. Frank had watched cancer waste a friend to emaciation, yet in his sleep, his friend came and shook his hand, restored to former health and vigor.
How much Clare would give for a sign from Frank, that he did not blame her.
Since the night she’d seen Steve Haywood drunk, she’d thought a bit about how people handled things they didn’t want to face. Too bad he thought a bottle could solve his problems, whatever they were.
Steve woke to a pounding that matched the throbbing in his head.
He’d done it again.
Some folks stopped drinking by taking it one day at a time, but he simply kept on, one day and one drink at a time. Today brought yet another defeat.
The pounding continued.
Someone at the door, he realized through a fog. Whoever it was seemed damned determined.
The small, dark bedroom of his house in Mammoth Hot Springs spun. The bottom of this hangover was out there, waiting to give him the shakes and the sickness. It would seize him maybe twelve hours after he’d found himself playing inarticulate, discordant chords at Susan’s piano, with tears pouring down his stubbled face.
How could he have let himself come to this? After Susan and Christa died, he’d thrown himself into his work back in Washington. A few months later, he’d discovered that only when he drank could