If You Fall

Fourteen

A few days later it was my sister's birthday, which was always a heartbreaking occasion.

When I was ten my baby sister was born, and my mom died. The two events were simultaneous and happened in the spring. We were poor before those two events, and after, we were broke. The hospital debt alone was enormous, the calls constant, the baby always crying. My mom, who would have somehow fixed everything, was gone.

It was a dark time. A year later I met Reed when my dad began teaching climbing, and he was a veritable light in that tunnel with his bright mood and smile.

A year and a half after that, things were smooth, if tight. My dad was teaching every day and we were getting by with food stamps and government daycare for my sister, who was two and a half. 

Then, right before Christmas, some asshole fell asleep smoking in our apartment building and burned it down.

I had woken up at two in the morning, the room smoky, and not been immediately panicked. We were on the fifth floor but there were fire escapes, and extinguishers that my dad himself had placed all over in a fit of safety awareness.

My calm had vanished upon opening my bedroom door. The small living room was full of smoke, chokingly so. I dropped to my knees and crawled, fire safety from school ingrained in my mind. I made my short way to my dad's bedroom, calling for him through the coughing. Essie still slept there in her crib, and neither of them were inside. The tiny bathroom was also empty, and with relief I assumed they had made it out.

I tried to flee myself and got caught in the staircase when the burning ceiling of the floor above me fell through and onto the stairs at my feet. I was forced to go through the flames or die there, and my hair had gone up instantly, my clothes also catching fire. When I fell down the last staircase there were people gathered there trying to either help or escape, and they put me out like a campfire.

The scars on my palms healed to where I could no longer see them, as palms do, and somehow my hair began growing back. A burning piece of wood had struck my face, and from my left temple down to my chin was layered in melted skin extending all the way to my ear. I was lucky it missed my eye. Part of my back and thigh also had that melted scarring, though I'd had skin grafting and some cosmetic surgery much later.

As for my dad and sister, they had indeed made it out, but only to the balcony. It had then collapsed with the rest of the building. I don't know why he didn't use the fire escape, which had been in perfect working order because of his maintenance of it. I'll never know if there wasn't time, or he froze, or if the flames were blocking them too.

I recalled little of that night after being pulled from the collapsing building. The agony of my burns had been so great, the only thing I knew for a long time. I had been in the hospital for weeks, in a drugged haze, hallucinating from the meds and endless pain. I didn't know for two weeks that my dad and Essie were dead because I kept thinking they were there with me. 

Those conversations I do remember too well, and they creep me out to recall, because they were all products of my imagination. Ways to cope.

Reed had been there, not quite fifteen but still adulting in a way that grounded me as I began to realize what was really going on. I turned thirteen in the hospital and was put into foster care, which was one shitty place after another, and I began to shut down. I stayed that way for a long time, until I got out. Until he got me out, anyway.

Saved me, and all.

Though society tries to pound it into us that we must be our own heroes, especially we women, and not depend on others, especially men, this is at times bullshit. We all need saving at one point or another, and often we are either incapable of it or in our own way. Some of us even find the person who will save them.