Dean told us he’d sent the boys back to the road to keep an eye out for the ambulance and direct it to the scene.
He walked alongside us, assisting us with his light. And then there were the vehicles, maybe fifty feet ahead. The ambulance was there. Two technicians were approaching Colm with a stretcher.
“Oh my God.” Farrell ran toward Colm. Gently and slowly, Farrell scooped the woman into his arms, his face in her neck, and I heard him say, “I love you,” and I might have heard her say it, too.
The woman was then loaded on the stretcher. I looked up to find my son. Thank you, I mouthed to him. I looked for Corey. I mouthed the same words to him, as well.
Colm’s big warm hand reached beneath my long hair, his fingers cupped the nape of my neck, and he pulled me against him, wrapped his other arm around me, held me like a hundred million years.
AMY RAYE
Amy Raye drove north on Highway 93 along the cliff band of North Table Mountain and just outside the town of Golden. The sky was blue like water without a shore, like she could swim in it forever, but she was still learning how to swim, and she knew that, too.
Farrell called. “How are you doing?” He asked her that a lot. It had become the words of an unspoken language between them.
“Today is another day,” she said, also words, like stones, and each day they picked up the stones and held them in their hands.
—
Two fire engine crews had contained the fire and extinguished the flames from the oil waste, as well as resecured the area. Amy Raye had been taken by ambulance to St. Mary’s Hospital in Grand Junction. Farrell had never left her side. She was kept in the hospital for two weeks. Her right arm had suffered second-degree burns, the three-inch gap on her left arm had been cleaned and stitched, she’d undergone surgery for her left ankle, and in another six weeks the cast would be removed and her physical therapy would begin. For a week she had remained on IV fluids, and then liquid supplements were added to her diet. And slowly the taut skin around her bones regained its elasticity. The color came back to her skin. And yet she continued to feel pain, and her doctors said this was a good thing. “You’re beginning to comprehend everything that happened to you,” one of them told her. “Try to focus only on the next minutes, on only one moment at a time. Work your way slowly from there.”
She felt vulnerable in ways she had never felt before; the slightest gesture from someone could bring her to tears.
And when Farrell had brought the children to see her after her third day in the hospital, when she’d been afraid of their reaction to her, that her appearance might frighten them and they’d pull away, and they’d scrambled onto the bed despite the tubes and machines, and kissed her and squeezed their bodies against her, she looked up at Farrell. “I’m sorry,” she said.
And she told the investigators she was sorry also, and the firefighters, and the search volunteers who came to see her. At first she did not understand why she was not charged with the fire, but she was sorry for that, too.
The sheriff told her it was the drugs. “Keep her on morphine, and everything will be all right,” he’d told Farrell.
And then there was the day before she was discharged and the visitors had gone away. She was lying in the white room, with white lights, and Farrell’s blue eyes, but his eyes were too blue, and she turned away. “I am so sorry,” she said.
“Look at me,” he said. He was holding her hand, and he tugged it gently. And when her head remained turned away from him, he said, “Why won’t you look at me?”
“Because you’re not safe with me,” she said.
“That’s not true,” Farrell said.
“I don’t deserve you. I can’t make any promises. I don’t want to lie to you anymore.”
“We just need to get you well. We can talk about this later.”
She turned toward him again and looked at him. “That’s just it. I’m not well. I haven’t been well for some time.”
“I know,” Farrell said.
“Do you love me?” she asked him.
“Yes,” he said.
“Why?”
“I don’t know.”
And both of them laughed.
She’d told Farrell about the cougar and the caches. She’d told him about the deer. She told him about her last day at the cache. “The birds hadn’t gotten to it yet. The lion must have been keeping them away. The eyes were still intact. And that’s odd. That’s not right. But I looked at those eyes, and I thought of you.”
The tears mingled on Amy Raye’s face. Farrell wiped them away. “It’s okay,” he said.
—
Before Amy Raye was discharged from the hospital, the female ranger came by one last time. Farrell kissed Amy Raye on the forehead and stepped out of the room.
“How is he?” Pru asked.
“He wants us to work things out.”
“He loves you,” Pru said.
“I don’t understand,” Amy Raye said.
Pru laid her hand over Amy Raye’s. “You don’t have to.”