Garrett Brand pressed a blessedly soaked towel to her face, then his hand to her shoulders to push her down low. She didn’t know where he’d got the wet towels. Right, she’d put a big water cooler backstage for the band. Garrett took Manny and Chelsea up the stairs.
Lily lowered the towel and shouted over the roar, “Top of the stairs, to the right!”
As Garrett’s form faded into the smoky staircase, Willow grabbed her mother, who grabbed Penny, who grabbed Kirsten, who grabbed Esmeralda. It was too many at once. Lily got in front of them, broke up the group, motioning them low again, pumping her palm to convey some should wait while others went up. Then she sent the rest.
She’d given away her towel and she needed it again. Somebody handed her one. She lost track of how many passed, of who was left behind. Garrett was up and down the stairs many times no longer letting her guide people up. It was so hot! Her skin felt sunburned. She couldn’t hear anything but the fire’s roar and furious crackling, like bones being crushed in the teeth of a giant.
“Lily, come on.”
It was Garrett again. He was pressing another wet towel to her face. “The others?” She asked. “Is anyone?—”
“Everyone’s up.”
“My dad? The kitchen crew?”
“I don’t know, Lil.” He put an arm around her and they turned toward the staircase. Then there was a whoosh as flames blasted up the stairway like a blowtorch, following the draft.
Lily screamed as she and the man who’d become like a second father to her over the past year, backed up into the darkest darkness they could find. They sank to the floor in a corner near the stage.
“He never even got to see it,” Lily said. Her chest kept spasming and she didn’t know if it was from the smoke or the grief. Garrett’s chest must be doing the same, because he was clutching it…Oh no. Oh no. “Garrett!”
But the big guy dropped like a sack of feed, flat onto his back on the floor.
“Garrett!” she shrieked.
But he didn’t move. Hell! She knelt and pressed her fingertips to his neck, then laid her head on his chest to be sure. No pulse.
The defibrillator was behind the bar, beyond a pool of fire. She couldn’t get to it. So she placed her hands over his chest, and started pumping, and counting. She gave him two breaths in between, because something told her to do it that way, rather than the newer method of all compressions, no breaths. But she felt it, he needed the air. So she gave him her own.
She started to cough. Her wet towel was beside Garrett’s head, but she had to keep pumping. Then all at once, he dragged in a loud long breath, only to start coughing. She rolled him onto his side and pressed the wet towel to his face and said, “Just slide yourself this way, Garrett. Can you do it?”
He nodded from behind the towel, and she got behind him, grabbed him under his arms, and he pushed along with his feet. They made it to the very front of the stage, the furthest spot from the fire.
Garrett lifted the wet towel to her face. He said, “You should’ve left me, girl. We ain’t gettin’ outta this.”
“Sure we are. You gotta have a little faith.”
He coughed lightly then rubbed his chest. “Tell me somethin’, Lily. Did I have a heart attack just now?”
“I mean, it stopped beating. It was probably the smoke.”
“Or maybe the sausage.” He offered the end of his wet towel to her. She lay down on the floor beside him so it would reach and held it over her face. “So my heart stopped altogether, did it? I was…dead?”
“What’s the movie line? You were…” She coughed hard and her eyes stung and watering and her chest burned. “You were only mostly dead.”
“Then it was real.”
“What was?”
He met her eyes, shook his head slow. She could hear his breaths because they whistled in and out of his lungs. His voice a rasp, he said, “You’re a helluva nurse, Lil. Should you ever want to go back to it, remember that.”
As they neared the exit to Mad Bull’s Bend, an ominous orange glow hung low in the sky. Ethan didn’t slow down when he got off the highway. His heart was already frozen with dread before he saw Two Lilies engulfed in fire, and barreled over the grass, across the patio.
“The roof!” Jeremiah shouted, pointing. “Back up, turn on the fog lights.”
Ethan did both, then dove out of the truck and ran toward the building before he even realized what he was seeing. People were on the roof, family, filing toward the farthest end, then inching lower along the peak, dangling from their hands, and dropping to the ground. He ran to them, Jeremiah right on his heels.
Manny’s family, all five of them, were huddled off to the right, and he spotted Hyram still in his white apron. Cat was with him, but not Lily.
