“Is it that bad?” Kissy catches my wandering eye.
I shake my head. “I’ve seen worse.”
Kissy readjusts the bag again. She tucks one leg up beneath her. Then the other.
I know I’m bigger than her, but she looks amazingly small in the moment.
She sighs out and seems to deflate to become even smaller. When her eyes meet mine again, there’s some defeat in them. “I was fourteen when a storm came into Robin’s Tree and flooded the town,” she starts. “Not that we didn’t see it coming. I remember everyone jumping to do different things to prepare in the time we had before it showed up. But still, it managed to hit every weak spot we had, and not an hour or two in, the whole town was struggling.” She moves the bag on her face to the arm of the chair. She absently picks at it as she continues. “My dad was an accountant with a firm in the city but did a lot of pro bono work for the town. We were at his office where he remote worked sometimes when we heard that the trailer park was having issues, especially the back end. My dad had a client he’d just helped who lived out that way, a nice lady my mom had become friends with, too, during her office visits. She had a toddler but no family, and Dad and Mom got so worried that on the way home we drove by.”
She shifts again.
The vegetable medley slides beneath her hand.
“The road that fed into the trailer park was washing away quick. So quick that Dad parked us up high next to a bridge that had withstood years and years of bad flooding. He went out into it with his water boots and came back a minute or two later with the woman’s toddler.” She shakes her head. Her gaze goes with it. “I remember how scared and worried he looked when Mom asked where the mother was. He said she was stuck under something—I can’t remember what—and that she wasn’t the only one in need of some help. Said they were running out of time.”
Kissy smiles. Soft and brief.
“See, Dad was a boring accountant kind of mind. He liked math and reading and was quiet until he liked you true enough. Mom, though? She broke up fights at the bar, ran marathons, and on Halloween every year set out to scare as many people as she could by wearing monster costumes and the like. She wasn’t a flame, Dad used to say, she was straight fire. Mom handed me the baby, told me to sit tight, and then ran out with Dad back down that road. Then it was just me and Micah.”
There it is.
The connection between Kissy and Micah.
Kissy’s smile fades away. “My parents had no way of knowing that the bridge was going to wash out or they’d never have left us alone,” she continues. “But it did. One second I was in the backseat with Micah in my arms, and the next the whole car was on its side and in the water.” She gets lost in it again. Her eyes defocus for a bit. Then she comes back. “You said a car blowing up was a singularly awful thing, and I’m here to tell you that one filling up with water is an experience I never want to relive either. It didn’t feel real. And maybe that’s why I was so calm.”
Kissy readjusts again, sitting taller. The bag of frozen vegetables slides into her lap. She doesn’t care.
“The driver’s side window had busted out, so I grabbed Micah and tried to climb up and onto the top of the SUV, all in hopes of not drowning.” She shakes her head. Mad. “I’d dislocated my shoulder and couldn’t for the life of me get us both up there with it. There wasn’t enough room—I needed my good arm to help me climb. So I left Micah sitting on the side of the center console and made my way out. I’ll never, ever forget clinging to the outside of the driver’s side door with all of the water rushing around us and looking back down into that SUV. I didn’t understand how we were alive. All I knew was that something had stopped us, and that something might not last forever, and I had to get us somewhere safe. So I reached down into the car for Micah with every intention of taking his hand and lifting him to me.”
Kissy was doing fine telling her traumatic story, but now her voice breaks.
No.
It shatters.
I lean forward and catch one of her hands. Her eyes are watering. There’s pure agony in them.
“I couldn’t reach him. I was—I was too short. The water was too fast. I couldn’t grab him.” She shakes her head again. “I start screaming, and Micah’s reaching up for me, and there’s maybe half an inch between us, and I just know, just know with all of my heart, that I’m about to watch him drown because I couldn’t reach. Andthatfeeling? That’s the worst thing I’ve ever felt, and I hope to God it’s the worst thing I’ll ever feel again. He just— He’s just looking up at me and then—then I hear him.”
She turns her head to the right, I assume falling deeper into her memory.
“A teenager a few years older than me, coming out of the trees next to the water. He doesn’t say a word when he climbs up to me. All he does is move me, and like it was nothing, grab Micah and pull him out.” She doesn’t smile as she continues, but there’s audible relief in her. “He tells me to hold Micah with my good arm and pulls us both through the water to the trees. Just like that. We’re saved.”
Kissy melts back against the chair.
“The boy got us to the hospital, and he was in the room when the deputy came in to tell me that my parents and Micah’s mom were gone. They died while trying to help save everyone they could. I lost it. Truly lost it. Tucked my head into the boy’s chest and sobbed like there was no tomorrow, Micah squished between us. The deputy and nurses around us didn’t know what to do.”
She looks me dead on.
“And that’s how I met Everett Guidry.”
CHAPTEREIGHTEEN
Kissy
I don’t like talkingabout meeting Guidry for a lot of reasons. Mostly because it makes me feel like a different person. Or really, because it reminds me that I’d be a completely different person had I not met him.
Seeing Beau react to the news that Guidry is the one who saved Micah makes me feel like that fourteen-year-old girl again. Rain beating down on me, terror flowing right along with the water around us.
