The Burning Road to Divorce After the Fire novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Four Minutes Away
Pearl dies on Cedar Grade while Brent's helicopter flies over to rescue his first love's dog, and eleven days later Brent calls Lainey dramatic; then the hotshot captain calls with the fire radio tape.
My grandmother died in my arms at 4:17 in the morning, on a mountain road, with the pines burning on both sides of us.
Minutes earlier I had been telling her that help was coming.
I believed it, because my husband had told me so.
The evacuation order hit my phone at 3:40.
She lived at the top of Cedar Grade, eighty-one years old, on oxygen, in the last house before the ridge.
The power was out and her machine was dead.
I drove up from town in my scrubs and got her into the car with her portable tank in her lap.
We made it to the third switchback.
Then a burning pine came down across the road and the car could not go forward or back.
I carried her out to the gravel turnout, because the car was filling with smoke.
She weighed almost nothing.
I called my husband, Brent, at 4:03.
He ran Breckenridge Air Rescue, and the base was six miles from where we sat.
He picked up on the second ring, which he never did.
"Lainey, listen to me. Sunflower is four minutes out. Stay where you are."
Sunflower was the white helicopter with the flower painted on its tail.
I had asked him once why a rescue helicopter had a sunflower on it, and he had said it was for luck.
"Four minutes," I told Pearl. "Brent's coming. Brent's sending the helicopter."
She smiled at me with her cannula crooked on her face.
"That's good of him," she said.
The tank gauge was down to a quarter.
I held it to her mouth and counted her breaths.
At 4:09 I heard the rotors.
I stood up in the road and waved both arms.
The white helicopter came over the ridge, low, with its landing light on.
I saw the sunflower on the tail.
It flew directly over our heads.
It kept going east, toward the valley, and the sound went with it.
I called Brent again.
It rang until his voicemail picked up.
I called again, and again, and Pearl pulled at my sleeve.
"Honey, sit down. Sit down by me."
I sat down on the gravel and took her into my lap.
"They'll turn around," I said. "They must have the wrong spot."
"Lainey," she said. "Your hands are shaking."
"I'm fine."
"You are not." She patted my wrist twice. "But you're good at it anyway."
Those were her last words.
At 4:17 her chest stopped moving.
I kept the mask on her face and said her name until my throat gave out.
At 4:19 my phone buzzed with a text from Brent.
"Bird is committed on a priority rescue. Ground crews are on the way. Hang in there, babe."
Nobody told me what the priority was.
A fire engine reached the turnout at 4:26.
A man in a yellow shirt jumped down before it stopped and ran to me.
He knelt and put two fingers on Pearl's neck, and then he looked at his watch and did not say the time.
"Ma'am," he said. "I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry."
His face was black with soot, and he was crying.
He carried her to the engine himself.
I rode in the back and held her hand until the hospital.
At 6:02 that morning the county news page posted a video.
A golden retriever sat wrapped in a blanket beside a white helicopter, on a ranch twenty miles east of Cedar Grade.
Brent stood next to it in his flight jacket with a woman's head against his chest.
The caption read: LOCAL RESCUE DIRECTOR SAVES FAMILY DOG FROM RIDGEBACK FIRE.
"We never leave anyone behind," Brent told the camera.
The woman was Melanie Lindner.
I knew her face from a photograph in his mother's hallway.
She was his first love.
I watched the video three times in the hospital parking lot, and then I turned my phone off.
I buried my grandmother on the sixth day.
Brent came to the funeral in a black suit and stood in the front row with his hand on my back.
He cried a little in the right places.
For five days after that I said almost nothing to him, and he let me.
On the eleventh morning after the fire my phone lit up on the kitchen counter.
"You've been ignoring me for a week and a half. It's getting dramatic, Lainey. Mom's dinner is Sunday. Wear the blue dress and be normal."
I read it standing at the sink in Pearl's old cardigan.
I put the phone face down.
I was done waiting for him to turn around.
It rang again almost at once, with a number I did not know.
"Mrs. Breckenridge?" A man's voice, low and rough. "It's Kurt Corbin. I was on the engine that reached you."
I said nothing.
"I need to play you something from the fire radio," he said. "From that night. I think you're the only one who should hear it first."
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