TORCH (3 page)

Crossing his hands on the deck, I brace myself on them and heave myself up. Then I turn and position the swimmer for rescue breathing. I brush a strand of my hair away from his face and press my mouth against his again. This time his lips are even colder against mine. I feel the same sensation I noticed in the water—as if I am being pulled under. As if
I’m
the one drowning. Then my face gets so hot it feels like my head will explode.

Breaking the seal, I gasp, turning in time to see the guy’s chest rise on its own. There’s a choking sound in his throat.

“Call 911!” Hux’s voice is so loud he must be standing right over me. “Bring the mask.”

“He’s breathing,” I say, still holding the swimmer tight. “He’s breathing.”

Hux kneels beside me. He reaches under one of the swimmer’s arms, I reach under the other and we hoist him out of the pool. We settle the guy on the deck. Putting his cheek to the swimmer’s mouth, Hux confirms my words with a nod, and then checks his pulse. “Blanket,” he says, and one appears over his shoulder. He covers the guy and slides a rolled up towel under his head.

Kneeling on the other side, I carefully remove the swimmer’s goggles. His eyes flutter open, revealing deep blue irises that are quickly swallowed by dilating pupils. It’s as if he recognizes me, and what he remembers isn’t good.

Whatever it is, Hux sees it, too. “Phoenix, move away.” His surfer dude slang has disappeared. He reaches for the guy’s wrist again.

“No,” I say.

Hux calls over his shoulder. “Get her away.”

Someone grabs me under the armpits and hauls me over to the wall. It’s Katie, the other lifeguard. She takes the end of the towel Bianca is holding and pulls it out of her hand. Bianca is so engrossed she doesn’t put up a fight. I wrap the damp towel around my shoulders and another flush of heat rolls over me, leaving me shaking.

“Don’t worry,” Hux is telling the swimmer as he tucks the blanket around him. “Everything’s okay. Help’s on the way.”

The emergency door at the end of the pool opens and two paramedics rush in. They set their equipment on the deck and kneel beside the swimmer.

The guy gets an arm loose from the blanket and tries to push them away. “I’m fine.” His voice is a hoarse croak. “Let me up.”

“Dude, you’re not fine,” Hux says, relaxing into his slang now that experts are on the scene. “Let them do their job.”

Through a gap in the crowd surrounding them, I see the swimmer reach up and pull off his bathing cap. He rubs his forehead as he answers the paramedics’ questions. I catch his name: Kai Seaver.

One paramedic hooks oxygen to Kai’s nose but he tries to sweep it away. He struggles to sit up and I see him peering through the wall of bodies surrounding him.

“Where is she?” he asks.

The paramedics push him back down and Hux looks at me over his shoulder. “Phoenix, into the changing room. Now!”

I can’t move. My limbs are like overcooked spaghetti. Huge tremors rock me from head to toe, as if I have a fever.

Katie leans over me. “Come on,” she says.

“But it’s my fault,” I say. “I want to stay.”

“He’s fine, don’t worry,” she says. “Let’s get you warmed up.”

I throw off the towel. “I’m too warm already.”

“Sounds like you might be in shock.” She pulls me to my feet and half-carries me to the changing room. “We’ll get the paramedics to look at you, too.”

“I’m fine,” I say. But after a few steps, my legs start to give out and the last thing I notice is the sting of chlorine in my nostrils.

G
raham slides a soda across the kitchen table toward me. His blue eyes—virtually identical to dad’s—are worried. Before Nate died, I’d never seen that expression on Graham’s face. Nate tended to be the worrier in the family. With dad working overnight shifts for days at a time, Nate looked after us a lot. If that bothered him, he never let on. In fact, Dad had to push him to take the job in Rosewood because Nate wanted to be closer to home. I was fifteen by then, and fully capable of taking on more responsibility, but my brothers and I had been a pretty tight trio since Mom died. Dad had seemed relieved to hand over the reins to Nate, and then let Nate hand them over to me. I think Dad considered the fire station his real home. Our house was just the place he crashed when he couldn’t get extra shifts.

Graham gives the soda another nudge. “Drink it,” he says. His attempt to sound commanding fails. At 13, Graham grew three inches over the summer, but he still looks like a kid, and a nerdy kid at that. He’s at the opposite end of the guy spectrum from Nate. Whereas Graham spends hours sketching his comic strips, Nate worshiped sports. In fact, the only sport Nate never liked was swimming, which is probably why I gravitated toward it.

“I think I want something hot,” I say, getting up from the table and plugging in the kettle. I don’t want much of anything but I feel like I have to act as if everything’s normal, and that’s hard to do when Graham’s staring at the faint red ring around my mouth. It’s tingly and sore, like sunburn as it heals. I can tell it’s going to peel, too.

“So what really happened?” Graham asks, as I wait for the kettle to boil.

“You already know what happened,” I say. “You heard it from Katie and you heard it from me. “I’m perfectly fine. The paramedics said so.” They hovered over me, watching me shake, and decided to take my temperature. The thermometer apparently read 108 degrees. They tried it twice and decided the thermometer was broken. I wasn’t so sure. Since we moved here, I’ve had a couple of other random hot flashes that start from my chest and roll up to my hairline and down to my feet in a massive wave. At first, I assumed it was stress, and would pass in time. When it didn’t, I let Regan convince me to see her doctor. He backed the stress theory.

By the time the paramedic got back from his truck with a new thermometer, I’d forced myself to calm down by closing my eyes and imagining myself back in our old house in San Diego. This time, my temperature registered a perfectly normal 98.6 degrees. The paramedics finally agreed to let Katie drive me home, where Graham is now interrogating me.

“So you hit this swimmer hard enough to knock him out?” he asks.

“I guess so,” I say, although I still don’t believe it. “Unless he has a heart condition.”

“Or an infectious disease.” My brother points to the ring around my mouth.

“The mark of a hero,” I say. “Proof that I've given the Kiss of Life.”

Graham snorts. “Dad’ll be so impressed.”

I highly doubt that. Dad isn’t easy to impress, or at least, he never shows it. I always felt Nate was his favorite, but that may only have been because my brother had wanted to be a firefighter from the time he was small. He aced his Fire Sciences degree and was doing great on the Rosewood crew. In fact, everything went according to plan. Until it didn’t.

The back door opens and Dad comes into the kitchen. His security guard uniform looks wrong on him after all his years in a fire fighter’s gear. Uncle Rick tried hard to get Dad on his team after Nate died, because he was down two men. Flynn Reilly, Nate’s best friend, was so broken up over what happened that he quit, and took a month off before starting fresh in another county.

At first, I assumed Dad said no because he’d been a fire chief himself on a far bigger department in San Diego, but now I wonder. Working in security is a low pressure job. I guess he needs a break.

Today he’s left work during a shift to check on me. “You didn’t have to come home,” I say. “I’m not the one who drowned.”

“Obviously,” he says, giving my ponytail a yank on the way to the fridge. “But your principal called.”

“Am I in trouble? It was an accident.”

Dad moves things around in the fridge until he finds a soda. “Principal McCabe knows that. But he said you were in shock and the paramedics were worried.”

Great. Bianca’s probably telling everyone I had to be hauled off the victim—some hot guy I don’t even know.

“Matt Huxley blew the whole thing out of proportion,” I say. “He feels guilty because he was chatting up a bikini instead of paying attention.”

Dad chugs half his soda and wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. “So you really thumped this guy, did you?”

“It’s a plastic pole. I just lost my balance and tapped him and he went down.”

“Then she gave him the Kiss of Life,” Graham says, smirking.

“I’ve never found much romance in it,” Dad says, with a rare smile. He’s done it hundreds of times and won tons of awards for his rescues, so I guess he’d know.

“I guess Phee’s a chip off the old block,” Graham says.

Dad’s smile disappears. He leans against the counter, staring at me. Finally he pushes himself upright, walks over and lifts my chin to study the ring around my mouth. “How did
that
happen?”

“I don’t know. The paramedics were stumped.”

I could tell him that there are similar marks on my arms and hands that I’m hiding with long sleeves, but I don’t. Dad’s not the kind of guy to listen to crazy scenarios about cold guys who burn you, and the last thing he needs is more worry.

The phone rings and saves me from further questioning. “Hey, Rick,” Dad says. “Yeah, she’s fine. Could you check on the guy she clipped? Paramedics took him into Rosewood Grace.” There’s a pause and then, “Yeah, I figured.”

“Figured what?” I ask, when he hangs up.

“Figured you guys would be hungry,” he says, pulling cans of tomatoes and kidney beans out of the cupboard for his famous fire hall chili.

Graham flips through a graphic novel and I pretend to do my homework while we wait. The chitchat usually peters out when Dad’s around. We haven’t found a new normal since Nate died. Or maybe this is the new normal and it’s always going to be depressing.

Chopping a mound of onions, Dad asks, “Why aren’t you joining the swim team this year, Phee?”

We’ve been over this already. “Because the pool sucks and they barely have a program. There’s no point.”

“You’re sure you’re all right?” His back is to me but I sense it’s hard for him to ask. We’re not a touchy-feely family. I barely cried when Nate died, although I wanted to, and it would have been a relief. Somehow I just couldn’t. It felt like crying would make it real.

“Yeah,” I say, grasping for something to reassure Dad that I’m coping. “Regan and I are going to join some clubs.”

“Good.” He sounds relieved. “I know that what happened with…” He drifts off, obviously not wanting to make it real either. “I know that the move has been hard for both of you.” It’s been harder for him, judging by the beer cases stacked up in the garage. Dad never used to be much of a drinker but now he spends his downtime in his recliner watching sports and downing beer. “I guess I could have handled things better but you guys seemed to be doing okay.”

Graham jumps in. “Sure, we’re okay. And with Phee's big rescue today, she could turn out to be a firefighter, like you.”

Dad turns, his wooden spoon dripping tomato paste onto the floor. “No one’s going into firefighting.”

“But it’s a family tradition,” Graham says.

“One that ends now. I will not lose another kid. You’re going to be an artist and Phoenix is going to—” he pauses—“do whatever she wants. I wish I hadn’t encouraged Nate.”

“You couldn’t have stopped him,” I say.

“I could have,” Dad says, turning back to the stove. “I should have seen he didn’t have the gift.”

“But Nate was a natural,” I say.

Dad shakes his head. “He worked hard, but he wasn’t a natural. It takes a special talent to be a good firefighter. I thought I saw it in Nate. I was wrong.”

Tossing the empty cans into the recycle bin one by one, he ends the conversation.

The phone rings again just as he lowers the heat under the chili. “Hey, Rick. You’re sure? Okay.” His voice gets more subdued with each fractured sentence. “Talk later.”

When he turns, I notice for the first time how much Dad’s aged recently. The bright lights of the kitchen show the lines on his face, and there are gray strands in his dark hair.

“What’s wrong?” I ask. “Is Kai okay?”

“He’s coming around,” Dad says, sitting across from me at the table. “Phoenix, I want you to stay away from this boy.”

“I don’t even know him. But why?”

“His family is trouble.”

“What kind of trouble?”

Dad gets up and starts pacing. “The kind of trouble we don’t need.”

“But I hit
him
.”

“Then you saved him,” Dad says, turning his blue laser eyes on me. “Maybe that wasn’t such a good idea.”

I laugh, knowing that no one dies on Dad’s watch if he can help it. “Yeah, I should have just let him sink. Saved myself some drama.”

“We’ll talk about this tomorrow,” he says, grabbing his uniform jacket. “I’ve got to get back to work.”

On the way to the door, he stops and puts his hand on my shoulder. It’s like a vice. “Have I made myself clear?”

“Yeah,” I say, squirming out of his grip. “Avoid dangerous drowned guy. More information to follow.”

“Correct,” he says, as he leaves. “I mean it Phoenix.”