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The precious gift of life...when death had been so horribly close.
Closing her eyes tight, as if that would keep the dark visions at bay, she lifted her face to the water and let it wash away her tears of shock—and joy that she got to live another day with the little girl who meant absolutely everything to her.
* * *
As they walked through a nearby Target store a couple of hours later, Megan was amazed to find that, despite the horrors of the fire they’d lived through, Summer had returned almost immediately to her normal energetic personality.
Megan wished she could rebound so fast. Of course, the two zillion forms she’d just filled out for the insurance company hadn’t exactly helped her state of mind. She was used to plenty of paperwork, but this had been over the top even for her.
She’d purchased their small but charming apartment last winter and had been fixing it up in her spare time. Now all she had to show for her hard work was a promise of money from the insurance company. After they did their assessments, of course. Until then, they’d given her enough cash to get by for a while until she could contact her bank for a new ATM and credit card. They’d also informed her that she had been checked into a Best Western hotel near the hospital until she could make other arrangements.
As soon as she bought a new cell phone, she’d call her parents and try to break the news of the fire to them without giving them a heart attack. No doubt they’d be on the next plane out from Minneapolis to come take care of her and Summer. Of course she wanted to see them, wanted to feel their warm arms around her, but at the same time...well, she wasn’t looking forward to a repeat of five years ago when David died.
No doubt about it, they were going to put the pressure on her to come “back home.” They’d use this fire as the perfect example of how much safer she and Summer would be in the small town she’d grown up in.
Megan unconsciously lifted her chin. She was proud of how well she’d done raising her daughter by herself. And regardless of what her parents thought, she’d learned her lessons about safety perfectly well. The men she’d dated the past couple of years were accountants like her, or teachers, or engineers. She’d never again make the mistake of giving in to the thrill of being with a man who thrived on risk, who ran toward danger instead of away from it like any sensible, reasonable person would.
Summer tugged her toward the food court and Megan broke another one of her rules, this time about junk food as they bought hot dogs and nachos and big cherry Slushies. But although Summer polished everything off, Megan couldn’t do more than take a couple of bites of the greasy fast food.
Knowing how much her daughter liked new clothes—oh, who was she kidding, they both did—Megan told her, “We’re just going to buy a few essentials like jeans and T-shirts today.”
“But we’ll need to get a whole bunch of new stuff soon, right?”
Silently thanking God that her daughter was more pleased about getting new clothes than she was distressed about losing her old ones in the fire, they went to try on a handful of things and were on their way to the front of the store to buy them, when Megan realized she’d forgotten something very important.
Yes, they needed clothes. Of course, they needed to buy some food. But despite how cheerful Summer was being about their situation, her daughter had just had all of her things taken away from her...including the Rapunzel doll she slept with every night.
Knowing they needed to be extremely careful with their cash for the time being, she put down one of the T-shirts she’d been planning to buy on the dressing room re-shelving cart and steered her daughter toward the toy section.
“Look, I think they have Rapunzel dolls here.”
Summer’s eyes lit up and she threw her arms around her mother. “You’re the best mom in the whole world!” As she ran down the aisle to get the doll, Megan had found herself standing in the middle of the big store with tears threatening to come again.
When they were trapped in the bathtub, she’d hoped, she’d prayed that she and her daughter would live to do something as mundane as go shopping together, but the fact was that as the fire had raged hotter and bigger, as the sirens had rung out louder without anyone coming to help them, she’d almost stopped believing.
Quickly wiping away the evidence of the emotion threatening to spill out again, when Summer returned with the brand new doll, perfect in its shiny package, Megan knew she had a lot to learn from her daughter’s smiling face, from her happiness over something as small as a pretty doll.
They’d lost things, but they still had each other.
All she wanted to do now was check into their hotel room and curl up with Summer for a much needed nap. But as soon as she arrived at the hotel, her neighbor and friend, Susan Thompson, pulled her aside.
“Megan, Summer, thank God you’re all right.”
The older woman brought both of them in for a hug. Again, tears threatened and Megan had to hold her breath and focus on a patch of dried gum on the carpet to keep them from falling. She wasn’t normally a crier, hadn’t let herself give in to tears even after David’s death. She’d been too busy then trying to keep up with her two-year-old; trying to hold on to her accounting job and keep them fed with a roof over their heads; trying to deal with the pressure from her parents to come back home immediately and never, ever leave again.
Mrs. Thompson, however, had no such qualms about crying. Her cheeks were shiny with tears as she finally let them go. “As soon as I told the firefighter you were both inside, he ran straight in for you.”
