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He looked away. “Yeah, but if I had been there, I could have saved her. Done CPR. Hell, I had an AED under the seat in my truck.”
“It’s not your fault,” I repeated.
“Maybe not. But that doesn’t change the fact that she could still be alive if I hadn’t skipped out on her that night.”
“Jesus, Drew. That is so much to carry around on top of what you already went through.”
He sucked in a deep breath. “There’s more.” He echoed my words from earlier. “After the accident, I couldn’t go back to our apartment because it was on the third floor with no elevator. I moved into my mom’s house. We moved into my mom’s house. Gwen and me. She took care of me for months and I pushed her further and further away. I finally became enough of a raging asshole that she left. I refused to change a thing in the house. I deserved to be reminded every day of the fact that I wasn’t here for my mom.”
“Drew…” What could I even say to him? He’d latched on hard to the idea that he was responsible for his mom’s death.
“Once I’d been home for a few weeks, Ivy kept dropping by with Russ to thank me. But I avoided them at all costs. I’d make Gwen tell them I was asleep, or in the shower, or at physical therapy. Finally, one day after about a month, Gwen got tired of lying and told them to wait for me downstairs. Right where Ivy sat today. The minute I laid eyes on them, I bailed because my first thought was I wish I’d never come across that car.”
“Was that the first time you’d thought that?”
Until this point, he’d been delivering this part of his story to the firepit, but with my question, his surprised gaze swung back around to me. “Yeah.”
“It’s impressive you made it as long as you did.”
He straightened under me and his expression hardened. “You don’t understand. I dedicated my life to saving people, and when faced with the child I rescued,” his voice rose, “my first thought was that I wished he died so I could have been there to save my mom. What kind of person does that make me? I knew on a daily basis I could die at work trying to save other people, and after managing to come out of that accident in one piece—”
“Not quite one piece.” I tapped his thigh to remind him he was downplaying what he’d lost while beating himself up for having a perfectly reasonable reaction to a terrible situation.
He glared at me and carried on. “It could have been worse.”
“Yeah, you could have died. You could have ended up paralyzed. You could have only managed to save one of them. You could have tried and failed and all three of you died. You could have driven a different route home that night. They could be dead, and your mom could still be dead. There are a thousand different ways that night could have unfolded that aren’t any better than the way it did.”
His face screwed up in anguish. “But none of those are what I wished. The moment I laid my eyes on Russ, all I wanted all the way down to my bones was to have not saved him. To have not blown off my mom. To have gone to family dinner like I was supposed to.” He let out a harsh breath. “I couldn’t stand myself anymore. It fucking shattered my reality. What kind of monster would wish to trade two lives for one like that?”
“Any normal human being would have thoughts like that. It doesn’t make you a monster,” I countered.
“Not me.” He thumped his chest. “I was supposed to be willing to make those kinds of sacrifices. And when it came down to it, I couldn’t handle the fact that I had.”
“So, what? This whole hermit act was never about your leg? It’s about your self-identity as a martyr being challenged?”
His blue eyes blazed.
Good. I wanted him angry because he was pissing me off. I refused to accept this picture he had of himself.
I pushed on. “You think I never wished things were different? That I’d never gotten pregnant, and Josh and I could have had a typical college experience. That I never wished away my own child so I could have had the love of my life instead.”
He flinched at my words. “That’s different.”
“Why, because the child wasn’t born yet? Because there’s a whole legion of pro-lifers out there that I’m sure would beg to disagree with you.”
“It’s still different. You wished for fewer deaths. Not more loss for other people to lessen your own guilt. And you never signed up for that possibility. I was supposed to be willing to make sacrifices.”
“One: yes, I did.” I counted on my fingers. “It’s called being human. There’s always the possibility of loss every day. But if you don’t accept that—if you live in constant fear of it—then you don’t get to experience all the amazingly beautiful things life has to offer you either. And two: you never volunteered to lose your family as part of the bargain of being a firefighter.”
His jaw hung slack. Confusion swam in his eyes. So much time wasted because he expected other people to agree with this disdainful view he had of himself. That was the tragedy—the life he could have been living over the last five years.
“How about your mom?”
“What about her?” he croaked.
“Would she have made that trade? Her life for theirs?” I asked.
He shook his head. “No. That’s the point. She never would have wanted that, so for me to even think it—”
