June, Reimagined (73)
She started to run, but someone grabbed her.
“Are you bloody mad, Peanut?” Lennox yelled. “Get away from here!”
“I need to get in there!”
“Like hell you do!”
“You don’t understand. Something important is in there and I need it.” She struggled in Lennox’s grasp, barely breathing in her panic.
“What’s so important you’d risk your damn life?”
“My brother!” June yelled.
“What in bloody hell do you mean by that?” Lennox held her, trying to catch her eye.
June’s resolve gave way to a gutting sadness that weakened her knees. “I took him, Lennox. I took his urn. When I left the States. And now he’s in there, trapped, and I need to get him out.” She panted and pushed but with little effort, hampered by the weight in her arms and legs. She pleaded, but even her words felt heavy. “Please. I can’t leave him now. I can’t let him go.”
Lennox grabbed June’s face. “Where’s the urn?”
“In the back of my closet.”
“Don’t even think about moving until I get back.”
Lennox disappeared into the old house. June fell to her knees, giving in to gravity and grief. She hugged herself tightly, trying to hold herself together. What had she been thinking, bringing Josh’s urn with her to Scotland? She couldn’t lose him. Not again.
Angus ran up to June, his face covered in sweat and ash, and collected her off the ground. “Is he fucking insane? What is he thinking going in there?”
The noise of the sirens echoed in June’s head. Hamish and Amelia stood nearby, locked in an embrace, watching their family home burn.
What had June just done?
She had allowed Lennox to go into a burning building. She had let him run toward death to save a dead person. An irrecoverable, incurable, irretrievable person. June could keep Josh’s ashes until the day she died, but he would never come back to her. His life had ended, and yet she was still willing to risk others for it, to sacrifice someone she loved just to soothe her own guilt.
If Lennox died, she would never forgive herself.
June tore from Angus’s grasp and ran toward the house. She felt him behind her, reaching for her, but June was faster than he was. She was almost to the front door when Lennox emerged, out of breath and carrying both the urn and June’s backpack.
“I told you not to move, Peanut!”
He dragged June away from the building, dropped her stuff on the ground, and bent at the waist, trying to catch his breath. June wanted to grab him, hold him, ensure herself that he was real, solid, strong.
“I took . . . what I could,” Lennox panted, streaks of ash and sweat on his perfect face. He was still alive, so alive—a solid, breathing body, fire in his eyes. “Now listen to me . . . I can’t take care of this with you around . . . I need you to go away.” June started to protest, but Lennox silenced her. “For once in your goddamn . . . stubborn life, just do as I say . . . My house . . . Now.”
June gritted her teeth, fighting her desire not to let him out of her sight.
Lennox pointed to the house. “I want to see you walk away . . . and don’t come back.”
June finally did as she was told, looking back over her shoulder, once, and seeing Lennox disappear into smoke and darkness.
TWENTY-NINE
June sat on the couch in Lennox’s living room, Max at her feet. She had no idea of the time. All she knew was that darkness was starting to fade. The sirens had stopped, along with the flashing lights, but time had become muddled in June’s mind, and she wasn’t sure how long ago that had happened. Lennox still wasn’t home.
June couldn’t watch the fire from the windows without wanting to run from the house, so she sat in silence, her face still streaked with soot, her clothes smelling of smoke. If Lennox died, she doubted she’d ever move again, unable to leave the night behind. It would consume her.
There was no thought to her future. No contemplation of what would happen after the fire. Everything before Hamish entered the pub felt like a dream. There was only the reality of waiting for Lennox now. Her bones ached from lack of movement, but for the first time in June’s life, she stayed with the pain, counting each twinge and burning throb.
When the back door opened, Max startled and picked up his head. There was no guarantee it was Lennox. June knew the disappointment of wishing that a person dead was still alive. How many times had she opened Josh’s closed bedroom door to see if his room still smelled of sweat and laundry detergent, to imagine the massive pile of dirty clothes in the middle of his floor, to get angry at the shower running too long, only to smell the wood cleaner her mother used to dust, and no clothes on the floor, and no sound of the shower?
June held her breath. If it wasn’t Lennox, she’d hold the breath until she passed out.
But Lennox stood in the doorway, his hair a tangle of curls. June turned away, shame overwhelming her. She didn’t deserve to look at him, rooted as she was to the couch, in purgatory, awaiting judgment. To look at him would be to see his beauty, and June had lost that right.
“Sorry I took so long,” he said. “Damn paperwork.”
Was he actually trying to be funny? And how dare he apologize to her? She was the guilty one. June didn’t laugh.