He tried to compose a speech to his mother in his addled head. To explain to her that he didn’t mean to be a drain on her. He was trying to be helpful. Trying to make her love him. Parents were supposed to love their children. That was what everyone said. A mother’s love. Like it was the most precious thing in the world.
“He’ll sleep right through it,” Kenzie promised. “He won’t feel a thing.”
Zachary started to choke as the smell of acrid smoke curled into his nostrils. He coughed. After that Christmas Eve so many years ago, he was terrified of fire. Just the faintest wisp of smoke would bring it all back. The room was growing warm and then hot around him. He could hear the screams of his family. The blaring sirens and horns, and the shouts of the firefighters. His throat constricted as he tried to breathe, the combination of smoke and heated air scorching his throat.
He tried to scream, but he couldn’t.
He couldn’t wake up from the dream.
A bright light pierced the thick smoke. Zachary remembered that light from before. The relief of the firefighters finding their way through all the smoke and fire to find him. The relief of rescue from the burning hell he was in.
“Over here!”
Another figure joined the first, spraying down the area around Zachary. The first hefted him up, lifting him out of his seat and carrying him through the thick, burning clouds of smoke. Down a couple of flights of stairs. Out into clear air that was so cold that it caught in his chest and throat making him cough again. There were red, strobing lights everywhere, dark figures hurrying back and forth, shouted orders and discussions and radio chatter.
The fireman put him down on a gurney.
“This one was in the affected apartment. Get a mask on him right away. Keep checking his airway.”
An oxygen mask was pressed over Zachary’s face before he could say anything. He tried to talk through it but couldn’t get out anything coherent.
“Just relax, sir. Lay back, and we’ll take care of you.”
A blanket was thrown over him. His skin was already cold from the night air.
“Just breathe the oxygen and don’t try to talk right now. We’ll talk in a little while.”
Zachary lay there for a long time, breathing the oxygen and gradually coming to understand that it wasn’t a dream. There really had been a fire, not just a memory from the past. He was at his apartment. Outside, in the cold, just like when he was ten. It wasn’t Christmas Day this time, but a few weeks later.
“How are you doing there, sir?” A paramedic bent over him, ruffling his hair like he was a little boy. Like they had ruffled his hair all those years ago. “You had a close call. How’s your throat?”
Zachary pulled the oxygen mask away from his face experimentally. He was again assaulted by the frigid outside air but managed to avoid coughing.
“It’s sore,” he admitted, voice strained.
“You might have some inflammation from the smoke and fire. How about the rest of your body? Are you burned anywhere?”
Zachary tried to tune in to his body. He’d been so caught up in his nightmare that he had no idea what else his body was feeling. He had been burned in the first fire, but he didn’t know if he’d been burned again. The paramedic was checking him over, not waiting for a response, examining his arms and legs, pulling up his shirt, looking for any burns.
“You’re red like you got a sunburn,” the man said. “But I don’t see anything serious. They’ll check you out at the hospital. Unless there’s something you’re aware of…?”
Zachary shook his head. “No. What happened?”
“You’ll have to talk to the firefighters. I don’t know. A few people got smoke inhalation, but you’re the only one who was in the apartment that caught fire first.”
He was glad that no one else had been hurt, but he was confused by the fire. It had started in his apartment? He felt like his dreams had engendered it. That somehow, by dreaming about fire, he had brought it into being. He knew it didn’t make any sense, but he didn’t understand what had happened.
Eventually, a firefighter came over to talk to him, taking off a blackened helmet and leaning over Zachary’s gurney to talk to him.
“Are you able to talk, sir?”
“Yes.” Zachary’s voice was rough, and his throat hurt, but he wanted to know what had happened. “What happened?”
“You’re the one who was in 3C?”
“Yes. I’m 3C.”
“Looks like maybe you had been burning some candles earlier this evening and fell asleep. One of the candles burned down, and some papers caught on fire.”
Zachary shook his head. “I wasn’t burning anything.”
“Some candles. Christmas candles.”
“No.”
The man raised an eyebrow at Zachary, like he was a stubborn child and just needed to admit what he had done. “We understand that it was unintentional. Sometimes things happen. Fires are tricky things. People don’t realize how dangerous candles can be. You can never go to sleep while they’re burning.”
Zachary tried to sit up. “I wasn’t burning candles. I would never do that.”
“It’s nothing to be embarrassed about. People start fires cooking Christmas dinner, smoking in bed, throwing a scarf over a lamp for a romantic atmosphere. Burning candles is just one of those things. It happens.”
“I was in a fire as a child,” Zachary said, catching the fireman by the front of his uniform and holding on to him tightly, afraid he was going to leave before Zachary could explain. “I can’t light a candle. They’re terrifying.”
The firefighter stared at him, his head wrinkling in puzzlement.
“You’re 3C.”
“Yes.”
“That’s where the fire started. It started with candles.”
“That’s impossible. I don’t have candles. If I did, they would just be for decoration. I would never light them.”
“Well, there were, and somebody did. There were apparently no batteries in the smoke detectors.”
Zachary’s jaw dropped. “There were! I replace them every
