If she could think, she would wonder how they had come to this. How things had turned from "see you in the morning" and babes tucked safe in their beds to a night like this. If she could think at all, if she could do more then repeat pointless mantras in her head.
Just a noise that woke them up. The beginning of how a heart breaks. They told her afterward that it couldn't be what she thought it was, whe pretends to believe them. Then a blur of grabbing kids and a blanket to wrap them up in, running into the smoke, calling, calling, calling, yelling, trying to force herself into a burning building.
The mantra in her head, "Just wake the fuck up so you can be okay."
The firefighter's stupid question that will forever rankle: "What makes you so sure someone's in there?"
All to her breath frosting on this April night/early morning. She's not sure how she came to be standing here. She knows her babies are safe in someone's living room, watching Toy Story 3, more confused then she is, but she has no way to explain what's happening to them.
This is how a heart breaks, with the last ever expected words from a lover's lips. "They didn't make it." Later he tells her, she punched him hard enough to knock him back a few feet. For a moment forever frozen in her soul, she doesn't remember that.
The after time is just as important. The way she keeps her silence and shuts down. The heartbreaking chore of telling her babies their friends are gone. The tears she listens to her babies cry. The nothing she can do to make anything better for them. The tears of her own that refuse to fall. The sleep that refuses to come for weeks and months on end. That time is not this story though.
