Chapter Nine
Devyn
Iwait until he’s sleeping beside me to watch the clip.
He’s insatiable, and we’ve made love twice more since he generously gave me ten minutes to grab a snack and a cup of coffee. He said the coffee is okay since the caffeine will keep my strength up. He has a sense of humor under the gruff, and I think he likes to make me laugh.
Making love wore him out, or maybe it’s the break in his routine since I’ve been here, but either way, he’s dead to the world now, lying in his bed, the comforter pulled over his chest. His bedroom is closer to the kitchen, he said, and I couldn’t argue with that. He didn’t bother to put his clothes back on either, before falling into a heavy sleep, his kiss still warm on my lips.
With my pajamas in place, I run up to the bedroom, grab my laptop, and I settle onto his bed with my earbuds to watch. Listening to him talk about the time he spent in the hospital chilled me to the bone, his wife abandoning him when he needed her most. I don’t want him to wake up and not find me here.
I’m falling in love, and it scares me. I don’t want to leave tomorrow any more than he wants me to go, but I have responsibilities that won’t disappear hiding in Old Harbor. He denies it, but I think once he’s done licking his wounds, Old Harbor won’t be enough for him, either. His decision to go back to Cedar Hill is a no-brainer, but I can’t live in the city and Talia can’t be around Sweet. That’s not saying Portland doesn’t have its own share of drug problems, but kids smoking pot in their parents’ basements when they go out of town is a far cry from having Sweet available on every street corner. The temptation is too much, and it’s best to keep her away from it, settle in a small town that still has everything we need.
I brush my fingers along his jaw, and in his sleep, Rick turns his head toward my touch.
The video is cued up and ready to go, and I push the earbuds into my ears and press Play. The information for the clip states it was posted by OSHA rep Fred McAllister who was on the site that day overseeing the lift. There are other clips from various angles, nosy pedestrians filming, hoping for their fifteen minutes of fame, but thankfully nothing that shows Rick and what happened after the crane’s arm fell from the sky.
I’ve never seen a crane up close, and around the time of Rick’s accident, I’d been desperately trying to keep my head down and out of the news while finding us a place to go as quickly as I could. I still heard about the accident, everyone had. No one could avoid it. When Renata Mercer filed for divorce four months after Rick almost lost his life, it was big news. I’d skimmed the articles over bites of breakfast thinking they were nothing but rich people problems and moving on, dealing with my own aftermath settling Talia in school and finding a niche at the Pioneer.
Workmen stand in a thin layer of mud on the site and watch the crane as it moves a large piece of framework off the ground and into the air. It looks like a piece of the insides, curved metal beams sautered together forming a heavy arch, too heavy for a crane to lift. It does though, and the workmen clap and hoot as the crane slowly moves the framework off the ground.
It looks like everything will go smoothly until the truck starts to tip, just as Rick described. The OSHA rep zooms in, and the crane’s operator scrambles with the controls, the light bouncing off the glass partially obstructing my view of him.
The truck starts to fall over, and there’s nothing anyone can do. The workmen on the ground start to scramble away, and the huge frame sways from side to side, hanging from the hook several feet off the ground. The truck succumbs to the soft earth, and as if in slow motion, tips over, and the...I open another tab and look up parts of the crane...boom, the long arm extending from the truck, crashes to the ground, the framework smashing into part of the building already in place.
Because of the angle, I can’t see who’s hurt or where, except for the crane operator who I later found out lost eight months of his life in a medically induced coma to treat a cerebral hemorrhage and brain swelling caused by his head hitting against the glass window of the operator’s cab.
Rick had been trapped under the boom, had stayed too close to the crash, trying to warn two ironworkers to get out of the way. It hadn’t helped, and the frame killed them when it dropped as the boom collapsed.
I wipe my tears away as the video ends. I’m glad whoever was filming hadn’t filmed Rick, too. I couldn’t watch as emergency crews worked to free him.
There are other views, and most center on the truck as it tips into the mud, the wind whipping ahead of another storm. The truck slants, the boom sways, the frame swings back and forth. I try to calculate when the operator should have aborted the lift, but there doesn’t seem to be any indication until it’s too late. The wheels sink into the mud and that might have been just enough with the wind to cause the accident. Rick’s right about one thing—they should have waited until the next storm passed and the ground dried out. But...
I watch the video again.
Why did the crane tip in the opposite direction of the framework? I don’t know how much the framework weighed, I would have to ask Rick, but it looks like it should have been more than enough to counteract the wet ground.
My reporter’s mind searches for clues, but I don’t know enough about construction sites, cranes, or weather conditions to argue with what Rick told me. OSHA investigated, hell, the rep was right there, and if they didn’t find anything wrong, then it must have just been poor timing and poor luck.
Still, I watch the video again. The crane operator should have known something was going on. He should have known something wasn’t right, but he pressed forward. He should have been able to feel when the balance shifted.
Shouldn’t he have?
Or had he been so focused on the framework that nothing else mattered?
I sigh.
“That’s why I don’t watch it,” Rick says from behind me. “All I would do is beat myself up for not waiting until the rain passed. I was stupid, and it cost people their lives. Let it go, Devyn.”
“But have you seen what happens?” I insist, popping my earbuds out of my ears and frowning. “Something isn’t right.”
He sits up and closes my laptop with a sharp snap. “You know more than OSHA? You know more than my foreman? You know more than the crane operator? You’re just a reporter pointing fingers at the wrong people, pissing them off until they run you out of town. Let. It. Go.”
There is so much pain on his face I can’t bring myself to argue, but it doesn’t excuse the crappy things he just said. I don’t want to give him the power to hurt my feelings. People have said worse to me, and he’s not wrong. Iama reporter, and itismy job to point fingers, but Stevie Johansson isn’t the wrong person. She’s into Sweet up to her eyeballs, only it’s not up to me to prove it anymore. She forced me out, and I’m never going back.
“Okay,” I say, scooting off the bed and snagging my laptop along the way. “I need to call Talia and check in on her. She should be out of class by now.”
“Fuck. Devyn, don’t. I didn’t mean it the way it sounded.” He’s sitting up, his eyes bleary with fatigue.