I could feel the blood draining from my face, just as my grip on reality started to slip too. My family held no malice for Dalton after the accident, but the things he said after he found out Juice didn't belong solely to him were reprehensible. He accused my brother of stealing the horse out from under him, and that Jace never gave him a chance to do anything with him. The truth was that Jace bought the horse outright, then let Dalton buy a quarter interest in him when he was 2. Their agreement had been that Jace would keep him, start him, and generally get him going. Dalton was in college still, and didn't have room to keep more than 2 horses at his place.

It seemed like yesterday, they'd both come back for Christmas. They'd been inseparable for a week, going to a few team ropings and an open rodeo over the weekend. It was New Year's Eve, and my mother was a nervous wreck when she heard they were going out. My mother's first husband, Jace's father, had been killed by a drunk driver on New Year's Eve when Jace was six.
Jace had hugged her, told her, "Mama, don't worry. We're gonna go drive out around the lake and be back in time to watch the ball drop with you and baby sister." A massive lump had lodged in my throat as Jace kissed the top of our mother's head, doing his best to salve her nerves. He hugged me and kissed me on the cheek, pinching the skin over my ribs before he left, laughing as he did so. I wanted to grab the back of his jacket and beg him to stay home, but I told myself it was just nerves, that I'd caught a case of the willies from my mom.

We'd watched the ball drop in silence, craning our necks every other breath, looking at the clock and the front window. Headlights never did appear, and when it got close to one in the morning, I was pulling my hooded sweatshirt over my head, walking out the door. Mom was on my heels, begging me to stay with her, saying she couldn't bear the thought of something happening to me too. I shrugged her off and jumped in my dad's old feed truck. It grumbled and belched black smoke, then I tore out of our driveway, knowing exactly, eerily where I needed to go. The whole thing played out in my mind again, like it always did. Like a scene from one of those overly dramatic, made for TV movies, it came back to me in flashes. Driving past our aunt's boat dock we swam off of when we were younger, rounding the curve then dropping down to cross the low water bridge.

The lump in my throat went from the size of a golf ball to the size of a boulder in a half a breath. I could see the guard rail on the right side of the bridge was askew, the water on that side of the bridge was glowing. The back end of Dalton's white truck was all I could see above the water, and I didn't realize that I'd dialed 911 before I'd even got around the curve. My ears were ringing, and looking back I realize it was from my own screams. My mother's best friend worked for the dispatcher's office, and luckily enough she answered my call. How I managed to articulate what was going on, I'm still not sure of. It seemed like seconds before the bridge was covered with the rescue workers. A tow truck, a rural fire truck, EMTs, county police officers...and me. I sat at the top of the hill, feeling like it was all just a bad dream. Watched them pull Dalton out of the truck, strap him to a bright orange board, then shuffle him away into an ambulance that screamed away into the night.

Extracting Jace wasn't so simple. His side of the truck had been submerged under 3 feet of water. I knew in my heart they weren't going to save him, he hadn't had a chance. The details of the wreck flooded my mind; Dalton had been wearing his seat belt, suffered a few broken ribs and a broken nose. Jace had been wearing his seat belt as well, but had died on impact. They said the truck had hit broadside, on the passenger side before it rocked back up to the way I found it. They couldn't figure out what had happened, and Dalton had no recollection of the wreck. It came back to him in bits and pieces, but none of us were ever sure what to believe. I was oddly comforted when they told me he'd died on impact, the thought of him trapped in that truck, strapped in and drowning was more than I could handle.