“The question is,” she said, slowly and carefully as if every word were a sharp knife, an angry viper, “do you love me?”
“I…I feel something for you. I don’t know if it’s love. Frankly, I don’t have much experience with that. But if I stayed, we could find out.”
“Like an experiment?” she asked.
Oh, Lord, she got it. Amazing. “Yes!” he cried, reaching for her. “Exactly like that.”
Something was coming over her face, something dark and stormy, and he realized that no, she didn’t get it.
“Am I the experiment?”
“No, my feelings are,” he said sheepishly.
“And what if your feelings don’t hold up?” she asked, crossing her arms over her chest. “What if we try and it doesn’t work out?”
“Then I’ll go, just like we’re saying.”
“No!” Mia cried and he realized he’d set off an avalanche of pain inside her, a whole wealth of emotion that he’d been clueless about. “I’m done being left by you, Jack. I’m done waiting for you to realize I’m part of your life. I have more pride than to let you…” She threw her hands up in the air. “Experiment! Are you kidding? Do you think so little of me?”
“No, God, Mia, no. I just…” Now he was getting angry. “I don’t know how to do this.”
“Be married or be divorced?”
“Either.”
“Well,” she snapped, “in your life, there’s not much difference between the two.”
“But what if there was a chance,” he asked, “that this would work out?”
She shook her head, her lips white. “I don’t care anymore.” She was lying; he knew she was lying. “I’m tired of waiting for you, Jack. I won’t do it anymore. You said you were leaving and I think…I think you should.”
He couldn’t push. He didn’t have the right. He’d blown every chance he’d ever had with her without knowing it.
“I’m…so sorry, Mia.”
She nodded once and then held herself so still, as if she’d suddenly realized she’d been standing on glass and one move would send her falling to who knows where.
“Can you just go?” she whispered. “I need a minute.”
Jack wanted to argue, but in the end he just nodded. “I’ll leave you the truck—”
“I don’t need the truck. I just need you to leave.”
There was nothing else to say. Nothing else he could do. He climbed into the truck and drove away. Leaving her in the high pasture with her horse, twilight falling all around her.
“Yeah, but it’s been hours,” Jack said, anxiety gnawing at his gut. He pushed away his plate, looking for allies in the other cowboys.
“I’m sure she’s fine,” Billy said. Tim nodded in agreement, not looking up from the last of the chicken pot pies.
Jack stared at Chris, who stared right back. “You go checking up on her,” Chris said, “and she’ll get pissed.”
“But what if she’s hurt?”
The cagey old cowboy nodded. “It’s a quandary.”
Screw quandaries, Jack thought. He couldn’t eat until he knew Mia was safe. And if she was just riding Blue, or doing more work, or hell, crying her eyes out in the high pasture, she damn well knew better than to be gone for hours at a time.
“She doesn’t have her cell phone?” Walter asked and Jack spun on the old man.
“She has a cell phone?”
Four grown men blinked up at him. “We all do,” Chris said. “It’s ranch regulation now.”
I’m her husband and I don’t know she has a cell phone?
“What’s the number?” he demanded. Chris rattled off the number while Jack dialed on the home phone.
“This is Mia at Rocky M ranch, leave a message,” her voice said.
After the long beep he said, “You need to call us. We’re getting worried about you. It’s 6:30—”
“Uh-oh,” Tim said and Jack spun away from the wall-mounted phone, the message forgotten. The cowboys were up, staring out the big picture window at the barn in front. Even Walter was slowly getting to his feet.
“What?” Jack asked. His stomach was somewhere near his feet.
Chris turned, his face creased with concern. “Blue just walked into the yard,” he said and then shook his head. “Without Mia.”
“I knew it,” Jack muttered, sweeping the keys to Mia’s truck off the counter. If something had happened to her, it was his fault. He’d known she was too emotional, too tired to be riding down that ridge on her own.
And damn her for having every man in this house convinced she was invincible.
“Wait a second, boy,” Walter said, grabbing his cane. “I’m coming with.”
“I can go faster alone.”
“You need another set of eyes,” Walter said and for a second Jack saw a glimmer of his father in the old man’s watery gaze. Implacable. Resolved. Right. “You watch the road. I’ll watch the ravine.”
Jack nodded and within moments he was back in Mia’s truck, bouncing up the old fire road, his headlights cutting bright circles out of the dark.
Walter, on the other side of the bench seat, kept watch out his window, looking over the edge of the road for any sign of Mia. Once they got to the pasture, if they hadn’t found her, Jack would walk back down, searching more carefully. The other men were taking a look at the barns and pastures.
Someone, at some point, would find her. And she’d probably be spitting angry and belligerent at all the fuss.
Please, God,
he thought, his chest empty,
please let her be spitting angry and belligerent and not hurt. Not bleeding and broken at the bottom of a ravine.
He’d just lost Oliver; he couldn’t lose her, too.
“I have never in my life met anyone so stubborn,” he muttered, and Walter shot him a sideways look.
“What?” Jack snapped.
“You’re no slouch in the stubbornness department,” Walter said, turning back to the window.
“I haven’t risked my life—” He stopped. Because he had over and over again. God, was this how Mia felt every time he went to Africa? He rubbed a hand over his face.
“Her mother was stubborn,” Walter said.
“Sandra?”
“Most stubborn woman I ever met.”
“Worse than Mom?”
“Victoria was crazy,” Walter said, shaking his head. “Big difference.”
If it were any other time, Jack might have laughed. Instead, he focused on the road in front of them.
The darkness outside melted into the cab, broken only by the illuminated dials in the dashboard. It was getting colder out. Mia’s jacket had been light. He remembered his hand under her thin shirt, against the warmth of her skin.
How long would she stay warm in the high country? If she was unconscious—
“There!” Walter yelled and Jack stopped the truck, peering into the darkness beyond his high beams. “Your side,” Walter said, pointing out Jack’s window. Jack saw the blur of a pale face as she turned and her left cheek caught the light. Slowly, she lifted a hand to shield her eyes from the glare of the headlights.
It was her.
He threw the truck in Park and hurtled into the night. She sat on a boulder, her legs splayed wide.
“Mia?” he said, dropping to his knees beside her. She blinked at him, her eyes unfocused. Not good. Unfocused eyes were never good. With shaking hands he turned her face so her right cheek caught the light from the truck.
It was red and black, sticky with blood.
Her cap was missing and he ran his fingers up under her hair, matted and thick with blood, until he felt a deep gash.
She winced and pulled away. “That hurts,” she said, sounding like a child.
A need to protect her—to care for her—surged through him.
But it was all too late.
“What happened, Jack?” she asked, clearly confused. Lost.
He picked her up in his arms, feeling her chill through his denim jacket.
“I don’t know,” he said, easing her into the truck.
“She all right?” Walter asked as Jack slid her up against the old man.
Jack could only shrug.
“Hey, Walter,” she said. “Victoria kick you out again?”
Walter and Jack shared a quick panicked look. And then Walter, showing more tenderness than Jack had ever seen, wrapped his arm around her and held her tight.
“Yep,” Walter said. “You want to go for a ride?”
“Sure,” she said, sounding sleepy.
“No sleeping!” Jack barked, putting the truck in gear and turning it around. He darted looks down at her face, watching her eyelids fight to stay open. “Come on, Mia. How about you tell me about the night of your high school graduation? Remember?”
“Of course I remember,” she said. “It was my graduation.”
“So, what happened?” he asked. The truck hurtled down the mountain and he tossed his cell phone toward his dad. “Call Chris,” he told him. “Tell him we’re going to the hospital.”
“I was so happy you’d come home,” she said, staring up at him. “Lucy said you wouldn’t. That you probably wouldn’t even remember what day it was, but I knew you’d come back for me.”
Shit, he thought. Shit. Shit. Shit.
It was like looking at the past with different eyes and he hated it. He’d been the hero in his own story, getting out of that house, making it on his own. Never going back. In his memory he hadn’t been so heartless.
She was quiet and he glanced sideways at her. “Hey now!” he said, shaking her leg. “Come on. What did we do that night?”
She opened her eyes and focused on him. For a second he saw some fear. Some clarity.
“I need you to stay awake,” he told her, while Walter spoke quietly into the cell phone.
“My head hurts,” she said. “And I’m freezing.”
He cranked on the heater. “Graduation night, Mia—”
“You took me on the roofs,” she said and he counted the miles to the nearest emergency room in Red Creek.
Turn.
Six steps.
Turn.
Honestly, the boy had to be getting dizzy.
“Sit down, Jack,” he finally muttered. “You’re making me seasick.”
Jack collapsed into a plastic chair as if he’d been waiting for permission.
“You know this isn’t your fault,” Walter said, being sure to keep his eyes glued on the TV. It was that pretty dark-haired anchor lady on the Channel Three news.
“In what way is this not my fault?” Jack snapped. “I left her up there, Dad.”
“She’s a grown woman.”
“Well, she sure as hell doesn’t act like it.”
“I suppose you’d be an authority on grown-up behavior?”
Jack opened his mouth and then shut it, as if realizing locking himself up in his room for five days was about as childish as it got.
“You know, Dad,” he said, leaning forward, bracing his elbows on his knees. His eyes were narrow slits and Walter had a pretty good idea that whatever was coming wasn’t going to be pretty. The boy was like a raccoon in a cage, all fired up with nowhere to go. “You’re one to talk. How many times did you go to Al’s Bar when Mom was on one of her rampages?”
“A lot,” he answered, feeling a hot flush climbing up his skin. “I’m not proud of it.”
“I suppose that makes it okay? Being sorry excuses your absence?”
“No,” he said, turning away from the TV to face his son’s damning eyes. “Nothing excuses the fact that I wasn’t there for you when you needed me.”
Jack blinked, a deer in headlights, trying to decide which way to jump.
“I kicked her out after that mess with Mia’s family.”
“I know.”
“But you still didn’t come home.”
“Did you expect me to?” Jack asked. “Like getting rid of her, years too late would make me rush back here?”
Yeah. He had been stupid, hoping for that. “No,” he said, “I suppose not.”
The boy was silent for a long time and Walter watched him, drawing from a well of patience, deep and dark. Patience he’d never shown when Jack was a kid.
Jack stood, shaking his head, pacing a few feet.
“Mia says I need to deal with what Mom did to me,” Jack said, staring up at the ceiling. All the pain he tried to hide covered him, as if he was a pack horse who’d never been given a break. “Can you believe that shit?”
Walter shifted in his seat, wishing he could be anywhere but here, but knowing his days of running from this were over.
“Your wife is a smart woman.”
“My wife,” Jack laughed. “My wife is kicking me off my own land.”
“Thought that’s what you wanted,” Walter said. “To leave.”
Jack pushed his hands through his hair, looking every inch a man who had no idea what he wanted.
Poor guy, Walter thought.
Walter figured there wasn’t much to say, so he kept his mouth shut. Waiting for his son to get around to pushing those heavy weights off his back.
The silence deepened. Grew thick. It became hard to breathe and still he waited.
“Did you know she was hitting me?” Jack finally asked. “When I was a kid?”
It was the hardest thing Walter had ever done, owning up to his part in how traumatic Jack’s childhood must have been, but he nodded.
“I knew she raised her hand. But not how much. Or how bad.”
“Why didn’t you stop it?”
“At first it didn’t seem so bad. You were a willful, stubborn boy—”
“Which of course makes it okay,” Jack snapped.
“No. It doesn’t. But she took on the discipline. I ran the ranch—”
“And drank. Don’t forget the drinking.”
Walter licked his lips. There was so much he wasn’t proud of.
“I finally stepped in after that night you came home with me from town, with your clothes all torn. You’d been up on the roofs. Remember?”
Jack nodded, silent. His eyes wary.
“Anyway, I saw how she went after you…” Walter stopped. His hands were big, strong. His fingers wide, the middle three of both, bent sideways from the first knuckle from being broken long ago. He’d never hit his wife, never laid hands on her in that way, but it had been hard to control himself that night.
Jack’d been a big boy, but his fear, facing down Victoria, made him small. His own mother made him small.
It wasn’t natural.
Walter put a stop to it as quickly as he could, but Victoria had gotten a couple of good licks in with her belt. He’d sent Jack to Sandra to get cleaned up and he’d told Victoria that if she so much as touched their son in anger again, he’d send her away without a penny.
“She didn’t hit you after that, did she?” Walter asked.
Jack thought for a minute. “No,” he said, sounding surprised. “She didn’t. Not like that.”
Shame sizzled through Walter and he hated it. He hated himself. “I should have kicked her out years ago,” he said. “But I didn’t know what I’d do with you and I was so scared that she might get custody somehow.
I mean, dads didn’t get custody back then. Especially dads who spent most nights down at Al’s.”
“They did if their wives were nuts.”
“But even that seemed to come and go,” Walter said.
He wasn’t a smart man, never claimed to be, and the situation he’d gotten into with his wife made him feel even more stupid. “It was like a storm cloud would come over our house and she’d be this monster, and then it would leave and life would be normal again.”
“For you!” Jack said with a dark laugh. “For me it was torture, waiting for the cloud to come back, wondering when it would.” He shook his head. “It was hell. I almost got to the point that I liked the monster better. At least that was predictable.”
“Dr. Meadows told me that he had medication that might make her better. Even her out. I got her to go see him, but she wouldn’t take the pills.”
This was the most they’d talked in years. Since Jack was a child and stopped clearing the fire road to the high pasture with him. That was one thing they’d always done together. Lighting and watching the fire—that had been their thing, once. Something Victoria couldn’t touch, until she seemed to touch everything.
“She had to be bipolar,” Jack said. “With borderline personality disorder and possibly paranoid schizophrenia.”
Walter looked sideways at his son.
Jack shrugged. “I took a couple of psych classes in college.”
“If I could change it—”
“You can’t, Dad. It’s the past. And it’s over.”
“I’m sorry, son—”
Jack held up his hand, anger climbing back onto his face. “Save it, Dad. Just…save it.”
Walter nodded. The moment was over and he wasn’t going to push. He’d gotten to say more than he thought he would.
The doctor, in a white coat and those green pajamas everyone seemed to wear in the hospital, came to stand in the doorway. “Jack McKibbon?” he asked.
Jack spun. “My wife?”
Walter did a double take at Jack’s words, wondering if Jack even realized what he’d said or how he’d said it. Like
wife
was a word he used all the time.
“Your wife is fine,” the doctor said, smiling to put them at ease in that way doctors did.
“Oh, thank God.” Jack sighed.
“She’s got a significant contusion on her brain and some pretty good bruising on her tailbone and shoulders and an ankle that isn’t sprained, but she must have wrenched it fairly hard.”
“She still doesn’t remember what happened?” Walter asked. That seemed wrong. Dangerous. The fear he’d kept at bay all night, watching Jack wear a path in the linoleum, trickled down through his chest, bathing his heart in cold. “Is that bad? That’s gotta be bad.”
The doctor shook his head. “It’s normal with head trauma. Don’t worry, she’ll probably remember in the next few days.”
“She must have been thrown,” Jack said, looking over to Walter who nodded. It made sense; everyone knew Blue was scared of snakes and that old fire road was thick with them in the spring.
“So, can we take her home?” Jack asked, and again Walter had to look at his son. Home? Had that word really come out of his mouth? Maybe Jack had some head trauma of his own.
“Yes,” the doctor said, sounding doctorly all of a sudden. “But here’s the thing. She needs to rest. And I mean rest, as in bed, feet up for a week. She needs to let her body heal.”
“No problem,” Jack said, and this time Walter did laugh.
“I’m sorry,” Walter said, “but can you maybe give us some drugs or something that would make that easier? We’ve got rope, but I don’t think that will help.”
The doctor raised his eyebrows at Jack, who shook his head. “He’s joking. We can manage without drugs or rope,” Jack said. “She’ll rest.”
“Good,” the doctor said. “You can sign discharge papers and pick her up on the second floor.”
The doctor left and Jack grabbed his coat and stepped toward the door, ready to bring Mia back with orders for her to lie down for a week. As if that was going to work.
“Jack—”
“Dad, I know. I do. But we’ll figure this out.”
“We? Earlier today you were going to sell the ranch, now you’re ready to be a nursemaid?”
“What do you want me to say? I can’t leave.”
“Yeah, and you and me can’t keep that girl off her feet for a week.”
Jack blinked, his brow crumpled. “You think we should leave her here?”
“No,” Walter said, his palms sweating like a teenager’s. And he knew that if anyone looked at him too long, they’d see right through him. Right to where his secret, his love and guilt, beat inside his chest. Victoria had been crazy, but she hadn’t been totally wrong. She’d seen what he’d felt for another man’s wife. “I’m saying we need reinforcements.”
“Dad.” Jack sighed. “I’m too tired for guessing games. If you have an idea, let’s hear it.”
“We need to call Sandra.”