Making Promises (37 page)

“You need water, Mutti? Food?” They had been feeding her Cream of Wheat or mashed vegetables if she could keep it down. If truth be known, most of her food and water came to her through the tube in her arm.

“No. I need you two to go away for a day. Tomorrow. Is your day off, yes?”

“Da. But we cannot….”

“Of course you can. I will not die tomorrow. I promise. I will not die the next day. The day after that I cannot promise, but for a day and a night, I want you to be happy. I remember—you used to go out to clubs and be gone for three days. You would come home and be tired and used and empty. I want you to go somewhere and be happy. I want to see you come home with your face flushed because you are full of something you cannot wait to tell me.” She indicated the photo album at her hand.

“I never got to see you come home from school excited about something, Mikhail. The closest I have ever seen to this has been the first night you came home after he had taken you to dinner and to the bookstore. Let me see that again.”

Mikhail swallowed hard and moved close enough to Shane to brush his coarse, curly dark hair off his brow and away from his eyes. “Is that what you are waiting for?” he asked, hating the question, hating himself for asking it. But it was nearly February, and she was still fighting, still here. So many days she had been lost, in pain, wandering around a past she so obviously wanted to join. The only reason his mother was still here, fighting, was to look after him. He wanted her to be at peace, and if death was that path, well, then, perhaps it was time for Ylena to walk it.

“No,” Ylena said softly. “What I am waiting for, I will perhaps never find. But this will be close, yes?”

Mikhail knelt then and laid his head next to Shane’s. “For you. And for him. Yes. We will take a day off of worry. I will make him show me his dogs—the new one is very young. He loves it very much—it is his first puppy. I will visit with his cats.” He puffed out a small laugh. “I like cats, Mutti. Do you think he will let me adopt one, just for me?” Ylena’s eyes were half closed, but her next word was very, very bright. “Pffaw!” she announced. “He will adopt an entire shelter, just to make you smile.”

Later, he would wake Shane up to say be there in the morning and come pick him up, they were having a break. Later he would hold his lover’s face in his hands and kiss him and try to tell him all the things in his heart that he could not seem to say these days. Later he would fall asleep on the couch and listen for his mother’s heart monitor, the incessant music that had lulled him to sleep each night and which had seemed to instill in him a terrible loathing of techno-pop.

But that would be later. For this moment he would just rub Shane’s back through his sweatshirt and feel his mother’s fingers in his hair and accept that there were some things you could not change and some things that you should.

SHANE arrived the next morning looking exhausted and happy. He’d brought a movie for Ylena to watch while they were gone and promised to have Mikhail back late that evening, and Ylena insisted it be late the next evening.

“You two have phones. You have numbers. If there is a change, they will call you. For now, go. Be happy. Please.” They left her in the care of her friends and the nurse, but they left reluctantly. Shane wanted to say something, Mikhail could tell. When Mikhail snapped, “If that damned woman dies while we are gone, I shall hire a medium to scold her in the afterlife for a week,” Shane had laughed.

“I’ll put in for that,” he agreed, and they had both met each other’s weary eyes and smiled.

Then they had gotten in the GTO, and the world seemed to open beneath their feet.

“Hey, Mickey,” Shane said as he was starting the car, “since you’ve got two days, how about we get out of here?”

Mikhail blinked at him. “Out of here? Where is here?” Shane waved his hands. “Out of the valley—out of the fucking fog bowl, man!” It had not rained much this year, but the fog had seemed to coat the sun in gray for nearly every day since Mikhail and Ylena’s return.

Mikhail found he was staring at Shane with wide, shiny eyes. The prospect of being some place with sunshine, some place, any place, far away from his tiny apartment, a place where they could see gold light and blue sky, almost brought him to tears.

“I think that would be amazing,” Mikhail said, and he was aware that muscles in his face were starting to ache. They hadn’t been used for a while, but he was pretty sure he was using them to smile.

Shane stopped at the grocery store and bought sodas and French bread and salami to make simple sandwiches along with some apples and cookies. They got coffee at the Starbucks next door, hopped in the car, plugged in Shane’s iPod, and went.

Mikhail practically hung his head out the window like a dog tasting the wind when they cleared Rocklin on I-80 and the sun began to make an appearance. By the time they had cleared Penryn, Shane had put on the sunglasses hanging from the visor and Mikhail was lying back in the seat, closing his eyes and bathing his face in the sunshine.

He opened his eyes as they started up the hill toward Auburn, and when he saw the sign for Bell Road, he made a connection.

“This is near Grass Valley, is it not?”

“Yeah, why?” Shane replied, startled. They had existed in a pleasant, companionable silence for a little while, and the music—Shane had downloaded the mix CD Mikhail had given him for Christmas—had begun to saturate their bones with movement and a little bit of angry joy.

It was a change from the dirge and the gray that had filled them for the past weeks.

“I know people who live there!” Mikhail said excitedly. “The people who give me rides when I work at the faires. Rose and Arlen. They are nice people—they run a horse ranch….” He closed his eyes to remember 226

and then stopped with a smile. “I think it is simply called Arlen Rose. I wonder if we will see signs for their ranch.”

Shane took the Bell Road turn off to Highway 49 and said, “I bet we can do better than that. Keep your eye out for a feed store, will you?” Mikhail was impressed with Shane’s wisdom in these things—and the clerk at the feed store knew exactly where to find the Arlen Rose.

As Shane went up Highway 49, Mikhail truly began to see a world beyond the one he lived in. As they neared Grass Valley and Colfax, there were trees—like a forest, only with the promise of a big, forest-dwelling suburb beyond all of the trees. The turn off they took from the highway took them on a terribly winding road, so narrow that once, when they were meeting a car coming toward them, the car had to back up to pull onto the shoulder so that they could pass. Mikhail thought of Arlen and Rose bringing a horse trailer up this road and back every weekend for years, and he actually turned a little pale. They were such nice people, and they seemed to have existed right close to death for such a terribly long time.

He said as much to Shane, and Shane had grunted in return, his hands white-knuckled on the wheel.

Eventually though, they saw a sign, brightly painted and nailed to white four-by-fours, sunk hardily into the red clay and decomposed granite of the driveway. Shane pulled off and gave a sigh of relief. The road beyond the sign was nice and wide, and as they pulled off into the driveway to their left—the one with the name of the ranch wrought in an iron arch above their heads—Mikhail saw Rose out in one of the rings, working one of the enormous black-brown draft horses that they trained.

As Shane brought the car to a halt and turned off the music, Mikhail found he was practically leaping out of the car for a chance to stretch and feel some more of that glorious (albeit cold) sunshine on his face. He reached into the car for his hat (another gift from Benny—Mikhail wanted to visit a yarn store just to buy her colors besides dark brown and navy blue) and scarf and waited for Shane to do the same. Shane was wearing the dark green scarf Ylena had made him, and Mikhail wondered at what a fool he was for that to make his throat thick and achy with pride.

Rose looked up and nodded at the two of them as they approached, and they let her work. Mikhail, who knew little of these things (and who was stoically hiding his terror at being near such a large animal) thought she was amazing. Dressed in jeans and a hooded sweatshirt, with leather Making Promises

gloves and boots to protect her feet from the red muck of the pen, she looked younger than her sixty or so years in spite of her gray bun and weathered face. Mostly, she looked happy.

When she was finished and the horse was sweating and done, she patted the creature’s nose and offered him a carrot from her pocket. Then she grabbed the bridle firmly and started leading the horse out of the ring.

“Heya, Mikhail—great to see you, boy! What’re you doing out in this neck of the woods?” Her voice was crisp but genuinely affectionate, and Mikhail was glad they’d come, horrifying road, terrifying horse, and all.

“Hello, Rose. My friend and I were out driving, and I thought we would look you up. It is okay?”

Rose flashed him a brief smile in welcome. She handed the horse to a boy of about fourteen, who took him into the stable to groom and feed, then took off her gloves and washed her hands at a spigot before drying them on a nearby towel. When she was done, she gave Mikhail an unexpected hug and then offered her hand to Shane.

“I’m Rosie MacAvoy—nice to meet you!”

Shane smiled his open-hearted smile. “Shane Perkins. Nice to meet you back.”

“So, Mikhail, what’re you doing out here?”

Mikhail and Shane met quiet eyes, and Mikhail shrugged nonchalantly. “Out for a ride. I remembered that you were out here, and it was as good a place to visit as any. How is Arlen? I wanted Shane to meet him too.”

Rosie’s eyes sharpened, and she looked at Shane again. Then she looked at the two of them together, and then she smiled warmly. “He’s at the doctor’s right now. He’ll be sorry he missed you, boy!” She turned and started walking toward the family-sized ranch house and jerked her chin for Mikhail to follow. “You want cookies? My daughter baked up a bunch of them so Arlen wouldn’t give the doctor any grief. Come on in and sit a minute.”

They did, following her into a cluttered sort of space full of old tack and business mail on the table and dogs sleeping on the couches. It was the space of people who spent more time outside than they did inside, and Mikhail had to smile as he sat at the kitchen table and Rosie moved a flat 228

of vaccines and veterinary supplies out of his way so she could pour him a glass of milk. It was good that they were not perfect. Perfect places made him uncomfortable, and one look at Shane’s comfortable, open smile as Rosie handed him some milk and cookies told him the same thing was true for Shane.

“So,” Mikhail said quietly. “Arlen, he is okay?” Mikhail sincerely hoped so. He did not think he could stand the story of one more person dying a slow, painful death at this moment.

Rose eased his fears by waving a hand. “Oh yeah. He injured his back, though—nothing too traumatic, but enough to make us start looking for someone to take over the breaking.”

“Do you have someone in mind?” Shane asked eagerly, and Mikhail looked at him, startled. “Because I’ve got some friends who are damned good at it and could really use the business.” Rosie looked surprised and then bemused. And then Shane started to talk—about Deacon and Crick and the surrogate family he obviously adored, and she began to look more and more intrigued.

“We’d still be boarding,” she said slowly, as though feeling her way through the idea, “but really, what we need is someone to spend about a year breaking them and training the riders how to break them. We need someone really patient….”

“Deacon’s your man,” Shane said confidently, and Rosie shook her head warningly.

“I hope so, Mr. Perkins. These animals are under a lot of stress—the armor clinks, the weight, the crowd, the battle maneuvers. It’s a two-man job—it’s why you need a trainer and a rider. I mean, I’ve heard some good things about your friend’s ranch—but there’s some nasty rumors about the health of the horses….”

“They’re bullshit,” Shane said abruptly, and Rosie blinked, startled again by Shane at his most socially awkward.

He blushed. “I’m sorry—it’s just….” He looked at Mikhail and shrugged. “These guys, this whole family—I showed up on their doorstep to take their statement, you know? Benny’s crazy father had just tried to take her baby, Crick had gotten back from Iraq with major injuries about two months before, and Deacon had just been
beaten
by a police officer he had to take to court earlier that spring. Their whole lives should have been Making Promises

falling apart. They should have
hated
me. And they asked me in for coffee instead. They cracked jokes and made each other laugh, and when things got too tough for Deacon to handle, they let him walk out and gave him his space. And then they invited me to Sunday dinner. The town can’t handle Deacon and Crick because they both grew up there and they’ve got baggage, but that’s the town’s problem. Me? I just spent a week and a half in a hospital, and the family visited me in shifts so I wouldn’t have to be alone. I’d lay down and die for these people. Please, Ms. MacAvoy—

please, just give them a chance.”

A quiet fell over the table, and Rosie looked at Shane with both surprise and, Mikhail was pleased to see, quiet admiration.