“Well now, if it isn’t the little mister,” she cooed, and chucked William under the chin. Addressing Inez, she said, “We’ve moved to the Cliff House, you know. Expecting that we’ll be there for a few days yet. You should bring Wilkie by; the children would love to play.” Then, under her breath she said, “Ma’am, he needs his nappies changed, just thought I’d say.”
“Uncle Eric is coming on the train,” said Mathilda. “He’s going to take us home, now that papa’s gone to heaven.” She stopped, touched one of the black mourning bows attached to the shoulder of her dress, and looked down as if she’d let slip a secret she wasn’t supposed to tell. “I have to wear these on my frocks now,” she said to Inez. “It’s to show respect for my papa. Mama has to wear all black, all the time.”
Mark came up, picnic basket and blanket over one arm, and Inez performed introductions. He spoke as seriously to Mathilda and Atticus as if they were adults, and bowed to Miss Warren. Miss Warren batted her eyes at him; the children stood taller, as if he had conferred some dignity upon them. Inez was glad there wasn’t a family dog or he, too, would have been eating out of Mark’s hand.
“Can we come to your picnic?” asked Mathilda. “We had ours hours ago, and I’m hungry.”
Miss Warren let out a scandalized “Hush! Manners!”
Mark smiled at Mathilda and said, “Give us a little time to recover from the ride. Perhaps you’ll all join us later for dessert? I spied cookies in the packed victuals.”
Thus mollified, the two Pace children allowed themselves to be hustled by Miss Warren to their end of the stream bank.
William began walking after them, apparently ready to abandon his new toy for the children’s company. Mark took his hand and said, “Let’s find rocks to throw at the water.”
“Rocks!” he said, and obediently trotted alongside his father.
Inez followed, rooting around in the satchel for clean things for William. Once Mark had claimed a picnic spot with the blanket, Inez took William off into the bushes to change his diapers. It was an entirely different procedure, she discovered, to change an uncompliant toddler compared to the infant she’d last labored over.
Much messier, for one thing.
Not willing to lie down, for another. William insisted on being changed standing up.
“Have it your way,” she muttered, and pulled off his frock, which would have to be washed in any case, and stripped the soiled pilche and linen diaper from him. He seemed to believe that, freed from clothes, he was also free to return to a pre-civilized state of being, and made an attempt to run back to the beach
au naturel
.
Inez grabbed his arm. “No,” she said sternly. She searched around, and handed him a stick, saying, “Here. Hit that rock, William.”
Whacking a handy red rock with the stick kept him occupied long enough for Inez to wipe him clean and dress him in clean clothes.
She considered the soiled diaperings, muttered, “We are
not
carrying these back with us,” rolled them up, and stuffed them under the rock savaged by William’s stick.
By the time she returned to the picnic spot, she was feeling the approach of a foul mood. She deposited William on the blanket beside Mark, pulled a damask napkin from one of the picnic baskets, and went to the stream. She plunged her hands into the icy water, scrubbing vigorously.
The low rumble of continuously moving water filled the space between the canyon walls and washed out all other sound. The stream flowed in a series of small waterfall leaps down to their relatively level area. Inez rested her hands on a submerged rock at the edge, where it was shallow. The racing water made the rock look like rippling silk, but the hard surface beneath her fingers was smooth and slick.
Inez stood and wiped her hands, tingling with the cold, on the napkin. She heard Mark say behind her, “Cold roast chicken, hard-boiled eggs, buttered rolls, jam, strawberries, cookies, and lemonade. I brought a little something that might make the lemonade more to your taste.”
She turned slowly.
Mark was opening a bottle of sherry; two cut-glass tumblers waited next to the lemonade jug. “Ended up smuggling the sherry out from the men’s parlor this morning,” he continued. “Once we return to Leadville, I’ll prepare you a Saratoga Brace Up with bitters, sugar, lemon and lime juice, anisette, one egg, brandy, mineral water. I think you might like it. Best way to imbibe mineral water, which I understand you’re not overly fond of.”
Mark crouched by the tablecloth looking up at her, the blue of his eyes softened by what appeared to be affection. The crinkle around his eyes, the odd dimple that punctuated his lopsided smile, it was all just as she remembered. He had removed his hat, and the water-scented breeze lifted his light brown hair on one side, sending a strand across his forehead. William sat on a corner of the blanket, trying to feed his toy horse a strawberry.
The picture of a perfect family.
It could be us. It could be.
For a moment, she felt dizzy. Dizzy with longing. Dizzy with regret. Dizzy with a sudden lurch in her stomach, as if she’d slipped into deep water and was tumbling away, heading toward the rapids and out of control.
“So did you do to Josephine what you did to us?” The question came out cold, colder than water straight from the high mountain snows.
He looked up, his smile fading. Confusion replaced the smile, followed by a wary cautiousness. “What do you mean?”
“Did you just up and disappear? One day you were there, the next morning, you were gone. As you did to William and me.”
“Inez, we aren’t going to talk about this now.” The caution was gone, replaced by iron determination.
He stood and limped toward her, wiping his hands on one of the napkins. She moved back, away from the blanket and the stream, closer to the trees. “So, it’s up to you to decide what we talk about and when? How very convenient. For you.”
“What do you expect me to do?” He said in exasperation.
“Tell me the truth! The whole truth, even if it hurts, not some abbreviated version. You left me, Mark. As far as I can tell, you left me for another woman. You have been gone for months. Not for a night, or a week or two. This is nothing like what happened in
Dodge
.” Even as she said it, she realized that the reference to the stormy events in Dodge City, where their marriage had very nearly ended, was a low blow.
Mark jerked back, his face tightening. “I said I’d explain later.”
“Later.” She sneered the word. “It’s always later with you. Don’t bother, Mark, I can read between the lines. You said yourself that after you recovered, you stayed with her. You never even considered coming up to Leadville after that, did you? You could have come up to see, to see…”
See if I was there. If we could rebuild our life together.
“Inez, I told you. It was months before I could move about on my own. By that time, I thought you’d have left Leadville, given William’s health.”
There it was, the accusation:
You abandoned our son. You gave him away.
“I was
waiting
for you,” she said. “Waiting for word, any word. You could have written and posted a letter yourself, after you were better. You could have sent a telegram. But you didn’t, and all I could think was that you were dead, after all that time with no word. But you weren’t. You’d simply decided to set up house with this other woman, this Josephine.” She was throwing the words at him as if they were rocks, pounding him with all the hurt and fury she’d held inside for so long. “You didn’t come back because you didn’t want to, you unfaithful, two-timing son-of-a-bitch!”
Mark closed the distance between them, reaching out for her. She stepped back again, out of his grasp, into the sheltering tree line. He moved with her, finally capturing her arm, forcing her to stop her retreat.
“Are you going to tell me, darlin’, that you were waiting for me from last summer to this—the faithful wife, pining in an empty bedroom, watching out the window with a candle lit for my return?” His voice returned her anger tenfold.
The roaring that filled her ears was no longer the stream, but the hammering of her heart.
Mark continued, “I hope you aren’t thinking of lying to me and saying yes. Because I know about Gallagher last summer. About Masterson—good almighty God, Bat Masterson of all people—last winter. And I know about Justice Sands.”
She gasped, and then demanded, “Who said all this?”
“Well, Inez, I’ve had some time to catch up with old friends since you left Leadville and came down here. It’s not always what people say, it’s more what they don’t say, and how they don’t say it. How they move their eyes when you ask a particular question. How and when they change the subject. You know, darlin’, there are always those who do talk. It’s just a matter of, as you said, readin’ between the lines.”
“Don’t you
dare
accuse me. You, of all people.”
He shook his head. “Inez, this time, you’ve outdone yourself. Yes, I stayed with Josephine. I told you straight out, and explained why. But while I was with her, how many men did
you
have climbing in and out of our marriage bed, after you sent our son back east? I’m wondering now, did you send him away so you could be free to—”
She slapped him.
They froze, staring at each other. He didn’t touch his face, didn’t look away. It was as if her blow had no effect whatsoever, except for the narrowing of his eyes and an ever-tightening grip on her arm.
“You don’t know what I went through.” Inez whispered. She pulled her arm out of his grasp. He let her go.
“That’s true, Inez, I don’t. But you don’t know what I went through either.” He took another step forward, she took another step back: a choreographed dance of discord. A dance they’d executed so frequently in their life together, Inez knew the moves by heart. This time, though, she had no idea how it would end.
Mark’s expression turned rueful. “I know you won’t believe this, but I want us to have a chance, see if we can’t resurrect the life we had before, or make something better. I’ll do anything, walk through fire, if you’ll agree to one more try. And Inez,” his voice became ominously gentle, an overlay of menace tempering the soft Southern drawl, “I advise you to give my request some serious consideration. When we get back to Leadville, if you take up where you left off, trying to get a divorce, I won’t lie down and let you roll over me. I talked to a lawyer after I pieced together what was going on in my absence. I’ll tell you, darlin’, if we were runnin’ a race, I wouldn’t put a plugged nickel on your chances of winning.”
“Mr. Stannert?” A small voice piped up behind Mark. “’Scuse me, sir? Ma’am?”
Startled, Inez and Mark turned to see who spoke.
Standing a respectful distance away, Mathilda Pace was holding her little brother Atticus by one hand, and William’s sleeve with the other.
Still burning with the heat of emotional battle, Inez dumbly registered that William was drenched, that he was crying and rubbing his eyes with one soaked sleeve. Miss Warner was coming up behind Mathilda. She lugged Edison in one arm and held her long wet skirts up and away from the ground, her mouth pursed in disapproval.
“What happened?” Inez hurried forward, grabbed up William and hugged him to her, ignoring the sudden soaking of her dress.
Miss Warren answered in a long rush, “We were coming up to see if you were done with your picnic, so the children could play together, and saw him, little Wilkie, heading into the stream, you see, because we could see his toy in the water, the fast part toward the middle it was, and he was just starting after it, I didn’t see either of you anywhere, so I had to run pretty fast, and me carrying Edison like this, I only had one hand free, so I waded in and grabbed him by his collar just as he lost his balance, lucky for him I did, for if I’d been just a little slower…” She ran out of breath and stopped, hitching Edison up higher on one hip.
Inez began to shake. The tremor started deep inside and spread out in a growing wave to her limbs. Soon, she was trembling so hard she could barely hold William. “Thank you, Miss Warren,” she whispered. Then, “William, William.” She buried her face in his wet hair.
Through William’s indignant cries, she could hear Mark say, “Miss Warren, we owe you a debt of gratitude we can never begin to repay. If you hadn’t been so vigilant and quick on your feet…” At that point, the words ceased having any meaning to her, becoming just a babble of voices.
There was Miss Warren’s partially mollified tone, Mathilda’s rising inflection of a question, and Mark’s soothing response. Inez heard a chorus of “good-byes!” followed by the chattering of the Pace children and their nanny, fading with distance. Only then was Inez aware that Mark had, at some point, put his arm around her and William.
Inez whispered, “Mark, William almost, he almost…”
“He’s all right, Inez. He lost a toy, which can be replaced, that’s all. He’s fine, without a scratch.”
“But everything could have so easily turned out differently. He could have…oh god, I can’t say it. And it was our fault. We weren’t watching, we were so caught up in our silly squabbling. It’s all just like before, like it’s always been. Things go well for a while and then, something happens, and we are at it again.” She finally looked at him.