The Tin Horse: A Novel (45 page)

Was it when I discovered the Kay Devereaux card?

Was it when Barbara left?

Or did the spill of events that brought me here begin long before, at some moment in our childhood when our eyes locked in perfect understanding, or we were laughing, and our two laughs, identical in pitch and rhythm, blended into a single voice?

Harriet, the one person in my family to whom I told the truth about this trip, tried to persuade me to let the news about Kay Thorne settle before I did anything; she offered to come with me if I still wanted to go this spring. But she didn’t insist that she needed to be there. And even if I were capable of waiting, when I imagined Harriet and me arriving at the OKay Ranch and approaching my twin sister for the first time in more than sixty-five years, I understood that this is something I need to do alone.

That is, with no one except my sidekick from the beginning of this quest, Josh—who’s driving the Explorer down the main street of Cody.

“This is it, right?” he says. “The Buffalo Bill Village?”

I look up and see the sign for the hotel I booked (which despite the picturesque name, is a Holiday Inn). Flying here took all day, half the time in the air and half waiting between flights in the Denver airport, so we’re staying in the hotel tonight and driving to Barbara’s ranch in the morning.

Josh unloads our gear, not just suitcases but a huge black case holding a professional video camera—unnecessary, and it was murder to get through security in Los Angeles. But he’s so delighted with his cover story, that he’s filming a documentary on World War II USO entertainers, he almost believes it himself. His enthusiasm has its value. He got on the
phone to Kay Thorne right after I called him, and she eagerly agreed to be interviewed; she even invited him to stay at the ranch. I’m grateful he wasn’t so caught up in his fiction that he accepted.

Actually, Josh has turned out to be a good companion on this journey. He threw out a few questions in the Los Angeles airport this morning—how was I feeling about seeing my sister again and what did I plan to say to her?—but when I changed the subject, he took the hint and didn’t ask again.

I spend half an hour settling into my room, then meet Josh for dinner at the hotel restaurant. He relieves me of the effort of talking by nattering about the bars in town he’s scoped out to hit that night. After dinner, I go to my room and watch television for a while.

At eleven I take an Ambien, turn out the light. And remain stubbornly awake.

The lighted display on the clock says 11:42 the first time I peek.

Then 12:26.

And 2:10.

The room is stifling. I’ve already shut off the heat vents. In Los Angeles, I never turn on the heat at night; on cold nights, a warm quilt is enough. I get up and open a window to a blast of frigid air. I can see the dark outline of the mountains to the west. Where
she
is.

In that visible distance, is she asleep, or does she, too, remain awake? Fighting insomnia? Maybe she’s a night owl and stays up watching old movies on cable. Having a geography for her at last, a place on the map, makes her more real; she’s in color instead of black and white. Did she ever cast her mind to Los Angeles and imagine me? Or did I always occupy a far smaller place in her life than she did in mine? Perhaps no place at all? I’m about to learn the answer to that.

I don’t want to know
.

I don’t want to risk finding out I mean nothing to her.
Elaine? Sure, I remember. How ya doin’?
Better if she’s furious at me for showing up, if she chases me off her ranch with a shotgun. Hate or fear, at least I matter.

What do you hope to get out of this?
Harriet asked me. A reasonable question, and reason is my touchstone; I’m an attorney not only by training
but in my deepest nature. And the answer? I want to glimpse the real woman behind the oh-so-public Kay of all the newspaper articles and the glossy dude ranch publicity, I told Harriet. I want to see for myself if she’s all right. To follow our family mystery all the way to its conclusion. To attempt some kind of reconciliation, even
healing
(though that’s Harriet’s word, not mine).

All of the answers I gave Harriet make sense. I could argue each one and convince a jury. Reason, however, has nothing to do with the force that sank its teeth into me, picked me up, and dropped me here—in Wyoming at three in the morning, fishtailing over a sweep of black ice.

Finally I fall into a sleep in which I clench my teeth so tightly that when I wake up at quarter to eight, I feel like I’ve taken a punch to the jaw.

“You okay?” Josh says when I meet him for breakfast.

“I will be after two cups of coffee.” I say; I hope. “How about you?”

He groans. “Country music, it always makes you feel like you’ve gotta have one more beer because of the girl who dumped you and you were so miserable you went and totaled a car, and the next day you lost your job … But hey, there’s nothing like a few beers to get people talking about one of their local legends.”

“Kay?”

“Miz Kay. First thing everyone said is that she’s an amazing businesswoman, one of the people who invented the modern version of the dude ranch. After some more beer, the story got really interesting. She’s got a reputation for being a ballbuster.”

“They used that word?” It’s what the right-wing pundit called
me
—“brainy ballbuster,” the slam I found so amusing that I cut out the column and had it framed. Does Barbara know
she’s
seen that way? How does she feel about it? I can ask her! My nerves zing with anticipation.

“ ‘Ballbuster,’ ‘tough as nails,’ and I recall something about ‘chewing up her husbands and spitting ’em out.’ Not that people saw that as a bad thing. They all respect Miz Kay. Except her own kids. She gets along fine with the son who runs the ranch—George junior, from her second husband. He and his wife live out there with her. But the son and daughter from her first marriage, that’s another story. The son fought in Vietnam
and came home with a drug problem. He moved away years ago; story is he finally got himself clean, but he calls a couple times a year and asks for money.”

“How would anyone know that?”

“Good point. Could be that’s just what fits the legend. Anyway, people
say
she and her daughter, Dana, fought like cats and dogs when Dana was growing up. Dana got married and moved to Seattle years ago. But she had to move back to the ranch last year with her youngest kid. Messy divorce.”

So Barbara was a less than perfect mother. Like me. Like every woman.

The morning is clear and chilly. According to the display on the Explorer’s dash, it’s twenty-six degrees when we leave the hotel shortly after nine. As we head west, the temperature drops. We’re steadily climbing, even though the mountains are peaks in the distance, while we’re traversing a rolling prairie, a sprawling-to-forever space in which the meager signs of human industry—occasional fences, huddles of cattle—dwindle to specks against the snow.

And maybe this is all I need—to inhabit, briefly, this landscape she chose as her own, under a sky so vast that high, thin cirrus are mere thoughts of clouds. Maybe having come this far is enough.

Well, I’m no longer a child, quivering at the top of the slide. If I tell Josh to turn around now, no one will jeer at me for chickening out. I just wish I didn’t feel so much like that child, my spine turned to liquid, my hands and feet like remote outposts I don’t trust to obey my commands.

“Is this it?” Josh says as we approach an exit from the interstate onto a county road.

I check my written directions—unnecessarily, because I have them memorized. “Yes.”

Now we’re
in
the mountains. Josh has to slow to thirty miles an hour, sometimes twenty, to negotiate the curving two-lane road. And I settle into the limbo of being in transit, in which we will drive on this road forever; in which I haven’t backed down yet never actually have to confront her. I am content.

Too soon, though, I see a carved wood sign that bears the ranch emblem, a stylized outline of a horse, and announces that the turn for the
OKay Ranch is a hundred yards ahead. The emblem is a bit crudely drawn, as if by a child, but the childlike quality is its charm; it sparks an instant sense of recognition. It makes me think of Saturday afternoon cowboy movies, and I’ll bet it has the same effect on potential customers planning their dude ranch vacation.

“Looks like we’ve hit the north forty,” Josh says.

A well-plowed entry road leads to an arched wooden gate with “OKay Ranch” and the distinctive horse emblem carved into the arch. Rustic but high-tech, the gate smoothly swings open after Josh announces himself over an intercom, and then closes behind us. The road makes a slight bend, and guests must get a thrill at their first view of the lodge, a graceful building made of whole logs and perched against the mountains.

“No wonder she’s a successful dude rancher,” Josh says, echoing my thought. My sister knows how to put on a show.

We come into the parking lot, large enough to hold perhaps fifty cars, though it’s empty today. The lodge is closed for the winter, and we’re supposed to continue to the family home a quarter mile on.

“Give me a minute,” I say as Josh consults our directions to figure out which of several side roads we need to take. I hate it that I feel so fuzzy. The rotten night. The altitude. My terror.

But I don’t have a minute. Zooming toward us, a snowmobile skims over the packed snow beside one of the side roads. It’s sixteen degrees outside, but the snowmobiler didn’t bother to wear a hat. Her blond curls fly, and I wonder if the granddaughter was dispatched to meet us.

She speeds into the parking lot and pulls up beside the driver’s side of the car. And I see that the face above the electric blue parka is as old as mine.

“Josh! Welcome,” she booms. Even with a touch of Western drawl, it’s
my
voice coming from her mouth.

Josh jumps out and goes to greet her, and she pumps his hand. Glancing past him at me, she does a double take, then shrugs. “Follow me to the house,” she says.

A tight U-turn, and she takes off in a spray of snow, a vigorous woman at home in this wild terrain. Zesty. Free. My sister.

It’s nothing like any of the lives I imagined for her. Yet as she tears
ahead of us, I see the Barbara who shoplifted groceries for Danny, the girl who yelled for joy on the bank of the river after a heavy rain. The girl who could leave us forever and not look back? But that Barbara I’ve never understood; that’s the sister I want to shake until she gives me an answer. Ah, now I feel ready, my back straightening and senses on alert; it’s the rush I experienced when I entered a courtroom.

“You okay?” Josh says.

“Fine.”

The side road leads to a house that looks big enough to hold a family of ten. What must be an original log ranch house sits at the middle of the structure, surrounded by log and limestone additions. It has none of the architectural majesty of the lodge; this is a place where people live. She pulls into a big garage—it holds two trucks, a van, and three SUVs—and parks in a line of about a dozen snowmobiles.

Josh stops just outside the garage. And I get out of the car. Walk toward her.

Getting up from the snowmobile isn’t easy for her. She has to perform a series of negotiations to extricate herself from the low seat; then she braces herself on the snowmobile and accepts Josh’s arm to come to standing. She must be in pain, but there’s no sign of it when she turns and gives me her close-lipped smile.

“I didn’t know Josh was bringing anyone.” She extends her hand. “I’m Kay Thorne.”

I hear Harriet warning me that I’m chasing an illusion. Then Kay Thorne smiles, revealing the gap between her two front teeth. I take a deep breath.

“Barbara,” I say. “It’s me. Elaine.”

I have imagined this moment so many times. I’ve seen her recoil. Or look perplexed and pretend not to know me. Or weep with joy.

For a heartbeat, she is so still, she might have stopped breathing. Then she breaks into a belly laugh.

“Holy crap!” She looks me up and down. “Holy, holy crap! Lainie, you’re an old lady.”

“Seventeen minutes younger than you!” I pull her into a hug, and she
hugs me back. My God, she still wears Shalimar! I can feel her body shaking. Or is the shaking mine?

I take half a step back but keep my hands on her shoulders.

She brushes my face. “Don’t cry. It’ll freeze.” She glances at Josh. “He’s not filming any USO documentary, is he?”

“No.”

“Hell of a bullshitter. It’s not nice to trick old ladies,” she teases him. Still a flirt. “Especially old ladies who are crack shots.”

“Sorry, ma’am.” He grins back.

“Your grandson?” she asks me. “He’s got Danny’s eyes.”

“A friend. Barbara, I didn’t marry Danny.”

“You’re kidding. Well, Jesus, Elaine, are you okay? You didn’t come here in the dead of winter because you’re dying of cancer or anything like that?”

“I’m fine. I came now because I had no idea where you were until a week ago.” But I bite back the sharpness that entered my voice. I don’t want to get angry, not when this is going so well. “How about you? Are you all right?”

“Can’t complain. Well, I
can
complain, and I do. But nothing’s seriously wrong.”

“Hey!” Josh breaks in. “Mind if a California boy goes inside out of the cold?”

The minute he says it, it hits me that my wool coat, fine for winter visits to my daughter in Oregon, feels no more protective than a paper hospital gown. I turn toward the house.

Barbara doesn’t move. Maybe she can’t?

“Do you need help?” I ask.

“Elaine!” She fixes me with my own Acid Regard. “Wait. My family’s here. You’re not going to tell them, are you?”

“For crying out loud. Barbara, I didn’t come here to expose you.”

“Kay. My name is Kay.”

“Fine!” What does it matter if she calls herself the Queen of Sheba? No one else has ever been able to jerk me around so completely or twist me into a tighter knot of helpless rage. Forget her voice and the gap between
her teeth; now I know beyond the shadow of a doubt that this is my sister. “Are you going to at least let me use your bathroom? My bladder is screaming.”