Cowboy Take Me Away (27 page)

“It doesn’t matter, anyway. What happened back then has nothing to do with what’s happening now. Just
forget
all that!”

“Will you take a look around you?” he shouted. “How the hell am I supposed to forget?”

“By realizing you’re not the kid you were. And knowing that whatever happened back then doesn’t affect the man you are now. Not unless you let it.” She took a few steps toward him, putting her hand against his arm. “All this is past history,” she said gently. “You need to get over it, Luke. Just get
over
it.”

His eyes narrowed, his mouth settling into a grim line of rage. “Get over it? You think it’s that easy? Just get
over
it?”

All at once, he grabbed her arm. She tried to shake loose, but he held on tightly. He turned and headed for the dining room, dragging her along behind him. “See that?” he said, pointing to a hole in the wall. “Know where that came from?”

“Luke—”

“The back of my head,” Luke said, his voice quavering. “I’m damned lucky it went through the wall. If there had been a stud behind that part of the Sheetrock, I’d probably be dead right now.”

Luke was at least six feet tall. That hole in the wall couldn’t have been more than five feet high. Shannon’s stomach turned over with disgust.

And then he was pulling her along again, this time to the kitchen. He yanked open a drawer. “See this?” he said, holding up a rusty spatula. “This was one of his favorite weapons. It has holes in it. You know what that feels like across your bare legs?” Luke hurled it across the room. It hit a window and shattered it, raining glass down on the filthy wood floors. Shannon shied away hard, but he grabbed her arm again.

“Luke, please—”

Ignoring her pleas, he dragged her into one of the bedrooms and yanked up a loose floorboard.

“I wanted a dog so bad I could taste it,” he said, breathing hard. “Of course I did. I lived in fucking Rainbow Valley, where everybody has a pet. But my father told me if I ever brought a dog home, he’d kill it. And he’d have done it, too. You think I wanted to watch
that
happen?”

He reached into the hole and pulled out a stuffed dog. Brown, with dirty, ragged fur and black button eyes.

“A woman at the thrift store gave it to me. When we left, I put it under my coat so my father wouldn’t see it. If he had, he would have ripped it to shreds. That’s what passed as a pet for me. A damned stuffed animal.” Luke hurled it across the room.

Shannon pressed her hand over her stomach, sick with the realization of what his life had been like. But it was over. His father was dead and gone. This had to
stop
.

“I know he drank,” she said carefully. “I know he was terrible to you. But—”

“You don’t have any idea what my father did to me. None at all. You couldn’t even
imagine
—”

“But it’s over now. He’d dead.”

“It’ll never be over! As long as I’m drawing breath, it’ll
never
be over!”

“Luke, I know he hit you. But—”

“Hit me? You think that’s all there was to it? He
hit
me? Christ, I used to
pray
that was all he’d do!”

“I-I don’t understand.”

“He’d get mad for no reason,” Luke said, his breath harsh and raspy. “I’d hear him fly into a rage. Then he’d come into my bedroom and tell me whatever he was angry about was my fault.” He turned his gaze up to the closet door beside him. “Then he’d drag me into that closet. Slam the door.” Luke swallowed hard. “Then he’d nail the door shut.”

Shannon followed Luke’s gaze to several bent, rusty nails scattered on the floor, then along the edge of the closet door, where she saw a dozen holes where nails had once been. Nausea crept through her stomach. She couldn’t imagine it. She couldn’t imagine any human being treating a child like that.

“Sometimes he left me there for two or three days,” Luke said. “No food, no water. Every time I heard him pound that hammer, I thought I was going to die. I cried…I screamed…”

For a few sickening moments, Shannon felt as if she was right there in that closet with Luke, hearing his cries, feeling his pain. “My God,” she said, horror snaking along every nerve. “He did that to you? Your own
father
?”

Luke reached back inside the hole beneath the floor and brought out something that made Shannon’s blood crawl to a near halt. A knife. Long and wicked, tarnished with age. He turned it over, and it glinted dully in the faint light.

“One day I stole this from the hardware store. I hid it under this floorboard. I told myself if he ever touched me again, I’d kill him.”

Shannon felt light-headed, her mind reeling. What if he’d done it? What if he’d murdered his own father? His life would have been over. Over, for doing something he was driven to do by a force he felt he couldn’t stop any other way.

“He never knew it was there,” Luke said. “But he knew something was different. Knew I wasn’t taking it anymore. He never touched me again. But I was still afraid. Every single night…so
afraid
…”

Luke slammed the knife back into the hole again and stood up, his eyes glistening. When he spoke again, his voice was clogged with emotion.

“I couldn’t stop him! No matter what I said, what I did, he kept
coming
at me! Over and over and—”

She reached for him. “Luke—”

“Don’t touch me!”
He jerked his arm away, holding up his palms, and Shannon drew back as if he’d slapped her.

“I-I didn’t know,” she said helplessly, her voice trembling. “I was a kid like you. I couldn’t have known!”

“Yeah, but what about everybody else? How could somebody not know? How in the name of God could the people in this town not know something was wrong? They saw him. They saw
me
, dirty and bruised and scared. I was just a little kid, and they left me with that
monster
! Why didn’t somebody
do
something?”

She didn’t know. She’d only been a kid herself. Luke’s age. Sleeping in her Barbie bed in one of the biggest houses in Rainbow Valley at the same time he’d been living this nightmare. In that moment, any problem she’d ever had in her life seemed so horribly, painfully insignificant that she couldn’t even imagine them anymore.

“So next time you tell me to
just get over it
,” Luke said, “you think about that, okay? You think about—”

“Luke—”

“Get out.”

She shook her head slowly, the horror of the moment leaving her jaw slack and her hand at her throat.

“Get out of this house.”

“But—”

“Get the hell out of this house!”

She backed away one stumbling step, then two, her hand still at her throat, the image of Luke’s father looming in her mind like a creature in a nightmare. She’d had no idea. No idea at all, or she never would have come there and said the things she had. Now she understood. She understood that whatever she thought Luke had endured back then, it had been nothing compared to the reality of what had happened inside these walls.

She hurried to the door, yanked it open, and ran down the steps to her truck, Luke’s furious shouts still reverberating inside her head. She opened the door and jumped inside, her body still trembling. The wind had ripped strands of hair loose from her ponytail, and she had to shove them out of her face before she could start her truck. The horror of it all was too much for her, the injustice, the terrible guilt she felt that she’d been living in heaven while he was going through hell. To Shannon, this place was just a dirty old house. To Luke, it had been a prison where his childhood had been held by the throat and flayed until it was bloody and lifeless.

She started up the road, but before she even reached the highway, her tears began. Soon she couldn’t even see to drive. She pulled over, wiping her eyes on her sleeve, feeling so helpless she could barely breathe.

I’m just one more pitiful stray you feel obligated to take in.

No.
God
, no. It was so much more than that. She’d told him the truth. She loved him. She loved him so much that just thinking about it practically knocked her to her knees. But now she had that same horrible feeling that invaded her dreams so many nights of her life, where she saw animals that were in agony, but there was nothing she could do to stop their pain.

Luke was right. She wanted his suffering to stop. But not out of some misguided need to save him. She wanted him to live again, to learn to love. To love
her
. She wanted to touch him, to hold him, to do something to drive those thoughts from his mind for good so they could figure out some kind of way forward. But now he was leaving, taking memories with him that were going to haunt him for the rest of his life.

And there was nothing she could do to stop him.

Luke stood in that repulsive house, breathing hard, every muscle tense and aching. Glancing out the window, he saw Shannon get into her truck and drive away. Despair overwhelmed him, and his legs felt weak and shaky. He needed to sit down, but this crappy furniture…he couldn’t bear to touch it. All he wanted to do was run.

He left the house, sidestepping the hole in the porch, the disgustingly shabby porch that had given way beneath his feet and eventually made him face this hell on earth. When he reached his truck, he turned back and looked at the unspeakable place he couldn’t even bear to stand in.

He wanted to set fire to it. He wanted to toss a match on what was left of the front porch and watch it go up in flames. He wanted to watch it burn until it was reduced to a pile of ashes that even the flimsiest breeze could sweep away. He wanted nothing left on this plot of land but scraggly, fire-damaged trees and blackened grass crackling in the breeze. He wished for it so hard he swore he could lift his head and smell the wood burning. But the fire wouldn’t stop there. The unprecedented lack of rain meant a single spark could ignite a fire that would consume the entire valley.

He got into his truck. It took him three stabs to get his key into the ignition. But instead of starting the engine, he folded his arms on the steering wheel and dropped his head against them.

She knows she knows she knows she knows…

That thought kept pounding inside his head. The things he’d kept to himself all these years, the horrific things he vowed he’d take to his grave…

So now Shannon knew exactly what he was, how damaged he felt because of his father, how the memory of it still stained every thought that passed through his mind. Since he’d left Rainbow Valley, every time a woman touched him, he had to divorce his mind from his body so it was just his flesh she was reaching for and not his soul, because what soul he had left was so ragged and broken it would have crumbled with a single touch.

Until now. Until Shannon.

I love you.

He played those words over and over in his mind, but he couldn’t make himself believe them. He knew what drove her, what hit her on an emotional level, what made her tick. It wasn’t love. It was pity. The same pity she felt for the damaged animals she took in. And even if it was love, he’d destroyed it now. He’d told her from what depths he’d come, and they were deeper than she ever could have imagined. He squeezed his eyes closed and pressed his palms to the sides of his head.
Get over it get over it get over it…

God, how he wanted to. He wanted to smash every memory with a mental hammer over and over until the tiny fragments bore no resemblance to the reality he’d lived through.

He’d never be able to look Shannon in the eye again. At best, she’d look back at him with the kind of pity that had always turned his stomach. That was why he needed to go, why he needed to get away from this town just as soon as he could. And this time nothing on earth would bring him back.

Shannon drove back down the highway and turned into the driveway leading to the shelter. Freddie Jo’s car was in front of the office, and she parked beside it. She sat there a long time, trying to get a grip, feeling as if the entire world had crumbled beneath her feet. She flipped down her visor mirror and saw that her eyes looked all red and cried out, and she doubted they’d look much better anytime soon. Finally she got out of her truck and went inside. Freddie Jo looked up, and the second she saw Shannon’s face, a concerned expression came over hers.

“Oh, honey…”

“I’m okay,” Shannon said, wiping her fingertips beneath her eyes. She walked past Freddie Jo and went into the kitchen. She reached the table and stopped, looking toward Luke’s apartment. She walked to it slowly and opened the door.

It was empty.

Her heart twisted, and for a moment she thought she was going to be sick. She knew Luke had to be on his way out of town, but still she’d held on to a last shred of hope that maybe he hadn’t actually packed up everything and left. That there was a chance things would cool off and they could come back together again. But just like before, he was gone for good. And she was so afraid she wasn’t going to be able to stand it.

She took a deep, shaky breath and walked back to the office. “Come on, Freddie Jo. We need to get the animals fed.”

Freddie Jo turned around, wearing a sympathetic look that drove Shannon crazy.

Shannon tossed her purse in her desk drawer. “I’ll take the horses if you’ll handle the cats. Then we can both do the dogs.”

“I don’t know what happened between Luke and Russell,” Freddie Jo said, “but I’m thinking there was more to it than met the eye.”

“Yes. There’s more. But it doesn’t matter. He’s gone.”

“Luke left town already?”

“Yes. So I guess we have things to do, don’t we? Let’s get after it.”

“I think you need to sit for a minute.”

Shannon wheeled around. “Sit? How am I supposed to sit? How in the world am I supposed to just sit around while there are all these mouths to feed around here?
How?
”

“Shannon—”

“It’s feeding time. The animals have to eat. Now come
on
!”

But Freddie Jo still didn’t move. She just shook her head slowly. “Sweetie, I think you need to go home.”

“No. This place is my responsibility. If Luke isn’t here to do his job, it’s up to me.”