The Horse Whisperer (41 page)

Grace handed the cord to Joe who told Robert to hold his finger up. Everyone was watching. Except for Tom. He was sitting back a little, watching Annie over the candle. She knew he could read what she was thinking. Joe now had the cord looped over Robert’s finger.

“Don’t,” Annie said suddenly.

Everyone looked at her, startled to silence by the anxious note in her voice. She felt the heat rising to her cheeks. She smiled desperately, seeking help among the faces in her embarrassment. But the floor was still hers.

“I—I just wanted to figure it out myself first.”

Joe hesitated a moment to see if she was serious. Then he lifted the loop from Robert’s finger and handed it back to her. Annie thought she saw in the boy’s eyes that he, like Tom, understood. It was Frank who came to the rescue.

“Good for you Annie,” he said. “Don’t you go showing no lawyers till you’ve got yourself a contract.”

Everyone laughed, even Robert. Though when their
eyes met she could see he was puzzled and perhaps even hurt. Later, when the talk had moved safely on, it was only Tom who saw her quietly coil the cord and slip it back into her pocket.

L
ATE
S
UNDAY NIGHT
, T
OM DID A FINAL CHECK ON THE
horses then came inside to pack. Scott was in his pajamas on the landing getting a final warning from Diane who wasn’t buying his story that he couldn’t sleep. Their flight was at seven in the morning and the boys had been put to bed hours ago.

“If you don’t cut it out, you don’t come, okay?”

“You’d leave me here on my own?”

“You betcha.”

“You wouldn’t do that.”

“Try me.”

Tom came up the stairs and saw the jumble of clothes and half-filled suitcases. He winked at Diane and steered Scott off to the twins’ room without a word. Craig was already asleep and Tom sat on Scott’s bed and they whispered about Disneyland and which order they’d do the rides until the boy’s eyelids grew heavy and he slept.

On his way to his own room, Tom walked past Frank and Diane’s and she saw him and thanked him and said good-night. Tom packed all he needed for the week,
which wasn’t much, then tried to read for a while. But he couldn’t concentrate.

While he was out with the horses, he’d seen Annie arrive back in the Lariat from taking her husband and Grace to the airport. He walked to the window now and looked up toward the creek house. The yellow blinds of her bedroom were lit and he waited a few moments, hoping he’d see her shadow cross, but it didn’t.

He washed, undressed and got into bed and tried reading again with no greater success. He turned off the light and lay on his back with his hands tucked behind his head, picturing her up there in the house all alone, as she would be all week.

He’d have to leave for Sheridan around nine and would go up and say good-bye before he left. He sighed and turned over and forced himself at last into a sleep that brought no peace.

   Annie woke around five and lay for a while watching the luminescent yellow of the blinds. The house contained a silence so delicate she felt it might shatter with but the slightest shift of her body. She must then have dozed off, for she woke again at the distant sound of a car and knew it must be the Bookers leaving for their flight. She wondered if he’d got up with them to see them off. He must have. She got out of bed and opened the blinds. But the car had gone and there was no one outside the ranch house.

She went downstairs in her T-shirt and made herself a coffee. She stood cradling the cup in her hands by the living room window. There was mist along the creek and in the hollows of the valley’s far slope beyond. Maybe he was already out with the horses, checking
them one more time before he went. She could go for a run and just happen to find him. But then what if he came here to say good-bye, as he’d said he would, when she was out?

She went upstairs and ran herself a bath. Without Grace, the house seemed so empty and its silence oppressive. She found some bearable music on Grace’s little radio and lay in the hot water without much hope that it might calm her.

An hour later she was dressed. She’d taken much of that time deciding what to wear, trying one thing then another and in the end getting so cross with herself for being such an idiot that she punished herself by pulling on the same old jeans and T-shirt. What the hell did it matter, for Christsakes? He was only coming to say good-bye.

At last, at the twentieth time of looking, she saw him come out of the house and throw his bag into the back of the Chevy. When he stopped at the fork, she thought for an anguished moment that he was going to turn the other way and head off up the drive. But he nosed the car toward the creek house instead. Annie went into the kitchen. He should find her busy, getting on with her life, as if his going was really no big deal. She looked around in alarm. There was nothing to do. She’d done it all already, emptied the dishwasher, cleared the garbage, even (heaven help her) put sparkle on the sink, all to pass the time till he came. She decided to make some more coffee. She heard the scrunch of the Chevy’s tires outside and looked up to see him swing the car in a circle so it was pointing ready to leave. He saw her and waved.

He took his hat off and gave a little knock on the frame of the screen door as he came in.

“Hi.”

“Hi.”

He stood there turning the brim of his hat in his hands.

“Grace and Robert get their flight okay?”

“Oh yes. Thanks. I heard Frank and Diane go.”

“Did you?”

“Yes.”

For a long moment the only sound was the drip of the coffee coming through. They could neither talk nor even look each other in the eye. Annie stood leaning against the sink trying to look relaxed as she dug her fingernails into her palms.

“Would you like a coffee?”

“Oh. Thanks, but I better be going.”

“Okay.”

“Well.” He pulled a small piece of paper out of his shirt pocket and stepped closer to hand it to her. “It’s the number I’ll be at down in Sheridan. Just in case there’s a problem or something, you know.”

She took it. “Okay, thanks. When will you be back?”

“Oh, sometime Saturday I guess. Smoky’ll be by tomorrow, see to the horses and all. I told him you’d be feeding the dogs. Feel free to ride Rimrock anytime.”

“Thanks. I might.” They looked at each other and she gave him a little smile and he nodded.

“Okay,” he said. He turned and opened the screen door and she followed him out onto the porch. She felt as if there were hands on her heart, slowly twisting the life from it. He put his hat on.

“Well, bye Annie.”

“Bye.”

She stood on the porch and watched him get back in the car. He started the engine, tipped his hat to her and pulled away down the track.

   He drove for four and a half hours but he measured it not by time but only by how each mile seemed to make the ache deepen in his chest. Just west of Billings, lost in thoughts of her, he almost drove into the back of a cattle truck. He decided to take the next exit and go the slower route to the south, through Lovell.

It took him near Clark’s Fork, through land he’d known as a boy, though there was little now to know it by. Every trace of the old ranch was gone. The oil company had long taken what it wanted and pulled out, selling off the land in plots too small for a man to make a living. He drove past the remote little cemetery where his grandparents and great-grandparents were buried. On another day he would have bought flowers and stopped, but not today. Only the mountains seemed to offer some slim hope of comfort and south of Bridger he turned left toward them and headed up on roads of red dirt into the Pryor.

The ache in his chest only got worse. He lowered the window and felt the blast of the hot sage-scented air on his face. He cussed himself for a lovelorn schoolboy. He would find somewhere to stop and get himself back together.

They’d built a fancy new viewing place above the Bighorn Canyon since he was last there, with a big parking lot and maps and signs that told you about the geology and all. He supposed it was a good thing. Two carloads of Japanese tourists were having their pictures taken and a young couple asked him to take one for them so they could both be in it. He did and they smiled and thanked him four times and then everyone piled back into their cars and left him alone with the canyon.

He leaned on the metal rail and looked down a thousand
feet of yellow and pink striated limestone to the snaking, garish green water below.

Why hadn’t he just taken her in his arms? He could tell she wanted him to, so why hadn’t he? Since when had he been so goddamn proper about these things? He’d conducted this area of his life till now with the simple notion that if a man and a woman felt the same way about each other they should act on it. Okay, so she was married. But that hadn’t always stopped him in the past, unless the husband was either a friend or potentially homicidal. So what was it? He searched for an answer and found none, except that there was no precedent to judge it by.

Below him, maybe five hundred feet below, he saw the spanned black backs of birds he couldn’t name, soaring against the green of the river. And, quite suddenly, he identified what it was he felt. It was need. The need that Rachel, so many years ago, had felt for him and that he’d found himself unable to return, nor felt for any being or thing before or since. Here at last he knew. He had been whole and now he was not. It was as if the touch of Annie’s lips that night had stolen away some vital part of him that only now he saw was missing.

   It was for the best, Annie thought. She was grateful—or at least believed she would be—that he had been stronger than she was.

After Tom left, she had been firm with herself, setting herself all sorts of resolutions for the day and the days to come. She would make good use of them. She would call friends to whose faxed condolences she hadn’t yet responded; she would call her lawyer about the tedious details of her severance and she would tidy all the other
loose ends she’d left hanging last week. Then she would enjoy her isolation; she would walk, she would ride, she would read; she might even write something, though what she had no idea. And by the time Grace came back, her head, and possibly her heart, would be level.

It wasn’t quite that easy. After the early high cloud had burned away, the day was another perfect one, clear and warm. But though she tried to be part of it, performing every task she set herself, she could not shift the listless hollow inside her.

At around seven, she poured herself a glass of wine and stood it on the side of the tub while she bathed and washed her hair. She’d found some Mozart on Grace’s radio and though it crackled, it helped to banish a little of the loneliness that had crept upon her. To cheer herself further, she put on her favorite dress, the black one with the little pink flowers.

As the sun went behind the mountains she got into the Lariat and drove down to feed the dogs. They came bounding from nowhere to meet her and escorted her like a best friend into the barn where their food was kept.

Just as she finished filling their bowls, she heard a car and thought it odd that the dogs paid it no attention. She put the bowls down before them and went to the door.

She saw him but a moment before he saw her.

He was standing in front of the Chevy. Its door hung open and its headlights behind him shone lambent in the dusk. As she stopped in the doorway of the barn, he turned and saw her. He took off his hat, though he didn’t twist it nervously in his hands as he had this morning. His face was grave. They stood quite still, perhaps five yards apart, and for a long moment neither of them spoke.

“I thought . . .” He swallowed. “I just thought I’d come back.”

Annie nodded. “Yes.” Her voice was fainter than air.

She wanted to go to him but found she couldn’t move and he knew it and put his hat on the hood of the car and came toward her. Watching him draw near, she feared that all that was welling within her would engulf and sweep her quite away before he got to her. Lest it did, she reached out like a drowning soul to grasp him and he stepped into the circle of her arms and circled her in his and held her and she was saved.

The wave broke over her, convulsing her with sobs that shook her very bones as she clung to him. He felt her quake and held her more tightly to him, burrowing his face to find hers, feeling the tears that streamed on her cheek and smoothing, soothing them with his lips. And when she felt the quaking subside, she slid her face through the pressing wetness and found his mouth.

He kissed her as he’d kissed her on the mountain, but with an urgency from which neither of them now would turn back. He held her face in his hands that he might kiss her more deeply and she moved her hands down his back and took hold of him below his arms and felt how hard his body was and so lean that she could lay her fingers in the grooved caging of his ribs. Then he held her in the same way and she trembled at the touch.

They leaned apart to catch their breath and look at one another.