The Merciful Scar

by Rebecca St. James

“Then we both knew, didn’t we?” she said.

  Could we slow down a little? I’m having trouble keeping up.

  “It’s a four-hour drive to the ranch, so the sooner we get started the better.”

  Um, has it even occurred to you to inquire—

  I tried to laugh and came out with a semi-croak. “I guess I should ask you what kind of ranch it is.”

  “David didn’t tell you? It’s a working sheep and cattle ranch up near Conrad.”

  No, David hadn’t told me. Otherwise, all bets would’ve been off.

  “He did tell you that I won’t charge for the inner work I’ll be guiding you through.”

  I gave the slowest yeah in the history of I-don’t-want-to-hear-this.

  “Your living expenses will be paid for by the outer work you do.”

  “With cattle?” I said.

  “No, with the sheep and me. Is there anything else you need to grab before we go?”

  I shook my head. “I might need to go by my house and get some, I don’t know, jeans maybe?”

  You’re going to herd sheep in skinny jeans and leggings? This oughta be good.

  “If you want to grab undies and pj’s,” Frankie said, “we can definitely make a stop. But I have everything else you’ll need.”

  How about a straitjacket?

  Was it really worth going back to the place where my heart had broken and poured its contents all over the bathroom floor? Even though my mother had said she’d cleaned it up, no amount of scrubbing could’ve scoured away the pain.

  And Mother. She was already skeptical about me going off with a former nun. When she found out I was going to be shoveling manure, she would probably try to have me and Sister Frankie committed. Still, I had to tell her something.

  How about adios?

  “While you’re doing the paperwork,” I said, “I’ll call my mother and ask her to pack a bag for me and we can just . . . pick it up.”

  “Whatever works for you,” Frankie said.

  It’s not gonna work for Mother. Just sayin’. . .

  I couldn’t leave town without at least saying good-bye. And making sure that since I was keeping up my end of the deal, Mother was going to keep up hers. No Dad. Period.

  After I said a tearful farewell to Roman, it took me as long to convince my mother that I was not being kidnapped into a cult as it did for Frankie to officially get me out of the hospital. The Louisiana Purchase couldn’t have taken that long.

  “I’ll pack some things for you,” Mother said on the phone. “But I think you’re being too dramatic about this. There has to be some other program.”

  “Not for free,” I said.

  “Nothing is for free. Kirsten, you’re too trusting.”

  So far we have too sensitive. Too easily moved to tears. Too emotional. Too dramatic. And now too trusting. Gee, Kirsten, looks like you’re too everything.

  While Mother, on the other hand, was never too anything. Never too flashy. Too intellectual. Too happy. Too affectionate. Too silly.

  Everything except too nutso about Lara.

  “I can’t stop you from doing this,” she said now. “But if you don’t show improvement in thirty days, I will intervene.”

  No pressure or anything.

  “I’ll see you when we get there,” I said. Although I was already planning to ask Frankie to go up to the door and get my bag for me.

  You realize, don’t you, that right this very minute your mother is going through your lingerie?

  I didn’t care. Suddenly all I wanted to do was get out of town.

  By the time we reached my place in Frankie’s somewhat-the-worse-for-wear Suburban, it was almost four o’clock and blazing hot. I wished for some dusky darkness so I didn’t have to see the flattened flowers in the front yard where paramedics had tromped through with a stretcher, and the driveway where Wes had leaned into Isabel’s window and betrayed me with a kiss.

  I’m thinking he betrayed you with a lot more than that.

  What I didn’t see was a rental car parked there. My zebra-striped carry-on suitcase was on the bench on the porch, a white piece of paper tethered to the handle, fluttering in the ever-present wind.

  Frankie swept her gaze over the scene and back to me. “You think that’s your bag?”

  “Would you mind?” I said, just before my throat closed.

  She got wordlessly out of the car and returned with the case my father bought me when Wes and I joined him at Big Sky for Christmas. “The note is for you,” she said.

  My mother had apparently been through my desk, too, because the folded paper Frankie handed me was from a set of stationery she’d sent me for my nineteenth birthday and which I’d never opened.

  Kirsten, she’d written flawlessly between the lacy edges.

  The next flight I could get back to Kansas City leaves at 4:00, which will get me back in time to tuck Lara in. I’m sorry I couldn’t wait for you. I’ve packed a week’s worth of underwear, though I couldn’t find any pajamas. I trust they’ll have laundry facilities where you’re going. We will want to hear from you, so please keep in touch. Remember, there is nothing you can’t handle.

  Yours,

  Mother

  The Nudnik was, of course, on it with I love you too, Mom.

  As for me, I crumpled the note into a ball and stuffed it into the pocket of the one 100-percent cotton hoodie she’d bought me. Then I took a last look at the quaint house I’d taken such pride in fixing up. It no longer invited me in. It accused me. Of being a fool. Of being too hopeful. Of being too everything.

  “I guess we can go,” I said to Frankie.

  “One more thing,” she said.

  I knew it.

  “This is a four-hour drive. Plenty of time to reconsider. If at any time you want to turn back, just say the word and we’ll make a U-turn.”

  Back to . . .

  “I think I’m good to go,” I said.

  But when we backed out of the driveway, I said, “By going with you, am I running away?”

  She looked at me, brown eyes shining. “Only you can really answer that, but I’ll tell you what I think.”

  “Okay.”

  “I don’t think you’re running away. I think you’re running for your life.”

  I could only hope I still had one.

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  I don’t think you’re running away. I think you’re running for your life. #TheMercifulScar

  Part

  TWO

  Now there was a great wind, so strong that it was splitting mountains and breaking rocks in pieces before the LORD, but the LORD was not in the wind.

  1 KINGS 19:11

  Chapter

  FIVE

  I lost count of how many times we crossed the Missouri River. Sister Frankie told me these were the headwaters, but with each bridge all I could think about was the fact that I was moving farther from the river’s destination: the place my mother was running home to that very minute.

  At least there’s that.

  It was my only comfort, really. The farther north we climbed in Frankie’s Suburban, which smelled like wet dog—

  Not to mention poop of unknown origin—

  —and which even I could tell needed new shocks, the less I felt like any self I knew. In my five years at Montana State I’d never strayed far from campus and downtown, so I had no idea the seed-processing plants and funky one-casino towns we passed in our first thirty minutes out of Bozeman even existed.

  You really need to get out more. Oh, wait . . . you are out. Way out.

  Nudnik wasn’t wrong. As we ascended into what Frankie told me was the Gates of the Mountains, I knew I was far from anywhere I had ever been. Even at dusk the walls of rock were so close I could have reached out and touched them if I hadn’t been hugging my arms around my body.

  “I wish there was more light so you could see the way it plays with the oranges and grays,” Frankie said. “It is gasp-worthy.”


  Yeah, well, keep your eyes on the road, lady. If we go over the side, somebody’s gonna be gasping over our mangled bodies.

  Frankie went on to describe what I was missing, but most of it was in geographical terms that sailed right over my head, terrain-challenged as I was. A few familiar words came through now and then. Awe-inspiring. Majestic. Solid.

  How about huge and scarier than Hades?

  It was too big. Too much. I would have told Sister Frankie I wanted to go home—if I’d actually had one.

  When we reached Conrad and Frankie said we were almost there, we still had several unpaved roads to traverse, each one less maintained than the one before. As we neared there, I was more disturbed by the openness than I’d been by the too-closeness of the mountains.

  I thought I’d be glad to get out of the car when we finally reached the ranch and Frankie pulled to a stop behind a box of a house, but the wind lifted my hair and slapped it into my face the moment I opened the door. I had to grab the top of it with both hands; I was surprised my body didn’t flap like a flag.

  Frankie pulled my bag from the backseat and mashed her ball cap further down on her head. “You’re getting a windy welcome,” she said.

  Windy? This is a cyclone! Take cover!

  As if there was a place to take cover. Even at eight o’clock the last of the light still stuck stubbornly to the sky, and from the knoll-top we were standing on all I could see was space, dotted now and then with a dubious structure built low to the ground. Too much air. Too much openness.

  Only because I was beginning to sound like my mother did I stop that roll and catch up with Frankie’s pointing tour.

  “That’s the barn,” she was saying as she gestured to the longest building in the collection. “Up the driveway and through those trees is the main house where I live and where you’ll have suppers with us. Down there is the old bunkhouse.”

  Old being the key word.

  “Beyond the barn, see, up on the hill? That’s the sheep pen.”

  I followed her point with my gaze but at first I didn’t see any sheep. Just a fenced-in hillside littered with low rock formations.

  Yeah, well, I smell something.

  It was a full twenty seconds before I realized those stones were actually wooly animals, gathered in clumps with their legs tucked under their bodies, motionless as the wind whipped around them.

  Are they dead?

  “You’ll see them better tomorrow,” Frankie said. “Let’s get you settled and fed.”

  Bring on the trough.

  Frankie led me along the side of the house down a path that was only a path because feet had made it one. Something rustled in the bushes that rose almost to the eaves, and I couldn’t help jerking.

  “We think a mama weasel has her nest in there,” Frankie said. “I hope you get to see the babies. They’re so cute.”

  A cute weasel. Now there’s an oxymoron for ya.

  We rounded the corner of the house and took several bowed-in-the-middle steps up onto a long porch that took a turn at the end and apparently went on from there. I had no desire to see where. I just wanted to get in out of the wind before it blew away what was left of my resolve.

  That resolve didn’t get any stronger on the inside.

  Oops. Somebody forgot to call the interior decorator.

  “They used to call this Crazy Trixie’s House,” Frankie said as she wafted a hand around the large, peeling room we stepped into, “because it was built for my great-great-aunt—my great-grandfather Maxwell’s spinster sister—to stay in when she came to live with them on the ranch.” She gave a husky laugh. “I guess she was a little too out-there to stay in the main house with them. When my grandparents cleaned this place out after she died at age ninety, they found the closets stuffed with every article of clothing she’d ever owned, including several corsets and about a hundred hat pins, and all these scrapbooks full of newspaper ads for everything from beauty tonics to booby traps.”

  Back up. What’s a hat pin?

  “We always called it Crazy Trixie’s until the first two girls who came to us renamed it the Cloister,” Frankie said. “We still kept a few of Trixie’s touches, though.” She pointed to a shadow box by the door that displayed what looked like a hankie, a pair of spectacles on a gold stick, and a yellowed advertisement for a three-wheeled car.

  Crazy isn’t even the word for it.

  “When did she live here?” I said, more out of politeness than actual interest, seeing how I was now fixated on a flock of moths that circled the overhead light.

  “From 1905 until 1945, and that was after she retired from thirty years as principal of the school in Conrad.” Frankie’s laugh was sympathetic. “Who wouldn’t be a little crazy after that?”

  Let’s just hope the old gal had plumbing installed.

  She had, as Frankie revealed on a quick walk-through. The bathroom was about the size of a linen closet with a water heater that took up half of it. I suspected the kitchen sink was the same one they installed in 1930. Everything was clean and tidy, but it still reminded me of one of those houses you see in black-and-white photos from the Great Depression.

  Appropriate, don’t you think?

  All the rooms, except the bathroom, were huge and empty feeling, and it made me dread my first look at my bedroom. That was apparently going to be the last stop on the tour.

  “You’ll be sharing the house with another young woman, Emma Velasquez.”

  Frankie nodded at a closed door just off the second large room that backed up to the one we’d first walked into. It was like no floor plan I had ever seen in architectural school.

  “She’s still up at the main house but she’ll be down later.”

  Wait a minute. Nobody said anything about a housemate.

  At that point I didn’t care. I just wanted to find a small place and crawl into it before I lost myself in these empty, high-ceilinged rooms.

  “Yours is in the front,” Frankie said and led me back through the first big area. Over her shoulder she added, “I think it’s the best one in the house.”

  Now there’s a coveted prize.

  Frankie beamed as she set my bag on the floor of the corner room, and I didn’t have it in me not to at least nod. Maybe to someone looking for a view it warranted some beaming. Two long curtained windows. Cream walls that reflected even the very last of the light. A pile of white quilts, yellowed from their life on a high, wide bed. And space. Enough space to open a cozy coffee shop. Enough space to make me as crazy as Aunt Trixie.

  Frankie continued my orientation. “The closet is all yours. Lots of room here in the dresser.” She dimpled. “Since they took out the corsets. I think you’ll find all the ranch clothes you’ll need but we’ll know that better as you discover how your gifts fit ours.”

  I simply cannot wait. Where’s Roman? I’m tugging my earlobe here!

  I was still nodding as if my neck were a spring. Nodding to everything and agreeing with nothing.

  “Are you hungry?” Frankie said. “Do you want to come up to the main house and have something hot? I’m sure there are leftovers.”

  I shook my head to both. Her whole face softened beneath the ball cap she was still wearing.

  A hundred bucks says she doesn’t take it off to sleep.

  “This is a lot to take in,” she said. “Why don’t you fix yourself a snack in the kitchen and get some sleep? I’ll be here for you at six—”

  In the morning? Are you on crack?

  “—so you’ll want to be rested.”

  As if that was going to happen. Panic was already spinning in my head. Sleep was out of the question.

  “I don’t know,” I said, eloquently. “I mean, what will I be doing? I’m not that coordinated—like, what do I wear?”

  If Frankie thought she’d just made the first mistake of her therapeutic career by bringing me here, she didn’t show it. “Definitely the hiking boots,” she said. “Jeans. And a jacket at first until the chill wears off.
”

  “Okay,” I said, “but I don’t know anything about . . . anything.”

  The husky laugh escaped again as if it came out purely by its own choice. “I doubt that,” she said, “but don’t worry. You’ll learn as you go.”

  With my not entirely honest assurance to her that I had everything I needed, Frankie left and I watched her from the porch. The wind still pushed at her, but she walked as if nothing could move her from the path she was on. Two dogs—border collies from what I could tell—greeted her at the driveway and danced around, fur leaping happily with the gusts. Together the three of them disappeared through a gate and into the shelter of two fatherly cottonwoods, just as if they had stepped into another world.

  And they weren’t the only ones.

  The very last of the light was sizzling out over the mountaintops when I crawled under the quilts and hid myself to sleep. When my cell alarm woke me up at five thirty, morning light was already seeping through the windows. That sealed it: there would be no getting away from the exposure up here. That was even more frightening than the prospect of going to the barn with Frankie and doing who knew what.

  Doesn’t actually matter what it is, you’ll be a mess at it, so why are we even talking?

  I wasn’t. I needed coffee first and I didn’t smell any, but I didn’t want to go shuffling through the house to the kitchen in nothing but a too-big T-shirt when I hadn’t even met my mysterious housemate yet.

  So I explored the drawers and the hooks in the closet and came up with a pair of jeans that fit surprisingly well and a faded pink T-shirt that said Agnus Dei on the front. I wasn’t sure what that meant but there wasn’t too much chance it was something obscene, so I pulled it on and covered it with a brown hooded sweatshirt. Crazy Trixie had obviously not had central heating installed.

  I also found a fleece-lined tan canvas jacket that had seen as many better days as Frankie’s Suburban and a pair of the ugliest hiking boots I had ever seen.

  And how many pairs of hiking boots have you actually laid eyes on?

  One. Wes’s. Right out of the L.L.Bean catalog. They made his skinny suburban self look earthy.