The Merciful Scar

by Rebecca St. James

  So I asked him as we walked out to the pasture.

  And with such poise, I might add.

  “Did you tell Frankie what you remembered?”

  Andy leaned down and pulled up a stem, which he stuck in his mouth. “No. I haven’t remembered anything more so . . . I’m still sorting.”

  “It’s totally your call,” I said. “But Emma’s told me some things and I’ve looked at some things. And even though neither one of us is probably where we need to be, y’know, it helps.”

  “When I’m ready I’ll tell her,” Andy said.

  He didn’t use a this-is-none-of-your-business tone, but the stem between the teeth was a clear signal.

  “Okay,” I said.

  And then I wondered if we weren’t both playing hide-and-seek with our pasts.

  I didn’t have to wonder long.

  The next morning before Andy and I headed up to the sheep pen, Frankie told us we needed to move what was left of the old hay into the barn to make room for the new stuff outside.

  “Dress light and drink a lot of water, Kirsten,” she said.

  “I’ll take care of her,” Andy said.

  The look Frankie gave us both clearly said I was to take care of myself.

  So I put on enough sunscreen to cover everybody on a Waikiki beach and buttoned a cotton shirt over a tank top and had two bottles of water from the barn pump with me as I climbed into the truck with Andy.

  “You’ve seen me try to buck hay before,” I said. “I’m probably not going to be much help.”

  “Define help,” he said.

  “Uh . . . I do half the work?”

  “Nah, see, you need to rethink that.”

  “I do.”

  “Yeah.”

  Andy steered the truck up into the baling area with one hand and gestured with the other.

  Had I mentioned that I really liked his hands?

  It’s come up, yes.

  “If I had to lift something that weighed eighty pounds,” he said, “and I could only lift seventy-nine, but you could lift one, wouldn’t that be helping? Wouldn’t we get it done?”

  “Yeah.”

  “So just because you can’t do as much work as I do doesn’t mean you won’t be helping.” He stopped the truck, shoved it into park, and gave my upper arm a playful squeeze. “Besides, you might be surprised.”

  It turned out I was. Three weeks before I had barely been able to lift a hay bale by its strings, much less toss it to a person in the back of the truck. But that day I was bouncing bales up to my hips and thrusting them out to Andy’s waiting arms, one after another.

  Of course I was also sweating from places on myself I didn’t even know existed. The sun beat down relentlessly and the wind was someplace taking a nap. I unbuttoned the shirt I was wearing over the tank top, but as my mother’s Missouri relatives would say, I was still burnin’ up.

  You’re gonna have to lose that shirt. It’s either that or pass out where you stand.

  Or let Andy see the scars.

  You don’t think he knows?

  Maybe he did. Maybe he’d figured it out. But knowing wasn’t the same as seeing. Having to look at the places where I had cut and sliced and carved into myself could be a deal breaker. Not that we had a deal of some kind. But if Andy never grinned at me again or called me Bo, I wasn’t sure I could handle that. Not after losing Bathsheba.

  But what if it isn’t a deal breaker? What if he doesn’t run off screaming like he’s seen Godzilla? Won’t that tell you something?

  I closed my eyes to make sure that was actually the Nudnik talking. But maybe it didn’t matter. They were questions I suddenly had to have the answers to.

  While Andy rearranged the last of that truckload of bales, I slowly pulled off the cotton shirt. The tank top was scoop-necked and came just to the top of my jeans, but it covered better than most swimsuits.

  Not that you’ve worn one in seven years.

  Still, I felt as if I had just stripped completely down to my skin and was standing there naked. But naked or no, I had to get back to work.

  Are you noticing anything? Like . . . you just revealed all and the sky didn’t come crashing down?

  I was actually aware something else had been peeled off with my shirt. A layer of aloneness maybe? Because it came to me that I was no longer by myself with my secret.

  We bucked an entire truckload of hay, had it piled over the edges of the truck bed, before Andy looked at me. I could suddenly feel every one of my scars as if it was freshly added to the roadmap etched on my skin. He just grinned at me and said, “Somebody’s gonna have to ride on top to make sure it doesn’t fall off.”

  “That’s my job,” I said.

  I always rode back to the barn up there with . . .

  Bathsheba.

  I could almost feel her paw on my leg, the way she’d pressed it there as if she were making sure I didn’t tumble over the side. Right now her fur would be lifting and falling as we bounced, and her tongue would be hanging out like a long elastic spatula. I put my hand to my face to wipe away her dog drool and realized it was my tears.

  I tried to smear them off when the truck rocked to a stop at the barn, but Andy was there lowering the tailgate before I could get it done.

  “Don’t,” he said. “Come here.”

  I crawled to the edge of the pile and let him lift me down. His arms stayed around me.

  “Let the tears run down,” he said. “Then you won’t have to do this anymore.”

  He ran a gentle finger over the spiderweb of scars on my shoulder.

  I had never slept with anyone. I didn’t know what it was like. But I did know that with that tiny gesture, Andy had just made love to me.

  I lay awake all night, my twenty-ninth night at the Bellwether Ranch. I heard Emma’s bad dream and Avila’s alarmed barking and the ceaseless wind that kicked up at midnight to rattle the old windows and slap the blackberry bushes against the glass. But it was the unmade decision that kept me from falling asleep.

  I sat up amid the yellowed quilts that had provided such safety for me and hugged my legs to my chest. I’d been so sure that at thirty days I would leave, ready or not. I even thought when I started to admit my anger that I could take it with me and deal with it . . . somewhere.

  My face fell to my knees. It wasn’t just that I didn’t know where somewhere was that made me doubt now. It was Lara. How could I urge Andy to talk to Frankie about his nightmarish memories when I couldn’t even talk to myself about things I hadn’t forgotten and probably never would? The bear cub encounter, losing Bathsheba, uncovering my scars and my secret for Andy—it had all distracted me from what was still left to face.

  Lara. Lara and my guilt and the anger I couldn’t bring myself to feel.

  I fell back against the pillows, but the bed didn’t cocoon around me. Could I continue to chip away at that in Bozeman? The summer semester was half over and I couldn’t slide into a studio without an approved project anyway. I definitely couldn’t go back to my house, not with the painful memories waiting in the very cracks in the walls. Chances were that as furious as my father was with me, he’d probably already gotten out of the lease and sold the whole IKEA shebang on eBay.

  You could always go back to Missouri. Lara’s there. You wouldn’t be able to get away from her—

  “I can’t,” I whispered.

  Then it looks like you were right. You’re powerless.

  I clawed my way out from under the covers and stumbled out to the front room, where I could pace like Aunt Trixie, back and forth across the feet-worn floor.

  I couldn’t be powerless, not after thirty days of the hardest work I had ever done. Sister Frankie even said I wasn’t.

  She said you had no power over—

  But that I did have the power to. The power to pray.

  You don’t think she’s still up.

  Did I need Sister Frankie to pray with me?

  Well. No. Maybe not.

  I pulled
a throw pillow from one of the recliners and set it on the floor in front of the window that overlooked the porch. There I knelt and folded my hands on the windowsill and closed my eyes against the slap of the wind and the last mutterings of the Nudnik and the faint, faint cry of my skin.

  “God,” I whispered, “I need to hear Your voice. Please.”

  Day Thirty dawned bright blue and as I squinted out the kitchen window I remembered how invasive that light had seemed to me on Day One. Now it glared at me as if to say, “Why haven’t you made a decision?”

  Cut the girl some slack. She still has twenty hours.

  Frankie had told Andy and me the night before that we’d be handling the morning chores on our own so she, Joseph, and Emma could get an early start in the alfalfa field. Andy and I had agreed to meet at 6:30 and it was only 5:45. I had made one decision before I fell asleep around two and I had time now to carry it out.

  I called my mother.

  You sure you’re ready for this?

  If I wasn’t it was too late now. She answered on the second ring.

  “Kirsten?”

  “Hi.”

  “This is a surprise.”

  It didn’t sound like it was an unpleasant one, so I didn’t hang up.

  “Are you still at that ranch?” she said.

  “I am.”

  I heard her let out a long breath. “I’m glad to hear that. I was afraid your father took you out of there.”

  “I would have let you know,” I said.

  “I should have called you, but—” She cut herself off with another sigh. “Frankly, I assumed you wouldn’t speak to me.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I told your father where you were. He called here right after he talked to Wes—I guess Wes called him?”

  “Yes.”

  The scumbag.

  “And you know what a bully he can be. He threatened to bring me up on charges of gross negligence—”

  “It’s okay,” I said. “I get it. He came up here and tried to bully me too.”

  “And he wasn’t successful.” Now she did sound surprised.

  “No, I stayed. But this is the last of my thirty days and I need to figure out what’s next.” I took a breath. “How would you feel about my coming home for the rest of the summer? Just until school starts.”

  “You’re better, then?” she said.

  How subtle.

  “Are you asking me if I’m still cutting?”

  “Are you?”

  “No. I’m not.”

  “So that’s done.”

  Does she want it written in blood? Oh . . . sorry.

  “I could help out with Lara.”

  There was a silence so dead if I’d been in the same room with my mother I would have checked her pulse.

  “I’m not sure what you could do, Kirsten,” she said finally. “We have our routine down. I have help when I need to go out.”

  In other words, you’re still an inconvenience.

  It wasn’t that bad, was it? She wasn’t completely dismissing me.

  But she’s not begging you to come home either.

  That was the truth, and suddenly that truth burned in my throat.

  “I’m your daughter, too, Mother,” I said. “And if I could just hear that you care whether I come home or not, that would be great.”

  My mother’s pause was only long enough for her to blink. “Of course I care, Kirsten,” she said. “You don’t have to take that tone with me.”

  There it was—the heart of the anger that now roared in my ears.

  Don’t take that tone. Don’t be honest. Just make it so no one else has to face what is.

  My mother sighed yet again. “Well, when would you be coming?”

  “I’ll let you know,” I said. And I hung up.

  I was halfway through with my incensed stomp to the barn when Andy caught up with me.

  “This walk is about a five on the Richter Scale,” he said.

  I stopped so abruptly I almost fell over my own hiking boots, and I jabbed at the shoulder he’d kissed with his finger the day before.

  “I made that cut with a calligraphy pen my old boyfriend gave me,” I said. “It felt like that pen was the only thing left that loved me. And now I think maybe I was right.”

  I know I told you that but it’s a little dramatic for this moment, don’t you think?

  No, I did not think that. What I thought was that I’d just said exactly what I felt. Out loud. To someone I cared about. And now it wasn’t stuck under my skin anymore.

  Andy was slowly shaking his head. “That pen’s not the only thing that loves you, Bo.”

  I tried to look away, but he caught my chin and turned it back to him.

  “I know this has to be totally your decision,” he said. “And maybe I don’t have the right to give my input. But, Bo, please don’t leave. Not yet.”

  I closed my eyes and rested my forehead on his chest. “I’ll get back to you on that,” I said.

  Because he was right. For the first time in my life, something was my decision. And if I was going to make the right one, there was one more person I had to talk to.

  Although Joseph and Frankie worked until sunset, they still prepared communion just as they always did on Sunday night. Frankie was just taking the bread out of the oven when I joined her in the kitchen. She pulled off her mitts and looked into me with her wise brown eyes.

  “Is this going to be a celebration dinner or a farewell supper?” she said.

  “I got angry today,” I said. “I got angry and I expressed it to the person I was angry at. Okay, my mother. I did it, and she shut me down.”

  She waited. When I didn’t go on, she said, “There are two reasons for that, I think. One, you’re the one who’s changing, not your mother. None of your work here is guaranteed to make the situations themselves better. Just you.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “Two, the voice of God isn’t in the anger itself. That just shakes things loose so you can look at them. You’re just now starting to look.”

  “I don’t think I can look by myself.”

  “There’s no need to.”

  Go ahead. Ask her.

  “How long can I stay?” I said.

  “As long as it takes, my friend.”

  One more. Get it out.

  “How will I know it’s time to go?”

  The grin I counted on wrinkled her nose. “You’ll hear bat kol. So”—Sister Frankie scooped the bread up into a white towel and set it between my hands—“will you carry this to the table? We have some celebrating to do.”

  I still wasn’t sure I would ever hear God or even bat kol. But I did know the voice that whispered to me before Emma and I left the main house that night. I was putting on my boots by the back door when Andy was suddenly there, in that way he and Frankie both had, putting his lips close to my ear.

  “You’re loved here, Bo,” he said.

  I had no trouble sleeping that night. I was back in my cocoon.

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  It came to me that I was no longer by myself with my secret. #TheMercifulScar

  Part

  FOUR

  And after the earthquake a fire, but the LORD was not in the fire.

  1 KINGS 19:12

  Chapter

  SIXTEEN

  We were a week into July before I realized I’d stopped counting days: days I’d been on the ranch and days since the last time I’d hurt myself. But without that as a frame, I found myself sticking closely to the rhythm of Bellwether.

  I got up early to make notes in the (second) red logbook. Prayed on the pillow in front of the window. Put my heart and soul into Petey and the other sheep. Improved the Moment every afternoon with Emma, dutifully showed up for target practice twice a week, gathered with the family for supper, stopped by Bathsheba’s grave to whisper a good night.

  Through it all I listened for bat kol. Sometimes I thought I might have already hea
rd it. In Bathsheba’s barking to save me, telling me I was worth dying for. In Petey’s devoted bleating, telling me I was worth living for.

  And surely there was something sacred in my time with Andy. I had never felt so at ease with a guy, not even with Wes in our early days. What I had taken for comfortable with Wes was merely me fitting into the folds of his life. It was so different with Andy.

  For starters, we had conversations that went far beyond flirting and into our ideas, our doubts, our truths.

  Our exes.

  Okay, so I told him about Wes and he told me about Cara, the long-legged beauty with the trendy-messy bun who transferred in his junior year and who had a fatal flaw: “She knew something was building up in me and she thought if we just had sex I’d feel better. She left me when she finally got that I wasn’t going to do it.”

  I also told him about Lara, but when I came to the night of her accident, my mental tires screeched. Andy, too, ran into a wall when he tried to talk to me about Joseph.

  We got onto that subject one day when we were walking back from taking the sheep out and there was time to start from the beginning.

  “I don’t remember him myself,” Andy said, “but Frankie and my grandfather always talked about Uncle Joe who I was supposedly pretty attached to until I was three. My mother died around that time . . . I barely remember her either. And then Joseph left and didn’t come back until I was eighteen and away at college.”

  “Where did he go?” I said, although I was afraid I already knew.

  “Prison. I didn’t know that until I was probably ten and I overheard Frankie and my grandfather talking about Joseph refusing parole. I wanted to know what that meant, which is when Frankie told me he’d done something he thought was right but the court thought it was wrong and he had to go to jail.”

  “Did you ever ask what it was?”

  Andy shook his head. “Something about the way Frankie said it—I don’t know, I just thought I wasn’t supposed to ask. I know now, of course, she would have told me. She’d tell me today if I asked her.” Andy’s face darkened. “But I’m not sure I want to know. Maybe that’s why I can’t remember.”