by Lisa Wingate
I had the urge to go knocking on her door, but I knew it was too early. The sky was just gaining a blush outside. I paced the room for a while, picked up the script and tried to concentrate on it, walked out into the hall with it, thought if there was a light under Lauren’s door, I’d knock and say something suave and unobtrusive like, “I thought you might want to take a look at this before breakfast.” Something that wouldn’t indicate I’d been stalking her door.
The light was on and I almost knocked, but then I decided it was stupid. Of course she’d know I was stalking her door. It was six-thirty in the morning. She’d think I was one of those creepy obsessive types who called to phone-smooch ten minutes after dropping a girl off from a date. Women don’t like men like that.
I hung around the hall waiting for it to get later, until finally the light came on in Frederico’s room, and I figured I’d better head out before Fred drafted me into his morning celebrity boot camp.
Last night at the barbecue, as Justin was slogging down coconut cream pie, Frederico had pointed out that tomorrow they must get back on regimen.
I heard Fred pass by in the hall as I laid the script on the table in my room and got dressed to go out for a jog. With any luck, I could get through the back door without Fred detection. A morning jog with Fred was like signing up for a challenge on Survivor.
Leaving my room, I moved down the stairs quietly, stopping at the bottom to listen for the hum and clink of exercise equipment in the lobby. The place was strangely silent, except for the moaning ghost in the dumbwaiter. Even the pecan rolls hadn’t arrived yet.
Maybe Fred had left for a jog on his own.
Then again, maybe he was in the storeroom, with all the Styrofoam wig heads and the refrigerator where we’d stashed the leftovers last night.
Aluminum foil? Was that crinkling aluminum foil I heard?
I stepped down the hall and saw a fan of light coming from the storeroom door, warm and silent on the cool wood floor. A shadow moved in, materializing in the doorway inch by inch—a foot stretching to a leg, a leg stretching to a torso, a torso stretching to an arm.
The shadow lengthened and came forward. I slid into the darkness by the wall, waited, watched Fred back toward the door. He moved carefully, hunched over like a cat burglar, his body shielding something. I had a feeling I knew what it was.
I smelled coconut cream …
And the unmistakable twang of barbecue …
I waited until he’d almost reached me, then I stepped out of the shadows and said, “G’mornin’, Fred!”
Fred jumped three feet, squealed like a teenage girl at a slumber party, and threw his hands in the air. The pie flew skyward, did a double flip, and landed on one of the wig heads, giving it a pie in the face. “Mama mia!” Fred gasped, pounding a fist against his chest. “You surprise me!” Fred’s eyes cut to the evidence, dripping wet and fluffy down the Styrofoam face as the pie pan slid free and clattered to the floor. It landed at Fred’s feet, but he pretended not to notice.
“What’cha doin’ there, Fred?” I asked. There was barbecue sauce on his chin, and he still had a fork tucked between his fingers. He held it up, as if he were considering offing the witness to cover the crime, then he shrugged helplessly and sighed out a long string of Italian that had something to do with nectar of the gods. With a quick swipe of the fork, he snagged a falling dollop of ambrosia, popped it into his mouth, and swilled it around, his eyes falling closed in a carbohydrate stupor. “Ahhhh, succulento … squisito, incredibile … ”
“Enjoy there, big guy,” I said, and left him to contemplate multilingual adjectives for the pie as he reached for another bite. In a way, it was nice to know that even Frederico Calderone wasn’t immune to Imagene Doll’s confectionary temptations.
The morning air was crisp and pure as I headed out for my run. One thing about life in Daily, Texas—traffic wasn’t a problem. The streets were especially dead this morning. Passing by a church in the predawn haze, I saw a preacher unlocking the doors and had the vague thought that it was Sunday already. The preacher watched me jog by like he was surprised to see anyone afoot this early, and as I continued on, the sheriff’s deputy honked at me from his cruiser, but then he waved, so I think he was being friendly.
On my way past the local law enforcement headquarters, I stopped to admire the new cement culvert that had been erected in Marla’s honor. Then I moved on, because I didn’t want to think about Marla. By now, she and Randall were probably popping Valium like baby aspirin and calling out the National Guard. I was actually surprised they hadn’t used some kind of satellite technology to beam the cell phones and track Justin down. He must have done an especially good job of leaving behind clues to lead them in another direction. Over the years, Justin had figured out how to disappear, when he wanted to. He usually surfaced among the high-priced party spots of Brazil, Mexico, Bali—anyplace he could get away with hanging out for a while and blowing some cash on mindless entertainment while Marla and Randall went nuts trying to discern where he was. I had to give him credit for having come up with a unique hideout this time. A quiet country town on Sunday morning was the last place anyone would expect to find him.
When I got back to the hotel, I found Lauren in the alley in her sweats, stretching like she was about to go for a jog.
“Headed out?” I asked, and she jumped.
“Looks like you’ve already been.”
Was it just my male ego, or did I detect a note of disappointment in that observation? “Nah, I just got warmed up,” I said, even though I’d been three miles around town, past the feed mill and the convenience store, through the park, and back. Undoubtedly, it showed. “Want some company?” I caught myself giving her the hopeful yet pathetic smile of a middle school nerd asking a cute girl if he could sit next to her in a cafeteria. What was wrong with me? “I mean, I’d like to do another mile or two.” What? My knees protested. Come again? You have got to be kidding.
She glanced reluctantly toward the door, and I felt like an idiot. She probably liked her alone time in the morning. Maybe she was embarrassed about last night and didn’t want to see me at all. Maybe she was on the warpath about The Horseman project again. Maybe she’d headed out the door so early because she was hoping she wouldn’t run into me. …
I shut down the unproductive train of thought before it could get to the section of track where my manly self-confidence lay bound and gagged.
Maybe she was up early, like me, thinking about last night. …
“Sure,” she said, and I let out an audible sigh of relief which I then cleverly covered up with a cough. “I’m more of a power walker, though.”
My knees gave each other an invisible high-five. “Great,” I answered, and we started down the alley.
Lauren’s form of power walking turned out to be especially nontaxing. We strolled out of town to a trail by the river, listening as the water hummed a morning song beneath the crown of pecan trees and sycamores. High above, a summer sky burned red, then cooled to aqua. We stopped to tour the bluffs along the shore, where Tonkawa Indians had left a pictorial history of their passing, hundreds of years before.
“I guess it’s a natural human thing,” I observed as we knelt, shoulder to shoulder, by the drawings. “To want to leave behind something that lasts, I mean.”
“I guess so.” Her voice was soft, intimate. “I guess as a writer, you’d have that chance. I doubt anatomy teachers leave behind much of a legacy.”
“Without anatomy teachers, there wouldn’t be any doctors,”
I pointed out.
She frowned in a self-effacing way. “I teach pre-vet. My students are headed to vet school.”
“Any veterinarians,” I corrected, but she didn’t laugh. Instead, she looked away, seeming a little sad. I slipped a finger under her chin, turned her face so that she was looking at me again.
“Someone with your kind of talent shouldn’t be just teaching anatomy,” I whispered, and then I kissed her, bec
ause sitting this close, looking into her eyes, I couldn’t help myself.
She didn’t seem to mind at all.
Chapter 17
Lauren Eldridge
Just as Nate kissed me, the postman, Harlan Hanson, happened to be driving over the bridge. Somewhere beyond the swirl of wild abandon in my head, I heard the unmistakable rumble-cough-cough of the remodeled army jeep he lovingly called Bessie. Nate’s lips parted from mine, and I looked up just in time to see Bessie creeping along the shoulder near the guardrail.
The fluttery feeling fell to the pit of my stomach like a lead butterfly. Harlan and Bessie were the Daily equivalent of an AP ticker tape. Harlan dropped the news at all the Daily hot spots, and then it multiplied exponentially, like jackrabbits. The area below the bridge, lovingly known as Camp Nikyneck, was one of Harlan’s favorite targets of surveillance, because teenagers liked to hang out there doing … well, what teenagers do. When I was a kid, I thought Nikyneck was an Indian word, but once I hit middle school, I, like all Dailyians, learned the true meaning of the word.
I experienced an instant of panic as Nate and I climbed the hill to street level. We made small talk, but I couldn’t focus and finally the conversation ran out. I was left alone in a tempest of thought to which Nate was, fortunately, oblivious.
What would people say? What would they think? I imagined them sitting in the café, whispering, bringing up the past, talking about whether it had been long enough since Danny’s death. Betty Prine and the literary ladies would say two years wasn’t enough time, considering. They’d turn up their noses, make snide comments that would embarrass my father, and bait Aunt Netta into an argument.
In Daily, even under the most normal circumstances, a budding romance was the meat of speculation, and my circumstances were hardly normal.
Budding romance? Had I said that to myself? Had I thought it? This is not a budding anything. It’s not. Nate and I were working together on The Horseman. That was it. Period. End of story.
I repeated that mantra in my head as we walked back to town. There’s no place in my life for this. I’m not ready. It’s too soon. However painful, it was the truth. So much of my soul was still a watery wash of grief and guilt. It was all I could do to maintain a steady course. I couldn’t allow anyone to jump into the pool—not Marsh and his daughter, Bella, and certainly not some slightly loony flip-flop– wearing California guy, who had a convoluted past and questionable motives, even if he was drop-dead gorgeous and a great kisser.
Oddly enough, the fact that I liked Nate was exactly what made me want to push him away. I was already floundering in an ocean of issues, and it wasn’t a pleasant place to spend time. I wouldn’t wish myself on anybody, at least not the way I was now. Maybe someday.
When? a small, lonely voice inside me asked as we crossed Main Street and angled toward the alley in back of the hotel. How much longer? How long is long enough to erase those final angry words, to atone for Harvard’s death?
“Everything all right?” Nate’s question was filled with deeper implications, of which he was completely unaware.
“It’s fine,” I said. “Nate, I didn’t mean to … ” lead you on sounded like a line from a pulp novel. “There’s not … I’m not … ” I realized we’d stopped walking. Nate was standing by the back door to the Daily Chamber of Commerce, studying me, seeming confused.
“It was just a kiss,” he pointed out with a grin that made me feel as if I were melting. “My fault completely. The aura of Camp Nikyneck overwhelmed me.”
“You know about Camp Nikyneck?” I stammered.
“You hang around a place a little while, you learn its history,” he said in a way that made me wonder how much Daily history he knew. “You find out a few secrets. Your dad told a story about the Indian paintings at the party yesterday.”
“Ahhh.” Back in the day, my father was famous for getting run out of Camp Nikyneck by the sheriff, and occasionally by the Baptist preacher, who was known to cruise the river bridge at night, tagging teenagers with his flashlight like a hunter spotlighting deer.
Nate laughed softly, and we started walking again. “Sounds like your dad had quite a reputation.”
I nodded. “My father was one of Daily’s wilder products. Legend has it that if he hadn’t met my mom, he would have been lost to the evils of wild horses and wild women. He never gave up the wild horses, but he only had eyes for my mom. Even after she died, I can’t remember him ever showing interest in anybody else.”
“Ever wonder if that kind of thing just doesn’t happen anymore?” Nate dribbled a smashed Coke can between his feet like a soccer ball, then kicked it down the alley.
“Sometimes.” I felt a deep, painful tug inside. When I married Danny, I wanted the real thing so badly that I convinced myself to overlook the obvious and see things that weren’t there.
“The concept keeps writers working, anyway,” Nate mused, then he didn’t say anything more. We came to the hotel, but neither of us reached for the door.
Tell him. Be grown up about this. I took a deep breath, felt him watching me. “Nate. I’m not … ready.” He didn’t try to interpret the vague revelation, just waited for me to define it. “For anything.
I just … ” Why was this so hard? Why did I feel like I was killing a relationship, giving up something that mattered? It was a couple of kisses. He’d probably think I was crazy for even bringing it up.
“When I left Daily, I was … there was a reason. There are reasons I haven’t been back.”
Nate nodded, seeming unsurprised. “It doesn’t matter.” His gaze caught mine, gripped it tight. I felt a pull somewhere deep in my soul.
“But it does.” How could I explain this? How did I summarize something I hadn’t ever let myself put into words? “When I moved back here after college, I wasn’t … alone. I was married.
It wasn’t … we were … we were just young, I guess. Impulsive. Danny and I had this plan to take a few years off school to travel and try to make the National Finals Rodeo. Two years ago, we were coming home from a show. The weather was bad. It was dark. There was water over the crossing on Caney Creek Road when we got there. We should have turned back, but we didn’t. Danny thought we could make it through. It was stupid. It was a single careless moment. It cost his life, and the life of Pastor Harve’s son, Harvard Jr.”
A sad, rueful sound burned my throat, then escaped. “Harvard was there to put road cones up to block the low-water crossing before he went off duty … but he found us there. He should have waited for the fire trucks to come, but I think he knew … he knew I couldn’t hold on much longer.”
Nate sighed, and I felt his sympathy, palpable like a bitter scent in the air, making it hard to breathe. I didn’t want sympathy. I didn’t want to tell the story again. I didn’t want to be the grieving widow who remembered those last angry moments, that final ugly meaningless fight I could never tell anyone about. I just wanted it all to be over.
Part of me knew it would never be over. This story, the past, would always travel with me. It would linger around every relationship, like a shadow only I could see at first. I’d always wonder how long to wait before revealing it, how much to tell, in what light to cast those who couldn’t speak for themselves. I didn’t want to be the one left to live with what had happened, left to tell the story. I wanted to have been swept down the creek, my last memory one of arguing over a barbecue sandwich and a crumbling life.
“I just … I’m not ready to move on,” I choked out.
I didn’t wait for an answer, just opened the hotel door and went inside. I stole quietly up to my room so Aunt Netta wouldn’t hear me, then sat down on the bed and felt heavy, and sad, and lonely, and guilty. I was useless here. I was useless to everyone. I couldn’t think about the future. I couldn’t change the past. I was trapped, turning around and around in the same box, wondering why the scenery never looked any different.
On the deepest level, I knew I didn’t deserve any better. I had no
right to sculpt future plans or make peace with the past. Why should I have that right, when Harvard and Danny couldn’t do the same?
Outside, the early bells rang in the steeple of Daily Presbyterian, and shortly after, the Daily Baptist bells chimed in, pointing out that on top of everything else, today was Sunday. I hadn’t even considered going to church until now, or wondered whether, with all the movie excitement going on, Aunt Netta would have plans to round everyone up for church. There was no way I was ready to march off to Sunday service and sit there with all the hometown folks studying me, so I opted to do the grown-up thing and sneak out before the question could arise. After dressing in a hurry, I left behind a hasty note scratched on the back of a deposit slip from my checkbook, tiptoed out the back door, and headed to the ranch to check on Lucky Strike and the goat.
My father and the rest of the crew showed up at the ranch late in the morning, ready for another day of Horseman preparation. Nate wasn’t among them. Aunt Netta said he’d decided to spend some time reading a copy of the novel on which the screenplay was based, and working on the script. I felt equal parts of disappointment and relief when he didn’t show up.
He hovered in my thoughts as the day wore on. When I looked at the live oak tree, when the nanny goat rubbed her head against my leg to have her ears scratched, when Justin hung his hat on the fence right where it had been yesterday, I thought of Nate. I envisioned him dropping the hat on his head and smiling. I wanted him to be there to see that with the reassurance of the goat, the relationship between horse and horseman was beginning to progress. I wanted Nate to give me the thumbs-up, and wink, and point out that he’d been the one to capture the goat in the first place. I wanted him to laugh as he joked, And you told me this one was too big. …