Way Back

by Abbie Williams

  Of course, I figured, stumbling as I descended the steps at a clip. It would only make sense. On foot, there was no chance she would reach the men riding this way before one of us caught up with her. And Patricia was nothing if not compassionate, and determined. She loved us. She would not allow us to be endangered again because of her.

  Patricia…

  What do we do, oh God, what do we do now?

  Axton was bleeding again, redness staining his tattered shirt as he rummaged for bullets in the drawer; Branch’s pistol lay on the table. With single-minded stubbornness, he announced, “I’m going after her.”

  I grabbed for his elbow, intending to stop him, but before I could speak a cry rose from my throat and it was Miles’s name on my lips right then. Birdie called for me from the bedroom, a high, panicked note. Baby Isaac’s crying seemed to fill the entire house. A black cape of dread swept down, smothering me in its confines. I could not move fast enough across the floorboards to the outer door. Just as I reached it a single gunshot cracked the night. I jerked as though electrocuted. The knob slipped in my sweating grasp but I wrenched open the door.

  And then I saw.

  Heedless of all else I ran, falling to both knees and scrabbling to Miles, protecting his head with my torso, hearing only an endless wail that tore my throat from the inside out. The ground flew in chunks as additional rounds struck the dirt. Someone was running at us. Someone else yanked me backward by the armpits. As though watching from a distance, my senses operating remotely, I observed my body as Axton half-dragged it through the open doorway. I heard men’s voices roaring in outrage. Cole returned fire as Grant ran for the house with Miles in his arms.

  “Oh God oh God oh God…” My voice spilled and jerked as I dogged Grant’s steps. Miles’s head hung back, exposing his throat. There was a gaping wound near his sternum, spouting dark blood against the ivory of his shirt.

  “Get them out of here,” Grant said roughly, referring to the little boys, and Birdie, still clutching Isaac, obeyed without question. Grant deposited his brother upon the bed with absolute tenderness, cupping a hand around Miles’s forehead. It must have been near dawn; pale gray light stained the room.

  “Miles,” Grant whispered. Anguish cut a trench across his bearded face.

  The yard outside was ablaze with shouting voices, with gunshots and buzzing chaos, and Miles rolled to one elbow, reaching for his brother’s hand. Gripping it, Miles whispered, “Go.”

  I could see what it cost Grant to obey this command but he did, kissing Miles on the forehead –”I love you, my brother” – before leaving the room at a run.

  I yanked free from my underskirt and folded the material over the blood flowing from Miles’s body, frantic with the desire to save him.

  “Would you have married me?” he whispered, slick with sweat, white as death. With both hands I pressed the underskirt against the wound killing him before my eyes. His blood was liquid heat against my palms. The mayhem outside grew distant, as though the volume had been lowered – I heard only Miles.

  “Yes,” I said, a half-moaning gasp, and the air around us shimmered with urgency, begging me to understand. I fought the sensation that I was about to be cleaved down the center, my heart forever after in two separate pieces.

  “Come closer,” he whispered and I did at once, climbing beside him on the bed. He was dying. I was as certain of this as I’d ever been of anything and my heart ached, the blade slicing deep. “Stay with me.”

  “I will,” I gasped, choking back harsh sobs. “I’m here, sweetheart, I’m here. I won’t leave your side.”

  “I love you so.” His voice was low and rough. “I loved you the moment I first saw you, Ruthann, riding your horse with no saddle.”

  There was nothing I could do to stop the blood pouring from between his ribs. I heard myself beg, “Don’t leave me, Marshall. Oh God oh God, don’t leave me, please, I’ll do anything…”

  I felt tricked by a cruel, indifferent fate. Disoriented memories flapped like moths at the edges of my mind. A shrill screeching filled my skull more with each passing second, the chaotic sound of clocks out of sync, and I was at once struck by the impact of a memory – that of a car flying toward mounds of banked snow on the side of a wintertime road. My body shuddered, anticipating the crushing blow of that exact moment.

  Oh Jesus, oh my God –

  And just like that, it all rushed back.

  My eyes slammed shut and in my mind I jolted forward with tremendous force, my car, my old Buick, careening out of control, the tires screaming over the packed snow on I-94 in February of 2014, the afternoon I’d been driving to Landon from Jalesville through a prairie blizzard, over one hundred and thirty years from now –

  My desperate eyes flew open, seeking the man before me.

  Marshall. Oh, dear God, Marshall –

  I finally understood.

  Marshall’s soul was inside this man.

  Marshall’s soul was in Miles.

  I crawled on top of him, clutching his face, bracketing his hips with my thighs. I put no weight upon his frame; I only knew I must touch him this way. He made a low sound of joy and gripped my waist, dark eyes burning with the last of his life.

  “I love you, I don’t want to hurt you…” I kissed his face, his temples and cheeks, his eyes and lips. His blood was everywhere and I wanted to die with him in this moment. At least our souls could be together then.

  “You aren’t hurting me. Oh God, Ruthann, let me touch you.”

  I brought his weakened hands to my face. He couldn’t begin to know how much I loved him. Tears gushed as I imagined that Marshall, my Marshall Augustus Rawley, could somehow hear me speaking the words. “I love you with all my heart and I promise we will find each other again.”

  His thumbs brushed the length of my cheekbones. “Your beautiful angel face.”

  “I swear to you I will find you, in time we will find each other again. Remember that, oh God, remember that. Promise me.”

  “I promise.” He was pale as a skeleton. I was panicking, wheezing and sobbing.

  “Miles…”

  “Don’t cry, angel…” His eyes slid slowly to one side.

  I clung as death robbed him of all warmth, the bullets that had killed him staked out in his body. I held him and sobbed brokenly.

  Miles was dead and Patricia was gone. The adjacent hillside and acreage, anywhere a person armed with a long-barreled distance rifle may have hidden, was crawling with Grant’s men, but there was no trace of the man whose shots had killed Miles. One of the ranch hands, a man named Hanson, was found with his throat slit, stuffed in the scrub brush on the rise across from the house, exactly where the shooter would have been positioned before scurrying away. Outside in the yard under the hot morning sun, I stumbled to the corner of the house and dry-heaved. I clung to the ground on all fours, vision pinwheeling. I could hear Cole’s panic-stricken rage through the wooden walls; he and Axton yelled ferociously at each other.

  Thoughts and memories crashed inside my head, fighting for attention. I knew exactly who I was, and where I’d come from, for the first time in many agonizing months.

  Marshall…Tish…Case…

  How long have I been gone?

  What do they think happened? Oh Jesus, they must think I’m dead.

  Miles is dead. Oh dear God, Miles is dead.

  Patricia is Tish, my sister. Oh God, how did I not see?

  What do I tell them? How do I get back?

  Grant was suddenly there, hovering between my hunched body and the glare of the sun; without a word, he lifted me into his arms. Grant, the man I knew in 2014 as Garth Rawley, carried me back to the house. Tears rolled down his face and dripped from his bearded jaws.

  I begged, “Let me see him.”

  Grant honored this wish, placing me atop the bed where Miles lay in stillness, hands limp; his eyes with a slit of white showing where the upper and lower lids would not quite meet. I curled around his body.


  Grant sat on the other side of his brother and bent his forehead to Miles’s shoulder, weeping unashamedly. “I should have gone first. I’m eldest. I should have gone first.”

  Miles’s soul had already fled to the place souls go after death, wherever that may be; I thought of a conversation with Marshall, back in Jalesville in 2013, warm and safe in the guest bedroom at his house, in which we’d just made repeated love.

  What if I died early? And you lived to the end of your natural life?

  I could not clamp hold of my escalating panic.

  What if this changes everything? What if I never get back to Marshall?

  Gasping breaths heaved at my chest and I rested my forehead against Miles’s neck.

  “I am eldest,” Grant whispered again; his sobs were quiet and devastating.

  “I loved him,” I whispered, and Grant reached to take my hand.

  “I never saw him love anyone the way he loved you, Ruthie.”

  You have to go, I understood. You have to go now.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  HOWARDSVILLE APPEARED DECEPTIVELY QUIET FROM A half-mile out, lit by the violet threads of an early sunset. I eased on Blade’s reins, bringing him to a halt, cautious now, after hours of hard riding to get here. Astride Charger, just to my left, Cole lifted the spyglass and peered in the direction of the depot. To my right, Axton sat the saddle in tense silence; he was bleeding again but I knew better than to mention it. His agonized fury had burned itself into something slightly more manageable since last night. Between the two men existed a tightly-wound tension held only precariously in check; our collective desire to find Patricia overpowered all else, forcing them to work together rather than attempt to kill one another for a second time.

  Cole’s nose was swollen, appearing slightly off-kilter, and his lower lip was split, discolored by an engorged magenta bruise; Axton had thrown punches without mercy, knocking Cole straight to the floorboards, unfairly blaming him for Patricia’s disappearance. It had taken all Grant’s considerable strength to restrain Ax and keep Cole from attacking. Birdie had been the one to restore order, weeping as she begged them to stop – Miles had not been dead fifteen minutes at that point. The agony in the household was thicker than blood. But no amount of threat or persuasion could stop both men from going after Patricia.

  I hadn’t explained to anyone what I’d remembered, and had no plans to explain in the near future; for one thing, I knew they would be hard-pressed to believe a word. I’d barely had a chance to grapple with the sudden knowledge of past and present, of why I was here rather than home. Just now there were more pressing concerns.

  But Marshall had not left my thoughts, not for a second.

  Marshall, sweetheart, I have to believe you can hear me. I know you didn’t mean what you said that night. I know you didn’t want me to go, you were just worried. Oh God, I love you. My heart aches with loving you. I will get back to you or die trying.

  I missed him so much that iron nails seemed lodged in my lungs with each new breath. Had time passed similarly in 2014? If so, I’d been gone for many months. Marshall, Tish, our families; all of them would be terrorized with worry, only amplified by the lack of evidence for my disappearance. I clamped down on a fresh wave of panic, remembering every detail of the fight between Marshall and me before I’d left Jalesville that February night. He’d been so jealous and afraid, and masking it with anger.

  I’d stormed from our apartment, self-righteously furious, intending to drive straight through to Minnesota; partly because the trip was necessary but mostly, I could admit now, to punish Marshall for what I considered his lack of trust. I closed my eyes, recalling the sequence of events after I left – standing in the parking lot of our little apartment in downtown Jalesville, just a few blocks from The Spoke, scraping snow from the Buick’s windows with angry slashes of my forearm, jamming the keys in the ignition and driving away with hot tears blurring my vision.

  Maybe fifty or sixty miles I’d driven that night, along snowy I-94. It was hard to know for sure. I recalled passing the road sign for Miles City but hadn’t yet crossed the state border into North Dakota. The winter weather grew more severe with each revolution of the tires. Even slapping at full speed, my windshield wipers could not keep up with the abundance of flying snowflakes. I appeared to be driving in a vortex of whirling white. I knew if I possessed any hope of returning home, I needed to remember the moments just before the accident, when I’d lost control of the big, heavy car on the unplowed interstate somewhere east of Jalesville. I scoured my memory, lifting thoughts as I would rocks on a lakeshore, examining each for a clue as to what had happened in that instant to send me to 1881.

  Una Spicer’s letters were back in Jalesville, at Tish and Case’s house. It was always because I touched the letters that I felt like I was disappearing…

  And the night Marshall and I rode to the site of the old homestead…

  I thought, for the countless time, of Aunt Jilly saying there was something from the past we had to understand.

  I understood plenty now.

  Aunt Jilly, hear me. If anyone can hear me, it’s you. Tell the womenfolk I’m all right. I’m here for a reason…

  And that reason was Celia Baker. I meant to find Patricia, but I also intended to find Celia and force her to seek refuge with Birdie and Grant. I was adamant that Miles’s child be raised with his relatives; I’d told Birdie everything about Celia’s pregnancy and she said in no uncertain terms, “Bring her to us. I will raise the child as one of ours if she does not wish to keep him.”

  The notion had occurred to me within minutes of Miles’s death – Marshall’s family believed Grant Rawley was their direct ancestor, but maybe he was not. Maybe the family I knew and loved in 2014 descended from Miles Rawley’s illegitimate child. It was the closest I could come to an explanation for my presence here in the nineteenth century; if I hadn’t discovered the truth of his paternity, Miles’s son would have been sent away, the Rawleys would never have known, and the chain of descendants which eventually led to Marshall would not have existed. And maybe I would never know for sure, but I did not plan to take any chances.

  Snapping my attention back to the present, Cole murmured, “The black train cars are there on the side track. Four, this time. No red cars.”

  “Do you see anyone near them?”

  We were west of town, momentarily stalled; despite the urgent flight from Grant’s homestead we’d taken care to plan our next moves. I knew Cole and Axton both longed to ride down there and violently remove anyone in their paths to get to Patricia, but I’d reminded them with all the persuasive force I could muster they would likely be killed in the attempt, thereby accomplishing nothing. Besides, it was possible Patricia wasn’t being kept within those train cars; I refused to voice my fear that we would come across her body on the route to Howardsville but there had been no sign of her, for better or worse.

  “No one near the cars just now.” Cole continued to peer through the spyglass, his words distorted by his injured lip.

  I flattened one hand against my chest, praying this might ease the gouging pain centered in my heart; I hadn’t yet begun to deal with the loss of Miles. Of course he and I had been drawn to each other – his soul was a part of Marshall’s, a connection deeper than perhaps all else. They also shared a bloodline, which made more sense the longer I considered the evidence; wouldn’t a soul, seeking the comfort of familiarity, the presence of souls it had known in other lives, return to a particular family? Wouldn’t the same souls, and therefore families, be drawn together, craving additional lifetimes in one another’s company?

  “She’s only hours ahead,” Axton had said as we’d ridden from Grant’s at midmorning. I left Flickertail behind in favor of Blade, a stronger animal all around and one better prepared for hard riding. I’d braided my hair and tucked it under my hat, dressed in Axton’s trousers and Miles’s heavy jacket, which still retained his scent. We pressed hard for Howardsville, knowing the w
indow of time was swiftly closing; Patricia may very well have been a prisoner within an eastbound train car as we spoke.

  Cole vowed, “I aim to kill the bastard who got Miles, I swear on my life. But I can’t think on that now. Not until Patricia is safe.”

  “She left to save us, you know this.” I glared at the horizon with sore, gritty eyes, hating myself all over again for not realizing her intentions last night. If Axton should have aimed punches at anyone, it was me; I’d watched Patricia leave the house. I’d been the one in a position to recognize what she was about to do, and to stop her.

  Cole cleared his throat with a harsh, grating noise. “I know it. If we don’t find her you might as well shoot me dead, because I don’t aim to go on.”

  “If anything happened to her, I’ll shoot you dead,” Axton muttered grimly.

  “Stop it!” I’d screamed, startling them both; I clung to self-control by only the thinnest wisp of thread. “Not another fucking word! We’ll find her. We have to.”

  They had immediately obliged; talking soon became impossible as our horses galloped east. Later, when we slowed the pace to give the horses a respite, Cole dared to speak again, no room for debate in his tone. “You should know Patricia and I are to be married. She accepted my proposal.”

  Axton’s jaws and shoulders squared like one preparing to enter battle. Without glancing toward Cole, he said, “I should like to hear it from her.”

  “You don’t understand,” Cole had said, and I’d looked his way at once, hearing something beneath his words, recognizing information of which I had not been made aware. I raced through last night’s events – Patricia and I had spoken on our walk yesterday afternoon, but the remainder of the evening we’d found no time alone. Miles had helped me to bed last night, but Patricia hadn’t returned to our room…