Cowboy Sing Me Home

by Harris, Kim Hunt

  “Did she look like you?” he asked again. “Did she have your hair? Your eyes?”

  After a long moment, she shook her head. “She had blue eyes. Most babies do, I think. And she didn’t have any hair at all, just barely a little bit of fuzz. But I think it would have been blonde, like mine.”

  He held her tightly and made long strokes down the top of her head, down her back, then brought his hand up to do it over again. “What was it like, to be pregnant?”

  “What was it like?” She rubbed tears from her eyes but stayed against him, their bodies swaying slightly, both of them too tired to stand but unwilling to change positions. “It was wonderful. Heavy and slow and interminable and over too soon and frightening and wonderful.”

  He led her back to the bedroom, and by some miracle she let him. She didn’t protest when he pulled off her boots and cradled her on the bed.

  “What was the birth like? Did it go okay?”

  “Supposedly. I thought it was pain beyond all comprehension, but the doctor seemed to think everything was right on target. And she was fine when she… when she was born. So I guess it went okay.”

  “Tell me what it was like, when you saw her for the first time.”

  She was quiet for a long time, and began to cry again, but silently this time, big tears sliding down her cheeks. “I don’t think I can. I don’t know even know how to describe it. The nurse handed her to me, and she looked right at me like she knew exactly who I was, her eyes were so clear and bright. Here was this brand new baby, only in the world for seconds, and yet she looked at me like she was so wise. Like she knew so much more than I did. I felt… like I was looking into another world.” She frowned and shook her head. “No, not another world, really. This world, but it was like I was looking through an open window to the deeper level of it. The source of everything. Like we’re all up here on the surface, doing our things and dealing with our little problems, and underneath there’s the – the heart of everything, busy forces at work, and we’re completely oblivious to it all, but it’s there. That’s what it was like, seeing her for the first time. Like I was looking into that world, and I really felt like she’d been sent to teach me. She was the new life, but I honestly felt like she knew what was going on, and if I just kept my mouth shut and paid attention, she’d teach me, too.”

  He didn’t realize he was crying, too, until he sniffed and felt hot tears in his throat. He cupped the back of her head.

  She cleared her throat, and whispered, “And, I thought, ‘she’s going to break my heart one day’. And she did. She left, and it broke my heart.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Dusty dreamed of Anne-Marie. The girl in her dreams was about four or five, and that was all wrong because Anne-Marie was only three months old when she died, and even if she’d lived she would now be close to ten. But in the way of dreams, Dusty was sure it was Anne-Marie.

  She watched with a lump in her throat and hope in her heart as the little girl with the straight blonde hair and laughing green eyes ran and played with the other kids in a yard Dusty didn’t recognize. Dusty knew there were other kids there; she could hear their voices. But she focused on the features of Anne-Marie. She looked like such a happy girl, with a giggle that tugged at Dusty, made her want to run and play, too.

  Dusty turned to the woman beside her, the woman who sat in the chair and rocked the baby and watched the other children play. “That’s Anne-Marie,” she said numbly.

  The woman just smiled and rocked the tiny baby she held to her shoulder.

  “I thought she was…” She couldn’t bring herself to say the word, didn’t want to say it in case it wasn’t true, but saying it would make it come true. “I thought…”

  The little girl ran up to her, giggling. Dusty stood frozen, afraid and in awe of this Anne-Marie who wasn’t gone, who hadn’t gone to sleep and never woken up. “Anne-Marie? I thought you were gone,” she finally said.

  The little girl just grinned and threw her arms around Dusty’s waist and laughed, a mouth full of perfectly straight, tiny white teeth flashing up at her.

  She couldn’t move, couldn’t understand, wanted desperately to understand how this Anne-Marie could be. How could she be here, solid and laughing and warm, when Dusty could see in her mind the picture of her little baby, her delicate skin pale, her lips blue, her body perfectly still? How could this be?

  As soon as she realized it was a dream, she awoke.

  She told Luke sometimes she forgot, but that wasn’t exactly true. The knowledge and memory – and the pain – were always there, in the back of her mind, sometimes in the front of it, but always there. She never thought of herself as a mother, and probably wouldn’t, but she never for a moment forgot that she’d once had a child. And had lost it.

  But seeing Anne-Marie again, touching her, feeling her thin little arms around her waist, the point of the girl’s chin against her stomach as she looked up at her and grinned, then having her again taken away, brought the pain back fresh and sharp and heavy in the pit of Dusty’s stomach. It was almost like losing her all over again. She knew she was awake now, although she didn’t open her eyes. She closed them tighter and rolled over, burrowing her head into the pillow, wanting to dive headfirst back into the dream, back to where Anne-Marie was.

  She rolled into a warm body and jerked fully awake, panicked.

  “It’s okay,” Luke mumbled in his sleep. His arm, heavy and solid, wrapped around her waist and held her down.

  Dusty lay stiffly against him, the strangeness of waking in an unfamiliar place combining with the emotional upheaval of the dream to leave her disoriented. She gripped Luke’s arm until his breathing – and her heart rate – returned to normal.

  The worst aspect of these dreams – which she’d had countless times in countless cities – was not the pain they brought with them. The worst part was that, alone in the dead of night, she was forced to acknowledge how alone she was. During the day she could keep her mind occupied. But at night, with nothing for company or distraction, she had to admit to herself that she was alone and always would be.

  She’d never experienced waking up next to someone, or accepting the comfort a warm body could give. She allowed herself to relax, to yield her body to Luke’s. His presence could soothe her, for what came next, after the dream.

  After the dreams came the memories. She’d learned over the years that it wasn’t necessarily easier, but it was quicker, to just go ahead and let them. Once she’d had the dream, the baby and the waking nightmare surrounding that time would be with her for at least the rest of the day, peeking over her shoulder, breathing down her neck, waiting for a moment when her focus slipped, waiting to descend upon her.

  For a long time, she’d been unable to think of the baby in any other way than in the last way she saw her, still, her skin cold like porcelain, long eyelashes resting on chubby cheeks. But over the years other images had blended their way back in, and these were the ones Dusty remembered now. The bizarre sight of her own stomach, bulging and moving with the life inside it. The surreal and completely right feel of the baby being taken from her body, the first moment when her eyes met the baby’s, and the instant of recognition and connection she’d felt with something bigger than herself, bigger than all of them. Sitting for hours at a time while laundry piled up and dishes remained dirty, staring down at the curve of her cheek, the soft bow of her lips as Anne-Marie slept against her chest.

  The intensity of the joy, and the fear, that came with loving for the first time in her young life.

  She didn’t want to remember the rest, but that didn’t matter; she would remember. So she took a deep breath, and let those memories come, too. Walking into Anne-Marie’s room that morning. Looking over the side of the crib, and knowing instantly something – everything – was wrong. She froze in that moment, and even now she knew that she had never completely thawed out. Something in the center of her was still cold and hard. She’d looked down at the innocent, still form
and something inside her recognized the truth, though she wasn’t ready to deal with it. Dusty had told herself she was just watching, waiting for Anne-Marie’s stomach to rise and fall with breath, waiting for her to stir. She waited and watched for so long, not blinking, not moving, until the world began to grow gray at the edges. “That’s it,” she’d thought. “I’ll faint. I’ll just faint, and never wake up, and it’ll be okay.”

  Except she didn’t faint, because her husband – himself just barely out of his teens, too – had come in the room then, taken one look at Dusty and known something was wrong. He’d rushed to the crib, snatched Anne-Marie up, crying and screaming until Dusty couldn’t pretend any longer that everything was okay. Until his screams had started her own, and she’d been unable to stop.

  She remembered her own voice, screaming, alive and terrible, as if the horror were a separate beast that lived in her throat and needed to get out. She remembered collapsing to the floor while her husband rushed around the house, calling an ambulance that wouldn’t help anything, begging a God who’d already made his decision.

  The memories, as always, left her exhausted. Her body felt heavy enough that she should fall through the bed, fall through the floor, and on down into dark oblivion. But instead she clung to Luke, letting the steady rise and fall of his breath anchor her.

  She lay awake, shaken by the depth of her desire to wake him, to share this part with him, too.

  I can share it with you, and you won’t have to carry it alone anymore.

  Could she share this with him? Would the pain and loss be halved, if he could join in it with her? The desire to do just that was so strong that she had to slip from under his arm and get away. She moved to a chair across from the bed and clasped her hands around her knees to keep them from reaching for him.

  She sat in the dark and watched Luke sleep, and realized that she was standing on the precipice of a decision – a decision she’d flirted with for the past few days.

  Someone very stupid said that time heals all wounds. That was a lie. But Dusty had to admit that, as much as it hurt to think of Anne-Marie now, it didn’t compare to those first months, first years following her death. Her wounds were not healed, but she had grown enough scar tissue to function again.

  Too many scenes flashed through her mind as she watched Luke sleep. Singing with him, watching and admiring as he worked the crowd at Tumbleweeds and at the Jubilee. The easy way he had of taking her hand or hugging her, of slipping right past all her barriers. The tender way he’d held her, the tears that had slid down his cheeks as he hurt for her, with her.

  Time didn’t heal all her wounds, but it did make them livable again. The question was, was she ready to take the chance on being wounded again? Because along with the good memories of the past week was the voice of Stevie, saying, “Luke has been shot.”

  The minutes ticked by as Luke slept and Dusty thought. Finally she rose and quietly tugged on her jeans. She started to leave without a word, but at the last second she leaned over his sleeping form, smoothing a lock of hair off his forehead.

  “I’m sorry,” she whispered. “But I’ve had enough for this lifetime. I can’t do it again.”

  Carrying her boots, Dusty tiptoed out of the house.

  Luke woke in the dark with the knowledge that something momentous had happened, though his sleepy brain didn’t latch onto exactly what that something was.

  Everything was different now. Everything.

  He rolled over to fold her back into his arms, to feel again her slim body wrapped in his. He reached, and kept reaching until he’d reached the edge of the bed.

  She was gone.

  He told himself she had just gone to the bathroom, or into the kitchen for a drink of water. But he knew the instant his hand felt empty bed that she was gone. He’d pushed too far. He’d pushed her away.

  Well, that was just too bad, he decided as she swung his legs off the bed, instantly awake. His right leg was stiff, but it loosened up as he stalked around the room, jerking on his jeans, boots and shirt. He grabbed his keys off the table by the door, and slammed it behind him.

  If she thought she was going to sneak out in the middle of the night, she was in for a surprise. He wasn’t her ex-husband. He wasn’t just going to let her walk away without a word. His jaw clenched as he drove through the dark toward Trailertopia. When he got there, he was going to make good and damn sure she knew…

  What? What was he going to say when he got there? That she had to stay and… and what?

  The closer he got to Trailertopia, the slower he drove. His anger gave way to uncertainty. What was he doing, racing out here half-cocked? Even if she had stayed the night, she was leaving tomorrow anyway.

  The thought left a heaviness in his chest. She was going to leave tomorrow, unless…

  He admitted to himself that he’d thought their conversation was the ‘unless’. He’d thought that his breaking through her barriers was just what she needed to decide on her own that she wanted to stick around.

  And what? The question came again. Was he really ready to take the leap and ask her to stay here, with him?

  It wouldn’t work. He knew it wouldn’t work. He could go out there and make a complete ass of himself but she wouldn’t stay. And even if she did stay, eventually things would fall apart between them. Things always fell apart.

  By the time he reached Trailertopia, he was driving at a crawl. His headlights led the way up the hill, bouncing off the silent trailers in the park.

  Should he just turn around and go back home? That didn’t seem right, either.

  He would just check and make sure she made it home okay, he told himself as his tires crunched over the gravel road to her space.

  Her pickup was there, beside her trailer. She had run back to the safety of her own place.

  He pulled up beside and put his pickup in park, but didn’t kill the engine. He felt like a stalker. Or an idiot.

  It wouldn’t work, he thought again when hope rose in his chest at the thought of storming inside and sweeping her off her feet. Unexpectedly he thought of the picture of his parents, in love and in each other’s arms. Then he thought of the way they looked at each other now.

  The vision of Dusty ever looking at him with contempt and derision in her eyes stopped him cold.

  He’d heard all his life that there was a thin line between love and hate, but he’d never realized what that meant until this moment. He’d never hated anyone, but then he’d never really loved anyone before, either. The two emotions, he discovered, live side by side at equal depth. The only person who inspired that depth of emotion in him was now locked inside her trailer, hiding from him.

  It would happen eventually. If, by some miracle, he convinced her to give up everything she held dear in life, everything that she’d ever known, to trust him and take a chance on what they felt for each other, eventually the intensity he felt for her would turn. And the beauty between them would be ruined, forever.

  He sat in his dark pickup, staring at her trailer and wondering which was the bigger shame: to let her walk away without a single protest, or convince her to stay and eventually ruin what was the most significant relationship he could ever hope to have.

  He dropped his head and scrubbed his scalp, torn. From the corner of his eye saw a short flash of light at the foot of the hill.

  He narrowed his eyes and focused in that direction. The sky was still too cloudy for any moonlight to peek through, but the only thing in that direction was the Hammond place. And they were supposed to be in New Mexico.

  As he focused his eyes in that direction, he began to make out the faintest outline of the house. It remained dark, and he began to think the flash of light had been his imagination. But as he watched the light flashed again, a thin beam that shot out and back before he could make out the source.

  It could be Nate and Julie, back from Ruidoso earlier than expected. But he didn’t think so.

  He reached for the gun at his hip and
cursed when he realized that, in his haste to go after Dusty, he’d left his gun at home. If his hunch was correct and it was Broeker, Wayne and Kenny down at the Hammond place, searching for the drive that Billy Dale had found, he couldn’t go after them without a weapon for protection. But he didn’t have time to go home and get his gun, either.

  He struggled with the decision, but in the end he did the only thing he could think to do. He got his cell phone out of the glove compartment, then popped the cover off the dome light and unscrewed the bulb. He opened the door, aware that any sound would carry farther with the cloud cover. He slid to the ground and walked softly up to Dusty’s door.

  He hoped he could get her attention without waking the entire lot, or alerting the intruders. He tapped on the door, then tapped again a moment later, his ear to the door and his eye on the Hammond place.

  He heard movement inside, and said as loudly as he dared through the door, “It’s me, Dusty. Don’t turn on the light.”

  He waited in silence a few seconds, not sure if she’d heard. He heard creaks as the trailer shifted slightly with her movement. “It’s me,” he said again. “Don’t turn on the light. Just open the door.”

  Something shifted above his head, and he looked up to see the curtain over the door move.

  The chain rattled as it slid aside, and he stepped back as she pulled open the door and held the screen door out for him.

  Evidently she’d picked up on the caution in his voice, because as soon as she opened the door she said, “What’s going on?”

  “I think Wayne and his friends are down at the Hammond’s house. I need your – “ He stopped when he saw the pistol she held at her side. “I need that.”

  Without hesitation she handed the gun to him. “You’re not going down there alone.”

  He checked to make sure the gun was loaded, then handed his phone to her. “Call Toby and tell him what’s going on. He’ll be out here within five minutes. His number is in the memory. And tell him to leave his lights off. I don’t want to ruin the surprise for them.”