CHAPTER 12 #3
“Keep her up another hour, at least, then she can lie down if she wants — don't let her roll, but down is fine once the pain's been gone an hour.” She was scribbling on the stall card, the pen she chewed clamped between her teeth between phrases, her voice running the smooth grooved track of instruction while everything underneath it shook.
“Small handfuls of hay, nothing big, watch she's passing manure.
If the heart rate climbs back over fifty, if she goes off again, if she so much as looks at her side wrong, you call me, day or night, I don't care what time.
I'll come back at first light to check her either way.
Banamine again in twelve hours if she needs it, I'm leaving it in the box, the dose is on the card.”
“Laney.”
“There's a chance this comes back tonight when the meds wear off. Most likely it won't. But she's high-risk and she's heavy and I am not taking chances with this animal.” She capped the pen. She still hadn't turned around. “If anything changes, you call me.”
“Laney. Look at me.”
She turned around.
He hadn't moved from where she'd left him, hands open at his sides, careful, and she forced herself to look at him the way she'd look at any patient, reading the body for what the mouth wouldn't say — and what she read undid the last of her.
He'd stripped off the charm, the easy deflection he hid behind, the joke that usually loaded up behind his teeth, and left himself a man looking at her like she was the only true thing in a hundred miles, frightened of her, and not running.
Standing his ground in a barn in the rain. Staying.
That was worse than anything. That she could have managed his leaving. She had a whole life built to manage his leaving. She had no chart at all for him staying.
“I have to go,” she said.
“I know.”
“She's fine. You did good. I mean that.”
“I know.” A beat. “Drive careful. Road floods at the low crossing when it comes down like this.”
She picked up her kit. The brass knife glinted.
Banjo lifted his head from the truck cab she could see through the open door, waiting.
The lightning came one more time as she stepped out from under the eave — far off now, gone harmless, a soft blue flicker through the barn boards behind her that lit the aisle and the mare and the man in it for one last flat white instant before the dark took them back — and then she was out in the clean cold wash of the let-up rain with her heart still going eighty and the smell of him still on her, coffee and rain and warm skin.
She didn't drive careful. She drove the way her father used to warn her against, fast on the wet dirt, both hands locked on the wheel, the wipers slapping. Banjo braced himself against the seat and watched her with his ears back.
At the cattle guard she stopped. She didn't mean to.
She just stopped, the truck idling over the rumble of the rails, the wipers ticking, the ranch glowing small and gold in the mirror behind her and the storm muttering off over Eagle Bench.
She put her forehead down on the cold ridge of her knuckles where they gripped the wheel and she made herself say it, out loud, in the empty cab, the way she made herself say a hard prognosis to a family so it would be real and she couldn't pretend later that she hadn't known.
“The line moved tonight.”
Banjo's tail thumped once.
“It moved and it's not moving back.” She lifted her head. Her face in the rearview was her mother's face and her own and, for one disorienting half-second in the dashboard light, eighteen years old. “And I knew it was going to. I drove out there knowing.”
She put the truck in gear.
For ten years she had built herself into someone who could not be left without recourse — who would never again wake to a note, never again hand her whole undefended heart to a man whose one true talent was the door. She had been so careful. She had been a model patient of her own prescription.
And tonight a horse had groaned and a thumb had rested at the corner of her mouth and she had gone still — and the stillness, for the first time in her life, had hidden nothing — and she had wanted, with her whole hammering uncalm heart, to close the inch herself.
She drove out under the spent storm with the windows down so the cold could keep her honest, and somewhere past the low crossing, where the water ran high and brown across the road and she took it slow at last, she let herself, just once, finish the diagnosis she'd been refusing all night.
You're not over him. You never were. You just got good at managing the symptoms.
The water sheeted off the tires. The mesas stood black against a sky scrubbing itself clear.
Behind her, miles back now, a man was walking a mare in a circle under a single gold lamp, staying up with her through the dark because Laney had told him to and because he wasn't, this time, going anywhere — and Laney Cross drove home to a house she'd built entirely alone, knowing exactly what had shifted, and refusing, all the way to her own dark door, to say the rest of it out loud even to the dog.