CHAPTER 18 #2
Laney started cleaning up because her hands needed something to do.
Cap the chlorhexidine. Drop the used needle in the sharps tube.
Fold the bloody gauze into a wad. She was aware of every one of these motions the way she was aware of her own elevated pulse, narrating it as procedure, tidy the field, repack the kit, do not look up, because if she stopped narrating she was going to have to feel the thing standing four feet away from her in the dark, soaked to the skin, watching her work.
“You were good with him,” Beck said.
“He'll do. He's green, but he's got grit, and grit you can't teach.” She wound a length of vet wrap back onto its roll. “The hand'll heal clean.”
“I didn't mean the hand.”
She did look up then. He was still crouched, forearms on his knees, the headlights raking him from the side so half his face was lit and half was lost. The St. Christopher medal hung out of his collar where the ride had pulled it loose, catching a fleck of light.
He wasn't smiling. He'd stopped reaching for the joke, and that was its own kind of alarming, because the jokes were the wall and he'd just let it down.
“You scared the daylights out of that boy and gave it right back to him in the same breath,” Beck said.
“Told him he was a man who strings the wire.
He's going to ride a little taller tomorrow off that.
Tucker'd have chewed him out. Hutch would've grunted at him. You...” He shook his head slowly.
“You doctored more than his hand. I've watched you do it all night and I don't think you even know you're doing it.”
“It's the job.” The dry line came automatically, her warning sign, the quieter she got the more it cost her. “You patch what's torn. You don't lecture the wound about how it got that way.”
“Is that what your dad used to say?”
It landed under her ribs. She went still — and this was the other kind of still, far from the busy quiet of working, the one that came down over her like a held breath, the vet calm that everybody she'd ever loved had eventually learned to read as the opposite of calm.
“My dad used to say a lot of things.” She heard her own voice come out level and far away.
“He used to say the worst calls always come at night. He was right about that. He died on one.” She made herself keep folding the wrap that was already folded.
“Two years ago. February. Three in the morning, a heifer down in a snowbank up the Eagle Bench road, and his heart quit in the cab before he ever got to her. They found the truck still running. Headlights still on.”
She didn't look at the headlights. She was very careful not to. “I do this work in this light a lot, Beck. I'm used to it. I learned to be the only one out here in it.”
He was quiet for a moment. When he spoke his voice had gone rough.
“I should have come.”
“Yes,” she said. “You should have.”
“I know it doesn't fix anything to say it now.”
“It doesn't.”
“I wasn't there for him.” The words came slower now, dragged up from somewhere deep, the short clipped sentences she'd come to know as his ordinary register breaking apart the way they did when feeling got ahead of him.
“I wasn't there for you, and I told myself a story about why that made me the good guy, that I was sparing you something, that you were better off without a man who breaks things, and the truth is I was a coward who couldn't stand to come back and look at what I'd cost everybody and so I just kept winning buckles in towns nobody'd ever heard of, in motel rooms a thousand miles from anybody who'd have known my name, calling it a life I'd made when all I'd really made was a real fast way of being alone, and I was good at it, Laney, I got so damn good at being alone I forgot it was supposed to feel like something.”
It poured out of him in one long unbroken rush, the run-on giving him away, and then he stopped, and rubbed his thumb hard along the scar through his eyebrow once, and made himself stop doing that too. The headlights hummed. The wet metal of the truck ticked as it cooled.
She should have let it lie. She had ten years of practice letting things lie, building a life around the scar instead of reopening it.
But she was tired down to the bone and the antiseptic was still sharp in the cold air and she'd been the only body in too many barns, and the truth came out of her before her vet calm could file it.
“You think you were the only one alone.” She said it flat, no rise at the end.
“I had a whole town. I had my mother and the clinic and a contract with this ranch and a heeler that snores and a calendar so full I never once had to sit in a quiet room.
And I have never been so lonely in my life as I have been these ten years, holding everybody up.
Carrying everyone. Diane after Dad. Jed when he fell.
This whole outfit when it started to go under.
Everybody leans on the steady one, Beck, and nobody ever stops to ask the steady one who she leans on, because the answer is nobody, the answer is she leans on a dead man's hoof knife and a job that never quits.” Her voice didn't rise.
It went, if anything, lower, and steadier, and that was how she knew she'd lost the fight to keep it in.
“I trained my hands to stop shaking a long time ago.
I made them so steady. And there are nights I'd have given anything just to have one other person in the light with me.
Just one. So don't you tell me about being alone like it's a country you discovered.”
The silence after that was enormous.