Chapter Four
CHAPTER FOUR
August 2028
FOUR MONTHS. ONE HUNDRED and twenty-three days. That’s how many mornings I’ve woken up at Blackwood Ranch. How do I know? I’ve kept a running tally in the notebook on the desk in my room. The top margin of the very first page is covered in little tally marks for every day I’ve been here. Every day I haven’t remembered who I am. Every day no one has come looking for me.
Sometimes when I drive into town, I stop by the police station and check in with Chief Sloan to see if there are any updates, but it’s the same answer every time: “Sorry, kid. Nothin’s coming in yet.” Which he usually follows up with, “I’m sure somethin’ll turn up eventually.”
Well, eventually hasn’t happened yet and I’m starting to lose hope that it ever will. I wonder if my few “memories”—if you can even call them that—are memories at all. Or maybe they are, but from a life I no longer have the privilege of knowing. Maybe an ex-girlfriend? A brother I no longer speak to? Or maybe they’re dreams my mind has created to give me a sense of false hope for something that doesn’t exist at all.
The sun beats down on the open riding arena a few hundred yards from the house, not far from the barn. The back left corner of the large, fenced circle is shaded by a patch of trees that extend out from the wilderness like a vein, where Joseph and Melody Jones watch Charlie give Melody’s daughter a riding lesson. It’s something Charlie started about two months ago at her father’s request, but she only offers lessons to a few select students. She didn’t seem happy when Joseph brought up the idea, but it wasn’t my place to ask questions. I thought it seemed like an odd request, Charlie barely spent time in or near the barn unless she was mucking stalls—an observation I’d never made until she was forced to spend time in the barn with her students.
Joseph leans against the steel pipe fence, one boot up on the bottom rung, as he squints against the bright August sun. Melody sits at the picnic table, dressed in clothes that make her look like she took a wrong turn and ended up at a farm instead of brunch at the country club. I’m surprised she even sits on the picnic table, not afraid that she might get something on the expensive-looking pants.
As I get closer, I hear mumbled instructions from Charlie who stands in the middle of the arena. She holds a long rope allowing her to maintain some control while she gives the girl a chance to do it herself as the horse prances in a circle.
“Oh, hello, Xavier!” Joseph says, turning toward me. “Mel, you met Xavier yet?”
“Yes, we met last time.” Melody smiles, her smile ghostly white against the stain on her lips. “Nice to see you again, Xavier.”
“Mrs. Jones,” I say with a nod. “Jenny’s looking good out there.”
“Isn’t she?” A look of pride crosses her features when she glances back at her daughter. “Charlie’s lessons have been doing wonders!”
Joseph shakes his head. “I tried to tell her she needed to do this a while ago, but that girl is stubborn as a damn mule.”
“Well, I’m glad you finally convinced her, Joe. Did I tell you Jenny wants to get into barrel racing like Charlie?”
“Charlie used to race?” I ask. The girl who will barely even go near one of the horses used to barrel race? That doesn’t seem likely.
“She was one of the best!”
“My wife was good, but Charlie was great,” Joe says, a nostalgic smile crossing his lips. “She used to be a big name on the circuit.”
“Used to?” I glance over at Charlie, who is oblivious to the conversation about her past. I wonder if that used to is part of why she seems so unhappy sometimes. I catch the last seconds of a look shared between Melody and Joseph before the former sighs and focuses on Jenny, who has started a series of jumps on the other side of the arena.
“You’ve probably noticed Charlie doesn’t have much to do with the horses,” Joseph says, catching my attention. “She was thrown from her horse, Arthur, a few years ago in the middle of an event. Arthur got spooked, no one knows why, but the whole thing was a circus.” He kicks something invisible in the dirt beneath the fence before straightening his back and looking at me. “When Charlie came to, she didn’t want anything to do with the sport again.”
“Well.” Melody scoffs. “Can you blame the poor girl? That must’ve been scary. One minute you’re on the back of your horse doin’ something as easy as breathin’ and the next you’re waking up on the ground, lucky not to be paralyzed.”
Well, shit.
I didn’t think about it that way.
“And that’s why she ended up goin’ to college. How could I fight her on it when something like that happened? Before the accident, she had applied to school but decided to go professional instead.”
“San Diego?” I ask, remembering a coffee mug in the kitchen and Joseph’s history lesson from my first night here.
“Yep.” Joseph sighs. “Packed up and moved to the West Coast until a few months before you got here, Xavier.”
Jenny guides the horse over the final hurdle before trotting to Charlie with a proud smile.
“I’ve never seen her ride either of the horses in the barn,” I say.
“She doesn’t ride anymore. Hasn’t since the accident. Before these lessons, I was lucky she even mucked the stalls.”
A smile, a genuine smile, splits Charlie’s face when she watches Jenny perform the circuit one more time before the girl breaks into a chorus of “Look at me, Mom!” and takes a lap around the arena. I catch Charlie’s eye when Jenny trots by and the right side of my mouth tugs up briefly. She reciprocates it. Charlie’s disdain for me has dampened in the last few weeks. I don’t know what brought her sudden change of heart, but I’m not complaining. Even though we’ve been more cordial toward one another, there is an underlying tension I don’t quite understand. It might have something to do with whatever she thinks I’m doing here. Something to do with that conversation I overheard on my first day here. She said there were people after this place. Why, though? It isn’t like Bezer is the next hot spot for development…At least it doesn’t seem like it.
Or maybe it’s something to do with how I catch her staring at me when she thinks I’m not looking. She has gotten a little bolder in her flirtations, but each time I shoot them down. I don’t know who I am. How can I even think about offering myself to someone? The thought of jumping into something with her seems insane. I’m not ready for that.
“She seems pretty okay with them now. You think she’ll ever ride again?” I ask.
“One can hope,” Joseph says. “But I doubt it. Her horse died not long after she ran off to San Diego. They were best friends. I’m not sure she’d have it in her to go out there without him.”
“Poor thing was probably heartbroken,” Melody says, meeting us at the fence.
Joseph nods. “She won’t say it, but it tore Charlie up, too. She wouldn’t want to face that again.”
“That black one in the barn isn’t hers?” I ask.
“Shadow?” Joseph asks, sharing a confused glance with Melody before they look at me. “No. No, Shadow is a rescue that no one else wanted. Stubborn-ass horse. Mean as a snake, too. I leave him alone, let him do what he wants, and he doesn’t bother me none. It’s better than what he was dealing with before.”
“He doesn’t seem too bad.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, he lets me pet him whenever I’m in the barn. Never gives me any issues mucking the stall or anything.” With each word, their eyes grow to be about the size of dinner plates. I’m starting to think I’m the first person Shadow has ever warmed up to.
“He let you pet him?” Joseph can barely get the words out as Charlie joins us underneath the shade. He scoffs, looking at her. “You’ll never believe what Xavier just told me.”
“You finally remembered who you are and you’re leaving?” Charlie’s face glows with fake excitement and I roll my eyes.
“He was able to pet Shadow,” Joseph says. Charlie’s face falls. “You should put Xavier in the ring with him. See what happens.”
“Can you even ride?” Charlie hisses.
Is she really asking me that? I don’t know if I can ride a horse. I don’t even know if I’ve ever been around a horse before, but neither one on this ranch has kicked me yet, and they don’t seem to mind when I’m around them. That has to be a good sign. Right? I shrug. “Only one way to find out, I guess.”
“This is a bad idea, Dad. That could’ve been a fluke, we don’t know—”
“I pet him every day.”
Joseph offers his daughter an I told you so look and she shakes her head. Pinching the bridge of her nose, she sighs. “I don’t like this. We don’t even know if he can ride. What if he falls and it makes whatever he has going on worse?”
“Or what if he falls and it makes him remember?” Joseph says with a straight face, but I know he’s only saying it to get a rise out of his daughter. And it works, her eyes blazing with fury. “I’m only kidding, Char. Let’s give it a shot, and if it still seems like a bad idea, you can end lessons dead stop.”
Charlie glares at me. “Fine, but if anything, and I mean anything , goes wrong…That’s it.”
I’m not sure what makes me go along with Joseph’s request—horseback riding lessons aren’t a requirement of my role at the ranch—but I do it anyway. Maybe it’s my curiosity about Shadow, maybe it’s my curiosity about Charlie, or maybe it’s both. Whatever the reason, I raise my right hand to my forehead in a mock salute, and say, “You’re the boss.”
Her gaze narrows even further before she closes her eyes, hearing the hoofs of the horse Jenny rides come closer. Taking a breath, she re-centers herself and turns on her heel to finish the lesson.
I wait until she’s gone to turn back to Joseph. “So, the real reason I came out here, Joseph, is to let you know I fixed that leak under the sink. Gonna need to replace some of that cabinet beneath it, bit of wood rot under there from the moisture.”
“You have enough wood in the barn?” Joseph asks, not taking his eyes off Charlie.
“Should, but I’ll be able to tell once I get more into it.”
“Don’t get in too deep, it’s not that much trouble.”
That’s a weird thing to say. I shrug. “I don’t mind. Helps me take my mind off things.”
“Any luck in the memory department?” Joseph finally looks over at me, and his question earns Melody’s attention, too.
“I get a little here and there, but nothing…big.” I glance out over the rolling acres of the ranch. “Nothing that tells me anything.”
“Don’t worry, dear,” Melody says. “You’ll get there soon enough, I’m sure. Don’t stress yourself too much or you could make it worse.”
“You’re right, Mrs. Jones…Well, I’m gonna go finish up that sink. Make sure there’s enough wood.”
A week after Joseph suggests putting me in the arena with Shadow, Charlie asks me if I really want to give it a try. The thought of getting on the back of a horse is a bit nerve-racking, but it can’t be that hard, right? After dinner, she knocks on my door and tells me to meet her in the barn in the morning. We’ll get in a lesson before the August heat rolls in and before the afternoon sun stands overhead. The weather has taken a turn for the worse in the last few days, and by noon the heat will reach close to one-hundred degrees. It’s beautiful but hot, and I’ll have to check on the fence at the farthest part of the ranch where Joseph says it looks like there’s some damage from a summer storm a few nights ago.
The next morning, Charlie walks into the barn as I finish cleaning Lady’s stall—the same horse Jenny had been riding during her lesson last week—and she doesn’t look happy. I’m not surprised. I’m used to her morning moods but today seems worse than normal. Charlotte Blackwood is the furthest thing from a morning person, requiring at least one cup of coffee before anyone talks to her. And from the looks of it, I don’t think she’s even close to finishing that first cup, or maybe today is a two-cup kind of day.
“Mornin’, Char,” I call over my shoulder, but she only grunts. Charlie sits on the plywood box across the hall from the stall, her legs pulled up to her chest, sipping from the travel mug on the top of her jean-clad thighs. “What cup is that?”
“One.”
“Talk to me when you’re done with it.”
“Shut up.” Charlie rolls her eyes, but her face falls when I step outside the stall. Her eyes travel up the length of my body as I lean against the rake and when she meets my raised brow, she quickly looks away, knowing she’s been caught. She clears her throat. “Hurry up. I want to get this over with.”
I try to hide my smirk, shaking my head and putting away the muck rake. “Anything I can do to get things moving for this lesson?”
Charlie points toward the tack room I cleaned up about a month ago. When I first walked in, I didn’t think it would be that bad—maybe a day or two to get it organized—but it had taken me almost a week to get it in good working order. Finishing the remodel that had been started but never finished was next on my list after mending the fence. That damn fence has become a nuisance. Something is always going wrong with it. It’s an old fence—I don’t think it’s been replaced since it was first installed however many years ago—but Joseph refuses to let me do any replacements unless it’s absolutely necessary. It’s getting to the point where slapping on a Band-Aid and calling it good won’t work anymore.
“Get your tack ready,” she says after a sip of coffee. When I look at her like she has three heads, she rolls her eyes for the millionth time. “Saddle. Bridle. Pads.”
I repeat the words as I walk through the tack room, using only the knowledge and limited experience of seeing horses on television to find what look to be the right items.
Her instructions continue with brushing Shadow before putting together the saddle. The whole time, Charlie watches from her place on the box with an unreadable expression, almost a mix of amazement, confusion, and irritation.
Next comes the tack, and from her throne, she gives me the order in which it should go: pads, saddle, buckle the girth (“What is a girth?” “The belt,” she says rolling her eyes), fit the bridle (“No, you put the mouthpiece in first.”), and adjust where needed.
“What the fuck?” Charlie says under her breath when I lead Shadow out of the barn by the reins. Her gaze is still slightly narrowed in confusion when she follows us into the outdoor arena. “Do you want me to take the reins while you mount?”
“What do you think?” I ask Shadow, earning a huff in response.
When I look at Charlie for interpretation, she only shrugs. “Let’s try it. See what happens.”
Shadow stamps his front feet, but to my surprise, he allows Charlie to take hold of the leather guides.
She doesn’t even try to hide the shock written on her face when I hoist myself on his back, swinging my leg over and landing in the saddle like I’ve been doing it my entire life. Shadow doesn’t seem phased by the added weight on his back, standing ready and waiting for instruction.
“You look surprised,” I say.
“I am.” Charlie laughs, tucking a piece of hair behind her ear. “This is…incredible. This is the first time he’s ever allowed anything like this. I can’t believe it.” Her hand raises like she’s going to pet the bridge of Shadow’s nose, but the horse takes a step back, forcing me to grab hold of the horn. “Still not a fan of me, got it. Here, you take the reins.”
We spend the next two hours going ’round and ’round the arena, even taking a few jumps (because Shadow didn’t feel like listening to Charlie’s instruction not to go over there), before Joseph parks his truck under the carport and joins us.
“You seem pretty comfortable up there,” Joseph says, leaning over the fence. “You sure you’ve never ridden before?”
“I went with what I’ve seen in the movies,” I say, earning an eye roll from Charlie.
“A little unorthodox, but I like it.”
“Don’t encourage him, Dad.”
“So, is it safe to say I was right?” I hear Joseph ask when Shadow and I approach the two of them.
Charlie sighs, pushing herself off the fence. “Yes, you were right.”
“Wait, wait, can you say that again? I need to get it on tape. Xavier, hurry, get somethin’ to record it with!”