Howling Wind
LILA
Slade’s house was built by a firm out of Bozeman that I’ve admired for years, architects who design with the landscape instead of against it, who understand that a structure in this terrain needs to breathe with the land, not fight it.
But Montana weather is a beast, and there’s no engineering against the katabatic winds that barrel down through the mountains.
Through the bedroom windows I can see the meadow grass flattening in great rushing waves. The cottonwoods at the tree line are whipping sideways. The gusts find every edge of the house, whistling through the seals, rattling the glass in its frames, making the steel beams groan.
Through the haze of half-sleep, I hear a door opening and closing down the hallway. The clock on my nightstand says it’s 2:30 am.
I get out of bed and pad down the hallway, shivering, to find Slade pulling on his boots by the front door.
My heart rate picks up at the sight. I haven’t lived on a ranch long, but I know it means some serious shit went down when your man is pulling on his boots in the middle of the night.
“Slade, honey? Where are you going?” I ask.
“Wind knocked a tree down onto the south barn. Horses spooked and scattered.” He glances up from lacing his work boots and his serious gaze softens when it lands on me. “We need everybody out there.”
My stomach drops. “Are the horses hurt?”
“Don’t know yet.” He stands and rubs his bad shoulder while looking out the window. “Tree took out the storage end, not the stalls, so probably not. But a spooked horse in a windstorm…” He pauses. “We gotta find them and get them settled before they hurt themselves.”
I look out the window at the darkness and the bending grass. Anxiety surges through me.
“It’s gusting ninety miles an hour out there,” I say.
“Hundred, last I checked.”
I go over to him. I want to reach for him so badly.
Touch him, hug him, do something to reassure myself that he’s solid and strong and he’ll come back to me.
Logically, I know he’ll come back to me.
Of course he will, he knows this land, he’s done this before, no doubt.
But the wind is a hundred miles an hour and the darkness outside is total and I want to hold onto him anyway.
But he’s shrugging his jacket on, checking the pockets like he’s running through a mental checklist, and I don’t want to interrupt his concentration.
“Can I help?” I ask.
“Stay inside,” he says, stuffing a pair of work gloves into his back pocket.
“I want to be helpful. The horses—”
“Lila.” He takes my hands, his rough, warm palms wrapping all the way around mine. “Handling spooked horses in a windstorm takes years of experience. You’d be putting yourself in danger and it’d be one more thing for me to worry about.”
I bite my lip. “I feel useless,” I say. “You’re going out there in the middle of the night to deal with this and I’m just sitting here doing nothing.”
“Staying safe is the most useful thing you can do for me right now.” He squeezes my hands. “I need to know you’re inside and warm and okay. That’s what I need from you tonight.”
I nod.
He holds my gaze for a moment like he’s making sure I mean it.
Then he goes to the sofa and pulls the throw blanket off it, comes back and wraps it around my shoulders himself, smoothing it down my arms with both hands, tucking it close around me with a care that makes my chest ache.
“Go back to bed, baby,” he murmurs. His lips press to my forehead, warm and unhurried, like he has all the time in the world even though he doesn’t. His hand cups my face for just a moment. “It’s gonna be a long night. Promise me you’ll get some sleep.”
I’ll be too worried about you, I think.
I wrap my arms around him instead of saying it.
He pulls me in without hesitation, strong and solid and warm, his chin dropping to the top of my head.
Then he lets go, with one last look back at me from the doorway before he’s gone.
The house feels immediately, enormously empty without him. At least I have Lucky snoozing here, happily snorting and yipping and twitching in her sleep.
I try to go back to sleep in my own bed.
I can’t.
I lie in the dark and listen to the wind and think about horses bolting in the pitch black, panicked and unpredictable and afraid.
I think about Slade and his father and brothers out there in it, men moving through a hundred mile an hour windstorm in the middle of the night because there’s a job that needs to be done.
I grew up around men who paid other people to do the hard things.
These men are the ones that do the hard things.
The wind gusts hard enough to make the windows flex and I pull my duvet up and stare at the ceiling.
At some point in the night, I give up on trying to sleep. I get out of bed and walk back down the dark hallway, telling myself I’m just going to get a glass of water.
Except it’s not the kitchen that I’m heading towards.
It’s Slade’s bedroom.
His door is open. The sheets are still rumpled from where he was sleeping two hours ago. His nightstand has his book on it. It’s a sci-fi paperback, Isaac Asimov’s Foundation, this one with a cracked spine and dog-eared pages. Next to it is glass of water he didn’t finish. His watch.
For some reason the sight of all those little things makes my heart twist.
I cross the room before I’ve finished deciding to. I haven’t been in here since the furniture arrived and Slade insisted on moving everything into place himself instead of using my crew. I added all the art on the walls, the blanket draped over the armchair in the corner, the lamps, everything.
But there’s one accessory I didn’t add myself. It’s on his nightstand, and I approach it slowly, scarcely believing my eyes.
It’s a silver picture frame. Inside it is the photo from our wedding: the one where he’s kissing me at the altar.
He framed that photo.
He keeps it on his nightstand.
My heart squeezes again, painfully tight. The emotion that moves through me is so powerful that it makes my eyes blur and my hands tremble.
Carefully, I put the frame back on the nightstand.
Turning to his bed, I smooth my hand over the soft linen sheets, as if it was him I was touching.
Then I climb in.
His pillow smells like cedar soap and something underneath that’s just him, something that smells like home in a way that shouldn’t be possible after only a few months but is. I pull the duvet up and close my eyes and feel the tension in my chest ease by a fraction.
The wind gusts hard, but I don’t flinch. Wrapped in his sheets, surrounded by his scent, I feel comforted. He’s still out there. I’m still worried. But less alone in it. Like some part of him stayed behind.
I’ll just stay for a minute, I tell myself.
Just until the wind dies down a little.
Just until I stop worrying.
I’m not going to fall asleep.
That’s what I tell myself, anyway, as my eyes drift shut, and my mind finally quiets as I drift off, wrapped in my husband’s scent and the memory of his warmth.
I wake to a wet tongue on my cheek.
I blink my eyes open and find Lucky’s happy, liquid brown eyes staring back at me. Another lick, this one up my nose.
“Hi sweet girl,” I sigh.
I lie there for a moment in that warm, half-conscious state where nothing has caught up with you yet. The duvet is a soft fluffy cloud around me. The light coming through the windows is golden and low. Something smells like cedar and I feel completely, inexplicably at peace.
Then it catches up with me.
I’m in Slade’s bed.
I slept in my husband’s bed like it was mine.
Lucky licks my cheek again, unbothered.
“Is Daddy home?” I whisper to Lucky.
She whines in a way that tells me the answer is no.
I’m caught between relief that he didn’t catch me in his bed and worry for him. Swinging my legs out of bed, I go to my room and reach for my phone to text him, only to find he texted me an hour ago. Three images.
The first: the south barn in the grey pre-dawn light, the felled cottonwood sprawled across the roof like a giant fallen in battle. The mountains rise up behind it sublime and unchanged, like commentary on the frailty of humanity against nature.
The second picture: the horses in the north pasture, steam rising from their backs in the cold air, backlit by the rising sun. It almost looks sepia-toned, like something from a history book.
The third: a panorama of the ranch at dawn, the meadow grass still flattened and silver with frost, the sky just beginning to go pale at the edges.
I scroll through them twice.
Slade Rhodes, who claims to be oblivious to anything that isn’t strictly functional, took three photographs that could hang in a gallery.
They could have been taken this morning or two hundred years ago.
They’re the kind of images you see in coffee table books about the American West, the harsh, unforgiving, earthly beauty rendered so plainly it becomes transcendent.
I wonder if he knows he did that. I wonder if he realizes what an incredible eye for beauty he has.
Slade
We’re handling it. All the animals are safe.
He knows me well enough to know I’d be worried about the animals. But apparently he doesn’t know me well enough to realize that it’s him I’m worried about too.
I text him:
Lila
Are you okay? How’s your shoulder?
While I get coffee going, he texts me back.
Slade
Been better. Ibuprofen didn’t cut it. Had to take some of the prescription meds. They always knock me out.
Lila
Come back home and take a nap. I have a site visit for work today but I’ll leave a snack for you.
Slade
Thank you baby
I set the phone down and go to make coffee and try not to read too much into the fact that a three words from this man can make my whole morning.
It’s a perfectly ordinary conversation. Domestic and mundane. And yet, as I read over it, there’s an intimacy there. A genuine familiarity, like we really are husband and wife.
Maybe that’s why I find myself typing: I miss you.
Three words that are perfectly true and completely inadvisable. I delete it before I send it.
I’m pouring my first cup of coffee when my phone buzzes again. I pick it up expecting logistics—what time he’ll be back, whether he needs anything from town.
Instead:
Slade
I miss you.
I blink. Shit. Did I accidentally press send? What just happened?
But no. The words are on the screen because Slade is the one who sent them. I miss you.
A slow smile spreads over my face. My hands are slightly unsteady when I type back:
Lila
I miss you too. I’ll try to get home early.
I put the phone face down on the counter. I stand there for a moment with both hands wrapped around my coffee mug, smiling way too huge.
Then I start on the pumpkin bread I’ll leave waiting for him when he gets home.
The smile stays on my face as I drive to work, Lucky hanging her face out the passenger window like she can’t stop smiling either.
It stays on my face through a tough work day with multiple vendor issues, an unhappy client complaining about her wool pillows being too rough, a delivery of the wrong fabric bolts.
At lunch, after I drop off Lucky at home so she can take a nap, I open his photos again just to look at them.
I miss you.
The smile comes back.