Chapter 51
KOENIG RANCH
“There you go, Fidget. Good boy.”
Kendra holds a carrot out for the gelding.
I watch as his weird horse lips maneuver gently over her hand to find it.
He’s a beautiful horse, a luminous brown color in the sunlight that filters through the slats in the barn.
I’ve been on him dozens of times, and I know how gentle he is.
But a part of me has never gotten used to horses—their muscular proportions, their hot breath and dark eyes.
In person they’re so different from the cartoon unicorns you grow up imagining.
They’re big, and strange, and hard to read.
They’re mysteries, and I’ve had enough with mysteries.
But I put my hand on his neck anyway. I stroke his velvety fur. The feeling brings back memories of all the time I used to spend here. On Koenig Ranch. With Rocky.
“Did Rocky ever tell you he raised him from a baby?” Kendra says.
“No, he didn’t,” I said. “We didn’t always talk about stuff like that.” I wish now that we would have.
She pulls out her phone and scrolls through the pictures. Then she pulls up one of a tween Rocky, bottle-feeding a baby Fidget. Rocky looks impossibly young, his face freckled under the brim of his cap.
“He was in 4-H in middle school. I don’t know if you remember him from back then.
” Kendra looks at the picture herself for a moment before putting it back in her pocket.
“He quit when he got to high school. He said it was because he wanted to focus on football, but I think it was more that he didn’t like raising animals to be sent to slaughter.
You’ve got to do that on a ranch, but he didn’t really have the stones for it. ”
That makes me tear up a little. I try to blink it away, but Kendra sees. She looks exasperated.
“Dude, it’s okay,” she says. “Just cry already.”
“I feel like I’ve been crying nonstop for months now,” I say.
“Yeah, but it’s different now,” she says. “Now you can just be sad. Instead of thinking he did something awful.”
She has a point. All this time, it’s been impossible to grieve for him. For either of them, really, but especially for Rocky. It felt wrong to miss him when I thought he was a murderer, and so I’d just pushed it all down. I’d just gotten good at dodging around my memories—especially the good ones.
“I’m so exhausted,” I say, dabbing at the corners of my eyes.
“Preach,” Kendra says.
Kendra had been the first one to arrive at the cabin on the night of the fire, before the sheriff and the fire department and the EMTs.
She looked out her bedroom window that night and saw the light from the flames.
So she called 911, and then, ignoring the advice of the dispatcher, she ran outside and tore across the ranch in the ATV.
She arrived just after Hayden and I made it out of the cabin.
Just in time to watch it go up in flames.
We’d been lucky that night. Someone, somewhere, was paying attention.
It feels like eons have gone by since then, though it’s been less than a week.
Carter is still in the hospital for observation, but he’ll be released into police custody when he’s well enough.
He’s been charged with assault and kidnapping for what he did to me.
I guess the sheriff is still sorting through the evidence to see if they can get him on Rocky and Lynette.
I don’t know how I’ll feel if they decide they can’t, but I guess we’ll all have to wait until we know more regardless.
Hayden is out on bail. I only know this because Deputy Mays called me to warn me that she’d be out.
I haven’t heard from her or seen her. I’m assuming her parents have her cloistered in their giant house.
Mrs. O’Hara’s YouTube channel has exploded since the news broke; she hasn’t added any content, but the comment sections on her videos are full of people speculating just where the O’Haras went wrong.
Look at Hayden’s expression in this one, she looks so scary when she’s mad.
Do you think they filmed this scene before or after she helped her boyfriend murder 2 people??
These people raised a monster.
Noelle showed me the comments with a satisfied smirk, but I don’t like to look. It doesn’t give me any pleasure to see the same thing happen to someone else.
Even if it’s happening to one of the people that hurt me. Me and Lynette. And Rocky.
Now I watch as Kendra opens the stall door. Fidget follows her out into the yard, where her own little gray mare Oona is saddled and waiting.
“You ready?” she asks.
I nod, even though I’m not sure I mean it. She swings herself effortlessly up onto Oona’s back and waits for me to climb up Fidget and get my leg across him.
“They’ve all been spooked since the fire,” Kendra says. “But you know Fidget, he’s chill. Just relax and he’ll follow me, okay?”
“Sure,” I say.
Kendra makes a small clicking noise and picks up her reins. Oona starts to walk. A moment later, Fidget follows her.
Everything is lovely and golden in the autumn afternoon light.
We ride past cows and sheep, past big cylindrical hay bales and stands of oak and mesquite.
Kendra stays a little ahead of me, and I get the feeling she wants it that way—that we’re doing this together, but also doing it alone, and that’s okay.
I lace my fingers through his mane and take a deep breath, inhaling the smell of hay and dirt and manure and the warm animal smell of horses.
Memories flit all around me—flashes of all the times I rode out here with Rocky.
Times we’d ride out to some far pasture together, sometimes to do chores but sometimes just to sit and do our homework together on a picnic blanket, or to get the horses some exercise.
I’ve never been on Fidget solo; usually Rocky sat behind me, his strong arms to either side of me.
I haven’t let myself miss that until now.
I close my eyes. The horse’s movement is slow and patient, and beneath his stride there’s a subtler rhythm: the blood moving through his body, the heart that announces itself again and again. Life and energy and warmth. It’s so unfair that Lynette and Rocky aren’t here to feel it too.
We make our way up the side of a ridge to the highest point on the ranch, a gentle slope that ends suddenly in a limestone outcrop that juts above the mesquite.
We get off the horses and look out across the land.
Back in the direction we came, I can see the ranch house and the outbuildings.
Off to the east I see the blackened smear that was the cabin.
But on other horizons, other things. Austin’s ripple of smog to the north. The river to the west. And beyond that, things we can’t see and can’t know.
Kendra takes a small wooden jar out from one of the saddlebags. Then she unscrews the lid. Inside are ashes—a portion of Rocky’s cremains.
“Hold out your hand,” she says. When I do, she taps some onto my palm. Then she taps the rest out onto hers.
“Is this okay? Wouldn’t your parents want to be here for this?” I ask.
She shakes her head. “No, this is mine to do what I want with. Mom’s got the rest of his ashes on the mantel. She got a football-shaped urn.”
“That’s cute, I guess,” I say.
But Kendra shakes her head. “I hate it. It just reminds me that he’s never going to do anything else.”
I close my fingers around the grainy ash for a moment. She’s right, of course. The dead don’t change. For better or worse, the chaos and mess and fear and hope of the living are settled fact for the dead. And it’s so sad, and so unfair—especially because Rocky wasn’t even eighteen.
But now that his name’s been cleared, it doesn’t seem wrong to hope that death is also peaceful. That now he can rest.
“Well, now he can be part of the ranch,” I say softly.
I hold up my hand and let the breeze pick up the ashes. I watch as they swirl out and away from me, vanishing when they disperse.
I hope he does become a part of the ranch. That his ashes settle into the soil, become a part of the plants and the animals here. He loved this place. But I hope, too, that a part of him goes farther. I hope he rises above Varda and when he looks back, we’re smaller than he remembers.
I hope he rides the wind as far as it will take him.