Chapter 12
Chapter twelve
Pain Won’t Last
Maverick
Twenty years ago
Ilurked in the darkness of the dimly lit hallway, quietly eavesdropping on Aunt Violet and Uncle Bad.
My eleven-year-old hands trembled as I pressed them to the wall.
Poking my head just far enough into the doorway, I found Aunt Violet standing at the kitchen sink, washing the last of the dishes while Bad dried them off and put them away.
“How was the kid’s appointment today?” My uncle’s sandpaper voice cut through the quiet.
“The doctors are impressed with his progress from this round of skin grafts. There’s not much they can do for the scarrin’, though.
It’s…” Her shoulders slumped, her voice shaking as she spoke, “it’s just so extensive.
” She sniffled and wiped at her eyes with the back of her arm.
“His broken arm’s almost ready for that cast to come off, though. Which’ll be good for him.”
Bad nodded. “What about the talkin’? What’d the doctors say?”
Aunt Violet turned to Bad, her face a mask of sadness. “There’s no damage to his vocal cords. Nothin’ physically wrong with him. It’s a mental thing. They said sometimes when someone goes through trauma like that, they can just stop talkin’.”
Bad blew out a breath. “They say how long it’ll go on like that for?”
“There’s no tellin’. He may never talk again. It’s completely up to him.” She took a steadying breath in and blew out slowly, the look in her gaze turning wary. “They wanna put him in therapy and have a psychiatrist look at him.”
“You mean they wanna pump him up with drugs and make him look at ink blots?”
I noted the layer of anger brewing in the depths of Uncle Bad’s voice. He wasn’t a huge fan of doctors in general, always said if it couldn’t be cured by a saddle or a bottle of whiskey, it couldn’t be cured.
“I don't know.” Violet shook her head. “Maybe they figure it could do him good.”
“Kid doesn’t need a headshrinker, Violet. He needs time to heal, time to process.”
“That’s what they’re trained to do, Clint. You and I are out of our depth here.”
Bad placed the towel down on the counter—so different from my dad, who’d have reacted with an explosion and likely broke something. But Bad was scary enough just with the tone of his voice. He rarely raised it, but with the slightest change in his emotions, you could pick up just how angry he was.
“You said that boy may never talk again. And you wanna send him to some stranger to talk about his trauma. He barely spoke before the accident, now you think he’s gonna open up to some doctor?”
“They might get through to him.” Aunt Violet didn’t sound convinced though. “With enough time.”
“Time is one thing we got plenty of. But the money to pay someone else for theirs?” Bad shook his head.
Guilt gnawed a hole in my chest. I hated being a burden.
And that’s all I’d been since the accident eight weeks ago.
Why couldn’t I have just died? Things would be so much simpler.
I wouldn’t hurt every day with just a shift in the wind or my shirt scraping just the right way.
I wouldn’t have nightmares. I wouldn’t hear Ellie Mae’s screams. Uncle Bad and Aunt Violet wouldn’t have to put up with me.
And Cash and his younger brother, True…well, they wouldn’t have to deal with my silence.
Not that Cash seemed to mind. He could talk to a wall and have a conversation; he didn’t need me to entertain him. But I think I scared True a bit. It was the scars, I think. Made sense though, kid was only four and a half and the burns were pretty gross.
Aunt Violet frowned, challenge brewing in her gaze. “So, what do you suggest?”
It was moments like that when I could see the resemblance between her and my dad. They both had a fire in them. But that was where the similarities ended. Aunt Violet was fierce, but fair. She wasn’t mean and rotten, like Dad had been.
And while my mom would have backed down to my dad if he’d looked at her like that, Bad didn’t falter an inch.
He matched her with a quiet fury blazing in his hazel depths.
“Give me three weeks. Three weeks with me and them horses and some fresh air. If he ain’t doin’ better by then, then you can hire a damn shrink. ”
Some of the worry eased in my chest. I didn’t want to put them out of money. Not that I was entirely convinced that Uncle Bad would be able to help either. But being with him and the horses sounded better than being with a shrink. I’d do my best to be better. To talk.
But I had nothing to say. Nothing to tell that seemed to matter. It hadn’t mattered what I’d said before the accident. My words were nothing more than wind…so why waste my time saying anything now?
I’d lost everything. I didn’t really feel like I was here. My body was, but my mind, my heart…they’d died in the crash. I might be alive…but I sure didn’t feel like I was living.
The two stared one another down for a long moment before Aunt Violet finally let out a weary sigh. “Okay,” she muttered with a nod, going back to scrubbing dishes. “And if he doesn’t get better? You gonna take him out behind the barn and shoot him?”
Bad chuckled. “Him? No. That nag of a mare of his dad’s? Maybe.”
“Clint!” Aunt Violet chastised, pegging him with a harsh glare. “She can’t be that bad. It’s just a horse.”
He shrugged and grunted once more. “I think that horse is one of them ones from Revelations. I saw a man that sat upon a black horse, and Death was his name and Hell followed with him? Something like that. Black horse of death.”
“It’s a pale horse. And don’t be dramatic.” Violet chided him.
“Dramatic, hell! The bitch tries to run me down every time I go near her and she’s only got three good legs to do it with. I don’t know what she’ll do if she ever gets sound again.”
“You can’t shoot the horse, Bad.” Violet shook her head.
“I bet Cash would do it if I asked him to.”
A lump lodged in my throat and tears burned in the back of my eyes.
Black Betty and I were the only survivors of the accident.
She’d come out of it almost as bad off as me, maybe even worse.
Though she wasn’t burned all over like me, she’d tore a tendon pretty bad in her right back leg and cut herself up pretty good.
Not the worst injuries the vet had ever seen, but if she didn’t let someone heal her up and help her, there’d be no point in keeping her alive.
She’d always been skittish, from the moment that Dad pulled her out of the stock trailer from the auction.
But a year under his hand…well, let’s just say, Eli Holstrom left his mark on all of us.
After the accident, she wouldn’t let no one touch her. Anytime someone came near her stall she went crazy, messing up any progress to her leg again.
Hot tears slipped down my cheeks and I fled from the doorway before my muffled cries could give me away.
True was already asleep, Cash was up playing with his Legos in the room we were sharing, but I didn’t want to go up there.
He’d just start talking. I didn’t mind it most days, but right now, I needed to be alone.
With a blurry field of vision and my heart feeling like it would thump out of my chest, I raced for the barn. It was quiet there. The ranch hands were likely all in the bunkhouse now, drinking, playing poker, or heading off to bed. No one would come bother me in the barn.
They’d put Betty in the final stall on the left, away from the other horses. Partly to keep her calm, partly because she tried to kill any she came into contact with.
She snorted, those sleek black ears of hers pinning back as she noticed me slowly placing my hand on the latch of her stall. She pawed and struck out, a whinny peeling from her lungs as I undid the latch.
“Shhhh,” the sound was foreign, scratchy in my throat, but it was all I could do. It bothered my vocal cords, reminding me of all the smoke that seemed coated to the back of my throat for weeks. Every now and then I still felt it. Tasted it.
This is stupid. What are you trying to prove? Reason warred with the storm of emotion in my chest. But I had to do this. I couldn’t give up on her. No one had given up on me yet. Not Aunt Violet, Not Cash and True, certainly not Uncle Bad.
And maybe I needed to prove she was worthy of saving because self-consciously, I wondered if I even was.
Taking a deep, steadying breath, I kept my head lowered, my gaze not directly on her, and one hand out as I took my time opening her stall.
Her wild, terrified gaze flittered about as she snorted and pawed. I didn’t shush her. I didn’t have it in me to say anything anymore. Even that had been too much. But I stood in her stall with my hand out. Waiting. Waiting. Waiting.
My heart, in tandem with the stomp of her hooves as she struck the barn floor, began to slow.
I forced calm, measured breaths from my lungs and met the mare’s gaze.
Fear and anger and just about every other emotion blazed in those brown eyes, reflecting my own feelings.
I saw so much of me in her. In a new place.
With new people. With all this hurt and terror eating away at my sanity.
I was her and she was me.
And maybe she understood that. Maybe she recognized all of the brokenness in myself within her…maybe that’s why when I reached out my hand, steady despite how I felt on the inside, she didn’t bite it off, but pressed her nose to my palm.
Emotion swelled in my chest, silent tears spilling down my cheeks. She moved closer, nuzzling my stomach.
I’d never felt so seen. So accepted than I had in that moment. She knew what I felt. She felt it too. We didn’t need words to talk. To understand.
I don’t know how much time passed. Could have been minutes or hours. We just stood there, her head resting against my stomach as I absent-mindedly stroked her neck. The motion was soothing…for the both of us.