Chapter 45
It’s still dark by the time we make it to the train yard, the same one Dolly said she’d been trying to keep at bay, but I can’t help feeling grateful for it now as I stow us away in an empty stock car about to head west. Locking the door behind us and hoping they already did their checks to leave at sunrise, hoping, too, that they won’t notice a little extra food and water going missing when I hear the yard begin to stir.
I wait for them to find us even after the train starts moving. And I don’t really stop over the two days it takes us to get to Arizona, nor do I stop waiting to see if Cypress is going to survive until we do.
By the time we jumped on board, Cypress was already in and out of it, anywhere from a few minutes to a few hours. I try to make him eat something every time he wakes up, drink something. Afraid that if he doesn’t he won’t wake up again.
Sometimes he talks. Sometimes he doesn’t. I have a hard time stopping him when he does, even if I can’t understand everything he is saying, even if the things I can understand make me wish I couldn’t.
Being on the train bothers him. Makes him tell me how he messed up joining them because he didn’t want to be alone anymore, how they used to rob trains and the people on them.
How he hadn’t minded when they were taking from people who could afford to lose.
How much he had minded when they started taking from people who couldn’t.
I remind him it’s just us now. I tell him he doesn’t have to do that anymore.
Being in the dark bothers him more. Makes him tell me how dark it was while they had him locked away, how they would hurt him to try to make him say where he took them, how he used to listen to the water dripping from the roof to distract himself.
Tap. Tap. Tap. How he used to wait to fall asleep because then he’d see them and the sky again.
I tuck him against me and cover his ears before I shoot holes in the ceiling of the train car. I tell him the light streaming in is stars.
He’s awake again to get off the train when we finally roll to a slow stop, the horses jumping off before us into the blinding daylight with a lot more grace than I manage while I’m carrying, more than holding, Cypress.
I turn us in time so that I absorb the worst of the fall.
Then I get back up, and we keep running.
I steal a wagon in the first town we reach, too desperate to care they see both our faces. Too desperate to care I’m a thief now, too.
He comes to while we’re heading north beneath a midnight sky, and if he were to ask me this time which stars are my favorite, I think I’d finally be able to tell him. Instead, he asks me where we’re going, and I tell him we’re going home.
Now, he’s quiet.
I think that’s the worst of it. He’s so fucking quiet.
I hadn’t realized how much I’d gotten used to it. His constant, ceaseless talking. The way he’d have something to say from the moment he woke up in the morning to the moment he put his head down at night. The way he’d even talk in his sleep.
But not now.
I keep pacing the room, waiting for something to do, for there to be something I can do, but for the past several days, I’ve run out of options by mid-morning.
Only so many checks clean shirts I can rip up for bandages, only so many times I can put my hand to his forehead to see if he’s still hot, only so many hours I can spend wondering if he’s stopped breathing.
When I can’t take being in our tiny one-room cabin anymore, I go out to check the horses, then go and chop firewood until my hands blister, enough to last us through the next several winters despite it being the middle of summer, but it’s something I can do close by.
Even with our food rations running low, I don’t risk leaving to hunt.
Maybe getting here was too much. Maybe I should’ve taken him to the doctor in Troy’s Hill, but I’d been afraid with both of us wanted that if he did live, it would only be to see a jail cell. That I’d be taken to one, too, and never know if he was all right. That he’d wake up alone.
This is all my fault. I was the one who insisted we leave Tom alive. I was the one who suggested we leave Dolly’s. As soon as there was trouble, I should’ve realized Cypress would put himself in harm’s way. He always does. Never knows when to quit. Never thinks he can.
I was the one supposed to keep him safe, and maybe the old me could have. I told Dolly I would. I told him I would. That was our deal.
You’ll take care of him for me, won’t you? You and the little bird.
Another time I didn’t do right. Another time I wasn’t where I was supposed to be. Another time when I didn’t hold up my responsibilities.
“Cypress.” I resist the urge to nudge him as I sit in the wooden chair I’ve kept next to the bed. “Cy, I need you to wake up. Don’t leave, okay? I can’t… I need you to wake up and talk to me.”
He doesn’t move. Doesn’t show any sign at all that he hears me, but just in case…
“There’s things I need to tell you,” I say to him, hoping that’s tempting enough to keep him here. “But you gotta wake up first.”
Nothing.
I try again and again over the next several hours, tracking his pulse with a silver watch in my hand until I finally let sleep take me, too.
When it does, I dream I’m running again. Looking back at everything I’ve lost.