Chapter 21 Bastien — Day 55
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The caliche road threw up its usual pale dust when he turned in off the county blacktop.
The sun sat low on the west ridge, that flat West Texas light that made every fence post iron.
He'd been driving since Fort Stockton. The truck cab still held some of the plane's cold, leftover chill from a concourse where he'd sat too long with coffee that didn't taste like coffee, and now the air through the open window smelled like creosote and cut hay and the faint metallic tang the barn always carried after a hot day.
He saw her before she saw him.
Mara was at the pasture fence east of the barn, one hand flat on Vespers' shoulder, saying something to the mare that made her ears cup forward.
Her braid hung down her back, sun-streaked and undone at the tail.
Even from the truck he could see the shape of her — the long line of her spine, the set of her shoulders, the way she held her weight easy on one hip, one boot cocked in the dust.
He'd been away three days. It felt longer than that.
He killed the engine.
She turned.
She'd already started walking before her hand fully left the mare, and by the time he'd stepped down out of the cab and shut the door she was in front of him with the same steady, unhurried gait she had for everything.
“Hey,” she said.
“Hey.”
Her hand came up. She laid her palm flat against his cheek — warm, dry, the small cool line of an old scar cutting across the base of it — and she looked at him.
She didn't ask if he was fine. She didn't ask about the flight.
She stood there with her hand on his face and her gray-green eyes searching his, and after a moment her mouth went quiet at the corners the way it did when she'd found what she was looking for and didn't like it.
“Something's wrong,” she said.
He tried to make his face say the thing his mouth was afraid to. He didn't manage it. He let his shoulders drop.
“I need to tell you something,” he said.
She didn't move her hand. She didn't step back. She held his eye and nodded once, small.
“Tell me at dinner.”
“Mara —”
“Tell me at dinner,” she said again, and this time she smiled a little, and the smile was the reason he'd come back. “You've been in a truck for six hours and a plane before that. Wash up. Eat first. Whatever it is, it'll still be there over the coffee.”
He nodded. He couldn't do anything else.
She took her hand away. He felt where it had been, cool now, and she reached down and slid her fingers through his for one second only — quick, private, all business the way affection was for her — and then she was walking back toward the house, and he was left to bring his duffel in from the truck bed.
He stood a moment longer at the tailgate. The sun was almost down. Roman had come to the fence and was watching him the way that horse watched everyone. He set his hand flat on the tailgate metal, still warm from the drive, and made himself breathe.
Opal fed them like she thought they'd both been starving.
Chicken and rice and the last of the tomatoes from Cassia's back garden, and a small brown loaf of the rosemary bread on the board between them, still warm.
She set it down and looked at him once, hard, the way she'd been looking at him for weeks now, and then she said, “eat,” and left them to it.
Mara ate the way she did everything—no waste, no fuss, one thing at a time.
Thayer was down at the bunkhouse. Rafe and Orin had gone into town for the Sunday late show and wouldn't be back for hours.
It was just the two of them at the long kitchen table with the yellow lamp on and the window open to the cooling dark.
He tried once between the chicken and the bread.
“Mara.”
She looked up. Fork halfway to her mouth. Waiting.
He opened his mouth. He'd rehearsed it. He'd rehearsed it on the plane and in the truck and in the shower before he'd sat down, and every version in his head had begun with the same six words.
My real name is Bastien Lorne. Six words.
He could hear them. He could feel the shape of them behind his teeth.
Nothing came out.
She waited.
“The bread,” he said finally. “It's better than usual.”
Her eyes stayed on his a moment. She didn't call him on it. She'd been called on enough things in her life to know when to press and when to leave the door on the latch. She nodded and said, “she put more rosemary. She's showing off because she knows you like it.”
“I do.”
“I know you do.”
He tried again after they'd cleared the plates.
He was at the sink and she was drying, and she handed him a clean plate to stack, and he took it and set it down and said, “I —” and then he stopped.
She'd turned to look at him and the yellow lamp was on her hair and her cheek and the faint line at the corner of her mouth where she smiled in her sleep, and he couldn't do it.
He couldn't do it standing in her father's kitchen holding one of her father's plates.
“You what,” she said.
“Nothing. I forgot what I was going to say.”
She looked at him a long moment. He watched her decide, again, not to push.
“All right,” she said. She took the plate from him and set it in the cupboard. “Come sit on the porch a while.”
They went out. She had one leg pulled up and her arm around her knee, and he sat on the top step with his back against the post.
“Vespers is off in the near hind,” she said.
“How bad.”
“Not bad. She stepped wrong in the arena Tuesday. Thayer's wrapping it cold.”
“Good.”
“Hay's coming in from the east field tomorrow. Sooner than we thought.”
“I'll help load.”
“You just got back.”
“I'll help load.”
She looked at him sideways. She let him have that one.
“Rafe patched the mudroom door,” she said. “Did it himself. It's actually creditable work.”
“He's got hands.”
“He does. He just doesn't like anyone knowing it.”
They watched the last of the light go out of the sky. She didn't once bring him back to the thing at the truck.
She was giving him the room to find it. That was worse.
When she went in, she stopped in the doorway and looked at him over her shoulder.
“You know where I sleep,” she said.
“I know.”
“Whenever you're ready.”
“I know.”
She went upstairs.
He listened to her feet on the boards above him, the small pause where she took off her boots at the top of the stairs, the door that never quite latched right. Then the house went still.
He didn't go up.
He went to the downstairs guest room, the one he'd used after the bunkhouse fire and returned to on the nights shame made the stairs toward Mara feel impossible.
A small desk sat under the window, its green blotter ringed by old coffee marks, a mason jar of pens beside it.
He knew the top drawer stuck and the chair squeaked at the third leg.
Around midnight, yard light fell across the blotter in a pale rectangle.
He turned on the desk lamp.
He took a sheet of the plain ranch paper Old Man Vale had bought in bulk a long time ago — there was still half a ream of it in the bottom drawer — and he uncapped a pen and wrote at the top of the page, in the small careful hand a nun in a Montreal schoolroom had made him practice until his P's and B's stopped listing to the right:
Mara — my real name is Bastien Renaud Lorne, and I am so sorry.
He looked at that.
He put the pen down.
He looked at it again.
It was a strange thing to see his true name written in her house, on her paper, above an apology he hadn't yet earned the right to make.
The next sentence had to be there is a company in Toronto called Lorne Ascend, and my brother ran it, and my brother died in August, and the chair fell to me and I ran from it.
Then: I didn't come here to lie to you. I came to disappear, and I found you, and I let myself forget I was disappearing.
The last sentence had to be the one he still couldn't write—the truth about her hand on his cheek and the fact that no one had touched his face in years without wanting something from it.
He picked the pen up.
He set the pen down.
He wrote nothing more.
After a long time he folded the sheet in three, the neat thirds his mother had taught him for a proper letter, and laid it inside one of the plain white envelopes Old Man Vale had also bought in bulk a long time ago, and he didn't seal it.
He slid open the top drawer of the desk.
Two old bank pens in it, a rubber band, and a receipt from the Alpine feed store dated the year he'd been in graduate school.
He placed the envelope on top of the receipts and slid the drawer shut.
He turned off the lamp.
He sat in the dark a while.
His phone rang at two minutes past midnight.
He knew who it was before he looked. Only one person in the world dialled him at that hour anymore, and she'd been dialling him at that hour for two months.
He picked up.
“Mother.”
There was a small breath on the other end that wasn't quite a word.
“Son,” she said. “Are you all right.”
Her voice was thin. He'd heard it that thin twice in his life — the day the boat had gone over in Georgian Bay when he was nine, and the day the phone had rung about Julien in August. He heard it that thin now, and something in his own chest that had been carefully held for a long time slid loose.
He didn't answer.
“Bastien.”
“I'm here.”
“Are you all right.”
He sat on the edge of the guest-room bed in the dark.
The window was open. Somewhere out past the barn a coyote spoke once, was answered, and went quiet.
He looked down at his own bare feet on the pine boards and he tried to find the answer she wanted and the answer that was true, and for the first time in months the two lined up.
“No, mother,” he said. “I'm not.”