CHAPTER 1 #2
“Coffee or tea,” Marta said from the kitchen. “You choose.”
“Tea. Please.”
I heard the kettle move to the burner. I walked out onto the porch and down the steps and around the side of the house.
There was a stone-lined bed of zinnias in bloom against the west wall — reds and rusts and a hot pink that had no business existing in nature — and past them a rock wall to the yard, and past that the wide dirt bay where the horse barn stood.
I walked out to it. One stall gate stood open.
The stall was empty. Fresh hay under the manger.
A blue nylon lead rope hung on a peg by the door.
At the far end of the barn a tack room. Saddle stands. A wall of bridles. And on the wall between them, hung neatly on a leather strap, a set of gelding shoes worn thin on the outside heel.
I stood in the doorway of the barn a minute longer than I meant to. I touched nothing. Then I walked back out into the sun.
Past the barn the country rolled west in a series of long shoulders, dry gold with new June green at the crown of each rise, and past the shoulders a treeline — Douglas fir, the near-black wall of them — and past the treeline a ridge, and past the ridge more ridges, going away into the haze in a stack that made my sternum feel like it had been asked to carry something.
Forty-two city blocks.
From that fence line to that treeline.
I stopped counting in blocks.
I did not know how long I stood there. Long enough that when I turned back to the house Marta was on the porch with a mug in each hand, waiting.
She did not wave. She did not call. She sat down in the rocking chair that was not Warren's rocking chair and put my mug on the little painted table between the chairs and looked west, herself, the way people do when they have looked west from a porch every evening of a life.
I went up the porch steps. I took the mug. Chamomile. Honey. A wedge of lemon.
“Thank you,” I said.
“You did not eat on the plane.”
“I did not.”
“There is chicken. When you can eat.”
“Thank you.”
She rocked once. Twice. The wood of the runner made a low sound on the boards.
“The horse,” I said. My voice came out steadier than I had expected. “There's an empty stall.”
“Copper,” she said.
“Where is he.”
“On the fence line. He rides most mornings.”
I did not ask he. I sipped the tea.
“You will be at the house tonight,” she said. It was not a question. “The upstairs guest room. West window. It gets the last light. I made the bed this morning.”
“Thank you.”
“You are safe to sleep.”
I looked at her. She was not looking at me. She was looking west. Her hands were folded around her own mug and her thumb was moving over the ceramic in a small unconscious circle, the way my thumb moved over my own palm.
“I know,” I said.
She nodded once as if I had confirmed a thing she had already decided.
We drank the tea. Neither of us spoke again for a while.
The sun dropped. The Bitterroots went from gold to rose to a color I did not have a word for — the color of a coal that has stopped glowing but has not stopped being hot.
To the east, over the far peaks, thunderheads had started stacking in the last hour: pale gray, cathedral-tall, the shoulders lit from underneath by a sun that was already below my ridge.
I watched them build. I watched them build for a long time.
They did not cross the ridge. They did not release. They stood over there and held their weather to themselves, the way a person holds an argument in the mouth and does not spend it.
(There is a storm somewhere that is not coming here.)
Marta set her mug down. She got up out of the chair with the precise care of knees whose limits she knew exactly. She patted my shoulder once as she passed — light, one pat, the way a nurse pats a patient — and went inside. The screen door tapped shut behind her.
I sat.
The sky over the east peaks went from pale to plum.
The thunderheads gave up their light in the same minute the ridge in front of me lost its edge.
Somewhere off in the yard a horse blew air through its nose — not the empty stall's horse, not near enough for that, an animal I could not see.
A cricket started up under the porch boards, first one of the year, its stitching thin and hopeful.
I had been in this state for eight hours.
I thought about my mother. I thought about the paper directions on the passenger seat. I thought about the fact that my phone had not caught signal in twenty-six miles.
I thought about the empty stall.
I thought about the ridge west of the barn where the country stacked away in shoulders under haze that smelled, faintly, from up here, of a fire burning in another state.
I did not think anything else. Not consciously. My ribs settled around a sentence I did not choose:
Nobody knows exactly where I am tonight.
It landed in my sternum with the weight of a hand pressing gently on it — not urgent, not frightening, but a weight — and stayed.
I did not lift the mug for a full minute after that.
The tea had gone from warm to only warmish, and then to the temperature of the night air, which was still 78 degrees and would drop to 58 by dawn according to the pilot's cheerful bulletin an hour before landing.
West, the treeline had gone entirely dark. The porch chair beside me was empty. I looked at the chair for a second. Then I looked back west.
(He is on the fence line. He rides most mornings.)
Somewhere out there, past the horse barn, past the pasture, past the shoulder of ground I could no longer see, a man I had not met was on horseback with a rifle and a decision to make.
I did not know that yet — not with any certainty — and I did not know that I knew it.
It sat in me the way the weight had sat in my sternum: without permission, without evidence, without a memo to warrant it.
I sat with it until the first stars came out over the ridge.
Then I got up. Then I carried the mug inside. Then I climbed the stairs to a room that was not mine, in a house that was not mine, and I stood at the west window and looked west one more time before I let the shade down.
The country stayed where it was. It did not narrow to fit me. The chair on the porch stayed empty. The unmet stranger stayed unmet.
His name would not reach me until the next day.
And still — before I put my head down on a pillow that smelled of sun-dried linen and Marta's soap — I understood, in a way I could not have named to anyone in Denver, that the porch chair beside mine had been empty in a specific shape. It had been empty in the shape of someone.