Chapter 17 #2
Porter did not call. Of course he did not call.
She had told him twice that he got nothing, and he had believed her, and in nine days her phone did not once have his name on it — which she noticed every single day, and which was, she understood by about the third day, the last test either of them was ever going to run.
Reid came up on the thirty-first about the windsock, which did not need anything.
"Big week," he said.
"It was."
"You going to be all right?"
Tess thought about how to answer that honestly, and found there was only one honest version.
"I think I'm going to be married," she said.
Reid Danvers looked out at the meadow for a second and then nodded.
"Well," he said. "The meadow's the meadow."
The trip went out on the second of August, eight clients, six days, and it went to hell on the fourth.
A man named Ackerley — sixty, fit, careful, doing everything right — put a foot in a hole on the scree below the pass at four in the afternoon and broke his ankle in two places.
It was a bad one. Not life-threatening; worse than that in some ways, because a life-threatening injury gets a helicopter and a broken ankle above treeline in weather does not.
And there was weather. There had been weather all afternoon and it was closing from the southwest, and Tess stood on that scree with a man on the ground and seven other clients standing around being useless and did the arithmetic she had spent twenty years learning how to do.
Toni was on the far side of the divide with the second string and was not reachable and would not be until Wednesday. Tate was nineteen. There was no helicopter until the cloud lifted and the forecast said it would not lift until Thursday.
She got Ackerley splinted, on a horse, and down four miles of bad country in four and a half hours with a nineteen-year-old and a schoolteacher from Longmont who turned out to be worth all the rest of them.
They came off the trail at the north trailhead at a quarter past one in the morning.
And the north trailhead is fourteen miles by road from Elkhorn, on the wrong side, and Tess's truck and trailer were at the south one, where they had gone in.
She stood in the dark at the edge of a gravel lot with a man on a horse who needed a hospital, seven exhausted clients, nine head, and no vehicle.
She had one bar of signal.
She sat down on a rock and put her head in her hands for about fifteen seconds, which was all she could afford, and did the list.
The county. It was not a rescue anymore — she had done the rescue; she needed a truck.
She could call the county anyway and they would come and it would take two hours to raise anybody and it would be a fire crew out of Steamboat at three in the morning for a job that any man with a flatbed could do.
Reid. Reid was ninety minutes away in Hayden and did not have a stock trailer.
A neighbor. She had four numbers and every one of them was a rancher who would be asleep and would come, and would take an hour and a half, and would spend the next ten years being the man who came.
She sat on the rock in the dark.
She had not asked anybody for anything since the thirtieth of October. She understood that completely, sitting there — that she had spent nine months building a life in which nobody could ever again be somewhere else when she called, by the simple method of never calling.
And there was a truck three and a half hours away and a man who would be in it in four minutes.
Tess Thayer looked at her phone for a long moment.
Then she called her husband.
He answered on the first ring.
"Which trailhead," Porter said.
He was there at ten to five in the morning with the flatbed and the stock trailer behind it, having driven three and a half hours in a hundred and fifty minutes, which she did not ask about then or ever.
He did not get out and say anything about the phone call. He did not say you called me. He got out and said, "Where's the injury," and went straight to Ackerley.
They loaded the horses. He drove Ackerley and the schoolteacher to Steamboat and came back for the rest of them; Tate took the clients in a neighbor's van at six.
By seven in the morning there were nine head in the corral at Elkhorn and a man in a cast in a hospital and eight clients drinking coffee in a parking lot in town telling each other the story they would tell for the rest of their lives.
At half past eight the yard at Elkhorn was empty and quiet, and Tess and Porter were standing in it, filthy, in the light.
"There's a horse with a cut hock," he said.
"I saw it."
"You want me to—"
"Porter."
He stopped.
She was so tired she could feel the ground moving.
"I called you," she said.
"I know."
"That's the whole thing. That's the entire thing. I have not asked one person for one thing since October and I sat on a rock at one in the morning and I called you."
He did not move toward her. He stood eight feet away in the yard with mud to his knees and let her say it.
"And you didn't say anything about it," Tess said. Her voice went. "You've driven all night and you didn't say one word about it. You said which trailhead."
"That's all there was to say."
"I know," she said. "I know that's all there was. That's why I'm—"
And then she could not finish, so she crossed the eight feet instead.
He caught her. That was all he did at first — he got his arms around her and held on and did not kiss her and did not say anything, and she put her face into a filthy jacket that smelled of horse and diesel and stood in her own yard and shook.
It went on a while.
"Okay," she said finally, into his collar.
"Okay."
"I want to be clear that this is not — I've got things to say and they're important and I'm going to say all of them."
"Tess," Porter said, "I have been awake for twenty-six hours and I would very much like to not talk for about an hour."
She laughed against him, wetly, horribly.
"Come inside," she said.
They did not make it upstairs.
She had thought, in the ten days, in some corner of her head, that if this ever happened it would be careful — that there would be a conversation first, and terms, and that they would both be sober and rested and it would be a decision made in a chair.
It was nothing like that.
He had her against the wall of the mudroom before the door was shut, and she had a handful of his shirt and was pulling him down, and the whole thing had the quality of something that had been held under water for nine months and was now coming up.
"Wait—"
"No," she said.
"Tess, I'm filthy, you're—"
"I don't care."
"Okay," Porter said, and stopped arguing.
She got the jacket off him. He got the buttons of her shirt wrong and then right. Her hands were not steady and neither were his and there was a bad moment where she got her bad shoulder against the coat hooks and made a noise and he went absolutely still.
"That's not—" She got hold of his face. "That's the wall. Don't stop."
He did not stop.
They got as far as the front room. There was no fire because it was August; there was full daylight coming in the east windows at nine in the morning, and Tess found that she did not care about that either, that she wanted the light, that she had spent twelve years being made love to in the dark by a man who closed his eyes and she was finished with all of it.
She said, "Look at me."
"I am."
"You'd better."
He got her the rest of the way out of the shirt and put his mouth on the scar without being asked, and she got a hand into his hair and held him there for a second. It was faded now. Ten months. Silver-pink and flat, and he touched it the way you touch a thing that belongs to you.
"It's not ugly," he said, into her stomach.
"It's a little ugly."
"It's the most beautiful thing I've ever seen in my life and I'm not going to argue about it."
Then she pulled him up and kissed him and there was no more talking for a long time.
It was fast and then it was not.
The first time was against the arm of the couch and neither of them had the patience or the coordination for anything better; she got a leg up over his hip and he got his hands under her and after that it was simply a thing that was happening, hard and unlovely and completely necessary, with her hand fisted in the back of his shirt and his face in her neck saying something she could not hear.
She came almost immediately and was embarrassed about it for about two seconds.
"Don't you dare say anything."
"I wasn't going to."
"You were thinking it."
"I was thinking," Porter said, against her throat, "that I'm about forty seconds behind you and it's going to be humiliating for both of us."
It was thirty.
After, they slid down onto the rug in a heap, and she lay half on top of him with her cheek on his chest and both of them still mostly dressed and absolutely wrecked, and the sun came across the floor and got into her eyes and she did not move.
"I have to check that hock," she said, after a while.
"I know."
"In about an hour."
"Okay."
She slept for forty minutes, right there, and woke up with his hand moving slowly up and down her back, and the second time was completely different — slow, upstairs, in a bed, in the middle of the day with the window open and the whole valley making its August noise.
He took his time and she let him. She lay with her hands above her head and let a man look at her in full daylight for the first time in her adult life, and when he finally came into her she got her ankles crossed at the small of his back and held him there and said his name once, out loud, into his shoulder.
"Say it again," he said.
"No."
"Tess."
"Porter," she said, and felt him lose the rhythm entirely, and understood — with a kind of savage satisfaction she would think about for years — exactly how much power she had in that bed and exactly how long she had been declining to use it.