Cowboy Sing Me Home (35 page)

After the dreams came the
memories.  She’d learned over the years that it wasn’t necessarily easier, but
it was quicker, to just go ahead and let them.  Once she’d had the dream, the
baby and the waking nightmare surrounding that time would be with her for at
least the rest of the day, peeking over her shoulder, breathing down her neck,
waiting for a moment when her focus slipped, waiting to descend upon her.

For a long time, she’d been
unable to think of the baby in any other way than in the last way she saw her,
still, her skin cold like porcelain, long eyelashes resting on chubby cheeks. 
But over the years other images had blended their way back in, and these were
the ones Dusty remembered now.   The bizarre sight of her own stomach, bulging
and moving with the life inside it.  The surreal and completely right feel of
the baby being taken from her body, the first moment when her eyes met the
baby’s, and the instant of recognition and connection she’d felt with something
bigger than herself, bigger than all of them.  Sitting for hours at a time
while laundry piled up and dishes remained dirty, staring down at the curve of
her cheek, the soft bow of her lips as Anne-Marie slept against her chest.

The intensity of the joy,
and the fear, that came with loving for the first time in her young life. 

She didn’t want to remember
the rest, but that didn’t matter; she would remember.  So she took a deep
breath, and let those memories come, too.  Walking into Anne-Marie’s room that
morning.  Looking over the side of the crib, and knowing instantly something –
everything
– was wrong.  She froze in that moment, and even now she knew that she had
never completely thawed out.  Something in the center of her was still cold and
hard.  She’d looked down at the innocent, still form and something inside her
recognized the truth, though she wasn’t ready to deal with it.  Dusty had told
herself she was just watching, waiting for Anne-Marie’s stomach to rise and
fall with breath, waiting for her to stir.  She waited and watched for so long,
not blinking, not moving, until the world began to grow gray at the edges. 
“That’s it,” she’d thought.  “I’ll faint.  I’ll just faint, and never wake up,
and it’ll be okay.”

Except she didn’t faint,
because her husband – himself just barely out of his teens, too – had come in
the room then, taken one look at Dusty and known something was wrong.  He’d
rushed to the crib, snatched Anne-Marie up, crying and screaming until Dusty
couldn’t pretend any longer that everything was okay.  Until his screams had
started her own, and she’d been unable to stop.

She remembered her own
voice, screaming, alive and terrible, as if the horror were a separate beast
that lived in her throat and needed to get out.  She remembered collapsing to
the floor while her husband rushed around the house, calling an ambulance that
wouldn’t help anything, begging a God who’d already made his decision.

The memories, as always,
left her exhausted.  Her body felt heavy enough that she should fall through
the bed, fall through the floor, and on down into dark oblivion.  But instead
she clung to Luke, letting the steady rise and fall of his breath anchor her.

She lay awake, shaken by the
depth of her desire to wake him, to share this part with him, too.

I can share it with you,
and you won’t have to carry it alone anymore.

Could she share this with
him?  Would the pain and loss be halved, if he could join in it with her?  The
desire to do just that was so strong that she had to slip from under his arm
and get away.  She moved to a chair across from the bed and clasped her hands
around her knees to keep them from reaching for him.

She sat in the dark and
watched Luke sleep, and realized that she was standing on the precipice of a
decision – a decision she’d flirted with for the past few days.

Someone very stupid said
that time heals all wounds.  That was a lie.  But Dusty had to admit that, as
much as it hurt to think of Anne-Marie now, it didn’t compare to those first
months, first years following her death.  Her wounds were not healed, but she
had grown enough scar tissue to function again.

Too many scenes flashed
through her mind as she watched Luke sleep.  Singing with him, watching and
admiring as he worked the crowd at Tumbleweeds and at the Jubilee.  The easy
way he had of taking her hand or hugging her, of slipping right past all her
barriers.  The tender way he’d held her, the tears that had slid down his
cheeks as he hurt for her, with her. 

Time didn’t heal all her
wounds, but it did make them livable again.  The question was, was she ready to
take the chance on being wounded again?  Because along with the good memories
of the past week was the voice of Stevie, saying, “Luke has been shot.”

The minutes ticked by as
Luke slept and Dusty thought.  Finally she rose and quietly tugged on her
jeans.  She started to leave without a word, but at the last second she leaned
over his sleeping form, smoothing a lock of hair off his forehead.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered. 
“But I’ve had enough for this lifetime. I can’t do it again.”   

Carrying her boots, Dusty
tiptoed out of the house.

Luke woke in the dark with
the knowledge that something momentous had happened, though his sleepy brain
didn’t latch onto exactly what that something was.

            Everything was different
now.  Everything.

            He rolled over to fold her
back into his arms, to feel again her slim body wrapped in his.  He reached,
and kept reaching until he’d reached the edge of the bed.

            She was gone.

            He told himself she had just
gone to the bathroom, or into the kitchen for a drink of water.  But he knew
the instant his hand felt empty bed that she was gone.  He’d pushed too far. 
He’d pushed her away.

            Well, that was just too bad,
he decided as she swung his legs off the bed, instantly awake.  His right leg
was stiff, but it loosened up as he stalked around the room, jerking on his
jeans, boots and shirt.  He grabbed his keys off the table by the door, and
slammed it behind him.

            If she thought she was going
to sneak out in the middle of the night, she was in for a surprise.  He wasn’t
her ex-husband. He wasn’t just going to let her walk away without a word.  His
jaw clenched as he drove through the dark toward Trailertopia.  When he got
there, he was going to make good and damn sure she knew…

            What?  What was he going to
say when he got there?  That she had to stay and… and what?

            The closer he got to
Trailertopia, the slower he drove.  His anger gave way to uncertainty.  What
was he doing, racing out here half-cocked?  Even if she had stayed the night,
she was leaving tomorrow anyway.

            The thought left a heaviness
in his chest.  She was going to leave tomorrow, unless…

            He admitted to himself that
he’d thought their conversation was the ‘unless’.  He’d thought that his
breaking through her barriers was just what she needed to decide on her own
that she wanted to stick around. 

            And what?  The question came
again.  Was he really ready to take the leap and ask her to stay here, with
him? 

            It wouldn’t work.  He knew
it wouldn’t work. He could go out there and make a complete ass of himself but
she wouldn’t stay.  And even if she
did
stay, eventually things would
fall apart between them.  Things always fell apart.

            By the time he reached
Trailertopia, he was driving at a crawl.  His headlights led the way up the
hill, bouncing off the silent trailers in the park.

            Should he just turn around
and go back home?   That didn’t seem right, either.

            He would just check and make
sure she made it home okay, he told himself as his tires crunched over the
gravel road to her space.

            Her pickup was there, beside
her trailer.  She had run back to the safety of her own place.

            He pulled up beside and put his
pickup in park, but didn’t kill the engine.  He felt like a stalker.  Or an
idiot.

            It wouldn’t work, he thought
again when hope rose in his chest at the thought of storming inside and
sweeping her off her feet.  Unexpectedly he thought of the picture of his
parents, in love and in each other’s arms.  Then he thought of the way they
looked at each other now. 

            The vision of Dusty ever
looking at him with contempt and derision in her eyes stopped him cold. 

            He’d heard all his life that
there was a thin line between love and hate, but he’d never realized what that
meant until this moment.  He’d never hated anyone, but then he’d never really
loved anyone before, either.  The two emotions, he discovered, live side by
side at equal depth.  The only person who inspired that depth of emotion in him
was now locked inside her trailer, hiding from him.

            It would happen eventually. 
If, by some miracle, he convinced her to give up everything she held dear in
life, everything that she’d ever known, to trust him and take a chance on what
they felt for each other, eventually the intensity he felt for her would turn. 
And the beauty between them would be ruined, forever.

            He sat in his dark pickup,
staring at her trailer and wondering which was the bigger shame: to let her
walk away without a single protest, or convince her to stay and eventually ruin
what was the most significant relationship he could ever hope to have.

            He dropped his head and
scrubbed his scalp, torn.  From the corner of his eye saw a short flash of
light at the foot of the hill.

            He narrowed his eyes and
focused in that direction.  The sky was still too cloudy for any moonlight to
peek through, but the only thing in that direction was the Hammond place.  And
they were supposed to be in New Mexico.

            As he focused his eyes in
that direction, he began to make out the faintest outline of the house.  It
remained dark, and he began to think the flash of light had been his
imagination.  But as he watched the light flashed again, a thin beam that shot
out and back before he could make out the source.

            It
could
be Nate and
Julie, back from Ruidoso earlier than expected.  But he didn’t think so.

            He reached for the gun at
his hip and cursed when he realized that, in his haste to go after Dusty, he’d
left his gun at home.  If his hunch was correct and it was Broeker, Wayne and
Kenny down at the Hammond place, searching for the drive that Billy Dale had
found, he couldn’t go after them without a weapon for protection.  But he
didn’t have time to go home and get his gun, either.

            He struggled with the
decision, but in the end he did the only thing he could think to do.  He got
his cell phone out of the glove compartment, then popped the cover off the dome
light and unscrewed the bulb.  He opened the door, aware that any sound would
carry farther with the cloud cover.  He slid to the ground and walked softly up
to Dusty’s door.

            He hoped he could get her
attention without waking the entire lot, or alerting the intruders.  He tapped
on the door, then tapped again a moment later, his ear to the door and his eye
on the Hammond place.

            He heard movement inside,
and said as loudly as he dared through the door, “It’s me, Dusty.  Don’t turn
on the light.”

            He waited in silence a few
seconds, not sure if she’d heard.  He heard creaks as the trailer shifted
slightly with her movement.  “It’s me,” he said again.  “Don’t turn on the
light.  Just open the door.”

            Something shifted above his
head, and he looked up to see the curtain over the door move.

            The chain rattled as it slid
aside, and he stepped back as she pulled open the door and held the screen door
out for him.

            Evidently she’d picked up on
the caution in his voice, because as soon as she opened the door she said,
“What’s going on?” 

            “I think Wayne and his
friends are down at the Hammond’s house.  I need your – “ He stopped when he
saw the pistol she held at her side.  “I need that.”

            Without hesitation she
handed the gun to him.  “You’re not going down there alone.”

            He checked to make sure the
gun was loaded, then handed his phone to her.  “Call Toby and tell him what’s
going on.  He’ll be out here within five minutes.  His number is in the
memory.  And tell him to leave his lights off.  I don’t want to ruin the
surprise for them.”

            “Maybe you should wait until
he gets here.”

            “I don’t want to take a
chance on letting them get away.”  He stood on the step and gave her a quick
kiss.  “Stay inside and keep the door locked.”

            He was gone before she had a
chance to say anything, and as he moved away he heard her door lock and the
chain slide back into place.

            He stayed in the cover of
the trailers for as long as he could.  The night was dark enough he doubted he
could be seen, but he didn’t want to take any chances.