Dream Country (26 page)

The boots came crunching through the snow, and then they stopped. Just a few feet away, so close he could hear the person’s breathing, in the exact spot where the Guardian had been standing a moment ago, the perfect vantage point for trying to peer through the woman’s windows.

Peeping Tom,
the Guardian thought derisively: Although he had his reasons for wanting to gather information, this new watcher was just a voyeur, standing very still, getting off on peeking into the woman’s bedroom.

After a brief interlude, the watcher walked back the way he came—so focused on the curtained window, he hadn’t noticed human tracks leading into the brush. Typical, the Guardian thought. He had left trails everywhere, evidence right out in the open, and they’d found only a fraction of it. In time, they would find more.

Shivering in the cold, he knew it was time to go. He slept in the barn some nights, in the basement of the big house on others. But he had his main camp set up on the nearby cliff, his tent pitched and his stove ready to fire. Just thirty feet up a gently sloping mule track, the Guardian had the best lookout a person could want. Oversee the ranch, the herd, the people, everything. His museum.

Keep watch.

He liked to be able to see his museum. That was important to him, his collection of artifacts. A little of this, a little of that. From his lair, he could see the whole display. And they all could see him, if they’d just decide to look up.

He yawned, feeling tired and hungry and ready to crawl into his bedroll, but first he had another mission. The Guardian wanted to follow the other tracks, the ones made by the other watcher. It had to be someone who lived on or near the ranch; wouldn’t it be interesting to find out who that might be? Peeping at the good rancher and his lovely ex-wife?

Good night, Mother and Father. Good night, happy family.

Look up, assholes.

Chapter Twenty-Five

T
he logging road ran through a deep ponderosa pine forest. Sometimes the road would break free of the trees and climb, and from the hill’s crest, the woods looked endless and black and full of secrets. The surface had been packed dirt at first, then gravel, and now a rough black pavement that sounded loud under the tires. During the night, while David drove and Sage slept with her head resting against the door, they crossed the border from Nebraska into Wyoming.

She must have known, even in her sleep. Dreaming of home, of her parents and brother, Sage had felt dizzy with joy. They were all on horseback, galloping across the range, holding hands in an unbreakable formation. When she woke up, dappled sunlight was coming through the pine boughs. Without sitting up straight, she turned her head and looked at David.

“We’re almost there, aren’t we?” she asked.

“Wyoming’s a big state,” he said.

“We’re in Wyoming?”

“We’re here.”

Struggling to come fully awake, she peered out the window. The scenery looked the same as yesterday: thick trees everywhere. David must have traveled this remote road before, because most people would have gotten lost fifty miles ago. Sage’s mouth felt dry, and she wished they had something cold to drink. The baby must have felt her anticipation—being in the land of her birth and her father—because he began bouncing up and down.

“Whoa,” she said, grabbing her belly.

“What’s wrong?” David asked.

“Nothing. He’s just playing.”

“They don’t play,” he said.

“Babies?”

“Before they’re born,” he said. “They’re just floating around inside.”

“How do you know?”

David didn’t answer, and his silence had weight and impact. Glancing over at him, Sage was glad to see that he had washed his face. Last night, after they had been driving for about half an hour, he had stopped to add his eighth and ninth dots—representing Jamie and Maisie, his latest savings. While Sage slept, he must have wiped all the marks off. He was glowering at the road ahead, his shoulders heavy with some invisible burden.

“Are you mad?” Sage asked.

“No. Leave me alone.”

“That’s a little hard, considering—ow!” Sage said, feeling the baby give her a double-footed kick. David cast a scathing look at her belly, as if he wished it—or she—would disappear. Sage felt an unmistakable shiver of fear. Here she was, on a deserted logging road in the wilderness, with a person who, last night, had drawn dots and lines all over his face.

“Where’s your father’s ranch?” he asked, as if he wished it was around the next corner and he could drop her off.

“The town’s called Solstice Falls,” Sage said. “I have the exact address—”

“I know those falls.” David cut her off. “I’ve camped up there.”

“Why are you mad at me?” Sage asked. “We were friends last night. You let me name the dogs. What’s wrong?”

David shook his head. As she stared at him, she could see shadows of the lines he had drawn. He wasn’t actually frowning—but the rubbed-off lines were slanted down, giving him the appearance of a bad mood, a mean streak. She must have been staring for a long time, because he finally looked over at her.

“What?” he asked.

“What did you mean yesterday?” she asked quietly.

“About what?”

“About being the messenger between realms.” Just saying the strange phrase made her feel self-conscious and afraid. “What does that mean, anyway?”

“That was last night.”

“I know, but I’ve been wondering ever since you said it. What realms?”

“Sssh.” He steered around a fallen branch.

“What’s the tradition?”

“Don’t talk about it now,” he said. “While the sun’s up. It’s better to wait till dark.”

Sage gathered the kittens around her. She began to feel spooked, in a way she probably should have last night. There she’d been, driving up a stranger’s driveway with a madman with paintings on his face, getting shot at by a man whose dogs she had just set free. The thing was, last night it had all made sense—they had been doing good deeds, saving helpless animals. Last night, the lines on David’s face had reminded her of the Native American motifs her mother worked with.

But today—he seemed so angry. He was driving too fast, skidding around fallen trees, upsetting the animals in back. Sage thought of her mother, the Shoshone designs she used—evoking the spirits of bears, owls, loons, and caribou.

“When you marked your face last night,” Sage said, “were you calling up the spirits of the dead?”

David looked shocked, then apprehensive. “How do you know?”

“My mother’s an artist. She does it, too. I recognized the dots and lines.”

“Maybe I was,” he said.

“But which ones?” she asked. “Which spirits?”

David looked around, giving Sage the idea they were being watched as they traveled through the forest. David shivered, and Sage caught it: The hair on her arms stood on end. Two of the dogs began to whimper, and Sage felt as if she had just invited a ghost into the car.

“Not during the day,” he said. “I told you—they don’t like it.”

“Tonight, then?” she asked. He was making her afraid, but one of Sage’s main qualities was an insatiable curiosity; she had braved many fearsome things to find the answers to her questions.

“You’re just going to leave, anyway,” he said. “What’s the difference why I do things? Why even ask me?”

“We can still be friends, right?”

He brushed the air with his hand, making an impatient noise. “Why say that?” he asked. “You’ll go live on the ranch, and I’ll keep driving around. I don’t exactly have a phone in the car. What’re you going to do—write me care of General Delivery?”

“I’ve had a long-distance relationship with my father since I was four,” she said. “I don’t forget people easily.”

“We just met. You’ll forget.”

Sage tugged her necklace out of her shirt and leaned across the seat to put it in his face. She made him touch the amulet, run his thumb over the two faces. “I don’t show this to just anyone,” she said. “But I showed it to you, remember? I let you hold it.”

“People do a lot of things,” he said. One of the dogs had started barking, as if she was really hungry or had to go to the bathroom. David pulled over into a clearing, and began the ritual of feeding the animals. Sage watched him for a while, then got out to help. His eyes looked tight, and his shoulders were tense as he settled down with an armful of kittens.

“I really don’t show my necklace to anyone,” Sage said, sitting beside him and taking two of the kittens. The ground was cold and hard. “Maybe four people altogether.”

“Four people,” David said, as if that was a large number.

“You, my mother, my aunt, and Ben.”

“The father.”

Sage nodded, clearing the nipple so the kitten could get more milk. Maisie would be next. She felt David watching her. For a man on the road, a rescuer of animals, he seemed very young and vulnerable, someone who’d been left. Sage knew how it felt to be left—she had been left by her brother, by her father, and by Ben. It was more than an event in a person’s life. It was all-encompassing, a way of being, who you were. David had been left; Sage would have bet her necklace on it.

“So we can be friends after you drop me off at the ranch,” she said, watching his face.

“What makes you think I want to?” David asked unkindly, but the fight was gone from his voice.

“You made me a dot.”

“Excuse me?”

“On your face. Last night—I was one of the dots, things you’ve saved.”

“Yeah, well—”

“We’ll stay friends. You don’t just abandon someone you’ve rescued.”

“Some people do,” he said harshly.

“Not you,” Sage hesitated, then reached over to touch his shoulder, take his rough hand. He let her hold it, and they held hands while managing to balance the nursing kittens between them.

“No?”

“You’re not that kind of person,” Sage said.

David snorted. He had mucus running from his nose, and tears from his eyes. It was fluid and terrible, and he didn’t seem able to stop it. The dogs had finished eating, and one by one they began to climb back in the car. Sage reached in her pocket, but she didn’t have a tissue. She offered her sleeve, hoping to make him laugh, but he didn’t even smile.

He just sat there on the hard ground, crying into the kittens’ fur. Sage held on to his hand; she wouldn’t have let go for anything. Maisie snuggled against her thigh. The sun hid behind the trees, and she tried to judge how far it had to go before it set. Many hours. Usually she didn’t wish the days away, but right now she couldn’t wait for night.

They would have driven many miles by then, and they’d be that much closer to her father’s ranch. And once the sun was down, once darkness had fallen, David might be willing to tell her about the tradition of being a messenger between realms. Maybe he’d tell her about the spirit he’d been trying to call by painting his face.

Sage could tell him more about her family—about her mother and father, about her twin brother, Jake.

“We should go,” David said, gazing down the long road ahead at the exact instant that Sage, starting to push herself up off the ground, spoke.

“We should go.” The words fell from Sage’s lips at the same time as David’s, as if they were speaking lines from the same play, completely in sync, being directed and spiritually guided by someone from beyond. The coincidence seemed funny to Sage, but David didn’t laugh.

He offered his hand, to pull her up. Sage thanked him, but he didn’t reply. The sun slanted through the thick pines, and Sage shivered—from something scary that was coming from inside David. Something had happened to him last night, something that Sage didn’t understand. His eyes looked hard, as if going to the puppy farm had brought back a terrible memory.

Crossing her fingers, Sage tried to remember that name . . . the Shoshone name her mother used to say, such a long time ago Sage could hardly remember, the name to call upon whenever one needed courage the most.

Wesh
. . . Sage thought.
Wash
. . .

The name was right there, on the edge of her memory and the tip of her tongue, just out of reach. Taking a deep breath, she held the kittens on her lap while David drove them down the lonely road. They were in Wyoming, on their way to her father’s ranch. It wouldn’t be long now.

We’re almost there,
she whispered silently to her baby while David gripped the wheel in silence.
Almost there
. . .

Daisy and James sat at the table in her small house, drinking coffee. The curtains were open to the mountain, and they watched snow clouds slide down from the north. Herds of migrating elk and antelope followed the trails south, just ahead of the bad weather. Observing nature seemed safer than talking, so they sat by the fire, staying quiet as long as they could.

“Where do you think she is?” Daisy asked, when she couldn’t hold it in any longer.

“Somewhere safe,” James said. “On a bus, coming here to us.”

Daisy bit her lip, wishing that were true. “She hopped a freight train. The night before she left, she capsized in a canoe. She takes risks—”

“So do we.” James squeezed her hand. “We always have.”

Daisy wished that made her feel better. “I know.”

“When did you find out she was pregnant?” James asked.

“After she left. I found the test.”

“She didn’t tell you?”

“No,” Daisy said, her voice small.

“And that’s why she left?”

“She wants to see you—”

“I know,” James said. “But I’ve always been here. Why right now?”

“We fought,” Daisy said. “Not a lot, but sometimes. She wanted me to be different, the way she thought I used to be. More fun, more adventurous. She wanted to go out west, and she wanted me . . .”

James waited, not blinking as he stared across the old wood table.

“To want to, too,” Daisy continued. “She used to look at our yard, and ask, ‘Can it be any more suburban?’ ”

“You didn’t want to come?” James asked, running his index finger over the back of her hand. Daisy had felt liquid since they’d ridden to the falls, and she wasn’t sure she’d ever get her center back.

“I was trying to be a good mother,” Daisy said. “I thought we belonged at home.”

“This was your home,” James said. “Once you left, you never thought about it that way?”

Daisy closed her eyes. “I was afraid to.”

“Afraid of what?”

“That we’d have to come back,” Daisy said, eyes closed. “If I missed it too much.”

“And you didn’t want to?”

She shook her head. “No.”

“You never used to be afraid.” Now he stopped tracing her skin. He clasped her entire hand in his and held it until she opened her eyes. He was sitting across from her in a T-shirt, and she gazed up his chest to his broad shoulders and finally to his face. He hadn’t shaved that morning, and she saw that he had gray in his dark stubble. But his face was still as lean and handsome as ever, and Daisy thought it was poignant and strange and somehow confusing to be having this conversation with the man who had been her husband.