“You plan anything else for me while you were at it?”
“If I had a son, we would’ve arranged a marriage,” Fletcher said.
“He made that bit up,” Lynn added, and Lucy felt her face flush at the fact that they were sharing a joke at a time when she felt like crying.
“Lucy.” Fletcher edged Terra Cotta closer to Spatter, and the two horses nickered to each other. “You started this without me; no reason to think you can’t finish it in the same manner.”
Her anger melted into tears and she gave in to the lump in her throat, allowing it to find release through a choked sob. “It’s not that I’m scared of going on without you. I’m losing you, don’t you get that? You’re gone, just like everyone else.”
Fletcher put a hand on her shoulder, one of the few times he’d touched her. “Losing people, that’s something I understand right down to my soul.” He leaned forward in the saddle and she slumped against him, crying so hard Spatter turned his head to glance at her quizzically, which only made it worse.
Lynn nudged Mister over to them, holding a water bottle out to Lucy. “You’re wasting your water,” she said.
“You would be practical right now,” Lucy said, pulling back from Fletcher and taking the bottle.
“Somebody has to be,” Lynn said, doing an exaggerated eye roll toward both Fletcher and Lucy.
Fletcher smiled back and tipped his hat. “So,” he said. “Sand City?”
Lynn patted the map tucked inside her pocket. “Seems that way.”
“Maybe I’ll . . .” He trailed off, an uncharacteristic blush spreading across his features. “Maybe I’ll find my way back there someday.”
“Maybe that’d be all right,” Lynn said, and Lucy could see the muscles in her jaw twitching in an effort to stop a full-fledged smile.
Fletcher had no such compunction, and his ear-to-ear flashed once again before he spurred Terra Cotta and they headed north.
Lucy’s sorrow was lost in a sudden rush of curiosity. “Shit, Lynn, how much talking did you two do?”
But Lynn had already urged Mister into a trot, and Spatter hurried to catch up.
Lynn had called it “the nothing” long before they reached it, a land where even the brush tapered off and the red rocks reached for the sky. The mountains had frightened Lucy with their vastness; their towering heights had persevered for thousands of years, reminding her she was a breath on the wind. The desert made her feel like even that breath was stolen, and the dust filling her lungs taunted her with the reality that one day she’d be reduced to the same.
The highway stretched to the horizon, an unbroken black strip that burned so hot in the afternoons the heat shimmer reached upward for miles. The landscape was equally monotonous, the stray breezes blowing up dust storms to compete with the mirages. The only thing that broke the view was the marching electrical poles, skeletons from a different world whose veins had been emptied of their power long ago.
Lucy reined in Spatter next to Mister and looked to Lynn, wondering why she had stopped. But the other woman’s eyes were rooted on the horizon, focused on nothing. “Lynn? What are you thinking?”
Lynn startled and seemed to struggle to focus on Lucy. “Just this—
“And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.”
“I think I like Walt Whitman better,” Lucy said.
“You would.”
Spatter and Mister ducked their heads low in the heat, their noses leading the party to the ever farther springs of water, some of them nothing more than a brackish trickle. For nearly a week after Fletcher had left their company Lynn kept her mouth shut, and Lucy knew she was waiting for her to make the right choice and unburden the horses. Her silence made Spatter’s nickering all the more precious. She twirled his rough hair in her fingers while she rode, putting off the inevitable for as long as she could. She was so focused on every aspect of Spatter—the sound of his hooves, the feel of his movements underneath her—she didn’t notice the speck on the horizon behind them until Lynn pointed it out.
“You’re lost in your head over there,” the older woman said.
Jerked from her reverie, Lucy was suddenly very aware she hadn’t spoken since they’d saddled up that morning. “Sorry,” she said, clearing her throat of the dust first. “Just thinking.”
“I’m not pointing it out for the sake of talk,” Lynn said. “There’s been someone behind us for a good two hours, and you’ve not spotted him.”
Lucy turned in her saddle, shading her eyes against the harsh midday sun. There was a black figure, barely discernable among the heat shimmer. “You’re sure it’s a person?”
“I been watching. Wasn’t much more than a dot, but he’s moving faster than us.”
“So he’s mounted?”