15
Abel lived for two days.
The EMT who stopped to help Beth carried several doses of epinephrine in his personal vehicle because his wife had severe allergies. Without him, Abel might have died on the side of the road. It took thirty-seven minutes for the ambulance to arrive.
A defibrillator resuscitated him. Oxygen revived him. An emergency surgery restored him. For two days.
For most of those fleeting forty-eight hours, Beth refused to leave her father’s side. She paced the waiting room during the five-hour surgery. When her family arrived, Levi scowled at Beth and Danny hugged her, but Rose refused to acknowledge her only daughter. The women hadn’t spoken and yet Rose knew, somehow had lashed together the outcome of the lawsuit and her husband’s heart attack in an inseparable cause-and-effect grip.
Beth locked herself in a hospital bathroom stall and cried until her eyes swelled shut.
After the procedure she stayed close but settled silently into the shadowy corners of rooms, where Rose would not object to her. Levi and Danny came and went. Dr. Roy, Jacob’s father and Abel’s lifelong friend, was the only other person permitted to visit.
Her father slept a great deal and had little energy for speaking while awake. Absence cost Beth her job at the supermarket, which seemed worthless now. The manager of the feed-and-tack, who’d done business with the Borzois for years, was more understanding and told her to come back when she could.
On Tuesday night, Beth’s body ached for lack of sleep and peace. In bursts of shallow rest she dreamed of tiny antelope grazing on the backs of gigantic wolves, grazing on tufts of gray fur. Their pronghorns were metallic, silvery, and shaped like a stethoscope’s binaural arms and ear tips. The wolves formed a long line and scaled a ski slope with graceful, sure feet, and not one antelope fell off their backs. Then the image fell away and her mind’s eye took an aerial perspective. The wolf line became distant beneath her, an indistinct line on a snowy, furry field. She soon recognized it as one of the distinctive brown rings around another antelope’s neck, which soon came into view.
She could see a reflection of herself on the surface of its enormous eyes. A wolf sat beside her, and she felt unafraid.
Beth’s eyes popped open. Her joints seemed locked at angles in the boxy wood-and-vinyl chair. She held this fixed position, waiting for her body to catch up with her mind before she tried to shift.
The hospital room was black save for a small night-light that cast a weak orange glow across her father’s bed. The heart monitor’s thin green lines created identical mountains in a long range, working silently so all could sleep. Her mother had crawled onto the bed against nurses’ orders. She lay with her back to Beth and her head on its own pillow, close to Abel.
Beth’s parents were murmuring in the low tones of physical weakness that didn’t have anything to do with the time of night, which was so still, so quiet, that she could hear every word.
“. . . time to find your old man,” her father was saying.
“You know we can’t,” said her mother.
“The years heal wounds.”
“Or deepen them.”
“You’ve scarred over, Rosy. Maybe he has too.”
Her mother’s silence magnified the difficulty Abel had drawing a breath.
“I don’t even know for sure where he is, or if he’s alive,” she said after a time.
“You haven’t wanted to know. I’ll bet he’s still in—”
“You’re right. I don’t want to know. He moved on—I’m the one who stayed. He knows where to find me if he wants to.”
“But now—”
“The writing is on the wall, Abel. It’s time to let the ranch go. We’ll sell it all, get this monkey off our backs, and still have enough to buy a quiet place where you can recover.”
Abel’s hair grated on the pillow as he turned his head toward his wife.
“Five generations, Rosy. That ranch is the only place in the world where I can recover.”
“It’s land, not life.”
“It’s our life. The life of . . . all those men. And Lorena now.”
“And what’s that worth to me if it kills you?” Rose pushed herself up onto one arm. From the shadows, Beth could see the tension in the gap between her parents, though they kept their voices low.
Her father seemed so weak. “Garner has the means—”
“Don’t ignore me, Abel. What will we do with this place if you leave us? Levi has no desire to fill your shoes—surely you see that? Danny would, but he’s so young. And Beth”—Rose glanced over and seemed satisfied by her stillness—“her poor judgment harms us all.”
“Rosy, Rosy.” He lifted his IV-injected hand an inch. “I think Garner said something similar about you once upon a time.”
True or not, the claim shut down the conversation. Rose got off the bed like an agile cat, quick and light, and left the room. Beth closed her eyes and pressed down on them with her fingertips.
“Beth, honey,” her dad said.
She feigned sleep.
“Find Garner Remke before your mother sells the ranch.”
Remke was her mother’s maiden name. Was Garner a brother? An uncle? She couldn’t ignore a request like this one. “Who’s he?”
“It’s impossible for a father to stop loving his girl.”
“He’s my grandfather?”
“Do you hear me, Beth?”
Slow and stiff, she unfolded from the chair and reached out to take his hand, which seemed featherlight and withered. All wrong. Not a rancher’s hand.
“What happened?” she asked. “To Mom and Garner?”
“Do you hear me?”
“Yes, I’ll find him.”
“It’s impossible for a father to stop.”
Weakness sucked him back into sleep. Beth stayed next to her father and held tight to his frail words, imagining that he spoke them about her.
She gripped his fingers until dawn, her back gradually sagging until her forehead came to rest on his pillow. Still she held on, waiting for that inexplicable cold to wash over her and pass through to him. Waiting for the antelope to rise, for the bird to fly.
The claw mark on her shoulder throbbed deep below the surface of her skin.
Whatever you did before, God, please do it again now. You did it for a sparrow—a worthless sparrow! Please do it for my father. My daddy.
Please.
Please.
God would not.
On the morning that her father died, Beth fled the hospital, disbelieving everything but that God was unmerciful and cruel, that his punishments were unfair. She would have done anything to pay any price for that mistake of stealing a saddle and a ride on Joe—any price but this one, which was wrong for anyone to demand. Including God.
She walked for miles under the searing August sun until Jacob found her, hatless and sunburned, dehydrated and mindless, on the highway that led back to the ranch. She didn’t know his truck when it pulled off the road in front of her, and she didn’t recognize his familiar face even after he got out of the cab and came toward her.
But his voice unlatched the gate that released the bucking bull of her spirit.
“Beth,” he said. He reached out to touch her arm. “Oh, Beth. I’m so sorry.”
She responded with a rage like she’d never experienced, and a surge of violence she shouldn’t have had the strength to deliver. All the grief in her heart kicked its way out of her throat, burning like vomit. She resented his compassionate platitude. She ordered him to get away from her. She blamed him for all the suffering in the world and demanded he justify the very existence of God.
When it became clear that she would neither reason with him or let him take her home, he grabbed her from behind in an embrace that pinned her arms. She swore and strained and then begged, sobbing, for him to let her go. But Jacob had wrestled steers more than ten times her weight, and he held on easily, though her shoes dented his knees and bruised his shins.
Beth’s fury didn’t burn out. She had an infinite amount of grief for fuel. But when Danny emerged from the passenger side of Jacob’s truck with red-rimmed eyes, the sight of him was like the smothering blast of a fire extinguisher. Fifteen and fatherless, he’d never looked younger to her, or more frightened by the unknown, and by her lack of self-control. He had no big words to rope her with this time.
As if Jacob could sense Beth’s mind shift onto Danny’s needs, he released her and she reached for her brother, whose more innocent sadness encased the three of them in pained silence while they stood, lost, at the side of the road.