Forget Me Not

by Elizabeth Lowell

  As though Rafe sensed Alana’s unease, he added quietly, “It was good of you to help Bob. It can’t be easy for you so soon after your . . . husband’s . . . death.”

  At the word husband Rafe’s mouth turned down sourly, telling Alana that her marriage was not a subject that brought Rafe any pleasure.

  But then, Rafe had never liked Jack. Even before Rafe had “died,” Jack had always been urging Alana to pack up and leave Wyoming, to build a career where artificial lights drowned out the cascading stars of the western sky.

  “Did Bob tell you how Jack died?” asked Alana, her voice tight, her hands clenched in her lap.

  “No.”

  Rafe’s voice was hard and very certain.

  Alana let out a long breath. Apparently Bob had told Rafe only the bare minimum: Jack had died recently. Nothing about the amnesia or the nightmares.

  She was glad Bob had told Rafe something. It would explain anything odd she might do. Jack was dead. Recently. She was a widow.

  And when she slept, she was a frightened child.

  The Jeep jolted off the pavement onto a gravel, road. The miles unwound easily, silently, through a land of gently rolling sagebrush and a distant river that was pale silver against the land. Nothing moved but the Jeep and jackrabbits flushed by the sound of the car.

  There was neither fence nor sign to mark the beginning of the Broken Mountain Ranch. Like many western ranchers, Alana’s grandfather, father, and brother had left the range open wherever possible. They fenced in the best of their breeding stock and let the beef cattle range freely.

  Alana searched the land for signs of Broken Mountain steers grazing the high plains.

  “Has Bob brought the cattle out of the high country yet?” asked Alana.

  “Most of them. He’s leaving them in the middle elevations until late September. Later if he can.”

  “Good.”

  The longer the cattle stayed in the high and middle elevations, the less money Bob would have to spend on winter feed. Every year was a gamble. If a rancher left his cattle too long in the high country, winter storms could close in, locking the cattle into certain starvation. But if the rancher brought his cattle down too soon, the cost of buying hay to carry them through winter could mean bankruptcy.

  “Grass looks thick,” Alana said.

  She wanted to keep to the neutral conversational territory of ranching, afraid that if the silence went on too long, Rafe might bring up the recent past and Jack’s death. Or, even worse, the far past. Rafe’s death and resurrection, a bureaucratic error that had cost Alana . . . everything.

  “I’ll bet Indian Seep is still flowing,” she said. “The hay crop must have been good.”

  Rafe nodded.

  Alana’s dark eyes cataloged every feature of the land—the texture of the soil in road cuts, the presence or absence of water in the ravines, the smoky lavender sheen of living growth on the snarled sagebrush, the signs of wildlife, all the indicators that told an educated eye whether the land was being used or abused, husbanded or squandered.

  And in between, when Alana thought Rafe wouldn’t notice, she watched his profile, the sensuous sheen of his hair and lips, the male lines of his nose and jaw. Rafe was too powerful and too hard to be called handsome. He was compelling—a man made for mountains, a man of strength and endurance, mystery and silence, and sudden laughter like a river curling lazily beneath the sun.

  “Am I so different from your memories?” asked Rafe quietly.

  Alana drew in her breath sharply.

  “No,” she said. “But there are times when I can’t tell my memories of you from my dreams. Seeing you again, close enough to touch, alive . . .”

  Alana looked away, unable to meet Rafe’s eyes, regretting her honesty and at the same time knowing she had no choice. She had enough trouble sorting out truth from nightmare. She didn’t have the energy to keep track of lies, too.

  When the truck rounded the shoulder of a small ridge, Alana leaned forward intently, staring into the condensing twilight. A long, narrow valley opened up before her. A few evergreens grew in the long, low ridges where the land began to lift to the sky. The ridges soon became foothills and then finally pinnacles clothed in ice and distance.

  But it wasn’t the savage splendor of the peaks that held Alana’s attention. She had eyes only for the valley. It was empty of cattle.

  Alana sat back with an audible sigh of relief.

  “Good for you, little brother,” she murmured.

  “Bob’s a good rancher,” said Rafe quietly. “There’s not one inch of overgrazed land on Broken Mountain’s range.”

  “I know. I was just afraid that—” Alana’s hands moved, describing vague fears. “The beef market has been so bad and the price of feed is so high now and Bob has to pay Sam and Dave. I was afraid Bob would gamble on the land being able to carry more cattle than it should.”

  Rafe glanced sideways at Alana with the lightning intensity that she remembered from her dreams.

  “Since when do people on the West Coast notice feed prices and the carrying capacity of Wyoming ranch land?” he asked.

  “They don’t. I do.” Alana made a wry face. “People in cities think beef grows between Styrofoam and plastic wrap, like mushrooms in the cracks of a log.”

  Rafe laughed again, softly.

  Alana watched him, feeling the pull of his laughter. Above his pale collar, sleek neck muscles moved.

  She felt again the moment of warmth at the airport, the resilience of his muscles beneath her fingers before she had snatched back her arm. He was strong. It showed in his movements, in his laughter, in the clean male lines of his face. He was strong and she was not.

  Distantly Alana knew she should be terrified of that difference in their bodies. Yet when Rafe laughed, it was all she could do to keep herself from crawling over and huddling next to him as though he were a fire burning in the midst of a freezing storm.

  The thought of being close to Rafe both fascinated and frightened Alana. The fascination she understood; Rafe was the only man she had ever loved. She had no reason to fear him.

  Yet she did.

  Rafe was a man, and she was terrified of men.

  The fear baffled Alana. At no time in her life, not even during the most vicious arguments with Jack, had she ever been afraid.

  Am I afraid of Rafe simply because he’s strong? Alana asked herself silently.

  She turned the thought over in her mind, testing it as she had tested so many things in the weeks since she had awakened in the hospital, six days and a singing partner lost.

  It can’t be something as simple as physical strength that frightens me, Alana decided. Jack was six foot five, very thick in the shoulders and neck and legs. He never used his strength, though, or even seemed to notice it. He did only what was needed to get by, and not one bit more.

  Jack had been born with a clear tenor voice that he had accepted as casually as his size, and he disliked working with his voice almost as much as he had disliked physical labor.

  Alana had been the one who had insisted on rehearsing each song again and again, searching for just the right combination of phrasing and harmony that would bring out the levels of meaning in the lyrics. Jack had tolerated her “fanaticism” with the same easygoing indifference that he had tolerated crummy motels and being on the road three hundred and fifty-two nights a year.

  Then Jack ‘n’ Jilly had become successful.

  After that, Jack would rehearse a new country or folk song only as long as it took him to learn the words and melody. Anything beyond that was Jilly’s problem.

  A year ago Alana had left Jack and come to Broken Mountain Ranch to think about her life and her sad sham of a marriage. When word of their separation had leaked to the press, record and concert ticket sales had plummeted. Their agent had called Alana and quietly, cynically, suggested that she continue to present a happily married front to the world. Fame was transient. Obscurity was forever.

  Th
at same afternoon, Bob had come back from a trip to the high country babbling about seeing Rafe Winter. Alana had written the letter to Rafe, seen Rafe’s rejection condensed into a single harsh word: Deceased.

  She had wept until she felt nothing at all . . . and then she had gone back to L.A. to appear as half of Country’s Perfect Couple.

  Until six weeks ago, when Alana had told Jack that the sham was over. Country’s Perfect Couple was an act she couldn’t handle anymore. He had pleaded with her to think again, to take a trip with him to the high country she loved, and there they would work out something.

  “Did you miss the ranch?” Rafe asked quietly.

  Alana heard the question as though from a great distance, calling her out of a past that was another kind of nightmare waiting to drag her down. She reached for the question, pulling it eagerly around her.

  “I missed the ranch more than . . . more than I knew.”

  And she had. It had been like having her eyes put out. She had hungered for the green and silver shimmer of aspens, but saw only dusty palm trees. She had searched for the primal blue of alpine lakes set among the chiseled spires of mountains older than man, but found only concrete freeways and the metallic flash of cars. She had always looked for the intense green silences of the wilderness forest, but discovered only tame squares of grass laid down amid hot stucco houses.

  All that had saved Alana was singing. Working with a song. Tasting it, feeling it, seeing it grow and change as it became part of her and she of it.

  Jack had never understood that. He had loved only the applause and worked just hard enough to get it. Alana loved the singing and would work to exhaustion until she and the song were one.

  “If you missed the ranch that much, why did you leave after Jack died?”

  Alana realized that she had heard the question before. Rafe had asked it at least twice and she hadn’t answered, lost in her own thoughts.

  “Jack died there,” she whispered. “On Broken Mountain.”

  She looked to the right, where the Green River Mountains lifted seamed granite faces toward the evening sky. High-flying clouds burned silver above the peaks, and over all arched an immense indigo bowl, twilight changing into night.

  “You must have unhappy memories,” said Rafe quietly.

  “Yes, I suppose I must.”

  Alana heard her own words, heard their ambiguity, heard the fear tight in her voice. She looked up and saw that Rafe had been watching her.

  But he turned away and said nothing, asked no more questions.

  He simply drove her closer and closer to the ramparts of snow and ice where Jack had died and Jilly had lost her mind.

  4

  I T WAS DARK by the time Rafe turned onto the fork of the road that led to the Broken Mountain ranch house. An autumn moon was up, huge and flat and ghostly, balanced on the edge of the world. Clouds raced and seethed, veiled in moonlight and mystery, veiling the moon in turn.

  The mountains were invisible, yet Alana could sense them rising black and massive in front of her. They comforted and frightened her at the same time as childhood memories and recent fear set her on an emotional seesaw that made her dizzy.

  Alana knew she had been at the ranch just four weeks ago.

  She knew she and Jack had ridden into the high country.

  She knew Jack was dead.

  She knew—but she didn’t.

  Alana had awakened in the hospital, bruised and cut, ice-burned and aching. And frightened. Every shadow, every sound, had sent her heart racing.

  It had taken a huge effort of will to allow Dr. Gene to examine her. He had tried to explain the inexplicable in ordinary words, telling Alana that her fear was normal, the overreaction of someone who had never known physical danger, much less death. In time, her mind and body would adjust to the presence of danger, the nearness of death in everyday life. Then she would be calm again. Until then, Dr. Gene could prescribe something to help her.

  Alana had refused the tranquilizers. She had seen too many musicians dependent on drugs. For her, chemical solutions were no solution at all.

  But it had been tempting, especially at first.

  The presence of Dr. Gene had unnerved Alana to the point of tears. Even Bob, her favorite brother, had seen Alana withdraw from any kind of physical touch, any gesture of affection he made. Bob had been hurt and very worried about her, his brown eyes clouded with conflicting feelings.

  Then, on the third morning after Alana had awakened, she had quietly walked out of the hospital, boarded a plane, and flown to Portland, a place where she had never lived. She hadn’t waited for Sheriff Mitchell to come back down off the mountain with Jack’s body. She hadn’t stopped to think, to consider, to reason. She had simply run from the black gap in her mind.

  Portland was big enough for Alana to lose herself in, but not big enough to remind her of L.A. and her life with Jack. There were mountains in Portland, but only in the distance.

  Yet fear had run with Alana anyway. Though she had never before been afraid of flying, or heights, there had been a horrible moment of terror as the plane had left the ground.

  Earth falling away and her body twisting, weightless, she was falling, falling, black rushing up to meet her and when it did she would be torn from life like an aspen leaf from its stem, spinning away helplessly over the void—

  “It’s all right, Alana. You’re safe. It’s all right. I’ve come to take you home.”

  Vaguely Alana realized that Rafe had parked the Jeep at the side of the road. She heard Rafe’s soothing murmur, sensed the warmth of his hand over her clenched fingers, the gentle pressure of his other hand stroking her hair. She felt the shudders wracking her body, the ache of teeth clenched against a futile scream.

  Rafe continued speaking quietly, repeating his words. They warmed Alana, words as undemanding as sunlight, driving away the darkness that gripped her.

  Suddenly she turned her head, pressing her cheek against the hard strength of Rafe’s hand. But when he would have drawn her closer, she moved away with a jerk.

  “I—” Alana stopped abruptly and drew a deep breath. “I’m sorry. Something—” Her hands moved jerkily. “Sometimes I—since Jack—”

  Alana closed her eyes. She couldn’t make Rafe understand what she herself had no words to describe.

  “Seeing death is always hard,” said Rafe quietly. “The more sheltered you’ve been, the harder it is.”

  Rafe’s hand stroked Alana’s hair, his touch as gentle as his words, as his presence, as his warmth.

  After a few moments Alana let out a long sigh, feeling the tentacles of terror loosen, slide away, the nightmare withdrawing. She turned her head and looked at Rafe with eyes that were no longer black with fear.

  “Thank you,” she said simply.

  Rafe’s only answer was a light caress across Alana’s cheek as his hand withdrew from her hair.

  He started the Jeep again and pulled back onto the narrow gravel road that led to the Burdette family house. Beneath the truck, the country began to roll subtly, gathering itself for the sudden leap into mountain heights.

  The ranch house was on the last piece of land that could be described as high plains. Behind the ranch buildings, the country rose endlessly, becoming ranks of black peaks wearing brilliant crowns of stars.

  Gradually, squares of yellow light condensed out of the blackness as the ranch house competed with and finally outshone the brightness of the stars. Dark fences paralleled the road, defining corrals and pastures where brood mares grazed and champion bulls moved with ponderous grace. A paved loop of road curved in front of the house before veering off toward the barns.

  As Rafe braked to a stop by the walkway, the front door of the house opened, sending a thick rectangle of gold light into the yard like a soundless cry of welcome. Three quicksilver dogs bounded off the porch, barking and baying and dancing as though the dewy grass were made of icicles too sharp to stand on.

  Rafe climbed out of the truck and
waded into the hounds with good-natured curses, pummeling them gently until they had worked off the first exuberance of their greeting. Then they stood and watched him with bright eyes, nudging his hands with cold noses until each silky ear had been scratched at least once. In the moonlight the hounds’ coats shone like liquid silver, rippling and changing with each movement of their muscular bodies.

  Alana slid out of the Jeep with a smile on her lips and the hounds’ welcoming song echoing in her ears. She stood quietly, watching the dogs greet Rafe, feeling the cool breeze tug at her hair.

  One of the hounds lifted its head sharply, scenting Alana. It gave an eager whine and scrambled toward her. Automatically Alana bent over to greet the animal, rubbing its ears and thumping lightly on its muscular barrel, enjoying the warm rasp of a tongue over her hands.

  “You’re a beauty,” Alana said, admiring the dog’s lithe lines and strength.

  The dog nosed her hand, then the pocket of her black slacks, then her hand again.

  “What do you want?” asked Alana, her voice carrying clearly in the quiet air.

  “Vamp wants the crackers you spoiled her with the last time you were here,” called Bob as he stepped out onto the porch, laughter and resignation competing in his voice.

  Alana looked up blankly.

  “Crackers?” she repeated.

  She looked down at the dog. The dog watched her, dancing from foot to foot, obviously waiting for something.

  “Crackers,” said Bob, holding one out to Alana as he walked toward her. “I figured that you’d forgotten—er, I mean I figured that you wouldn’t have any crackers on you, so I brought one.”

  “Vamp?” asked Alana.

  She took the cracker and looked at the pale square as though she’d never seen one before. She held it out.

  The hound took the tidbit with the delicate mouth of a well-trained bird dog.

  “Vampire,” Bob said, gesturing to the dog at Alana’s feet. “You know, for all the sharp teeth she had as a pup.”

  The look on Alana’s face made it clear that she didn’t know the story behind the dog’s name. Yet it was equally clear that Bob had told her the story before.