The Horse Whisperer

by Nicholas Evans

  He’d have to leave for Sheridan around nine and would go up and say good-bye before he left. He sighed and turned over and forced himself at last into a sleep that brought no peace.

  Annie woke around five and lay for a while watching the luminescent yellow of the blinds. The house contained a silence so delicate she felt it might shatter with but the slightest shift of her body. She must then have dozed off, for she woke again at the distant sound of a car and knew it must be the Bookers leaving for their flight. She wondered if he’d got up with them to see them off. He must have. She got out of bed and opened the blinds. But the car had gone and there was no one outside the ranch house.

  She went downstairs in her T-shirt and made herself a coffee. She stood cradling the cup in her hands by the living room window. There was mist along the creek and in the hollows of the valley’s far slope beyond. Maybe he was already out with the horses, checking them one more time before he went. She could go for a run and just happen to find him. But then what if he came here to say good-bye, as he’d said he would, when she was out?

  She went upstairs and ran herself a bath. Without Grace, the house seemed so empty and its silence oppressive. She found some bearable music on Grace’s little radio and lay in the hot water without much hope that it might calm her.

  An hour later she was dressed. She’d taken much of that time deciding what to wear, trying one thing then another and in the end getting so cross with herself for being such an idiot that she punished herself by pulling on the same old jeans and T-shirt. What the hell did it matter, for Christsakes? He was only coming to say good-bye.

  At last, at the twentieth time of looking, she saw him come out of the house and throw his bag into the back of the Chevy. When he stopped at the fork, she thought for an anguished moment that he was going to turn the other way and head off up the drive. But he nosed the car toward the creek house instead. Annie went into the kitchen. He should find her busy, getting on with her life, as if his going was really no big deal. She looked around in alarm. There was nothing to do. She’d done it all already, emptied the dishwasher, cleared the garbage, even (heaven help her) put sparkle on the sink, all to pass the time till he came. She decided to make some more coffee. She heard the scrunch of the Chevy’s tires outside and looked up to see him swing the car in a circle so it was pointing ready to leave. He saw her and waved.

  He took his hat off and gave a little knock on the frame of the screen door as he came in.

  “Hi.”

  “Hi.”

  He stood there turning the brim of his hat in his hands.

  “Grace and Robert get their flight okay?”

  “Oh yes. Thanks. I heard Frank and Diane go.”

  “Did you?”

  “Yes.”

  For a long moment the only sound was the drip of the coffee coming through. They could neither talk nor even look each other in the eye. Annie stood leaning against the sink trying to look relaxed as she dug her fingernails into her palms.

  “Would you like a coffee?”

  “Oh. Thanks, but I better be going.”

  “Okay.”

  “Well.” He pulled a small piece of paper out of his shirt pocket and stepped closer to hand it to her. “It’s the number I’ll be at down in Sheridan. Just in case there’s a problem or something, you know.”

  She took it. “Okay, thanks. When will you be back?”

  “Oh, sometime Saturday I guess. Smoky’ll be by tomorrow, see to the horses and all. I told him you’d be feeding the dogs. Feel free to ride Rimrock anytime.”

  “Thanks. I might.” They looked at each other and she gave him a little smile and he nodded.

  “Okay,” he said. He turned and opened the screen door and she followed him out onto the porch. She felt as if there were hands on her heart, slowly twisting the life from it. He put his hat on.

  “Well, bye Annie.”

  “Bye.”

  She stood on the porch and watched him get back in the car. He started the engine, tipped his hat to her and pulled away down the track.

  He drove for four and a half hours but he measured it not by time but only by how each mile seemed to make the ache deepen in his chest. Just west of Billings, lost in thoughts of her, he almost drove into the back of a cattle truck. He decided to take the next exit and go the slower route to the south, through Lovell.

  It took him near Clark’s Fork, through land he’d known as a boy, though there was little now to know it by. Every trace of the old ranch was gone. The oil company had long taken what it wanted and pulled out, selling off the land in plots too small for a man to make a living. He drove past the remote little cemetery where his grandparents and great-grandparents were buried. On another day he would have bought flowers and stopped, but not today. Only the mountains seemed to offer some slim hope of comfort and south of Bridger he turned left toward them and headed up on roads of red dirt into the Pryor.

  The ache in his chest only got worse. He lowered the window and felt the blast of the hot sage-scented air on his face. He cussed himself for a lovelorn schoolboy. He would find somewhere to stop and get himself back together.

  They’d built a fancy new viewing place above the Bighorn Canyon since he was last there, with a big parking lot and maps and signs that told you about the geology and all. He supposed it was a good thing. Two carloads of Japanese tourists were having their pictures taken and a young couple asked him to take one for them so they could both be in it. He did and they smiled and thanked him four times and then everyone piled back into their cars and left him alone with the canyon.

  He leaned on the metal rail and looked down a thousand feet of yellow and pink striated limestone to the snaking, garish green water below.

  Why hadn’t he just taken her in his arms? He could tell she wanted him to, so why hadn’t he? Since when had he been so goddamn proper about these things? He’d conducted this area of his life till now with the simple notion that if a man and a woman felt the same way about each other they should act on it. Okay, so she was married. But that hadn’t always stopped him in the past, unless the husband was either a friend or potentially homicidal. So what was it? He searched for an answer and found none, except that there was no precedent to judge it by.

  Below him, maybe five hundred feet below, he saw the spanned black backs of birds he couldn’t name, soaring against the green of the river. And, quite suddenly, he identified what it was he felt. It was need. The need that Rachel, so many years ago, had felt for him and that he’d found himself unable to return, nor felt for any being or thing before or since. Here at last he knew. He had been whole and now he was not. It was as if the touch of Annie’s lips that night had stolen away some vital part of him that only now he saw was missing.

  It was for the best, Annie thought. She was grateful—or at least believed she would be—that he had been stronger than she was.

  After Tom left, she had been firm with herself, setting herself all sorts of resolutions for the day and the days to come. She would make good use of them. She would call friends to whose faxed condolences she hadn’t yet responded; she would call her lawyer about the tedious details of her severance and she would tidy all the other loose ends she’d left hanging last week. Then she would enjoy her isolation; she would walk, she would ride, she would read; she might even write something, though what she had no idea. And by the time Grace came back, her head, and possibly her heart, would be level.

  It wasn’t quite that easy. After the early high cloud had burned away, the day was another perfect one, clear and warm. But though she tried to be part of it, performing every task she set herself, she could not shift the listless hollow inside her.

  At around seven, she poured herself a glass of wine and stood it on the side of the tub while she bathed and washed her hair. She’d found some Mozart on Grace’s radio and though it crackled, it helped to banish a little of the loneliness that had crept upon her. To cheer herself further, she put on her favorite dress, the black
one with the little pink flowers.

  As the sun went behind the mountains she got into the Lariat and drove down to feed the dogs. They came bounding from nowhere to meet her and escorted her like a best friend into the barn where their food was kept.

  Just as she finished filling their bowls, she heard a car and thought it odd that the dogs paid it no attention. She put the bowls down before them and went to the door.

  She saw him but a moment before he saw her.

  He was standing in front of the Chevy. Its door hung open and its headlights behind him shone lambent in the dusk. As she stopped in the doorway of the barn, he turned and saw her. He took off his hat, though he didn’t twist it nervously in his hands as he had this morning. His face was grave. They stood quite still, perhaps five yards apart, and for a long moment neither of them spoke.

  “I thought . . .” He swallowed. “I just thought I’d come back.”

  Annie nodded. “Yes.” Her voice was fainter than air.

  She wanted to go to him but found she couldn’t move and he knew it and put his hat on the hood of the car and came toward her. Watching him draw near, she feared that all that was welling within her would engulf and sweep her quite away before he got to her. Lest it did, she reached out like a drowning soul to grasp him and he stepped into the circle of her arms and circled her in his and held her and she was saved.

  The wave broke over her, convulsing her with sobs that shook her very bones as she clung to him. He felt her quake and held her more tightly to him, burrowing his face to find hers, feeling the tears that streamed on her cheek and smoothing, soothing them with his lips. And when she felt the quaking subside, she slid her face through the pressing wetness and found his mouth.

  He kissed her as he’d kissed her on the mountain, but with an urgency from which neither of them now would turn back. He held her face in his hands that he might kiss her more deeply and she moved her hands down his back and took hold of him below his arms and felt how hard his body was and so lean that she could lay her fingers in the grooved caging of his ribs. Then he held her in the same way and she trembled at the touch.

  They leaned apart to catch their breath and look at one another.

  “I can’t believe you’re here,” she said.

  “I can’t believe I ever went.”

  He took her by the hand and led her past the Chevy, with its door still open and its lights now finding purchase in the fading light. The sky above them domed a deepening orange till it met the black of the mountains in a roar of carmine and vermilion cloud. Annie waited on the porch while he unlocked the door.

  He didn’t turn on any lights but led her through the shadows of the living room where their footsteps creaked and echoed on the wooden floor and penumbral sepia faces watched their passage from the pictures on the walls.

  She had a longing for him so powerful that as they climbed the wide staircase it felt almost like sickness. They reached the landing and walked hand in hand past the open doors of rooms strewn like an abandoned ship with discarded clothes and toys. The door of his room was also open and he stood aside for her to go in then followed her and closed the door.

  She saw how wide and bare the room was, not how she’d imagined it those many nights she’d seen the light at his window. Through that same window now, she could see the creek house, shaped black against the sky. The room was filled with a waning glow that turned all it touched to coral and gray.

  He reached out and drew her to him to kiss her again. Then, without a word, he started to undo the long line of buttons at the front of her dress. She watched him do it, watched his fingers and then his face, the little concentrating frown. He looked up and saw her watching but didn’t smile, just held her look as he undid the last button. The dress fell open and when he slid his hands inside it and touched her skin, she gasped and shivered. He held her by her sides as before and bent his head and gently kissed the tops of her breasts above her bra.

  And Annie leaned back her head and closed her eyes and thought, there is nothing but this. No other time, nor place nor being than now and here and him and us. And no earthly point in calculating consequence or permanence or right or wrong, for all, all else, was as nothing to the act. It had to be and would be and was.

  Tom led her to the bed and they stood beside it while she stepped from her shoes and started to unbutton his shirt. Now it was his turn to watch and he did so as if from some reaching crest of wonder.

  Never before had he made love in this room. Nor never, since Rachel, in a place that he could call his home. He had gone to women’s beds but never let them come to his. He had casualized sex, kept it distant that he might keep himself free and protect himself from the kind of need he’d seen in Rachel and which now he felt for Annie. Her presence, in the sanctum of this room, thus took on a significance that was both daunting and wondrous.

  The light from the window set aglow her glimpsing skin where her dress fell open. She undid his belt and the top of his jeans and pulled his shirt clear so she could roll it off his shoulders.

  In the momentary blindness as he pulled off his T-shirt, he felt her hands on his chest. He lowered his head and kissed again between her breasts and breathed the smell of her deep into his lungs as if he would drown in it. He eased the dress gently from her shoulders.

  “Oh Annie.”

  She parted her lips but said nothing, just held his gaze and reached behind her back and unhooked her bra. It was plain and white and edged above with simple lace. She lifted the straps from her shoulders and let it fall away. Her body was beautiful. Her skin pale, except at the neck and arms where the sun had turned it a freckled gold. Her breasts were fuller than he’d thought they’d be, though still firm, her nipples large and set high. He put his hands to them and then his face and felt the nipples gather and stiffen at the brush of his lips. Her hands were at the zipper of his jeans.

  “Please,” she breathed.

  He pulled the faded quilt from the bed and opened the sheets and she laid herself down and watched him take off his boots and socks and then his jeans and shorts. And he felt no shame nor saw any in her, for why should they feel shame at what was not of their making but of some deeper force that stirred not just their bodies but their souls and knew naught of shame nor of any such construct?

  He knelt on the bed beside her and she reached out and took his erection in her hands. She bent her head and brushed her lips around the rim of it so exquisitely that he shuddered and had to close his eyes to find some lower, more tolerable key.

  Her eyes, when he ventured to look at her again, were dark and glazed with the same desire he knew glazed his own. She let go of him and lay back and lifted her hips for him to take off her panties. They were of a pale, functional gray cotton. He ran his hand over the soft bulge within them then pulled them gently down.

  The triangle of revealed hair was deep and thick and of the darkest amber. Its curling tips trapped the last glimmer of the light. Just above it ran the paled scar of a caesarean. The sight of it moved him, though he knew not why, and he lowered his head and traced its length with his lips. The brush of her hair on his face and the warm, sweet smell, he found there moved him more powerfully and he lifted his head and leaned back on his heels that he might catch his breath and see her more fully.

  They surveyed each other now in their nakedness, letting their eyes roam and feed with an incredulous, suspended, mutual hunger. The air was filled with the urgent synchrony of their breathing and the room seemed to swell and fold to its rhythm like an enclosing lung.

  “I want you inside me,” she whispered.

  “I don’t have anything to—”

  “It doesn’t matter. It’s safe. Just come inside me.”

  With a little frown of need, she reached for the tilt of him again and as she closed her fingers on it, he felt she had possession of the very root of his being. He came forward again on his knees, letting her steer him in toward her.

  As he saw Annie open herself
before him and felt the soft collision of their flesh, Tom saw suddenly again in his mind those birds, wide-winged and black and nameless, soaring below him against the green of the river. He felt he was returning from some distant land of exile and that here, and only here, he could be whole again.

  It seemed to Annie, when he entered her, that he dislodged in her loins some hot and vivid surge that swept slowly the entire length of her body to lap and furrow around her brain. She felt the swell of him within her, felt the gliding fusion of their two halves. She felt the caress of his hard hands on her breasts and opened her eyes to see him bend his head to kiss them. She felt the travel of his tongue, felt him take her nipple in his teeth.

  His skin was pale, though not as pale as hers, and on his rib-furrowed chest the cruciform of hair was darker than the sunbleach of his head. There was a kind of supple angularity to him, born of his work, which somehow she had expected. He moved on her with that same centered confidence she’d seen in him all along; only now, focused exclusively on her, in this new domain, it was both more overt and intense. She wondered how this body that she’d never seen, this flesh, these parts of him she’d never touched, could yet feel so known and fit her so well.

  His mouth delved the open hollow of her arm. She felt his tongue slick the hair that since coming here she’d let grow long and soft again. She turned her head and saw the framed photographs on top of the chest of drawers. And for a fleeting moment, the sight of them threatened to connect her to another world, a place which she was in the act of altering and which she knew she would find sullied with guilt if she were to let herself but look. Not now, not yet, she told herself and she lifted his head between her hands and quested blindly for the oblivion of his mouth.

  When their mouths parted, he leaned back and looked down at her and for the first time smiled, moving on her to the slow rasp of their coupled selves.

  “You remember that first day we rode?” she said.