by Joanna Sims
They loaded the dogs into the backseat of his truck, and he held the passenger door open for Savannah and helped her climb into the passenger seat. She had made some progress in physical therapy, but even though the limp was barely noticeable, her leg was still weak.
“Windows up or windows down?” Savannah asked happily when he climbed behind the wheel.
“Down.”
“That’s what I thought, too.”
Bruce lowered the windows halfway in the back seat so the dogs could stick their heads out, as they liked to do, without risking that they would jump out. He cranked the engine, but before he shifted into Drive, he asked, “What are you in the mood for?”
As with everything, his wife put her due consideration into the question of music choice. After a minute of thought, she said with a question in her tone, “Motown.”
Bruce scrolled through his phone with a nod. “Motown it is.”
On their way off the ranch, they saw Noah riding in one of the pastures. He waved to his younger brother but didn’t stop. He did stop when he saw Jock and Lilly rocking on the front porch of the main house.
“Why the hell weren’t you two at breakfast?” Jock hobbled down the steps. He wasn’t all that old, but his spine didn’t seem to know that. His father had a couple of herniated discs in his back that he refused to have fixed. So the rancher and patriarch walked in a side to side motion, often with his hand on his back.
“It’s my fault, Dad.” Savannah was quick to take the blame. “I was too tired for a big family breakfast.”
“Bah.” Jock rested his hands on the open truck window. “Where’re you off to now?”
Savannah looked at him with an excited smile before she answered Jock. “Bruce is taking me hiking up at Drinking Horse Mountain.”
The rancher gave a slight nod, and pushed away from the truck. “Have a good time, then.”
Bruce couldn’t remember the last time he drove away from the ranch on a Sunday, with his wife next to him, his hiking gear packed, and his dogs ready for an adventure. The day was as beautiful as a day could get, with a clear, cloudless, turquoise-blue sky, and a coolness in the air that made it feel more like fall than summer. Bruce cranked up the tunes, with his right hand on the steering wheel, and let his left arm rest on the open window. The sun would warm the skin on his arm, and then the breeze would cool it of, and his wife was sitting next to him, singing off-key and loudly, as she always did, to Stevie Wonder’s “Signed, Sealed Delivered, I’m Yours...”
They didn’t speak much on the way to the recreational park—not in an awkward “I don’t have anything to say to you” kind of way. It was comfortable. Like it used to be for them. From Sugar Creek Ranch, they drove through downtown Bozeman and then State Route 86 to the figure-eight shaped hiking trail. It was one of the few trails they hadn’t visited; they loved to set out together with the dogs and hike the abundant trails in Montana. After their marriage fell apart, Bruce hadn’t had the desire to hike alone or with friends. It had been “their” thing, and without Savannah, hiking lost its appeal.
“It’s crowded.” Savannah had turned down the music as they approached the park. “Oh! There’s a spot right there.”
“Got it.” Bruce pulled into one of the few free spaces just before another truck got there.
He shut off the engine. “Are you sure you’re up for this?”
Ever since the accident, she had developed a mild case of social anxiety, and he wasn’t sure how she’d feel about sharing the trail with large groups of hikers.
“I’ll be okay,” she told him, but she had a worried look in her eyes as she took a survey of her surroundings.
Bruce made sure he was at her door to help her down to the ground before he unloaded the dogs and slung the backpack onto his back. Savannah used her standard walking stick, a stick that had pins from most of the trails she had tackled since she was a teenager, as well as holding Hound Dog’s leash.
“They have two trail types—we’ll take the easy route this time.” He shortened his stride to keep pace with Savannah.
She nodded in response because she was too busy admiring the beautiful landscape that encompassed the forty-acre park. “This is incredible. Isn’t it?”
“It sure is.” They had always agreed on the beauty of Montana. They were both natives, and they both couldn’t imagine any other place in the world to call home.
Mindful of Savannah’s healing concussion and her leg weakness, Bruce was careful to hold their pace to a slower one than was typical for them. Every time Savannah would speed up, excited to see more of the landscape unfolding before them, he would be the one to remind her to slow down. He got them to take frequent water breaks, and pointed out benches to rest more often than he needed. Her health, her recovery, mattered to him. He couldn’t seem to get the image of her lying in the hospital bed, hooked up to every beeping machine in the room, her face swollen, in a coma, out of his head. That was an image that wouldn’t wash, no matter how much he tried to scrub it from his mind.
“Let’s sit down over there.” Bruce pointed to the next bench on the trail.
“Again?” Savannah’s cheeks were flushed red, and she had beads of sweat rolling down her neck.
“Why not?” he asked her. “You got somewhere else to be?”
She frowned at him. “No.”
He dug a bottle of water out of the backpack and handed it to her. While his wife cooled off, Bruce took the three dogs down to Bridger Creek so they could hydrate and cool off, as well. Savannah laughed loudly and freely when the dogs, now sopping wet from the creek, descended upon her and shook themselves dry. She was sprayed from three directions and was splattered from her waist to her face by water from their fur.
“You cooled off now?” Bruce joined her on the bench.
Savannah was picking some dog hair off her tongue. “Yeah. I think so.”
They sat together, silent, the three dogs at their feet, taking in the brown-and-green mountain landscape before them.
“This is heaven on earth.” Savannah sighed.
Bruce looked at her, enjoying the view of his wife as much as the scenery provided by Drinking Horse.
“You know what this reminds me of?” he asked her, gesturing to the mountains.
“What?”
“All those movies they used to show us in school when we were kids about the outdoors.”
They decided to eat a snack before continuing on their hike. Savannah finished her last bite of her protein bar, balled up the wrapper and put it in the front pocket of the backpack.
“I couldn’t believe that Liam and Cynthia got divorced,” his wife said to him. “When did that happen?”
Bruce put his empty wrapper in the front pocket as well, then zipped it shut. “It’s been at least a year now.”
Savannah shook her head in disbelief. “What happened?”
“I’m not too sure.” He flicked a bug off his arm. “Liam doesn’t like to talk about it, so I don’t push him.”
“Does he get to see the kids?”
Bruce stood up and hoisted the backpack onto his back before offering his hand to his wife. “He’ll be getting them for a month this summer. But that’s about all I know.”
He was glad when Savannah dropped the subject—the more they talked about Liam’s divorce, the more it made him think about their near miss. They walked the entire trail together, little by little, taking it slow, taking their time. He took pictures of Savannah on the trail for her to text to her family and friends, and a fellow hiker had offered to take a picture of them, as a couple, with the dogs, on the Kevin Mundy Memorial Bridge.
“Send that to me,” Bruce said to her after they both looked at the first picture that had been taken of them since her return to the ranch.
By the time they got home, t
hey had spent an entire Sunday together as a couple, and it felt more like old times to Bruce than it had in a long while. They had tired themselves out on the hike, built up a heck of an appetite, and then they’d cooked out at Savannah’s parents’ house, with Savannah’s sister Justine and her fiancé, Mike. The fact that he was back at his in-laws’ house, a home he’d loved and in which he had always felt welcome, was like a dream in motion. He’d thought it had all been lost.
“I don’t know about you, but I am tired and stuffed.” Savannah laughed tiredly.
Bruce shut the front door behind them, hung his hat on the hook and dropped the backpack next to the door.
“I’m right there with you.”
Instead of going straight into the bedroom, Savannah turned on the lamp next to the couch and then circled back to him. She surprised him by wrapping her arms around his waist and giving him a quick hug.
“Thank you for today.” Savannah dropped her arms, her face upturned.
It would have been so natural to kiss those lips—lips that were small and peach-colored, and always felt so soft beneath his own. She wanted him to kiss her—he knew that look in her eyes—but he just couldn’t bring himself to do it.
“You’re welcome,” he told her as she turned away from him.
“Do you mind if I take a shower first?”
“No. You go on ahead. I’ll go after you.”
He sat down on the couch, Buckley next to him and Murphy at his feet, in the silence. He didn’t feel like turning on the TV or listening to music; he just wanted to sit there and get his mind right. God, how he wanted to trust in his marriage. He wanted to make love to Savannah without any fear that she was going to leave him one day. She’d already ripped out his guts once—how could he give her the chance to do it again?
“Bruce!”
“Yeah?”
“Could you get me a towel out of the dryer?” Savannah called to him from the master bathroom. “I forgot to get one out!”
“Okay!”
Bruce went into the mudroom, opened the dryer and pulled out the towels Savannah had put in to dry before they left. For a split second, he was taken back in time, to another day when he had pulled towels out of the dryer—a day he had tried so hard to forget. He shook off the memory and carried the towels into the bedroom, dropped the pile onto the bed, and grabbed one for his wife.
They had designed the master bathroom shower together—both favoring a roomy shower built for two, with two showering stations at either end of the stall. Two sides of the shower were made completely of glass. Bruce had made it a point not to go into the bathroom when Savannah was showering, because there was no way not to see her naked.
“I’ll just leave it on the counter.”
“Oh, no. I’m so cold. Just hand it to me, would you? Please?”
Savannah was his wife. He had seen her naked thousands of times—and he had enjoyed every moment. In his eyes, she was a lithe, nymph-like beauty, and he loved seeing her body unclothed. Why was he trying so hard to avoid it now? Because he’d have to deal with the hard-on it would surely arouse?
Instead of averting his eyes or trying to avoid Savannah’s nakedness any longer, Bruce walked straight over to the shower with the towel.
Savannah had the door of the shower cracked open, and the water was off.
“Thank you.” She smiled at him as she hugged the towel to her body. Her right breast was round and full, with droplets of water clinging to the puckered nipple. In moments past, he would have bent down to lick the water from her nipple; he would have taken her, still damp from the shower, to the bed and made love to her.
Savannah caught him staring at her breast, and she didn’t cover her body. Instead, she met his gaze when he brought his eyes to hers, and there was an invitation there for him to see.
As much as he wanted to love her—as much as his body wanted to love her—he just couldn’t seem to take that leap of faith.
The moment was lost; Savannah wrapped the towel around her body and stepped out of the shower. While he took his shower, she closed up the house, took care of the dogs for the night, and was in bed by the time he emerged from the bathroom.
It had become a pattern for the dogs to create a barrier between the two sides of the bed, his and Savannah’s. Bruce turned off the light and lay flat on his back, listening to the sound of Hound Dog licking his private parts.
“Really, Hound Dog?” he complained. “Is that necessary?”
Savannah laughed. “I find it to be oddly soothing.”
Bruce turned his head to look at his wife. “Good night, Savannah.”
“Good night.”
Not right away, but before he drifted off to sleep, Savannah added, “Dr. Kind thinks it would be a good idea if you come to my next appointment.”
Bruce didn’t respond; he listened.
“Will you think about it?”
When he didn’t answer right away, she said, “Bruce? Will you?”
“Yes,” he said before he closed his eyes again. “I’ll think about it.”
Chapter Six
He had gone with her to speech therapy and to physical therapy—he had gone with her to her neurologist, to her internist, and he had dropped her off at her psychologist. But he hadn’t imagined that he would be involved in her meetings with the psychologist. Perhaps that was naive thinking on his part.
“Thank you for coming today, Mr. Brand.”
“Bruce,” he corrected. “You’re welcome.”
Dr. Kind was wearing a long, flowy skirt with sandals, and her toenails were painted a very deep shade of purple. She folded her hands on top of an open notepad, drawing his eyes back to her face.
Savannah was sitting on one end of the three-seater couch, while he was at the other end. Bruce wondered if Dr. Kind had already made a note on her pad about that.
“Is there anything you’d like to say to start, Savannah?”
Savannah quickly glanced his way; her shoulders were stiff, and she was biting the inside of her cheek, which was a sure sign that she was a bundle of nerves on the inside.
“Um, sure.” His wife cleared her throat. “I just feel stuck.” She turned her head so she could look him in the eye. “I think that we’re stuck. And I want to move forward. I want us to be like we were before.”
It took Bruce a second to process what Savannah had said. He thought that he was here for her—to help her with her feelings relating to the memory loss. He wasn’t here for marriage counseling. He told Dr. Kind as much.
“Savannah has done a substantial amount of inner work related to her individual concerns. Inevitably, we have to deal with problems related to the marriage.”
Dr. Kind continued. “How do you feel the marriage is working?”
Maybe it was the soothing tone of Dr. Kind’s voice or the scent of lavender in the air, but one minute he was clammed up and the next he was spilling his guts to a woman he’d just met. Dr. Kind scribbled furiously as he spoke, and when he managed to get himself to shut up, she looked up from her notes.
“Thank you for sharing that, Bruce,” the psychologist said. “Let me see if I can recast what I’ve heard you say. While you understand that, for Savannah, the fighting and the separation and everything leading up to the divorce is not a part of her current memory, for you, every fight, every attorney meeting, every attorney bill is very real, and still very raw. Yes?”
Bruce nodded.
“Do you hear that, Savannah?”
Savannah, who hadn’t stopped chewing on the side of her cheek yet, gave a little nod.
“What I hear in all that you’ve shared with me today, Bruce, is that you are afraid to invest in this marriage because you are concerned that Savannah can leave the marriage again.”
“I don’t know
why I left,” Savannah interjected; she reached out across the divide and touched his arm. “But I’m not leaving again.”
“Do you hear that, Bruce?”
“I hear it,” he acknowledged. “But what happens when your memory comes back?” He said this directly to his wife before addressing the therapist. “I personally think that we need to talk about the elephant in the room, about what caused the divorce in the first place. That way we don’t have to spend all of this time working on our marriage if all she’s going to want is to go through with the divorce.”
“Are you ready for that, Savannah?”
He hated the fact that he was the cause of the color draining from Savannah’s face.
“No.”
Dr. Kind checked her watch. “Okay. We have a couple of minutes left. Bruce, Savannah has made a promise to you that she isn’t going to proceed with the divorce. If you want your marriage to work, you’re going to have to let go of the pain of these last several years and try to move forward. And, Savannah, you need to be patient with Bruce.”
The therapist closed her pad and put it on the table next to her chair. She leaned forward, hands clasped, her forearms resting on her thighs. “Savannah, I want you to sit next to Bruce. Bruce, turn to your wife and take her hands.”
Like a robot, he followed her direction. This woman had a way of getting him to do things that he wouldn’t normally do on demand.
“Tell Bruce what you need.”
Savannah took a steadying breath. “I need you to stop calling me ‘Savannah.’ You only used to do that when you were mad at me. I need you to hold my hand, and sit with me on the couch and...I need you to kiss me ‘hello’ and ‘goodbye.’”
“Bruce?” Dr. Kind prompted. “What do you need from Savannah?”
He couldn’t believe he was in this moment; he hadn’t anticipated it. Savannah, her hands in his, her eyes focused so intently on his face, was listening to him in a way that perhaps she never had before.
