Dances of the Heart

by Andrea Downing

  Jake twitched his face to avoid the match, then reached in agony to smash out the flame with his hand.

  Ty laughed. He lit another one, dropping it carefully onto Jake’s scalp.

  Jake threw his head about then tried to see where the match was. He assumed it had gone out with his twitching. “Ty…” he started.

  “Ty…” his enemy mimicked in a whine. He lit yet another match and held it high above Jake. “How ’bout this? You think you can stomp out this one?”

  The match flickered out so he lit one more, and then, before Jake could fight the pain arcing through him and move, Ty threw it into a stall.

  Jake winced on to his side only to receive a kick in his gut.

  “Good luck,” said Ty, glaring down at him. “Have a nice life,” he continued as he lifted the lantern to head to the back door.

  Jake scrambled to his knees, doubled over with the pain in his gut, his shoulder and hand both pounding. He could feel the wet of his own blood soaking through his shirt now, took in the smears of blood on the panel of the stall. The horses were whickering in panic, bucking against their stalls as smoke started to spiral up and the straw caught alight. He tried to grab the stall release as he shuffled to his legs, but his limbs wouldn’t hold him.

  He glanced back at the scarred and evil face of Ty, his eerie laugh mocking him.

  Wind blew in from the stable door, fanning the flames for a moment. The overhead lights snapped on, and there stood his father, rifle pointed down to the other end of the alley between the stalls as the flags of smoke waved up.

  “Freeze, Ty. That’s it. Stay right where you are.”

  More straw flared up, and the horse there kicked out with fear.

  “You wouldn’t shoot me,” jeered Ty, turning to face Jake’s father. “You haven’t got the guts, you old drunk.”

  “I think he would,” said a voice behind him. “But in any case, I certainly would.” Dex stood there, gun pointed at Ty’s chest, the most sour look on his face anyone in Gillespie County would ever see.

  Jake was on his feet at last and opened the stall where flames danced and licked at the walls of the stable. He swayed somewhat, but was able to lead the panicking horse out as his father grabbed the fire extinguisher off the wall and came running to reach him.

  Ty snarled at him, disgust and jealousy written on every muscle of his face. “Good luck, Jake. You’ll need it. You’re just like your brother. You just don’t know when to quit, do you? You just have to go on and save the world.”

  And that was the very last Jake heard for a while. Suddenly everything was too much, too much pain, too much longing for the oblivion sleep would finally bring. The shadows flickered above him as the voices grew dim and faded out.

  ****

  Ray peered over the top of his reading glasses as Leigh Anne came in to the hospital room. She flung her bag on the chair in the corner before she sat down on Jake’s bed. The heart monitor attached to their son blipped its song without hesitation as if it were a metronome for the low conversation emanating from the next curtained cubicle.

  “Well, how’d you do this, Jake?” she started. “You come back from Iraq in one piece, and within the year, you go and get yourself busted up and in hospital. I hope to hell you got yourself medical insurance or veteran’s or something.”

  His son exchanged a look with him.

  “It’s fine, it’s all taken care of, Leigh Anne.” Ray took off his glasses and lifted the case from the inside pocket of his jacket. “You weren’t going to be paying anyway, so what are you worried about?”

  “Well, I’m worried ’bout my boy here, Ray.” She stood to face him. Then, with a sly smile on her face, she went on, “And I don’t want to see you losing any money. I got my old age to consider.”

  He folded the glasses away and stuffed the case back in his pocket, as if he were keeping them from Leigh Anne, along with his cash. “Well, I got your ‘last offer’ from your lawyer, and I’m going to be dealing with that, so let’s just say your “old age” is taken care of.” He nodded across at Jake.

  “How are you, Mom?” His son’s voice came out croaky with sedative. “You headed north then?” He shifted slightly, wincing with obvious pain.

  “Yeah, tomorrow.” She sat back down on the edge of his bed. “Just come to say good-bye.” She gave a glance to his bandaged hand and shoulder before her gaze followed the drip tubes. “Doctor said that bastard just missed your heart by a couple of inches.”

  “Doctor said he’ll be right as rain in a few days,” Ray corrected. “They’re just keeping him in on an antibiotic drip to make sure there’s no infection.” He stood and stretched, studying the prone figure of his son, wishing he could have replaced Jake in the bed. Having been up most of the night dashing between the Hill Country Memorial Hospital in Fredericksburg and back to the ranch to help Mark Shandler calm the horses and dogs and see to them, and then back to the hospital again, exhaustion now creased his face and dulled his eyes. He rubbed at a day’s worth of gray growth stubbling his face, making him feel older and worn. “Jake’s gonna be fine, absolutely fine.”

  “Well, ’course he is,” said Leigh Anne, taking the bandaged hand for a moment before she let it drop. She stood again and faced him. “Well. You gonna marry that Bennett woman?”

  Ray guffawed and arched a brow in answer.

  “Well, whatever,” she continued. “I guess it’s up to the lawyers now.” She gathered her bag from the corner, hesitated, then bent to kiss her son on his forehead.

  From inside his bedside cabinet, Jake’s cell phone started ringing.

  “Want me to get that for you?” Leigh Anne made a move toward the cabinet.

  “No, it’ll be fine.”

  His son’s gaze slid to him as he came around the bed to open the cabinet and pluck out the ringing phone.

  “You’re not supposed to have these on in hospital, Jake. Don’t they interfere with the machines or something?” He held out the phone, got a slight shake of his head from Jake, and answered it himself. “Hello?”

  “Well, I’m off.” Leigh Anne stood uncertainly for a moment, staring at him as he listened to the voice on the other end. “Have a nice life, Ray. I hope you sort yourself out sometime.”

  “Hang on, just a minute,” Ray said into the phone. He held it down and took in his wife. “You, too, Leigh Anne. I hope somewhere down the road you find what you’ve been lookin’ for.”

  She nodded her answer and turned to go, stopping in the doorway for a last look at her son. Then she gave a little wave and was gone.

  Ray put the phone back to his ear. “Sorry, who is this?” he growled.

  There was a split second pause. “Is that Ray?”

  A small smile of recognition found its way around Ray’s mouth. “Well, that sounds to me like Paige Bennett. How you doin’?” For a moment, he wondered if this was as close as he’d ever get to Carrie once more.

  “Oh, my gosh. What’s happened to Jake?”

  “Well, don’t panic now. He’ll be fine. He’s just playing possum for a while.” He caught his son’s gaze and exchanged a smile.

  “Playing possum?” Paige repeated. “Isn’t that, like, playing dead?”

  “Yeah, well…remember, I did say ‘playing.’” So this is interesting, Paige concerned about Jake.

  “What happened? Can I speak to him?”

  Ray raised an inquisitive brow at his son whose left hand came out for the phone. “Yeah, sure.” There was a momentary hesitation before he ventured, “How’s Carrie, Paige? She well?”

  “Uh…as well as can be expected.”

  “Well, what the heck is that supposed to mean?” A jab of concern hit him as he plunked down in the vacated corner armchair, a longing swimming through him.

  “Well, you know. She’s not happy, Ray, but she’s keeping busy. She’s out at the beach at the moment, working and trying to keep her mind off things.”

  “What sort of things?” Was this a game they
were playing?

  Her exasperation with the two simmered over in a long, deep breath. “Look, for heaven’s sake, why don’t the two of you just grow up and speak to each other? Can’t you phone her or something and ask her yourself?”

  Ray sat there thinking as if he had forgotten he’d been on the phone. It was Paige’s “Hello?” which brought him back to the present.

  “I’ll hand you over to Jake now, Paige. Tell your mama I’m sorry, will you? Or tell her I said hello. Here’s Jake.”

  He collapsed back against the bedside chair and listened with half an ear as Jake tried to recount the story of his encounter with Ty Sheldon. His son’s voice was groggy and it was taking great effort to keep talking, but the drone had a somnolent effect on Ray, who let his mind wander to Carrie. He had buried thoughts of her under the weight of worry about Jake and the ranch, blocked her out as best he could, but now, she had come back to haunt him.

  He missed her; he missed her tremendously. But the reality was, if he was truthful with himself, she had never really left. She had been sitting there in the wings all along, always ready to get into his consciousness and ask him why he hadn’t phoned, why he hadn’t tried harder to get her back.

  Tonight, he would go home when he left the hospital and face the excruciating quandary of there being plenty of booze on the premises at a time when he needed it most. That little voice in his ear would scream at him, and lord only knew what the answer would be. Hopefully, exertion would win out and he could just go to bed without a drink. And he wouldn’t have to go over why he hadn’t phoned her, why he had let her go so easily. The answer he kept getting when he waited for it, possibly a lie to himself, was he and Carrie both needed more time.

  Time.

  It could make or break the situation, and he really didn’t know which, but for now, that’s what he assumed. Time.

  Jake handed the phone across to Ray and lay back, no doubt exhausted with the effort.

  “She’s crazy,” he mumbled.

  “Well. I guess I might know where she gets that.” Ray rested his head back against the chair once more.

  “She wanted to come down for Thanksgiving. She’s trying to fix me up with her roommate who, apparently, is from San Antonio.”

  His father shook his head in disbelief, a small smile escaping.

  “I told her she best be spending the holiday with her mother, and I’d be up in Philly in a couple of weeks.”

  He sat up, alert. “You still fixin’ to go up north? You know that can wait. Really. There’s nothing so urgent about that stallion. I don’t think it’s goin’ anywhere. Or I can send Mark. After all, he manages the horses. Which reminds me, I better phone him and see what’s happening.”

  “No, I want to go. I think I need to see Paige, if nothing else. We been speaking regularly on the phone and all.” He drew in a deep breath. “Yeah, I gotta do that. Anyway, I think I convinced her to make it up with her mother, since they had argued about the Thanksgiving holiday, and I’ve talked her out of coming down now.”

  Ray rubbed the stubble of his chin and reached into his back pocket for his own phone. “She was going to let Carrie have Thanksgiving on her own?”

  “Something like that. But she says Carrie has plenty of friends she entertains over the holidays, so she wouldn’t be alone anyway.”

  “No,” said Ray, punching in Mark Shandler’s office number. “I guess she’ll never be alone.”

  ****

  Carrie curled her toes to scrunch the damp cold sand before releasing them again. The November chill coursed through her, and she draped her jacket tighter around her. Waves rolled in, pounding the shore, hammering the tide line before heaving back to reveal a cornucopia of detritus, shells, seaweed, sea glass and pebbles. Tiny air holes opened in the wet sand. What had Ray joked? That it was so monotonous, all that water just going in and out. She tossed her head with the memory, her gaze following down the line of the beach studded with the row of now-vacated houses, standing blindly, waiting for the winter storms. Windows were shuttered, shrubberies covered, patio furniture stored away against the corrosive invasion of salt air. Carrie could feel it in her lungs, the briny damp that made her feel as if she had a sore throat.

  Absentmindedly, she drew a huge heart in the sand with her pedicured toe, then scratched it out furtively, as if the windows of her own house were watching eyes. Down the beach, another solitary figure walked a dog, which ran and played, enjoying at last the freedom of the empty shore.

  She ran a hand through dank hair knotted by the wind and tucked some strands behind her ear. What was he doing now? Where was Ray? Those days sitting out back in the enclosed sunroom were another lifetime, and yet, that place and those people still existed, were going about their business, getting on with their lives without her. It wasn’t something she had conjured up, something she had imagined, something she had written.

  She headed back to the warmth and security of her kitchen. Carmen would have lunch waiting now, soup and toasted cheese, and after, she would sit and go over the final galleys. They had certainly rushed this one through, to take advantage of the holiday book-buying season. She brushed the sand off her frozen feet in the mud room. Ray had been right about one thing: she wanted a happy ending.

  And this time, she couldn’t write it.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Ray stood staring at the bottle of Jack, his mind blank, his sense of time lost. With the thump of Mabel’s vacuum being dragged down the hall, he glanced over his shoulder, then gave the bottle one more look. He hefted it in his hand for a second before he slowly tipped it over the sink to watch the dark golden liquid disappear down the drain before he pedaled the kitchen bin open and dropped the bottle in.

  He sauntered down the hall, peering once into Jake’s room, where Mabel now dusted, and then stopped briefly at Robbie’s. Print-outs of his late son’s emails were spread out on the table in the back sunroom where he had left them, the table where Carrie had so completely gone into her world, become so focused each and every day on her work. But it wasn’t Carrie he wanted to think about now—it was Robbie. He slumped into the chair, fingering those old letters. Had he ever really known his son, had he ever understood him? Lord knows he had tried; he had certainly been under the impression he knew both boys. So, here were Robbie’s emails from overseas, his letters while he did his tour of duty. He had read them when they’d arrived, printed out each and every one and read them again after the soldiers had come with the news, read them yet again after the service. They were stories about his days, stories about the men with whom he served, stories…but no pointers. And the pictures that lined the living room, those captured moments in time—they, too, told nothing more, gave away no secrets, no hidden messages, unraveled no mysteries as to the man his son had been. Robbie winning prizes, Robbie in action as an athlete, in football or army uniform—those photos, too, told a story, encapsulated a life. But as to the man behind the smile, nothing.

  Mabel’s vacuum screamed from the bedroom as the front door slammed and Jake walked in. His son stood there by the door for a long moment, staring at Ray down the hallway before he put his hat on a peg and struggled out of his jacket, his arm still stiff and his hand still bandaged.

  “You’re supposed to be taking care of that, Jake, not doing too much, the doc said,” Ray called down the hall. He adjusted his reading glasses on his nose and peered at his son over the top.

  “I’m being careful.” Jake came and slouched in the doorway, his legs crossed at the ankles as he leaned against the frame. “Rob’s emails?”

  There was no note of surprise in his son’s voice, no real question.

  “Uh-huh.” Ray jabbed the glasses back and took up one print-out, before setting it down again with a sigh.

  His son carted out the chair opposite him and folded himself onto it before resting his chin in his good hand. He scowled. “What do you want to know, Dad? What is it you want to know?”

  “I guess…” He
breathed out as if the troubles of the world were pressing the very air from his lungs. “I guess I want to know who he was, why he did the things he did. Everyone has a secret life, Jake. Everyone has hopes and dreams and fears and, well, secrets. But you bring up a child, you live with them more or less their entire life and you think you know who they are—were. Then one day, you find out you didn’t know them at all. You find, instead of the young man who begged you to take on the horse breeding, the young man who’d been so dang popular in high school, football team and I don’t know—goodness knows what else—you suddenly find you had a son who shirked his responsibilities, who—”

  “He didn’t shirk his responsibilities, Dad! What responsibilities, for chrissake?”

  “Lucinda for a start.”

  “No, Dad—that’s it. That’s just it. Your reaction, that’s what Robbie feared.” Jake leaned back and tapped the table.

  Outside, leaves fluttered like pennants and flew off in the wind.

  “Maybe your generation felt they had to do that, maybe it was right for you. Robbie could see what he had done, what his birth had done to you. To Mama. He didn’t want the birth of some unwanted child doing it to him and Lucinda. He wanted to live, grow, and mature until he was ready for a wife and family. Lucinda was still in school, still doing her barrel racing and all the rest of it. They didn’t feel they had to pay the rest of their lives for one mistake.”

  Ray thumped the table. “If I had it all to do again, I’d have done it just the way it was…at least from the decision to marry your mother. I never regretted that, you know. We may not have seen eye to eye, we may have grown apart, your mama and me, but when it came to having you boys, I never regretted it for one second.”

  “I know you didn’t, Dad.” Jake tipped his chair back for a moment. “We never felt anything but love from you, Dad. And that’s a fact. You were always fair, firm but fair. But you’ve made your mistakes, and no matter what you said or what you did for us, we were always going to make our own. That’s all it was—Robbie made some mistakes. He paid for them.”