“Sagebrush,” Mathias said. “I told you.”
We stopped at five different overlooks throughout the day, snapping pictures with the digital camera that Diana lent us, Mathias bending down to my height, both of us laughing as we pressed our cheeks together and he held the camera high to capture yet another shot of ourselves.
“I love that you’re such a good sport,” I reflected as we drove on from the blue sign welcoming us to Montana, in the late afternoon. I felt a jolt of pure excitement at the sight of that state sign, the sense of wildness and wonder inside my soul stretching further outward. I clicked through the pictures we’d already taken, giggling at one where Mathias was licking my cheek instead of smiling for the camera. “You’re such a goofball, and I love it.”
“Sense of humor is vital,” he said, lifting his eyebrows high and making a face at me as he drove. “And I love that you get mine. Most people just think I’m crazy, as you well know.”
“You are crazy. But then you lick me and I’m totally fine with the craziness.”
“Come lick me,” he invited, and I scooted across the bench seat and got him good across the ear, so that he yelped and wiped it against his shoulder.
“If I wasn’t driving you’d be in trouble,” he warned, as I giggled and shimmied right back to my own side, propping my feet on the dash again. Out the windshield the sky was bluer than a jay’s wing, streaked with a few thin, lacy, fair-weather clouds as the sun began its slow descent toward evening. The temperature was perfect, hot but not scorching, and there wasn’t one blessed hint of humidity in the air. My hair was as straight as it had been since arriving in Minnesota three years ago.
“We should be at Makoshika in about a half hour, my sweet darlin’ lover,” Mathias said. “And then we can set up our tent and go exploring.”
“It is so gorgeous and wild out here, I can’t get over it.” I set aside the camera to stare out the passenger window. The sight of the landscape caught me in the chest, not quite pain, but close. A longing rose within me, an ache almost like nostalgia, though I’d never before been this far west. I supposed everyone felt this way about certain places, maybe a familiar scent in the air, a particular tint to the sunlight striking the earth. But then I realized I knew the rock formations in the distance; I had seen them before, and a sudden twisting in my gut sent me bending forward.
“Out there,” I heard myself say. “Aces and Malcolm are out there.” I fumbled to open the glove compartment and retrieved Malcolm’s picture, which I’d toted with; I didn’t like to be parted from them. Clutching it, I studied the landscape in the distance and was pierced by certainty. I whispered, “That’s where this was taken. Out there. Thias, I know it.”
“I feel it, too,” Mathias said, in a completely different tone; gone was all trace of lighthearted joking. The sun cast an auburn beam directly across his face, glinting in his blue eyes and somehow darkening them, highlighting the angles of his nose and chin, his straight black eyebrows. My heart clenched into a hard knot.
Malcolm, I thought.
He said, low and hoarse, “Come here, let me feel you against me.”
I set aside the photograph and went to him at once, his right arm gathering me near. He shuddered, as though the cold shiver leaped from me to him, and pulled over on the shoulder of the interstate. Before and behind us stretched an endless ribbon of road, empty of all vehicles except for our truck. The Montana landscape sprawled as far as the eye could see in every direction, creating the illusion that the truck huddled in the exact center of a circle.
A circle that one could wander for days, for weeks, without reaching its end.
“Mathias.” I clutched him as hard as I could, in desperation, overwhelmed by something I couldn’t rationalize. I felt, that was all, felt the threat of loss all the way to the deepest trench of my soul.
“I’m here.” He held me just as fiercely, as though I might disappear in a wisp of smoke if he loosened his grip. He said against my loose hair, “I’m right here.”
“Don’t go,” I begged, in a voice not my own. “Don’t go.”
The sun slipped another fraction below the horizon and the angle of the light changed, however subtly. I leaned back enough to see his face, clutching it with both hands; he gripped my wrists. Our eyes held steady, both of us shaken, unable to explain.
“I will never leave you,” he vowed. “Not ever.”
I believed him; I trusted his words. But the loss had already happened, beyond my control, out there in the foothills. The echo of it, the searing remembrance of pain, seemed powerful enough to smother me. Don’t you see, don’t you see? Oh God, Malcolm, don’t you see?
I forced myself to say, “I know. It’s all right.”
He smoothed both hands over my hair and kissed my forehead, whispering as though to lighten the air, “Should we go get some food and then find our campsite, love? I’m starving.”
“Same here,” I whispered, though I was reluctant to move from his embrace; I kept my left hand in his right as we rolled on, our fingers tightly linked.
We drove first through the small town of Glendive, Montana, where we stopped to gas up the truck, hit a drive-thru, and buy some beer, and the normality of these things helped to dissolve the ball of ice in my stomach, at least a little.
“This town is so familiar. We always camped out here as kids,” Mathias said as we shared chicken nuggets and fries, cruising along one of Glendive’s main streets, a lovely route bordered by a thin blue strip of river to our right. The low-slung rocky ridges on its far banks were lit a warm caramel by the lowering sun. I kept the passenger window rolled down, my right elbow braced there, drinking in every sight as Mathias played tour guide.
“That’s the Yellowstone River, there,” he explained, indicating. “And there’s the dinosaur museum where we always begged to go. There’s a billboard of a T-Rex around here somewhere. Honey, keep an eye out for Snyder Street, that’s where we want to turn left to get out to Makoshika.” He pronounced it with the emphasis on the second syllable.
“Makoshika,” I repeated. “Sounds Japanese.”
“Lakota,” he corrected. “It means something like ‘big sky badlands,’ I think. Isn’t it great out here? I knew you’d love it as much as me.”
“Of course I do. It’s so hard to imagine you as a business major in Minneapolis,” I marveled, which he had been once upon a time ago, as a college student before we’d met. “I feel like your soul must have been hibernating.”
“That’s exactly what it was doing,” he agreed. “I understood it a little better when I came home to Landon last winter, but I didn’t fully realize it until I saw you at Shore Leave that first night. My soul leaped and bounded then, right to yours.”
I squeezed his fingers, clasped around mine. “Oh, sweetheart, look,” I said, with reverence. I nodded east, where a nearly-full moon had just cleared the horizon. “Look at that.”
“You just wait until we stargaze tonight,” he promised, squeezing my fingers in response.
We reserved a night at Makoshika no more than fifteen minutes later, and were directed to a campsite. As the sun sank the air grew increasingly cold and I tugged a hooded sweatshirt of Mathias’s over my head.
“Mom must have twenty pictures of us with that Triceratops,” Mathias said, indicating the wooden sign near the entrance as we climbed back in the truck.
“Let’s get one, quick,” I said, and so we did.
The moon was splendid in the sky, a creamy ivory that gilded the edges of the rock formations as we found our campsite and proceeded to unload our gear. The very scent of the air here was wilder than back home, full of a sharp sweetness that I’d never smelled…and yet, I knew I had, at the same time. It made no sense. But as it had been since first meeting him, everything with Mathias seemed right. I fully intended to help set up camp, but he worked with swift efficiency, staking out our tent, hoisting the rain cover, setting up our two little camp chairs; he skillfully constructed a te
pee of kindling, which he had burning even before the light fully faded from the violet and indigo-streaked sky. I did little more than admire him as I perched on a split log and sipped my second beer.
“You’re incredible,” I said as he crouched on the far side of the steadily-growing fire, the red flames highlighting the angles of his face from beneath. His grin was, as always, like a beam of sunshine.
“Didn’t know your man was so capable, did you?” he asked in response, helping himself to a beer and cracking it open.
“You’re a regular pioneer,” I said, and looked around for our horses; surely they were tethered nearby, dozing contentedly after a day spent carrying us west. Of course they were. How could we travel without them?
Wait a second…
“I know, I feel like Aces should be right over there,” Mathias murmured, indicating with his beer can. He looked beyond my shoulder, into the open country, as a log snapped and sent a small shower of red-hot sparks into the night. I shivered again, unable to shake the feeling that we had been here together before tonight. Near here, at least, in this area, and around a fire, exactly like this. Mathias whispered, “I swear he’s out there, grazing.”
“I swear it, too.” I was hard-pressed to remember exactly what year it was. Maybe I was drunk. I reached for Mathias and he came around the fire.
“Come here,” he said, tugging me onto his lap on one of our chairs.
“Do you believe in past lives, truly, I mean?” I asked as we studied the flames and the sky became spangled with an unfathomable magnificence of stars. I felt tiny and vulnerable under so much sky, and yet so very alive, washed clean and born anew.
Mathias caught my engagement ring between his thumb and index finger. So many nights I’d stayed awake, considering the possibility of reincarnation, vacillating between certainty and skepticism. I believed in Aunt Jilly’s Notions with all my heart, and there was very little scientific rationale supporting the ability to sense the future; most people would just laugh, or outright scorn the idea. There’s so much more to life than you can see, I heard Aunt Jilly say, and I was only beginning to understand the truth of this.
“A year ago I would have laughed at the idea,” Mathias said, just as softly. “Even having been raised in the same house with Elaine, who’s been reading the cards and trying to perform past-life regressions since we were little. When I think of where I was a year ago, in the Cities, trying to find a job. The scariest part is I actually thought I was fairly happy. I knew I wasn’t incredibly happy, but I told myself that no one really is, I mean, come on. I figured life was about as good as it was going to get. And then I came home to Landon, but mostly I came home to you. I saw you and I knew you were mine, in every sense of the word.” He whispered passionately, “And I believe to the bottom of my soul that you have been mine since the beginning of time.”
“Thias,” I breathed, turning so that I could press my face to the scent of his neck.
“How does it work?” he wondered. “How does a soul find its mate? Is there a celestial roadmap for souls, somewhere out there? I don’t think… what I mean is, I don’t think we’ve been allowed to be together in every life. I know we’re young, I know we’re healthy, but when I die, where will my soul go? Can it go somewhere to wait for yours? I can’t imagine being apart from you for a few days, let alone a lifetime. Jesus, that scares me so much.”
We’d talked of these things before, snuggled in our bed or swimming in Flickertail, but here under the open sky in a place that held meaning above and beyond what we knew as Mathias Carter and Camille Gordon, there existed an urgency that chilled me from the inside out. The thought of being separated from him, of death inevitably parting us, rendered me hollow and cold, elementally frightened. How many more lifetimes would we have to exist, kept apart from one another after that, until our souls could find each other again?
What if we never found each other again?
And the echoing cry of this dreadful thought seemed to lift from me and fly into the vast night sky.
“It scares me, too,” I whispered. “But we can’t think like that, sweetheart. We just can’t. It’s like you told me, back home. If we thought about everything that could happen, every terrible thing, it would rob all of the joy out of life. And I’m not planning to waste one second of this life with you, Thias, not one second.”
“Camille,” he whispered, and I could hear a lump in his throat. “I know you’re right, honey.”
For a time we watched the fire in silence, wrapped together beneath the old plaid blanket Mathias had grabbed from the truck. At last I murmured, “Look at the Milky Way. I’ve never seen it so perfectly clear.”
“I remember lying on my back as a kid, in this same campground, and watching it. Feeling like I could maybe drift up there and swim, or something,” he whispered.
“I thought the same thing the other night in the lake. About being able to fly up there and hop from star to star.”
“That’s where I’ll wait for you,” he said, half-teasing, but my heart seized at his words. “That one cluster of stars right there,” and he took my right hand in his to indicate. “I’ll wait right there for you. No matter how long it takes.”
Tears filled my eyes. “Then I will find you there. Nothing will stop me.”
He pressed his lips to my temple. “I want to make you pregnant, right now. I want you to have a part of me with you, always.”
Urgency buzzed in the air, determinedly stalking us, about to pounce. Without a word I spread the blanket on the ground and then we were kissing, deep kisses that spoke of time running out, even as I rebelled against the horror of that thought. With hurried movements we bared our skin from the waist down, my thighs curving around his hips as I took him inside, fingers linked as Mathias drove almost violently into my willing body.
“Let me,” I begged and he knew what I wanted, turning us so that I could straddle him. I kept our frantic pace. I didn’t want to blink, afraid if I did he would be gone. In the moonlight he was achingly beautiful, strong and powerful, so hard inside of me, and yet there existed a gaping gulf of vulnerability in my soul; I felt as though I retained no control at all, that events were exploding out of my hands and I was powerless to stop any of it.
“Mathias,” I gasped, curving forward over him, desiring to bring him into my body entirely, to cradle and protect him until the end of time, to force the universe to acknowledge that we belonged together, and could never be separated.
“Come here,” he ordered, rolling so that he was on top once more. The onrushing intensity of him, the scent of his skin and taste of his mouth, the strength of his thrusting overwhelmed my senses, until the stars appeared ablaze in the sky, whirling faster and brighter, blinding my eyes. Just before he came I thought I saw a shooting star flare across the multicolored sky, breaking into two distinct tails before shimmering out of existence. And then he cried out, harshly, shuddering as we fell to the side and clung; the world around us all at once seemed hushed, expectant, and no words were necessary.
Later, when the fire had reduced to glowing embers, we curled together in our tent, kept from full darkness by the faint red glow. Mathias pressed his palm to my belly and kissed my forehead. He whispered, “There. Right there. Can you feel him?”
I managed a sleepy smile, naked and warm and all tangled together with my man. I murmured honestly, “I can.”
When I woke—or was it a dream?—deep in the night, there was a third person in our tent. I gasped and tried to sit up, but was too enveloped in both Mathias’s arms and the sleeping bag. My heart seemed to burst. I thrashed both arms as though I had the power to push aside the smothering darkness.
Please, a voice whispered, and its agony swelled in my skull. The faintest of outlines shivered beside our sleeping bag, on Mathias’s side. I watched in silent shock, the pulse of blood gurgling in my ears, obliterating all external sounds. Please find me, please, I beg of you. I’ve been waiting so long…
Mal
colm? I gasped. I leaned over Mathias’s sleeping form, reaching wildly to grasp at the figure, desperate to contain it; I demanded, Is that you?
No, the voice whispered, its pain ancient and deep, and the outline trembled, allowing me to glimpse long, curling hair, much like my own.
It was a girl, I realized, and then for the space of one breath I could see eyes in her hollow white face, blazing into existence, one cedar-green and one with an iris so brown it was almost black. She stared directly at me and my internal organs simultaneously froze solid; a scent as of flowers filled the tent and in my mind appeared a sudden picture of a blossom with sharp pink edges. A name rose in my throat, emerging as both a gasp and an acknowledgement.
Cora, I whispered. In speaking her name, it all rushed back. Malcolm’s desperate search had been to find her. To find Cora. Resistance built an immediate protective shield—I couldn’t bear the razor of this truth; of what I’d already known on some deep level.
Malcolm had never found me.
I covered my eyes, blocking out the sight of Cora—of myself—of what I had tried so hard to forget.
Her pleading voice penetrated my defenses.
Please. There is no one else who can find me. Oh God, please, find me…
Find me…
Chapter Nine
I WOKE WITH AN ACHING HEAD THE MORNING OF JULY fifth, but I dragged myself and Rae over to the cafe to say good-bye to Camille and Mathias, who were leaving for their trip. Jo was there, Matthew in tow, and Grandma and Aunt Ellen, who were watching Millie Jo for the week.
I hugged Camille, whispering into the soft clouds of her dark hair, “Be careful, and find answers, all right?”
She drew back and I admired her beautiful eyes, her irises with a ring of darker gold surrounding them, her lashes fan-like on her cheeks when she blinked. I knew she wanted me to tell her that they would find all the answers they sought, and I wished so badly that I could assure her. But just now, I couldn’t even assure myself.
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