“Nah, I have so much energy because of all this.” He gestures to the land and sky and everything else in front of us.
I smile. “Storms invigorate you, eh? Finally, the secret of Jake.”
“That and my constant supply of soda pop.”
Soda pop. Ha.
Since our argument the day Reverend Hal came by, Jake and I have been fine. Better than fine. We’re partners. He looks out appreciatively over Eight Hands Ranch. I appreciate it more each day, too. Appreciate him, appreciate Anna.
I haven’t asked specifically what Anna’s relationship is to Dad, but now that I know she’s a part owner of the failing ranch, I know she’s more to him than just an assistant. Just as Jake is more to him than simply a ranch hand.
They are his family, and they’re becoming mine as well.
“It’s terrible for you, you know, “ I say. “All that caffeine and dye. You should switch to tea. If I lived here year round, I’d make you switch.”
Anna got me hooked on the stuff. She serves it up cold with a thick, fresh lemon wedge and a couple of perfectly baked chocolate chip cookies: chewy on the inside, crunchy on the out. Between the Diet Dr. Pepper, tea, and chocolate chunks, we’re pretty much caffeined out 24/7. It helps with the slog of everything else, electrifying the heavy sadness that surrounds us. Gives us strength to combat the darkness.
“What dye?” He frowns with suspicion. “Besides you’d never live here year round, Cowgirl.”
“Who says I wouldn’t?”
“I know you. You’d never leave the city.”
“Not true.”
But it was true. I couldn’t imagine the winters here. The solitude. As awful as this last year was, I miss ordering take-out. I miss the wide array of restaurants—any ethnicity I wanted, anytime—I miss the buzz of the creative minds in the valley. The hustle.
When I don’t add anything else to my “not true”, he repeats his question about the dyes.
“Caramel coloring for one,” I say. “Never mind the amount of sugar. Did you know one soda has the equivalent of nine and one quarter teaspoons? Not to mention the high fructose corn syrup.”
“That’s why I drink diet,” he says, wagging the can in front of my face.
“Diet is even worse. Aspartame causes brain tumors.”
“Yeah, well, we all gotta die sometime.”
I frown. “Don’t say that.”
“It’s true. Look at old Gus in there. You think he ever would’ve thought he’d contract a rare disease? Anna could get cancer. Hell, we could get struck by lightning and fry right here on the porch.”
“That makes me feel better.”
“I’m just saying, we all have our vices, and this is mine.”
He shakes the can again, his eyes wild from the caffeine. It’s nearly empty, and I hear the liquid gunk swish around in the can.
“I guess you’re right. But it doesn’t feel like you’ll ever die. You’re invincible, or something.”
He scoffs. “Invincible? No. Just lucky, that’s all.”
His blue, blue eyes flash, holding my whole world steady. We’re sitting very close to each other on the swing. Each clash of thunder sent me scooting a little closer to him. Blushing, I cut the eye contact and look down, mumbling something about how hot it is. “The weather, I mean,” I say, and he chuckles, like he knows my reaction to his eyes on mine have nothing to do with the temperature in the air.
“Let’s hope your luck helps us come up with an idea to save the ranch,” I say as a way to cover my reaction.
His jaw clenches as he takes in the wide expanse of our falling-apart home again. Always watching and noticing, he points across the valley. “Look at that.”
“Wow,” I whisper. As if painted by the hand of Zeus himself, white stripes pierce the clouds and zigzag over the Tetons. The entire sky is like a painting: grays and blues and whites. “That doesn’t even look real.”
“That’s why we don’t need all those gadgets you guys have in the city. We have this.”
I feel him breathe in the vibration of the swing, and my breath catches up with his. If we can’t be physically together, we can breathe together. In and out. Our feet rest near each others, gently pressing the swing back and forth, back and forth. I press my hand down on the narrow space between us on the hard wood of the swing. The painted wood is hot against my palm. If he just set his hand on mine like he did that one time during dinner, would that be so bad?
Yes.
Yes, it would be. But the fact that I longed for touch, human touch, his touch—meant something. I was doing better. The ranch was helping. He was helping.
“Maybe we can start a YouFundIt,” I suggest.
“What’s that?”
“It’s something people do on social media. You get a cause and then raise money for that cause.”
“Random people donate?”
“Yeah.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. They get excited about the idea, I guess,” I say.
“Don’t they have stuff going on in their own lives they have to spend money on?”
“Probably. Or maybe not? I don’t know. I never really thought about it before.”
Suddenly the crowdsourcing idea did sound weird. But it worked. I knew lots of people who raised money for women’s business projects in developing countries, indie films, even books this way.
“I wouldn’t want to be indebted to any strangers like that.”
Cowboy Jake being Cowboy Jake. Had I really expected a different reaction?
Smiling, I just nod. Explaining the tech capital of the world and bitcoins and start-ups to someone who had never lived twenty miles outside where he was born was pointless. Maybe crowdfunding was, too. I don’t know.
“It was just an idea,” I say.
“I’m not faulting your ideas, Paige. I like your brain. It’s always running.” His fingers draw circles next to my forehead like a helicopter propeller.
“Running away, maybe. It’s my flaw. Like you said.”
He shrugs, his form of an apology. “I was just mad. Besides I run, too. It’s easier to run sometimes. But that’s not what I mean here. I mean running. Charging. Working on overtime. I look at you sometimes and I can tell you’re thinking about something.”
“Really?”
“Yep.”
“You look at me?” I ask.
“Sure.”
Jake notices me like I notice him. And admits it.
We sit for a while watching the storm. I stare at Jake’s dusty boots and suddenly they’re all I want to see for the rest of my life. Jake’s dusty boots beside mine.
And for a second I let myself want.
For a second I let myself long for Jake.
Maybe he feels it, too, the buzz between us as real as lightning in the summer sky because he tilts his body a little into mine, not so close that we are touching, but just enough to let me know he might be thinking that way about me as well.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Then
I decided to give Ty the benefit of the doubt. I needed someone to talk to, someone that understood, and that was Ty. Luce had a mental breakdown and got early acceptance to Princeton and left without even saying goodbye. I couldn’t relate to the crying, hugging classmates, to the crying/hugging teachers. I felt like an alien on a strange, depressing planet.
I needed another alien.
I needed Ty.
And as much as I hated to admit it, I missed him.
We were just starting to get chatty again—slugging each other in the hallway, meeting eyes over takeout with Mom and Phil at dinner—when Elliot happened.
Elliot was the fifth.
And for Ty, Elliot was the worst.
It happened in mid-May when we thought our string of suicides was over. When the volunteer parents who made up the coalition of the willing started to peter off—heading back to tone their million-dollar bodies with pre-dawn Pilates, early-morning meetings, fair-
trade coffee with angel investors, and kale smoothies with venture capitalists looking for the Next Big Thing.
Ty and Elliot were on the same Little League team—the Cardinals, he reminded me after—when they were in second grade back in Brooklyn. He relocated a few years before Ty. There’s a continual Harvard-Stanford shuffle that goes on between university scholars. Ty told me Elliot was a quiet, unassuming kid with an amazing knack for hitting doubles. Because he was small, the other team would come in closer when he was up, then, when he’d bang that shit out of the ballpark, they’d scramble like eggs in a blender to catch his heat.
Ty played a mean shortstop with Elliot manning first base. They’d work together, scrawny Ty scooping up the ball and tossing it underhand to Elliot who’d nail the kid out at first. They’d high five after, chase each other around the play structure, and sneak a second bag of Doritos at snack time.
Ty moved up to machine pitch after that year but Elliot’s parents pulled him out. He had to adjust his schedule to make room for things that mattered more than baseball. Like violin lessons and tutoring.
Ty was thrilled to run into him again last year when he moved to California, but they didn’t have a connection anymore. They had nothing in common, and Elliot blew him off when he tried to get together. “I have to study,” he always said.
Ty thought Elliot looked at him like he was a bad influence. Someone who would suck him down to the sewer, keep him from his dreams—like those confident spring days when nothing could come between them but a ball that the two of them, together, could tackle easily.
By the time Elliot stood on the train tracks, he and Ty weren’t even communicating anymore, other than a half-hearted wave in the hallway. But his death hit Ty so hard I didn’t think he’d ever recover.
After school, instead of playing video games or bantering with me in the kitchen, Ty would lie on his blue comforter and toss his old baseball against the wall, over and over and over, until a day became a week and a week a month.
“Ty,” I asked, knocking softly on the open door frame, “Can I come in?”
His room stunk the way the inside of a closed trunk does.
Thunk. Thunk. Thunk.
His Little League uniform was flat on his desk, hand pressed like he’d run his palm over the size 8 T-shirt over and over again. His tiny white uniform pants, still with faded grass stains on the knees, lay next to it. And next to them, red knee-high socks.
His hat, a small red cap with a Cardinal on it, was resting on his head, bill pointed backward. He’d unhooked the back to make it fit, but it was still way too small.
Ty looked like a crazy person sitting there surrounded by his childhood things.
“I don’t care,” he said.
“Yes, you do.”
I shut the door behind us. Pushed in the lock with my thumb.
“Ty.”
I sat next to him and felt the bed shift.
His eyes were red and puffy and broke my heart into a million pieces.
“What can I do?” I asked.
“Get me a time machine. Let me go back. Let me go back and make his parents stop being such assholes. Let him continue with baseball, the one thing he loved, instead of forcing him down a road he had no interest in going down. You have a time machine, Sis?”
His voice had an angry edge to it, the Sis oozed with sarcasm. It was just a mask.
“I wish I did.”
Thunk. Thunk.
“Why’d you want to help me anyway? I’m a rapist remember?” He spat that last bit.
“Ty.”
“What? You believed them! You know you did. You probably still do.”
“I live down the hall from you. I have every right to be scared.”
That stopped him. His glare faded into pure horror. His eyes filled with tears. “You think I’d hurt you, Paige?”
“No. I mean, I don’t know. After the last time…”
“FUCK. THIS. WORLD.”
He didn’t ask me to leave. So I stayed.
“His dad’s a fucking asshole is what he is.” Ty continued to toss the ball against the wall while he ranted. “He works, what? Eleven, twelve hours a day at that crazy place? Even when we were kids, he never took the time to play catch with Elliot. It was the coach who invested in him, recognized his talent. You know I was there when that sonofabitch talked to Coach and told him Elliot wouldn’t be coming back next year, wouldn’t be moving on with the rest of us, and Elliot just had to stand there, taking it? He didn’t say a word. He wasn’t even breathing.”
“What did you do?”
“I laid into him! I begged him to let him go on with us. We were a team. We’ve been at it since T-ball. Saturdays at the park and Sundays at the batting cages, it was what we did. It was what we loved. Who we were.”
“What happened?”
“He told me to mind my own business. What will Elliot do, become a pro-baseball player? They expected things from him.”
Thunk. Thunk.
“That sucks.”
He scowled at the wall. “It doesn’t suck. Missing a green light sucks. That was fucking insane is what it was. You don’t tell an eight-year-old kid they have to be pro-anything. A pro-baseball player? What the fuck? It’s for fun. We were KIDS. Sometimes I fucking hate all these so-called ‘successful’ motherfuckers who rob their children’s childhoods for some blank canvas future. That’s what’s happening, you know? In their attempt to secure these ‘successful futures’, they are quite literally killing their children.”
He stood up. He shoved his closet open and grabbed a baseball bat. He started swinging it around the room. I backed up against the closet and spoke in a quiet voice reserved for…God, I didn’t remember the last time I used it. Probably when my dad was drunk and we were in Wyoming. I shivered at the thought.
“You know why I didn’t go to his funeral, Paige? You know why I didn’t get up on the altar like I did at Elena’s and sing for my friend?” Ty stared darkly into my soul. I sucked in a breath. He was holding the bat up above his head. One false move and I could be dead. I could be next.
“Because you’d kill his dad if you had?” I said, my voice barely above a whisper.
He looked at me then as if he was seeing me for the first time.
“No. Jesus. You think I want to go to jail for life? No fucking way.” He glanced at the bat like he just noticed he was holding it up in a threatening matter. He tossed it gently on the bed and approached me, slowly, purposefully, like a tiger. “I’d tell him, ‘You did this.’” He shook his finger in my face. “‘Elliot didn’t kill himself. You did. Nine years ago. Because he was a strong-ass kid. It just took this long to make his heart stop. And Elliot was such a sweet guy, he wouldn’t want to hurt his father’s feelings.’”
After that moment, I knew Ty was capable of pretty much anything. He was both an angel and a devil. The problem was, I had no idea of my role—who I was to him, or which persona he was to me—but the room was thick with passion and pain, and it was only a matter of time until my curiosity would win, and I’d make myself find out.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Now
After chores, dinner, and watching old movies with my dad, Anna and I move out onto the porch, watching the sun pour down onto the corral in front of us, baking the previously wet dirt into cracked cake. When I feel the tension in the air shift from a casual break to a more formal conversation, I ask, “Where’s Jake?”
This is my new stand-by for when the anxiety rises from my stomach to my chest and threatens to pour out of me in the form of a tantrum or tears—I’m never sure which. Even if Jake and I aren’t actively involved in a conversation, just being around his cool confidence while he works is so calming. I like to know he’s nearby.
“Getting the horses ready.”
“For what?”
She takes a long sip out of a tall, strawberry-decorated glass. She peers at me over the lip. “For our overnight.”
My pulse races. �
��Overnight, like overnight-overnight?”
“What else would overnight mean? Tanya, our friend from town, is coming to sit with your daddy, and we’re going to fetch a herd of cattle that have been grazing over the mountain.”
“We?”
“You, me, and Jake.”
Thunk. My heart. Not unlike the sound of Ty’s baseball hitting that wall. “Oh.”
Jake and me on an overnight? Just the three of us for 24 hours? At night. Over. Night. Stars. Sleeping bags.
Panic mode. “I can’t go. I have too much…writing to do.”
“You don’t write. You just sit there and stare at that screen.”
Crap.
“That’s called writer’s block, and it’s very normal—I hear—and anyway, I’m writing somewhere else. Not that it…besides, I don’t think we should up and leave dad with this Tanya, this stranger.”
“Him and Tanya get along just fine.”
“Why can’t the two of you just go?”
“We could. But we want you to come along.”
The way she says it is strange. Anna and Jake worship at the Church of Personal Space.
Then it dawns on me. “You don’t want to leave me alone.”
“Your mother asked that we don’t.”
“Is that why Jake hangs around? You’re paying him to babysit me?”
“Jake? No. Jake does what he wants. If he’s hanging around you, that’s on his own accord.”
I feel stupid. And stupidly relieved. I look away so she can’t see the relief spilling all over my face.
“What exactly does my mom think I’ll do?” I ask.
Anna takes a long sip of tea. Her ice cubes clink around in her tall glass. She doesn’t need to answer, and it was dumb of me to ask anyway. What did I want, her to actually say it? That I was on suicide watch? That I was sent here because they suspected I’d be next?
We exchange a knowing look and I realize there’s no point in arguing I could stay home alone. I didn’t even want to stay home alone. I’d way rather be with Anna and Jake, though I hated to admit it. Anna is now part of the Coalition of the Willing—except she rides a horse instead of an REI chair. “Fine. When do we go?”
Paint My Body Red Page 10
