Paint My Body Red

by Heidi R. Kling

  I lean into the rhythm of her strong body as we push through the wet mountain air and pound up the trail, trees and brush and all forms of logical decisions whizzing by. She runs and runs and runs like she needs it, too, and when she finally stops, it’s not because I want to, it’s because she does. She’s exhausted. We’re miles from home when, panting and sweaty, she drops her head and starts munching on a bush. I slip off her wet back and nearly fall to the ground. I can barely stand after holding onto Scout with my inner thighs. Bareback is a whole new adventure.

  My heart pounds a million miles an hour. I try to take a step, but my legs are wobbly and uncertain.

  Scout turns her head from the bush and looks at me like, Well, you’re the one who hopped on my back again, girl. What’d you expect?

  “Anna’s going to have a field day with this one,” I groan, happily.

  And I swear to all things holy, it looks like Scout nods in agreement.

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  It’s long after dark by the time I make it back to the house.

  Anna and Jake are outside calling my name, shining flashlights into the darkness.

  “Right here,” I say. I try to flatten the excitement out of my voice, but it doesn’t quite work. I’m positively giddy that Scout let me ride her. That I’m not hurt. That I found my way back in the dark in one piece.

  Jake and Anna run up to me, and Jake grips my arm and moves in like he’s going to hug me but Anna beats him to it, pulling me into her arms with a hard squeeze. “Are you okay? What happened? We were worried sick.”

  “Sorry. I was…well, I was feeding her, and then I thought, okay, what the heck, I’ll give it a try, and well, she took off out the gate—I held on and she didn’t try to buck me and we ended up miles away before she finally stopped.”

  Jake’s eyes are smiling as he shakes his head, unable to conceal he’s at least a little proud of me. Anna, however, is a different story. The creases deepen between her eyebrows.

  “Well, where is she?”

  “Up on the mountain. She wouldn’t come back with me.”

  “We’ll deal with her later. Come on inside. It’s cold—the storm, I was worried you were caught up in it—and you look a fright walking around in the dark all chilled! Riding in the dark.” Anna storms back to the house, expecting us to follow, still mumbling.

  We do, but slowly.

  I grab the elbow of Jake’s rough jacket, and pull him back. “She let me ride her, Jake! It was amazing! She didn’t try to buck me off or anything. It was like nothing I’ve ever experienced.”

  “Genuine cowgirl, huh?”

  I beam. “Getting there.”

  “All right, Cowgirl. Time to face the music,” he says wryly, but he puts his arm around me and gives me a squeeze. The wool of his coat smells like all the good in the world: horses, mountain air, and Jake—freshly in from the rain.

  When we walk through the door, Anna is still loudly listing my crimes, stomping around in the kitchen, banging something together. Coffee and sandwiches, I hope—if she’s feeding me, she can’t be that mad, can she? When she re-enters the room with a tray of sandwiches and coffee (yes!), she points at a chair for me to sit, and then, after pouring me some hot coffee, sits herself. Arms crossed, she finally demands in the eerily calm voice of a judge, “Explain why you thought riding an untamed ‘stang in the dark—again—was a smart choice.”

  “Sorry. I have no excuse. I wanted to see her. I’d been cooped up inside for so long—I know, also my fault—but we were hanging out, watching the rain. And then the rain stopped. And the sunset was just gorgeous, and well, I guess I wanted to ride her. She was antsy from the storm, and she let me, so I did.”

  I eye the sandwiches. The turkey and lettuce and tomato falling out of the thick, homemade bread. My stomach growls. She pushes one toward me, and while I listen to her lecture, gobble it up.

  “Didn’t you learn anything from being in bed a full two weeks? Thank goodness your father is sleeping.”

  I wipe tomato juice off my chin. “You didn’t tell him? Phew.”

  “And worry him sick? The last couple weeks he barely left your side. Once we can forgive, but twice makes me think something else is going on here.”

  “Like what?” My heart is still pounding with adrenaline. I wish Anna would leave so I could pull Jake into a dark corner and regale him with my tale. It’s clear my excitement over riding Scout is only feeding Anna’s fury. I want to enjoy this triumph. It worked. We connected, finally.

  “Like”—she glances first at Jake—“maybe you want to get hurt.”

  That stops me. My chest falls. I put what’s left of my sandwich down. “I don’t…I don’t want to get hurt.”

  “Then why else would you keep riding a horse who doesn’t want to be ridden?”

  Anna’s face is red. I’ve never seen her angry like this. And upset. And worried. Her face is a mirror of my mother’s at SFO the day she dropped me off. I didn’t want to scare my mom then. And I don’t want to scare Anna now.

  “I’m sorry I scared you, ” I start to say. I want to explain, that this was the opposite of wanting to be hurt. I don’t want to die. I want to live! But she interrupts me before I have a chance to explain.

  “Sorry. Yeah, I’ve heard that before.” She leans forward, eyes intense. “You know what is keeping your father alive, sitting in that chair, eating baby food? You. You being here.” She smacks the strawberry tablecloth with her palm. “It’s true. Before you came—and I’m sorry if this is blunt, but truth often is—he was thinking of pulling the plug, being done with the machines and—”

  “Anna,” Jake warns.

  He scoots his chair closer to mine, pressing his upper arm against mine for support. A move that is both secretive and strong. I appreciate it so much.

  Jake? My eyes ask and he nods with a sad shrug, a confirmation, and a truth.

  “You being here, Paige. You on this ranch?” Anna taps the table. “It changed his mind. It’s making him come back to life again. To use the rest of his days the best he can.”

  “This isn’t true,” I say, shaking my head. “He loves you. He loves Jake. He wants to live for you.”

  Anna shakes her head. “You know how hard it is for him to wake up every day and not be able to use his hands? To be unable to form a sentence or use the bathroom? He’s a cowboy, Paige. He was brave and he did his best, but he was just done. And what I don’t think you understand, maybe because of what you went through in California—and believe me, I know it was a lot. A whole hell of a lot more than anyone your age should have to go through—but Paige, honey, you don’t have much time left with him. You’re his daughter. Do you think the two of us even compare? You need to stop thinking of yourself and stop beating yourself up about what happened back home and think of him when you make these choices. Your daddy, who has loved you all your life, who would do anything to be able to walk across the room again, to hold you in his arms. Never mind get back on a horse.”

  Dad was ready to cut off his ventilator and feeding tube and what, just wait to die? My being here gave him the will to live? Well, then I better freaking live.

  No wonder Jake and Anna were so shaken up when I was hurt.

  And then a horrific thought. A sentence that once I think it tumbles over and over in my shaken brain. The whole of my life is centered around death. No matter what I do to try and escape it, I can’t. It follows me everywhere. My chest is heavy with sadness—a dull, never-ending ache I finally thought I was escaping. I swipe a hot tear off my cheek and try to swallow the others away. Why do I even try?

  I look down at my hands. They suddenly look so small. “I need to learn to ride Scout to save the ranch.”

  “There are other ways,” Anna says.

  “There’s not,” I say. “He can’t lose the ranch, Anna. We can’t lose the ranch.”

  Jake sets his hand on mine, and when I look up at the two of them, they are all blurry because my eyes are full of tears.


  “So you think Scout’s still up on the mountain, then?” Jake asks.

  I nod. “I wanted to stay the night up there with her, but I figured you’d be worried.”

  “Figured we’d be worried? Paige, that’s what I’m talking about. We were sick with worry…” Anna says. “After all you’ve been through. I don’t want to get into all that right now, but you…Paige. We have to worry about you.”

  That hits me like a crash to the hard dirt. They have to worry about me? I don’t want their pity. Back in California, I was ignored. My mother was too busy for my problems. She was too disinterested to care, and even when she did care, she didn’t know how to care. I’m not used to this.

  I squirm in my chair. Even Jake’s warm hand is starting to feel like a too-thick blanket, smothering and hot, and I want to throw it off me. But I don’t have to. He scoots his chair back and moves to the doorway, slipping into Dad’s old plaid jacket.

  “Where are you going?”

  “To get Scout.”

  I stand back up. “I’m coming too, then.” No way am I staying here with angry Anna. Horrible news bearing Anna. I don’t want to be in the house at all.

  “No. Go on and clean up and get some rest,” he says to me. But then he mumbles to Anna in words I can barely make out, “Hope she didn’t take back with her herd.”

  “Her herd?”

  Anna rubs the worry lines between her eyebrows. “Oh, god. I hope not.”

  “What herd?” I ask.

  “You didn’t tell her yet about Scout’s lineage?” Anna asks Jake.

  “Nope,” he says, putting on his riding gloves.

  “What? Come on, you two have been keeping secrets from me since I got here. Please just tell me.”

  Anna looks at me pointedly, like I’m one to talk about secrets.

  I avoid her eyes. I’m torn between wanting to melt through the floor to avoid the Ty talk and pushing further on the Scout lineage business when Jake, still standing at the closed door in his cowboy hat and long, dark brown coat, says the words that make me want to throw my arms around him and keep him forever. “I’ll fill her in on the way up the mountain. Grab your coat, City Slicker.”

  “Really?”

  “You’re the one that lost her, makes sense you’re the one who should find her.”

  I mouth, Thank you. He nods. I slip into my coat and follow him out before Anna can stop me.

  In the darkness, Jake and I saddle up Blue and Thunderbolt, and, with headlamps strapped to our foreheads, we follow little pools of light as well as the moonlight up the mountain. The crickets chirp through the dry night air.

  “Scout’s mom is Luna, our prize-winning mare,” he says after a while. His even voice cuts through the night, calming me immediately. I take a deep breath and cling to his voice.

  “She was a champion cutter a few years ago,” he continues. “One day, when your dad was first diagnosed, we were all in town at the doctor’s office—clearly our brains weren’t with the horses because we had so much other stuff on our minds—and we forgot Luna was in heat. When we got back to the ranch, the corral had been knocked over and Luna was gone.”

  “Gone? Did someone steal her?”

  “Something like that.” Jake’s voice smiles in the darkness. “Eloped more like it.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “You see,” Jake, says in his drawl, “one of the wild mustangs your dad kept for the government—on the top acreage near where we camped out?—well, he wanted to get at Ole’ Luna so bad, he tore down the corral fence and somehow convinced her to run away with him.”

  “That was…ballsy.”

  “That’s one way of putting it.” I hear his smile again. “Anyhow, mustangs are known for that sort of thing. So when we finally caught up with her, she was grazing in a field with their herd. She came back home with us reluctantly. Eleven months later, your Scout was born.”

  Your Scout. Riding side by side in the dark like this makes it so easy to talk. We lumber along and Jake talks. I could listen to Jake talk forever.

  “Good news for their filly is that a lot of show horses are inbred now. Breeding with their cousins and aunties and the grandfathers you name it, and they have to be put down a lot of the time. Scout here is half mustang. She’s half prize-winning mare. There’s a fire inside her and a winner in there, too. That’s why we were so disappointed she couldn’t be rode. Why I kept trying.”

  “I’m still trying. She let me ride her, Jake. Me. The fact that she let me mount her like that was a big step in the right direction. It could keep Daddy fighting. Keep him alive, you know?”

  Jake knows immediately what I’m referring to.

  “You don’t need to pay any mind to what Anna said back there. She’s just worried about him.” I can see his profile in the dark. He turns to look at me. “Worried about you.”

  I scowl at him. “You don’t have to protect me or make excuses for Anna. I’m a big girl and have a pretty decent bullshit detector. Anna speaks her mind, and it’s usually the truth. She was telling me the truth back there.”

  “Those parts of it, that he was planning on giving up are true, yes, but most Lou Gehrig’s patients don’t go to the length he does to stay alive. When they stop eating on their own, they often just…let nature take its course.”

  “They give up?” That’s so awful, I can barely take it.

  “More like they can’t afford to stay alive. You have any idea how much these machines cost? Or what a full time caregiver would? If we didn’t have Anna, we’d be looking at a whole other situation.”

  “But I’m here. I could do what Anna’s doing, if they’d let me try.”

  “We didn’t know you were coming. That you’d come. He didn’t know.”

  “What I don’t get…” Tipping my head back, I swallow the infinite stars. “…is why no one told me.”

  “We tried to.”

  “You should’ve tried harder. Made me listen.”

  “You didn’t return our calls. Your mom is impossible to tie down to a phone conversation…”

  “She’s more of an…electronic communicator.” I laugh, although nothing about it is actually funny.

  “More like a robot,” Jake says, which makes me laugh some more. “How could she not care about the man she was married to for years?”

  “She cares in her own way.”

  “Huh?”

  “It’s complicated.”

  He adjusts his hat. “A way I don’t understand then.”

  “Things are different where we are. People don’t care about the things you do here.”

  “Like what? Like dying relatives? What human being doesn’t care about that?”

  “Have you ever been so caught up in something, like training for the rodeo, for instance, that it’s all you think about morning, noon, and night? You go to sleep thinking about it and you wake up thinking about it until it consumes you into neglecting the things that should be consuming you?”

  He shrugs. “I guess.”

  “Well, that’s how she is about her career. That’s how my stepdad is, too. When they aren’t at work, they are on their computers 24/7. After we left the ranch, it was like she wanted to shake off everything she was here in Wyoming. She never tells people she’s from here. I don’t know. Maybe my dad hurt her too much…”

  “I can’t see Gus hurting anyone, but he does go through his periods…”

  “Periods?”

  “Yeah, where…well, I don’t know if you want to hear all this.”

  “It’s fine. What?”

  “He’d be fine and then he’d just sort of shut down. Drink more. Drink during the day. I’d be looking for him and catch him sitting in his den with the shades drawn just looking out at space. I’d pick up his empty bottles, toss them out. Sometimes it got pretty bad.”

  “How so?”

  Jake is quiet. We ride along in the dark.

  “Jake? Tell me.”

  “I’d worry about h
im is all. But then spring would come and he’d be out scraping the horse droppings and cooking up bacon again, and it was like it never happened.”

  “Yeah, whenever my mom rants about Dad, it’s always about his dark spells, his drinking. She wanted him to get help for depression, but I guess he sloughed it off. It was one of their huge problems.”

  “Was he like that when you were a kid?”

  I frown. “I’ve never really thought about it. But now that you ask, yeah. I remember him making pancakes and laughing and running around with me on his back. Then I remember him sort of…disappearing for a while. Mom would usually take me to California or Hawaii or New York City when that happened. A couple weeks later he’d be okay. All sorry and the house full of flowers, and they’d dance to country music. One time we started looking at houses in California and just didn’t come back. “

  “That’s seems so unsettling.”

  “Yeah. It was. I haven’t thought about all of that in years.”

  Jake’s silhouette moves languidly on the horse. “Weird how stuff we forget is just sitting there the whole time, waiting to be drawn back out.”

  “Seriously.” Again, it’s like wiping off the foggy mirror and facing my past head-on.

  “So I guess he got worse as the years went on. That’s probably why my mom didn’t want me to visit. She never knew how he’d be.”

  “Sounds like she was protecting you.”

  Some of my past anger fades into appreciation. Mom might not be perfect, but she wanted to do what was best for me, back then, anyway. Maybe even now. Maybe that’s why she dropped me off at the airport. She knew I needed this. That coming to the ranch might be the best place for me. “Yeah, I guess so.”

  “Maybe your daddy tried his best, too? Even back then?” Jake suggests.

  I nod in the dark. “Maybe we all do,” I say.