'For his loving you.'
'Yes. And Grace. It sounds awful, doesn't it?' 'No.'
She asked him if it was like that with Rachel and he said no, it was different. And Annie listened in silence while he told her the story. She conjured life in her mind from the photograph she'd seen in Tom's room, the beautiful face with its dark eyes and glossy tumble of hair. The smile was hard to reconcile with the sorrow Tom now spoke of.
It was not the woman but the child in her arms that had moved Annie most. It gave her a pang of what, at the time, she refused to acknowledge as jealousy. It was the same feeling she'd had when she saw Tom's and Rachel's initials in the concrete of the well. Oddly, the other photograph, of the grown Hal, gave full mitigation. Though he was dark like his mother, his eyes were Tom's. Even frozen in time, they disarmed all animosity.
'Do you ever see her?' Annie asked when he'd finished.
'Not for some years. We talk on the phone now and then, about Hal mostly.'
'I saw the picture in your room. He's beautiful.'
She could hear Tom smile behind her head. 'Yeah, he is.' There was a silence. A branch, white-crusted with ash, collapsed in the fire, hoisting a flurry of orange sparks into the night.
He asked, 'Did you want more children?'
'Oh yes. We tried. But I could never hold on to them. In the end we just, gave up. More than anything, I wanted it for Grace. A brother or a sister for Grace.'
They fell silent again and Annie knew, or thought she knew, what he was thinking. But it was a thought too sorrowful, even on this outside rim of world, for either one of them to utter.
The coyotes kept up their chorus all night. They mated for life, he told her, and were so devoted that if ever one were caught in a trap, the other would bring it food.
For two days they rode the bluffs and gullies of the high Front. Sometimes they would leave the horses and go on foot. They saw elk and bear and once Tom thought he saw, watching from a high crag, a wolf. It turned and went before he could be sure and he didn't mention it to Annie in case it worried her.
They came across hidden valleys filled with bear-grass and glacier lily and waded up to their knees through meadows turned to lakes of brilliant blue with lupine.
The first night it rained and he pitched the little tent he'd brought in a flat green field strewn all about with the bleached poles of fallen aspen. They got soaked to the skin and sat huddled together, shivering and laughing in the mouth of the tent with blankets over their shoulders. They sipped scalding coffee from blackened tin mugs while outside the horses grazed unbothered, the rain sleeking off their backs. Annie watched them, her wet face and neck lit from below by the oil lamp and he thought he'd never seen, nor ever would he see, any living creature so beautiful.
That night, while she slept in his arms, he lay listening to the drumming of the rain on the tent roof and tried to do what she'd told him they must, not to think beyond the moment, just to live it. But he couldn't.
The following day was clear and hot. They found a pool fed by a narrow twist of waterfall. Annie said she wanted to swim and he laughed and said he was too old and the water way too cold. But she wouldn't take no for an answer, so under the dubious gaze of the horses they stripped and leapt in. The water was so icy it made them shriek and they had to scramble right out and stood hugging each other, bare-assed and blue, jabbering like a couple of loopy kids.
That night the sky shimmered green and blue and red with aurora borealis. Annie had never seen it before and he had never seen it so clear and so bright. It rippled and spread in a vast luminous arch, trailing folded striations of color in its wake. He saw its crenelate reflection in her eyes as they made love.
It was the last night of their blinkered idyll, though neither gave it name, other than by the plangent joining of their bodies. By tacit compact forged only of their flesh, they took no rest. There was to be no squandering in sleep. They fed upon each other like creatures foretold of some dreadful, limitless winter. And they only ceased when the bruising of their bones and the raw traction of their coupled skin made them cry out in pain. The sound floated through the luminous stillness of the night, through shadowed pine and on and up until it reached the listening peaks beyond.
Some time after that while Annie slept, he heard, like some distant echo, a high primeval call which made every creature of the night fall silent. And Tom knew he'd been right and that it was a wolf he'd seen.
Chapter Thirty-three
She peeled the onions then cut them in half and finely sliced them, breathing through her mouth so the fumes wouldn't make her cry. She could feel his eyes upon her every move and she found it curiously empowering, as if his watching somehow invested her with skills she'd never thought to possess. She'd felt it too when they made love. Maybe (she smiled at the thought), maybe that was how horses felt in his presence.