'The child has such a vivid imagination,' her grandmother said.
Reduced to mute contempt and acts of petty vengeance, Annie stole cigarettes from the witch's purse and smoked them behind dripping rhododendrons, greenly contemplating how unwise it was to love, for those you loved would only die and leave you.
Her father had been a bounding, joyous man. The only one who ever thought she was of value. And since his death, her life had been a ceaseless quest to prove him right. Through school and through her student days and on through her career, she'd been driven by that single purpose: to show the bastards.
For a while, after having Grace, she'd thought the point proven. In that pinched pink face, hungering so blind and needy at her nipple, came calm, as if the journey were complete. It had been a time for definitions. Now, she told herself, now I can be what I am, not what I do. Then came the miscarriage. Then another and another and another, failure compounding failure and soon Annie was again that pale, angry girl behind the rhododendrons. She'd shown them before and she'd show them again.
But it wasn't like before. Since her early days at Rolling Stone, those parts of the news media that followed such matters had dubbed her 'brilliant and fiery'. Now, reincarnated as boss of her own magazine - the kind of job she'd vowed never to take - the first of these epithets stuck. But, as if in recognition of the colder fuel that drove her, 'fiery' transmuted to 'ruthless'. In fact, Annie had surprised even herself with the casual brutality she'd brought to her latest post.
Last fall she'd met an old friend from England, a woman who'd been at the same boarding school and when Annie told her about all the bloodletting at the magazine she'd laughed and said did Annie remember playing Lady Macbeth in the school play? Annie did. In fact, though she didn't say this, she remembered being rather good.
'Remember how you stuck your arms in that bucket of fake blood for the "Out, damned spot" speech? You were red right up to the elbows!'
'Yep. Sure was one hell of a spot.'
Annie laughed along but went away and worried about the image for a whole afternoon, until she decided it wasn't even remotely relevant to her present situation because Lady Macbeth was doing it for husband's career not her own and in any case was clearly out of her tree. The following day, perhaps to prove a point, she had fired Fenimore Fiske.
Now, from the fatuous vantage of her office in exile, Annie reflected on such deeds and on the losses within her that had prompted them. Some of these things she had glimpsed that night at Little Bighorn when she'd slumped by the stone etched with the names of dead men and wept. Here, in this place of sky, she now came to see them more clearly, as if their secrets were unfurling with the season itself. And with a bereaved stillness born of this knowledge, as May slipped by, she watched the separate world outside grow warm and green.
Only when she was with him did she feel part of it. Three times more he had come to her door with the horses and they had ridden out together to other places he wanted to show her.
It had become routine that on Wednesdays Diane collected Grace from the clinic and sometimes on other days she or Frank might take her there too if they had to go to town. These mornings, Annie would catch herself waiting for Tom's call to ask if she wanted to ride and when it came she would try not to sound too eager.
The last time, she'd been in the middle of a conference call and she'd looked down toward the corrals and seen him leading Rimrock and a colt, both saddled, from the barn and she'd quite lost the drift of the conversation. She was suddenly aware that everyone in New York had gone silent.
'Annie?' one of the senior editors said.
'Yeah, sorry,' Annie said. 'I'm getting all this static this end. I lost that last bit.'
When Tom arrived, the conference was still going and she waved him in through the screen door. He took off his hat and came through and Annie mouthed to him that she was sorry and to help himself to coffee. He did and settled himself on the arm of the couch to wait.
There were a couple of recent issues of her magazine lying there and he'd picked one up and looked through it. He found her name at the top of the page where it listed everyone who worked there and he made an impressed face. Then she saw him grinning to himself over another style piece of Lucy Friedman's, called "The New Rednecks'. They'd taken a couple of models to some godforsaken place in Arkansas and shot them draped over the real thing, unsmiling men with beer guts, tattoos and guns slung in their pickup windows. Annie wondered how the photographer, a brilliant, outrageous man who wore mascara and liked to show everyone his pierced nipples, had escaped with his life.
It was ten minutes before the conference call finished and Annie, aware of Tom listening, became more and more self-conscious. She realized she was talking in a more dignified way than normal to impress him and immediately felt foolish. Gathered around the speaker phone in her office in New York, Lucy and the others must have wondered what she was on. When it was over she hung up and turned to him.
'I'm sorry.'
'It's okay, I liked hearing you work. And now I know what to wear next time I go down to Arkansas.' He tossed the magazine onto the couch. 'It's a lot of fun.'
'It's a lot of pain. Mostly in the ass.'
She was already in her riding clothes and they went right out to the horses. She said she'd try the stirrups a little longer and he came and showed her how to do it because the straps were different from those she was used to. She stepped in close to watch how he did it and for the first time she was aware of the smell of him, a warm clean smell of leather and some functional brand of soap. All the while, the tops of their arms touched lightly and neither of them moved away.
That morning they'd crossed over to the southern creek and made their way slowly up beside it to a place he said they might see beavers. But they saw none, only the two intricate new islands they'd built. They dismounted and sat on the gray bleached trunk of a fallen cottonwood while the horses drank their own reflections from the pool.
A fish or a frog broke the surface in front of the colt and he leapt back scared like some character in a cartoon. Rimrock gave him a weary look and went on drinking. Tom laughed. He got up and walked over and when he got there he put one hand on the colt's neck and another on his face. For a while he just stood there holding him. Annie couldn't hear if he spoke but she noticed that the horse seemed to be listening. And without any coaxing, he went back to the water and after a few wary sniffs, drank as if nothing had happened. Tom came back and saw her smile and shake her head.
'What's the matter?'
'How do you do that?'
'Do what?'
'Make him feel it was okay.'
'Oh, he knew it was okay.' She waited for him to go on. 'He gets a little melodramatic sometimes.'
'And how do you know that?'
He gave her the same amused look he'd given her that day when she'd asked him all those questions about his wife and son.
'You get to learn.' He stopped and something in her face must have told him she felt rebuked because he smiled and went on.
'It's only the difference between looking and seeing. Look long enough and if you're doing it right you get to see. Same with your job. You know what makes a good piece for your magazine because you've spent time making it your business to know.'
Annie laughed. 'Yeah, like designer rednecks?'
'Yeah, that's right. I wouldn't guess in a million years that's what people want to read about.'
'They don't.'
'Sure they do. It's funny.'
'It's dumb.'
It came out harsh and with a finality that left a silence hanging between them. He was watching her and she softened and gave him a self-deprecating smile.