The woman on the bench seemed oblivious to the family as well. And oblivious to Page. She just kept looking toward the night.
He smelled cigarette smoke and glanced over his shoulder toward where Costigan leaned his tall, thin body against a post that sup- ported the platform’s roof. The police chief had put on a cowboy hat and raised a glowing cigarette to his mouth. The woman didn’t pay attention to that, either.
Confused, Page looked in the direction that held her gaze. Above the horizon, he saw an amazing number of stars, with more appearing all the time as the last of the sunlight retreated. He studied the dark expanse of the grassland. Forty-five degrees to the right, he noticed the distant specks of headlights as a few vehicles approached Rostov from the Mexican border, which lay fifty miles away.
So what the hell am I supposed to understand? Page wondered. He was beginning to feel like the victim of a scam, yet he couldn’t imagine what it might be.
At the fence, the middle-aged man spoke again, echoing his thoughts. “It’s just like I told you. Nothing. Just some kind of tourist trap. I’m amazed they’re not trying to sell us something.”
“Honestly,” the woman replied, “I don’t know where you’re in such a hurry to go. Just give it a chance.”
Meanwhile, at another section of the fence, the two children tugged harder at their parents’ hands.
“Daddy, I don’t see anything,” the little girl said.
“Here, I’ll lift you up,” the father said.
“Me, too,” the little boy insisted.
“You’ll have to wait your turn. I can’t lift both of you at the same time.”
“I’ll do it.” The mother picked up the boy.
“I still don’t see anything,” the little girl said. “Daddy, the dark makes me scared.”
“Mommy, I’m hungry,” the little boy said.
“Okay,” the father told them, sounding defeated. “I guess we’d better go after all. Nothing’s out there anyhow. Tomorrow morning, maybe we can see where they made that James Deacon movie. The set’s supposed to be around here, and I hear the big old ranch house is still standing.”
As the parents carried the fidgeting children to the car, two other vehicles pulled in. One was a pickup truck, and when it stopped, three teenagers got out. The other, to Page’s annoyance, was a bus labeled TEXAS TOURS, from which about thirty people emerged. A clamor arose as they all felt the need to say whatever flitted through their minds.
Who are all these people? Page wondered. He had come here hoping to talk with his wife and to find out what had possessed her to leave. With every new arrival, a quiet reunion became more and more impossible.
To the woman on the bench, however, none of the other people seemed even to exist. She just kept staring at the horizon, never once moving her head toward the growing distractions.
Page realized that he was hesitating, that despite his effort to get here and his impatience with Costigan for making him wait, he was actually afraid of the answers he might get.
Bracing his resolve, he walked through the darkness toward his wife.
18
She had her head tilted back so that it was leaning against the shadowy wooden wall. Her gaze was straight ahead.
Page stepped up to the side and watched her.
“Tori.”
She didn’t reply.
In the background, the jabbering conversations of the people who’d gotten off the bus filled the night.
Maybe she didn’t hear me, Page thought.
“Tori?” he repeated.
She just kept staring toward the horizon.
He stepped closer. The reflected headlights from another car showed him that her eyes were wide open, and she didn’t even seem to be blinking. It was as if she were spellbound by something out there.
Again he turned in the direction she was looking, but all he saw were the dark grassland, the brilliant array of the stars, and another set of headlights off to the right on the road from Mexico.
“Tori, what are you looking at?”
No response.
Stepping closer, Page came within five feet of her and noticed in his peripheral vision that Costigan moved protectively closer, then leaned against another post. The smoke from his cigarette drifted in the air.
Suddenly Page heard her voice.
“Aren’t they beautiful?” Tori asked.
“They?” Page turned toward the dark grassland and concentrated. “What do you see?”
“You can’t see them?”
“No.”
With the noise of the annoying conversations behind him, Page almost didn’t hear what Tori said next.
“Then you shouldn’t have come.”
Baffled, he sat beside her.
Corrigan shifted again.
She still didn’t look at him.
“What did you expect me to do?” Page asked, working to keep his voice calm. “You left without telling me. You disappeared for two days. I was afraid something had happened to you. When I found out you were here, surely you didn’t expect me to stay home.”
A half-dozen people stepped onto the observation platform, their feet thunking on the wood, their voices echoing in the enclosure.
“Don’t see a thing,” one of them said. “What a crock.”
“Wait!” someone in the crowd at the fence shouted. “There!
“Where?”
“Over there! Look! Four of them!”
“Yes!” a woman exclaimed.
“I don’t see a friggin’ thing,” a teenager said.
“There!” someone said. With each exclamation, the crowd shifted and turned. The murmur died away as people focused all of their attention, then rose again when some-Page among them-saw nothing.
“You’ve gotta be shitting me. There’s nothing out there,” another teenager complained.
The crowd’s comments went back and forth. Some people were rapt, while others were frustrated. A few became angry.
Page heard Tori’s voice next to him.
“The interruptions go on for a couple of hours,” she said.
Bewildered, he studied her. They sat silently for a while, and as some of the onlookers began to leave, the headlights of their cars showed how intense her eyes were as she gazed at the darkness. Her red hair was combed back behind her ears, emphasizing the attractive lines of her face. He wanted to touch her cheek.
“Then it gets peaceful,” she said, “and you can really appreciate them.”
“Why don’t I sit here, and we’ll wait for the rest of the crowd to leave? Then you can show me.”
“Yes.”
Page felt an ache in his chest. His mind raced with questions that had nowhere to go.
Leaning against the nearby post, Costigan dropped his cigarette and crushed it with his boot, all the while continuing to watch carefully.
“When I was ten, my parents took me with them on a car trip,” Tori said, staring toward the darkness. Her voice drifted off.
Page didn’t understand why she’d told him that. Then she seemed to remember what she’d started to say.
“We lived in Austin back then, and we didn’t reach this section of west Texas until dark.” She tilted her head toward something in the distance. “My father wanted to visit a cousin of his who’d just gotten a job on a ranch out here. The cousin was only going to be in the area for a couple of months.” Again Tori paused, then seemed to remember what she’d started to say. “As you know, all my father’s relatives were wanderers.”
Including him, Page thought, but he was careful not to interrupt. Her father had deserted the family when Tori had been sixteen.
“Anyway, we drove through here,” Tori said.
The exclamations of delight in the crowd contrasted with com- plaints about the increasing chill and the impatience some felt when they didn’t see what others claimed they did. The noise made it difficult for Page to hear what Tori said, but he didn’t dare ask her to speak up for fear of having the opposite effect.
She continued, “I needed to go to the bathroom. Even back then, the county had a couple of outdoor toilets here. When I saw them in our headlights, I yelled for him to stop, but my father was in a hurry to see his cousin. He wouldn’t have stopped if my mother hadn’t insisted. I rushed into one of the toilets, and after I came out, my father was waiting impatiently by the car. Something made me look toward the grassland, and I saw them.”