“It wasn’t your fault,” she said. “It had nothing to do with you. It was all about me. How could I blame you for anything? You saved all—”
“Now, now,” he said. “No need for that. I thought all this out. I just want the old life back. I want you to be my wife, I want my baby girl to be fine, I want to work with the horses and take care of y’all. That’s the best life there is, the only life I’ve ever wanted. I get these bad moods. Or I used to; I hope I’m over that. If I had some ghosts, they ain’t walking out of the cemetery no more. So … well, what do you say? Will you let me come back?”
“I already called the lawyer. He recalled the separation request.”
“That’s great.”
“It’ll be good,” she said. “I think we should use some of that money and go on a nice vacation. We should close up the house here, the house outside of Boise, but then go to some warm island for two weeks. Then we can go back to Arizona. R&R.”
“God, does that sound like a plan to me,” he said with a smile. “There’s only one last little thing. Trig’s mother. She was very helpful and she told me that if I ever learned anything about the way her son died, I should tell her. Tell her the truth. I still feel that obligation. So in a couple of months or so, when all this dies down, when we’re back, I may take a bit of time and head back there to Baltimore.”
“Do you want us to come with you?”
“Oh, it ain’t worth it. I’ll just fly in, rent a car, fly back. It’ll be over quicker ‘n’ you can believe. No sense putting no trouble to it or taking Nikki away from her riding. Hell, I may drive instead of flying, save some money that way.”
He smiled. For just a second she thought there might be something in his eyes, some vagrant thought, some evidence of another idea, another agenda; but no, not a thing could be seen. They were depthless and gray and revealed nothing except the love he felt for her.
ittle by little, life for the Swagger family reassembled itself toward some model of normality. Even the big news of a spectacular murder in Russia failed to make much of a stir. Bob just watched a little of it on CNN, saw the burning Jeep Cherokee and the dead man in the back, and when the hysterical analysts came on to explain it all, he changed channels.
Sally stayed until they moved back to Boise, and then Bob drove her to the airport.
“Once again,” she said at the gate, “the great Bob Lee Swagger triumphs. You killed your enemies, you got your wife and family back. Can’t keep a good man down.”
“Sally, I got ’em all fooled but you, don’t I? You see clean through me.”
“Bob, seriously. Pay attention to them this time. I know it’s easy to say, but you have to let the past go. You’re married, you have a wonderful, brave, strong wife and a beautiful little girl. That’s your focus.”
“I know. It will be.”
“There’s no more old business.”
“Is that a question or a statement?”
“Both. If there’s one little thing left, let it go. It doesn’t matter. It can’t matter.”
“There’s nothing left,” he said.
“You are one ornery sumbitch,” she said. “I swear, I don’t know what that woman sees in you.”
“Well, I don’t neither. But she’s pretty smart, so maybe she knows something you and I don’t.”
Sally smiled, and then turned to leave, good friend and soldier to the very end. She winked at him, as if to say, “You are hopeless.”
And he knew he was.
hen the cast came off a little later, and Julie was back among the supple, the family flew to St. John, in the U.S. Virgins for two glorious weeks. They rented a villa just outside Cruz Bay on the little island, and each morning took a taxi to the beautiful Trunk Bay beach, where they snorkeled and lay in the sand and watched the time pass ever so slowly as they turned browner and browner. They were a handsome family, the natural aristocrats of nature: the tall, grave man with gray eyes and abundant hair, and his wife, every bit as handsome, her hair a mesh of honey and brown, her cheekbones strong, her lips thin, her eyes powerful. She had been a cheerleader years ago, but she was if anything more beautiful now than ever. And the daughter, a total ball of fire, a complete kamikaze who always had to be called in, who pushed the snorkeling to its maximum, who begged her father to let her scuba or go water- or para-skiing.
“You got plenty of time to break your neck when you’re older,” he told her. “Your old mommy and I can’t keep up with such a thing. You have to give us a break. This is our vacation, too.”
“Oh, Daddy,” she scolded, “you’re such a chicken.”
And when she said that, he did an imitation of a chicken that was clearly based on a little real time in the barnyard, and they all laughed, first at how funny it was but second at the idea that a man of such reserve could at last find some way to let himself go, to be silly. An astonishment.
At night, they went into town and ate at the restaurants there. Bob never had a drink, didn’t seem to want one. It was idyllic, really too good. It reminded Julie just a bit of an R&R she’d had with Donny in Hawaii, just before … well, just before.
And Bob seemed to relax totally too. She’d never seen him so calm, so at ease. The wariness that usually marked his passage in society — a feeling for terrain and threat, a tendency to mark escape routes, to look too carefully at strangers — disappeared. And he never had nightmares. Not once did he awake screaming, drenched in cold sweat, or with the shakes, or with that hurt, hunted look that sometimes came into his eyes. His scars almost seemed to disappear as he grew tanner and tanner, but they were always there, the puckers of piebald flesh that could only be bullet wounds: so many of them. One of the Virgin Islanders stared at them once, then turned to say something to one of his colleagues, in that musical, impenetrable English of theirs, so fast and full of strange rhythms, but Julie heard the word “bombom mon,” which she took to mean “boom-boom man,” which she in turn took to be “gunman.”
But Bob appeared not to notice. He was almost friendly, his natural reserve blurred into something far more open and pleasant to the world. She’d never quite seen him like this.
There was only one night when she awoke and realized he wasn’t in bed with her. She rose, walked through the dark living room, until she found him on the deck, under a tropic night, sitting quietly. Before them was a slope of trees, a hill and then the sea, a serene sheet of glass throwing off tints of moonlight. He sat with utter stillness, staring at a book, as if it had some secret meaning to it.
“What is that?” she asked.
“This? Oh, it’s called Birds of North America by Roger Prentiss Fuller.”
She came over and saw that he was gazing at a section on eagles.
“What are you thinking about?” she asked.
“Oh, nothing. This book has some pretty pictures. Kid who painted them really knew his birds.”
“Bob, it’s so unlike you.”
“I was just curious, that’s all.”
“Eagles?”
“Eagles,” he said.
hey returned to Arizona and with the money, Bob was able to upgrade the barn, hire two Mexican assistants, buy a new pickup and reintroduce himself to the Pima County horsey set. In just a little bit of time, they had patients-seven, eight, then ten horses in various states of healing, all ministered to with tender care. His lay-up barn became a thriving concern after a while, mostly on the basis of his own sweat, but also because people trusted him.