Really sees who I am.
“Holy shit… you’re Tacker Hall,” he gasps.
“Can you take me to a new address without making me jump through hoops?” I ask.
“Sure thing, Mr. Hall,” he replies, turning around to put the car in drive. “Where to?”
“Some place called Shërim Ranch,” I mutter, pulling up the directions from a link on the website. “I’ll tell you where to go.”
I settle in for the ride. It says the ranch is forty-two minutes away, and I’m going to spend the entire time wondering what in the hell Dominik Carlson has gotten me into.Okay… I’ll admit it… I’m intrigued. This definitely isn’t what I’d envisioned when I was ordered into counseling. Somehow, that’s comforting to me. The thought of laying on a couch and pouring my feelings out to a perfect stranger gives me the heebie-jeebies.
I’d googled Shërim Ranch on the ride over. It’s owned and operated by Nora Wayne, the woman Dominik told me to ask for. She’s a licensed therapist, with undergraduate and master’s degrees from the University of Colorado. It appears she bought the ranch about three years ago, and it serves several purposes. In keeping with the history of the place, it still breeds and sells horses as well as offers general riding lessons.
But the focus of the ranch is on “healing”—whatever that may mean to an individual. In fact, the website said Shërim meant “healing” or “recovery” in Albanian, and the small biography on Nora Wayne informed me she had been born there but moved to the United States when she was young.
They offer camps for low-income kids so they can learn how to care for and ride horses. Nora Wayne also partners with the juvenile justice system, and she offers work on the ranch as a substitute for jail time in certain cases.
And then there are the generalized counseling services she offers—both with and without equine assistance. Oh, and she does some other hippie shit like yoga and meditation services, which I am most definitely not interested in.
My Uber driver takes me up the long dirt driveway to a ranch house. It looks to be about twenty-five-hundred square feet, all one level and done in stucco and red tile. Off to the left is a gray weathered barn and three different railed-off arenas. Beyond the house is a pasture, mostly brown patchy grass, but some green showing in the distance where a tree line starts. Three horses are there grazing.
Curiously, there’s also a white metal-type building like those seen on a construction site. It’s set up on cinder blocks with a set of wooden steps that lead up to the door.
A woman and teenage boy are in the paddock to the left of the barn. She’s holding on to the halter of a brown-and-white horse. The boy faces the horse with a dubious expression on his face. An older man watches from the exterior of the arena, his arms resting on top of the wooden fence.
I hand the Uber driver a hundred-dollar bill before exiting the vehicle, giving a short wave as he effusively thanks me. Unsure of where to go, I head toward the only people I see.
I have to assume that’s Nora Wayne in the paddock, but I could be entirely wrong. She’s tall and curvy, seemingly poured into the dusty, faded jeans she’s wearing with scuffed cowboy boots. It’s nice out with the temperature hitting the mid-seventies, which is normal for February in Arizona. She has a navy V-neck tee on with a plaid flannel wrapped around her waist. Her head is covered with a cream-colored cowboy hat that doesn’t let me see much of her face other than from the bottom of her nose down. A dark braid hangs down her back.
The horse jerks slightly against the woman, taking half a step to the side. She brings him quickly under control, but the boy jumps backward, his eyes wide with fear.
I lean up against the fence, directly on the opposite side from where the man watches, and I wait until they’re done with whatever it is they’re doing.CHAPTER 3NoraThe horse shies left again, but I hold on to her halter. With a soft word, she settles.
“He doesn’t like me,” Terrance grumbles, taking a step back.
“She,” I correct.
“She doesn’t like me,” the sixteen-year-old clarifies. He retreats more, his face a mask of dubiousness.
“Well, we don’t know that’s true, do we?” I ask softly. “It’s not fair to judge what someone or something is thinking based on a tiny action. An expression. A sound.”
Terrance stares. It’s his first session with me, and he has no more trust in me than he does Starlight, my beautiful, sweet-souled horse. I give her a tiny scratch under her chin with my free hand.
“What if I told you that a horsefly just bit her on the ass?” I ask with an encouraging smile. “And that’s what made her move.”