She would have to change that. Tomorrow she’d stop taking the Xanax and get back to the business of living. She had to, whether she wanted to or not.
Feeling a tiny bit better with this goal (she’d made it before, but this time she meant it; this time she’d really do it), she headed for the loafing shed, where they kept enough bales of alfalfa for a week. Opening the door, she pulled out the wheelbarrow and stacked it with flakes of hay.
In the barn, she snapped on the lights and began feeding the horses, going from stall to stall. Here, she found a measure of peace again, and she was very nearly smiling when she un-latched Clem’s stall door.
“Hey, girl, have you missed me?”
There was no answering nicker, no whisper of a tail whooshing from side to side.
Vivi Ann knew the minute she stepped onto the fresh shavings.
Clementine lay crumpled against the stall’s wooden wall, her massive, graying head lolled forward.
Vivi Ann stood utterly still, knowing that if she tried to move she’d fall to her knees. It took work just to breathe. In that moment, in the cool, shadowy familiarity of this barn that had always been her favorite place in the world, she remembered everything about this great mare. Their whole lives had been lived together.
Remember when you stepped in that hornet’s nest . . . when you jumped the ditch and I landed in the blackberry bushes . . . when we won State for the first time?
Swallowing hard, Vivi Ann moved forward and dropped to her knees in the pale pink shavings at Clem’s belly. She reached out and touched the mare’s neck, feeling the coldness that shouldn’t be there. There were so many things to say to this great animal—her last real link to her mother—but none of that was possible now. Vivi Ann’s throat felt swollen; her eyes stung. How would she go on without Clem? Especially now, when so much had been lost?
She scratched Clem’s graying ears. “You should have been out in the sunlight, girl. I know how much you hate this dark stall.”
That made her think of Dallas and the cell he was in, and loneliness and grief overwhelmed her. She lay down against her mare, curling into the fetal position against her comforting flank, and closed her eyes.
Goodbye, Clem. Tell Mom I said hey.
Time kept going; inching, lurching, slowing, but always moving. The year 2000 drained away in a blur of gray and empty days and endless nights. Noah had started kindergarten at five (too early, Vivi Ann thought; she should have held him back a year, would have if Dallas were here, but he wasn’t), and T-ball at six and soccer at seven. She missed all of his Saturday games; it was just one more thing to feel guilty about. Aurora always offered to come with her to the prison, but Vivi Ann refused the offer. She could only do it alone.
Then, finally, in the first week of September 2001, she got the call she’d been waiting for.
“Mr. Lovejoy would like to see you today.”
It was good news. Vivi Ann knew it. In all the years of Dallas’s imprisonment, never before had Roy asked Vivi Ann to come to his office for a meeting.
Thank you, God, Vivi Ann thought as she got ready that morning. That sentence cycled through her mind, gaining the speed of a downhill racer, until she could hardly think of anything else.
On her way out of town, she stopped at the school and picked up Noah. After all that they’d been through, he deserved to be there on the day they got the good news.
“I’m going to miss recess,” Noah said beside her. He was playing with a pair of plastic dinosaurs, making them fight on the front of his bumper seat.
“I know, but we’re going to get news about your daddy. We’ve been waiting so long for this. And I want you to remember this day, that you were here for it.”
“Oh.”
“Because I never gave up, Noah. That’s important, too, even though it was really hard.”
He made sound effects to go along with the dinosaurs’ epic battle.
Vivi Ann turned up the radio and kept driving. In Belfair, the town at the start of the Canal, she drove to Roy’s office, which was housed in an older home on a small lot beside the bank.
“We’re here,” she said, parking. Her heart was beating so fast she felt light-headed, but she didn’t take one of her pills, not even to calm down. After today, she’d never take one again. There would be no need, not once their family was together. Helping Noah out of his seat and taking him by the hand, she walked up the grass-veined cement path to the front door.
Inside, she smiled at the receptionist. “I’m Vivi Ann Raintree. I have a meeting with Roy.”
“That’s right,” the receptionist said. “Go on through that door. He’s expecting you.”
Roy sat at his desk, talking on the phone. Smiling at her entrance, motioning for her to sit down, he said something else into the phone and hung up.
Vivi Ann put Noah on the sofa behind her, told him to play quietly; then she took a seat opposite Roy’s desk.