“Having never been to a class or taken an exam, oddly, I do not.”
“Lucky bastard.” I shift in his arms. “I bet you don’t get anxiety dreams at all.”
He purses his lips.
“Do you even know what those are?” I ask.
“Never heard the term, but considering what you just described, yeah, I get them. After my parents left Rockton, and I was sheriff, I used to have nightmares where no one listened to me.”
I fight a sputtering laugh. “For you, that would be a nightmare. Did it ever happen, though? Even back then?”
“Hell, yeah. There are always people who don’t listen until I show them why they really should.”
“So that was the nightmare, then? You gave orders, and someone ignored you?”
“Everyone ignored me. Laughed at me, even. I’d wake up in a cold sweat. Truth was that it shocked the fuck out of me that people did listen. I was the youngest resident, and here I was, playing sheriff, giving orders and tossing curses and glares. I was never the biggest or toughest guy here. I just acted like it. I’d seen it work for Ty, but that’s different.”
“The man is the size of a grizzly.”
“And I’m not. Yet residents treated me like I was the person I was pretending to be, while I kept waiting for someone to call me on my bullshit, and no one did.”
“So the nightmares stopped?”
“Eventually. Now I just get the ones where you’re not here, and when I go looking for you, no one knows who I’m talking about.”
I wince.
“Yep, those suck,” he says, kissing my cheek, “but then I wake up, and you’re here, and I know you’re staying, so I can shove that bullshit in the closet where it belongs.”
I run a finger over his cheek, prickly with stubble, the winter beard shaved. He’ll keep the stubble, though. There’s something in his face that needs the scruff to keep him looking like the hard-assed sheriff. Otherwise, there’s always an innocence there. A wide-eyed innocence and a wounded innocence, and a man who cannot allow the world to see either. It’s only when it’s the two of us that the wall comes down and that strong jaw relaxes and those gray eyes lose a little of their steel, letting me see what lies within.
What lies within is a boy who grew up in the forest, with parents who loved him and a younger brother who adored him. A harsh but also idyllic life. Then Rockton’s sheriff Gene Dalton found him.
Gene took the boy home and, according to the town records, the nine-year-old was suffering from severe malnutrition and had been abandoned by neglectful parents. That was bullshit, but it gave Gene the excuse to present his wife with a son after they’d lost their own child down south in the tragedy that brought them to Rockton.
It was like those old stories of missionaries “rescuing” “heathen” children, when the truth was that they stole those children from loving parents who followed a different way of life.
What happened next is hazy in Dalton’s mind, tainted by the stories Gene told him growing up. Then, a few years ago, he reconnected with his brother, Jacob, and learned that his parents weren’t the negligent guardians that Gene claimed.
Yet it wasn’t as if he’d been taken as a baby. Dalton had repressed nearly a decade of good memories, and he didn’t know how to deal with that. So he decided not to. His birth parents were dead, and the Daltons had retired down south, so what was the point in digging up the past? What’s done is done. Keep moving forward.
It obviously isn’t that easy. All those questions he’d tamped down had left a smoldering keg in his soul, the rage and hurt of a boy who’d been abandoned by loving birth parents and then, as an adult, come to realize that his loving adopted parents actually kidnapped him. Little wonder he has nightmares where he wakes to find me gone, to discover I never existed at all.
It was only last winter that Dalton agreed to talk about his parents. While Jacob is more than happy to fill in the missing memories, he cannot supply the most critical answer of all. Jacob had been seven when Dalton disappeared into Rockton. He knows their parents searched frantically for his brother. He eventually came to understand that Dalton was in Rockton, where their parents assured Jacob that his brother was healthy and happy. They made it sound like having an older sibling at board
ing school in a far-off place.
He’s gone away to learn new things and grow up, and when he does, he’ll come back to us.
From what I’ve heard of Steve Mulligan and Amy O’Keefe, there is no way they decided their son was better off in Rockton and left him there. So what really happened?
We have no idea. They both died fifteen years ago.
So much trauma visited on a family who only wanted peaceful lives in the forest. Further proof, as if we needed it, that the biggest danger out there isn’t the animals or the landscape or the weather.
It’s the people.
And here we are, reminded of that yet again with the tourist we found. A woman who came here expecting to deal with the animals and the landscape and the weather, and what put her in our clinic, fighting for her life, was another human being.