study for tests that no longer mattered, be what Matt needed in the way of a mother, think of things to say to Cord when he called?
She hadn’t asked him to stay and mourn with her. If he didn’t understand that she needed him more than they did the money to pay off Summer’s medical bills-
Her bare foot hit a rock and she barely righted herself in time. Biting down on the inside of her mouth, she vowed to think of nothing except finding Matt. But Cord was only a few feet away, his back to her, giving her a view of the pocket where he kept his picture of Summer.
Until this morning she hadn’t known he’d taken one.
Maybe, if he’d told her about it and they’d stood together and studied their daughter’s features-maybe…
Cord could hear Shannon breathing. It was a whisper sound, a message he understood but didn’t know what to do with. It was possible she was now thinking about Matt and had to fight down her fears, but maybe her mind was still on what they’d said, or almost said, to each other a few minutes ago.
She’d said he should have cried with her when Summer died, making it sound like an accusation. Now he wished he’d been able to make her understand that, because of his grandfather’s wisdom and teachings, he’d found a peace that transcended grief.
But her grief frightened him, took him back to his sixteenth year. His tears had come the day Gray Cloud wrapped an ancestral doe skin over his frail shoulders and stepped out of the cabin they lived in. It was in Gray Cloud’s eyes; he was going away. Going home.
For a night and a day Cord had sat inside the cabin, tears staining his cheeks. Then, when he couldn’t cry anymore, he followed his grandfather’s tracks into the wilderness. The old man had died curled under the blanket that had been handed down through generations of Utes. He took the blanket because it was now his, buried his grandfather in that peaceful place, and cried again.
Now, suddenly, he stopped, body wire-tight, listening. It took him a moment to sort out what had caught his attention. A deer was hidden maybe thirty feet away. He signaled to let Shannon know. After a few more seconds he sensed the deer moving away, and went about getting ready for the day.
Summer lived here. He wondered if Shannon would ever know that, or why he’d given their daughter an Indian name. If the time had been right, if she’d ever indicated she wanted to hear this-if he’d known how to say the words-he’d have told her about where he’d gone the night after Summer died. He’d heard his daughter calling to him and left his sleeping wife, stepped into the night, and gone looking for her.
Because they’d come back here to be near Shannon’s parents for the birth, he’d wound up at a small, clear pool of water fed by spring runoff. It was near this spot that he’d buried Gray Cloud and where he’d spent the night telling his daughter how much he loved her and that her great-grandfather would always been there to take care of her.
When he’d taken Summer’s picture in the hard – smelling, too bright hospital, he’d wanted to explode from unspent tears.
Beside the pool, watched by an owl, talking to two people he loved, he’d lost his grief and found serenity.
But he hadn’t been able to guide Shannon to his peace and now they were trapped together in the wilderness with nothing in common except the boy who’d been over this ground yesterday but could be anywhere now.
He needed to find Matt, for himself, and for Shannon.
Because Matt had come across a deer trail and was following it, Cord and Shannon were able to make easy progress. Still, about an hour after they left camp, Cord called a halt because he wanted to see how well her pack fit. She turned her back to him and stood passively while he adjusted the shoulder straps. He would have believed she felt nothing, cared nothing for his touch, except that her fingers were tightly clenched.
Lightly clamping his hands over her shoulders, he turned her toward him. “It’s going to be a long time before we overtake him,” he said. “I want you to know that.”
“I do know. And it doesn’t matter.”
Although he should get started again, he continued to face her. She stood slightly below him on the hill with the sky draped around her, looking smaller than she usually did. She’d run a brush through her hair before rebraiding it and washed up as best she could, her simple chores reminding him of the femininity that simmered- waited-beneath her practical clothes.
“What’s going on inside you?” she asked abruptly. “What do you feel? What do you think about when you’re trying to find a sign, any sign, that Matt came this way?”
“I don’t feel, Shannon.” It was a lie, but a necessary one. If he opened so much as a crack to his emotions this morning, she might step boldly inside-might expose herself to too much.
“I feel sorry for you. Sorry and…I don’t know. Damn it, I don’t know!”
“I don’t know what more you want me to say.”
“I’m sure you don’t. I think, finally, I understand that. It’s just-maybe I still want different what can’t be different. I wish to God I didn’t. It would be easier for me, maybe easier for both of us.”
“What do you want changed?”
She stared at him as if she had never expected to hear that question from him. Answering her gaze, he looked as deeply into her as he could, but he couldn’t reach far enough. If he’d ever once touched her heart, it had been a lifetime ago.
“For us to be able to go back again, to be wiser, honest,” she whispered. “Oh, Cord. It should all be behind us, shouldn’t it? Okay, I guess I’ll always regret that you and I…when we should have clung to each other, shared as we’d never shared before – it didn’t happen.”
No. It hadn’t. Summer’s death had changed something inside Shannon and he’d never truly understood what that was. She’d pulled away from him, buried herself. He’d had no idea how to reach her. “You never gave us a chance.”
She blinked, looked off balance. Wounded. “/ never-You had no idea I might not be there when you came home that last time? That I couldn’t stand mourning our daughter alone, that I needed you…”
He couldn’t let the conversation continue. Matt was waiting for them to find him. And if Shannon went on, she’d only open wounds she’d spent years healing. He didn’t want her hurt any more than she already was. “You know why I had to be gone.”
“Oh, yes. Yes. We were drowning under medical bills and that had both of us scared. But, Cord, there’s another kind of drowning-of the soul. Of love.” She dragged her hands along her temple and grabbed twin handfuls of hair. “I’m sorry. I don’t want to hurt you. I’m just so raw right now that-”
Although he simply nodded and returned to tracking, he was left with the realization that nothing about their conversation felt complete. The few times she’d spoken to him after that horrible day when he’d walked into an empty apartment stripped of her essence, she’d said only that his silence had been more than she could stand.
Nearly seven years ago they’d gone their separate ways. Neither of them needed any more pain.
But it hadn’t all been pain. She’d once been more important to him than life itself. Around her he’d felt whole. Vulnerable and incapable of telling her how much she meant to him, but whole. All she’d had to do was stand in front of him and hold out her arms to him and he would have died for her.
She’d once owned him heart and soul. Didn’t she know that?
He closed his eyes and breathed deeply through mouth and nostrils to clear his head of the cobwebs she’d always been able to spin inside him. Matt. Today was about Matt.
Still, because he was tracking with his eyes and not his ears, he didn’t need the silence she said she hated. After a few minutes, he drew her attention to a tree trunk that deer used to rub their antlers against, pointed out some black bear sign, and even showed her the entrance to a fox den nestled under a moss-covered boulder.
“How do you know where to look for a newborn fox or where a deer has bedded down?”
“Time and experience. My grandfather. John Muir.”
“The naturalist? What are you talking about?”
“He and Gray Cloud spoke the same language. I learned from both of them.”
Shannon didn’t speak, but he easily absorbed the questioning in her eyes. Looking out across an endless carpet of green, he sought inside himself for an answer. “Muir believed that everything in nature fits into us, becomes part of us.”
“You-”
