He must have felt her gaze, for he turned to look at her, cautiously. To mask her thoughts, Sarah smiled and, like a whipped dog sensing forgiveness, he smiled back. He got up from his seat and crossed the aisle to sit next to her. Sarah moved her purse to make space.
“We just flew over the Divide,” he said. There was more than one meaning to what he had said and he quickly tried to clarify. “I mean, the Continental Divide.”
Sarah glanced briefly out of her window.
“Well,” she said. “The other Divide must be somewhere pretty close then.”
“No. It’s some way south and west of here.”
“Oh.”
It was the place where it all began. Or began to end. The Divide guest ranch where they had come summer after summer and had the best vacations of their lives. The place where Abbie had fallen in love with Montana and become so determined to go to college there. And where, six years but what now seemed like a lifetime ago, Benjamin had fallen in love (or whatever it was) with Eve Kinsella and set about the destruction of their marriage.
For a while neither of them spoke. The flight attendant was wheeling a wagon of drinks and snacks toward them along the aisle. They both asked for water. The piped air of the cabin was cold and smelled fake and antiseptic.
“Talk to me,” he said quietly.
“What?”
“Please, Sarah. Can’t we just talk a little? About Abbie?”
She shrugged.
“If you like. What is there to say?”
“I don’t know. I just think that if we talked about it, we might be able to . . . give each other a little comfort, I suppose.”
“Oh.”
“Sarah, you know, we mustn’t blame ourselves—”
“Blame ourselves?”
“No, I don’t mean—”
“Benjamin, I don’t blame myself at all. Not at all.”
“I know, I just—”
“I blame you. You and you alone . . .” She broke off and smiled. There was that woman too, of course. She could see in his eyes that he read the thought. “Well, maybe not quite alone.”
“Sarah, how can you say that?”
“Because it’s true. Abbie didn’t die because she fell or jumped or got pushed off a cliff or whatever it was. She died, Benjamin, because of what you did to us all.”
TWO
SIX
The Divide was a place that seemed to want to keep itself secret. It perched concealed at the head of a split and tortuous valley that descended to another far grander where a highway followed the curves of the Yellowstone River. Beside this highway, for those who could spot and decipher it, there was a sign of sorts. But the gnarled cottonwood to which it had long ago been nailed had all but consumed it and the words now looked like a parasitic scarring of the bark. Some thirty yards on, a road of pale gravel branched away beside a creek and the only clue that it led anywhere was a battered tin mailbox.
Lost Creek, whose course the gravel road followed, was well named. In summer it ran dry or at best was barely a trickle and its banks were rife with chokecherry and willow scrub, their leaves layered with a white dust churned from the road. The water was plundered for the hay meadows that stretched away on either side and for cattle ponds farther upstream where the land began to rise and the grassland filled with sage.
Even with the snowmelt of spring, even in its highest reaches, Lost Creek never truly found itself. But its sibling, across the dividing spine of pine-clad rock that gave the ranch its name, was thirstier and flashier by far. Named for some long-forgotten but doubtless ebullient pioneer, Miller’s Creek brimmed and tumbled for five dramatic miles of bouldered curves and waterfalls and swirling, trouty pools.
It took fifteen minutes to drive up from the highway and only in the last half-mile did the ranch reveal itself. Just as the gradient seemed to be growing too steep and the forest too darkly encroaching, the road broke abruptly from the trees into a bowl of lush pasture where glossy quarter horses ambled and grazed and swished their languid tails at flies. Beyond them, on higher ground and dustier, stood a cluster of whitewashed clapboard stables and a red sand arena and corrals with bleached wood fences. And above all this, encircled by flower beds and lawns, the mountains rearing grandly behind it, was the ranch house itself.
The building was long and low and made of logs and fronted for its entire length by a deck some ten feet wide with tables and chairs where in the evening guests liked to gaze out over the treetops and watch the mountains on the east side of the valley catch the last ocher glow of the lowering sun. The creeks divided behind the house and moated it on either side where both were simply bridged to oval meadows stolen from the forest. Along their perimeters, discreetly placed among the ponderosa pines, were two tennis courts and a swimming pool and twenty log cabins, each with its own porch.
Montana had ritzier ranches, with finer cuisine and glitzier guests. But there were few, if any, so beautiful. The Divide didn’t advertise or tout for business for it had no need. Its guests came by word of mouth and returned again and again. And thus it was with the Cooper family. For the last two weeks in June, they always took cabins six and eight. This was their fourth visit and it would be their last, the vacation that would change their lives forever.
Today was Ben’s forty-sixth birthday and he was dragged from his dreams into it by the most wretched rendition of “Happy Birthday” he had ever heard. His head was clouded from too many beers and too little sleep and the out-of-tune singing entered it like a rusty corkscrew. He opened an eye to see Sarah smiling from the pillow beside him. She leaned over and kissed him on the cheek.
“Morning, birthday boy,” she said.
“So that’s what they’re singing.”
The sun coming through the red-and-white curtains cast a glaring checkerboard pattern on the bare wooden floor and across Ben’s bare feet as he shuffled to the door, pulling on his bathrobe as he went. Abbie and Josh and a ragged choir of conscripts were gathered in the meadow just below the cabin porch, and they cheered as he emerged, shielding his eyes against the sun.
“Oh, it’s you guys,” he said. “I thought there was a pack of sick coyotes out here.”
“Happy birthday, Daddy,” Abbie called.
She had mustered her friends and a couple of their favorite ranch hands. There were eight or nine of them, all grinning and wishing him a happy birthday and making smart remarks about his age. Abbie came up the steps with Josh and they kissed him and handed him a big box wrapped in paper decorated with little cattle brands. Sarah was out on the porch too now, wrapped in her matching white bathrobe. She came to stand between her two children and draped her arms around their shoulders. They were all tanned and their hair tinted even blonder by the sun. Ben had never seen them so radiant, so golden.
“It’s kind of from all of us,” Abbie said.
“Well, thank you. Do I get to open it now?”
“Of course.”
There was an envelope on top and he opened that first. It was one of those cards parents had to pretend to find funnier than they truly did. It had a picture of a dinosaur skeleton on the front and inside said Happy Birthday, You Old Fossil. Ben nodded and smiled.
“Thanks,” he said. “I love you too.”
Inside the box was a fine Stetson made of beige felt.
“Wow, that’s what I’d call a hat.”
He put it on. They cheered and whistled. It was a perfect fit.
“Goes great with the bathrobe,” Abbie said.
“How did you know my size?”
“We just went for the biggest,” Josh said.
Everyone laughed and Ben made as if to grab him but the boy dodged easily out of reach.
“Mr. Cooper?”
Ty Hawkins, one of the ranch hands, stepped forward, holding out a little package. Abbie’s two best friends, Katie and Lane, were giggling behind him and had clearly put him up to it. He was a mild-mannered young man with a shock of blond hair and the kind of rugg
ed yet innocent good looks that had weakened the knees of just about every female on the ranch. Especially Abbie. She had made sure she was in his riding group every day since the vacation began.
“The girls reckoned you’d probably need this to go with it.”
Ben opened the package and pulled out a patterned leather cord, braided with horsehair. He knew what it was, but didn’t want to spoil the joke.
“What’s this for?”
Ty smiled. “I think it’s supposed to hold your hat on.”
“They’re called sissy straps,” Katie trilled.
Ben Cooper’s birthday had become a ritual of these ranch vacations and while he considered himself a good sport and enjoyed the attention, he sometimes felt it unfair that his notching of years should be so routinely public. Last year they had given him a red toy Porsche in a box emblazoned with the words Ben’s Menoporsche. Though he wasn’t as neurotic about aging as some men he knew, he couldn’t say it was a process he relished: the way your bones creaked when you got out of bed and how your hair seemed to get bored of growing on your head and sprouted in your ears and nose instead. Yesterday in the shower he had discovered his first gray pubic hair and he was trying not to see it as symbolic.
“We better be getting back to work,” Ty said. “Are you riding this morning, Mr. Cooper?”
“If you’ve got a horse man enough for this hat.”
“We’ve got a stallion needs breaking, if that’s okay?”
“No problem. Saddle him up.”
Ben’s riding was another family joke. He brought to it, as he did to most sports, more enthusiasm than skill. Abbie, who had ridden since she was six and had inherited her mother’s effortless elegance, said that on a stationary horse he looked like Clint Eastwood, but morphed, as soon as it moved, into Kermit the Frog.
Ty and the other wrangler said they had better go start saddling the horses for the ride and everyone else agreed to meet at the ranch house in twenty minutes for breakfast. Ben and Sarah lingered on the sunlit porch to watch the little crowd drift and disperse across the meadow.
Lane and Katie were ragging Josh about something and he was pretending to be mad but clearly lapping up the attention. It was good to see. In the past year the boy’s hormones had gone into overdrive. He had started to shave and was growing so fast he could hardly keep up with himself. Fortunately the clothes he liked to wear were mostly big enough for two of him.
Josh had always been the one Ben and Sarah worried about. Perhaps it was simply the contrast with his sister, who had every gift one could wish upon a child. Whereas Abbie had so far breezed through life, her brother seemed to snag himself at every turn of the trail. The very slouch of his shoulders suggested how heavily the world weighed upon him.
He was a gentle soul and sweet-natured and had many other fine qualities, but he lacked his sister’s natural grace and good looks. And though Ben would never have admitted it to anyone, for he knew the emotion to be inappropriate, the love he felt for the boy had always been tinged with something akin to pity. He had witnessed too many disappointments, seen him reflect his own failure on the success of others, watched him watching from the sidelines while peers, brighter or sportier, better-looking or simply more extroverted, gathered the garlands. Ben suspected that Sarah felt the same, but they had never been able to discuss it without it escalating into a row. She was fiercely defensive and took as a personal slight any implication that her son might be less than perfect.
Last summer Josh had been almost chronically shy with Katie and Lane. But judging by the way he was romping off across the meadow with them now, that seemed to have changed. And watching them, Ben dared to hope that things might at last be falling into place for the boy. Children all seemed to have a particular age when they found their stride. Maybe, at last, this was Josh’s. Katie gave him a shove now and ran ahead with Lane, the two of them laughing and taunting him and, like an overgrown Labrador puppy, Josh rollicked off in pursuit.
This left Abbie and Ty walking on their own. Unaware that they were being watched, they moved closer together. Now she leaned closer still to whisper something and he laughed and she tucked her thumb into the back pocket of his Wranglers. Ben and Sarah looked at each other.
“Looks like our girl won the contest,” he said.
“Ever known her to lose?”
“He seems like a nice enough guy.”
They stood watching, neither of them saying anything more, until all that remained in the meadow was a fan of footprints in the dew, the chime of the girls’ voices fading on the windless air of the morning.
In the cabin’s cramped, log-walled bathroom, while Sarah showered, Ben stood and shaved before the basin mirror wearing nothing but his new hat and a resolve that today things were going to be different between them. Be nice to her, he told himself. Stop being such a grouch and giving her—and yourself—such a hard time. Forget how it’s been for the past week and start over.
“I can’t get over Joshie,” Sarah said from behind the glass.
“What do you mean?”
“The way he is this year. How he’s blossomed.”
“Yep. Amazing what getting laid can do for a fellow.”
“You don’t mean it?”
He didn’t. He was just being mischievous.
“Why not?”
“Benjamin, the boy’s only fifteen years old, for heaven’s sake.”
“I know, some guys have all the luck.”
He said it without thinking, without any conscious attempt to needle her. But judging by her silence, that was precisely how she had taken it. He tried to change the subject and didn’t quite succeed.
“How serious is Abbie about this young cowboy?”
“I don’t know, but she’d better be careful she doesn’t get him fired. They’re pretty strict about that kind of thing here by all accounts.”
“What kind of thing?”
“You know, consorting with the guests.”
“Consorting?”
“You know what I mean.”
She normally laughed when he teased her about her euphemisms, but not today. The rush of water stopped and the shower door opened. He watched her in the mirror step out and reach for a towel, studiously avoiding any eye contact.
At forty-two, she was still slim and firm-breasted and even after twenty years of marriage the sight of her naked body rarely failed to stir him. Perhaps this was because his access to it had always been so much less than his desire. Things had long been thus between them and her evasions of his lust had grown deft and mechanical. As now, when he turned and stepped toward her and she briskly wrapped the towel around her so that by the time he reached her she was covered. He held her by the shoulders and she smiled defusingly and pecked him chastely on the lips.
“That’s a really great hat.”
“Thank you, ma’am.”
“Do you honestly think Josh and Katie are . . .”
“Consorting? Of course.”
“Shouldn’t we talk with him about it?”
“Sure, if we really want to embarrass him.”
He was still holding her and tried to stem her defensive talk with a kiss.
“Benjamin, I’m serious.”
“Can we talk about this later? There’s another male member of the Cooper family that needs a little attention.”
He was aroused now and pressing himself against her. She glanced down and arched an eyebrow.
“Precisely which member are we talking about here?”
“Him. Forget about me. This is entirely altruistic.”
“Later. I want to give you your present.”
“You’re the only present I want.”
He held her closer and kissed her neck and she let him but stopped his hand when he tried to unhitch her towel.
“Later.”
He kissed her mouth. But she wasn’t going to relent. She put her hands on his chest and gently fended him off.
“Benjamin, we’ll be late
for breakfast.”
He let go of her and turned away and saw himself in the mirror, sullen and tumescent and suddenly fatuous in the hat. He took it off and spun it onto a chair.
It was the same old thing. The same predictable cycle of slight and sulk, of sexual rejection and injured pride that had dogged their marriage for almost as long as he could remember. Despite knowing how things stood, he still concocted these foolish, romantic notions about how it might be different once they were on vacation together. It was as if he actually wanted to be disappointed.
Sarah had disappeared into the bedroom and a few moments later, protectively robed, her hair wrapped in a towel, she came back with the gift, prettily wrapped and tied with a red ribbon. He was drying his face and pretended not to see her. She had probably bought him a shirt and would probably apologize for it and predict that he wouldn’t like it. He probably wouldn’t but would pretend, unconvincingly, that he did.
“If you don’t like it, they’re happy to change it.”
“Oh, thank you.”
He took it from her and put it down on the chair.
“I’ll open it later. We’ll be late for breakfast.”
And with a sideways glance to gauge the impact of his spite, he stepped into the shower and shut the door behind him.
They rode that morning to The Outlook. It was one of their favorite places, a high buttress of red rock that reared above the forest like the brow of some vast and noble warrior surveying his domain. It was a long ride and steep in its first twisting miles up through the canyon. But after an hour the land leveled into high pasture and that was where they were now, crossing a wide and shallow valley where the horses liked to run before they stopped to rest and take water.
The grass this year had grown long and lush with copious spring rain and the horses had to hoist their heads as they loped through it, parting it with their chests like warm-blooded boats through an ocean of green. Including Sarah, there were nine riders and, as usual, she was last in line. Apart from Jesse, the ranch hand who was guiding them up front, she was by far the best rider, but she liked to go last so that she could stop whenever she liked without bothering anyone. And that was what she was about to do now. Spangled in the grass she had noticed some white and yellow flowers that she didn’t recognize. She wanted to pick a couple so that she could take them back to the ranch and check them in her new edition of Plants of the Rocky Mountains.