Vella Munn - The Return of Cord Navarro

“We’ve been looking for days. What the hell good has it done us?”

Shannon never swore. Now she’d done it twice in less than a minute. The words were enough to swing him back around toward her.

Her eyes said it all. They were sunken deeper into their sockets and the flesh there was now shadowed almost as if she’d bruised herself. There were lines at the corners of her mouth he’d never noticed before and her shoulders seemed to sag a little.

Still, determination ruled her.

“I didn’t mean to say that,” she apologized. “I’m just giving in to frustration, that’s all. Please don’t stop for me. No matter where you go or how fast, I’ll keep up.”

“This isn’t a race.”

“Yes, it is. A race to save our son. I lost one child, Cord. I can’t do it again.”

She’d spoken the words as if they meant no more to her than a million other words had, but her eyes gave her away. She wasn’t crying. He sensed how fiercely she’d guarded against letting that happen. But for reasons she might not fully understand, everything had boiled over for her and the only thing she could do was fight her way around a mother’s worst fears, a father’s nightmare.

“He’s all right,” he told her.

“You don’t know that. Don’t fill me with false hope.”

“I’m telling you the truth.” At least it was when he walked this way. “It’s in his signs.”

That took the fight out of her; he didn’t know he was capable of hurting her so deeply with a few words. Anger-at her tears, at the wilderness that defied them-had whipped through her and met head-on with fear and defeat.

“Shannon, listen to me, please. The Taos Indians have a saying, a prayer. There’s a lot of wisdom in it. Maybe it’ll help you. I know it does me.”

“Does it?”

“Yes,” he said, although he knew she was simply going through the gestures of keeping the conversation going. “They believe that the Mother of us all is earth, the Father is the sun, the Grandfather, the creator who bathed us with his mind and gave life to all things. Our Brother is the beasts and trees, Sister is that with wings.”

She stared, blinked, stared.

“We, the Taos believe, are the children of earth. That’s what Matt is. A, child of the earth.” And so is Summer .

“Of the earth? Safe?”

“Safe,” he told her, believing, at least for the moment.

She held out a trembling hand, and he took it, pulled her to him, embraced both her and her pack. She’d again attempted to braid her hair this morning but hadn’t been able to capture all the strands. Now one teased the corner of his mouth. Barely aware of what he was doing, he gave her his chest to cry into if that’s what she needed, fought the thousand emotions that had built and then splintered inside him. Fought more than that.

“It’s all right to be afraid,” he whispered.

“Is it? Fighting fear so it won’t take over everything is so hard, takes so damn much energy.”

She was right; he knew that better than she. “Pretending it doesn’t exist is even worse.”

He felt more than heard a deep sob tear through her. Clutching her to him, he thought to shield her from the worst of her pain. If only he could think of the words to say, but if he wasn’t careful, his own fear would spill out.

She needed him to be strong, to be there for her when she couldn’t do it on her own.

He clamped down on his anxiety and denied it. Buried it. Hid from it.

“It’s all right,” he whispered while she fought to gain control over her tears. “It’s all right to cry.”

She didn’t argue with him this time. In fact, if he was correctly reading her body’s silent messages, she was grateful he’d given her license to acknowledge what she’d been holding inside her.

Shannon worked with her fear, accepted it with tears that dampened his shirt and again made him long to spirit her away from this place, this journey. This nightmare. Feeling awkward and inadequate, he held on.

Still, a quiet, insistent part of his brain continued to listen, to assess their world.

Her loss of control didn’t last long. After half a dozen shuddering breaths and a raw sound deep in her throat, her body found its strength again.

“What else do the Taos believe?” she asked. “I think I need to hear it all.”

He kissed her forehead, wondering if that simple gesture might convey everything he felt at this moment and whether exposing his vulnerability, his need for her, was dangerous. It didn’t matter because he was past holding himself in. “That everyone-man, beasts, trees, birds, earth, all share the same breath.”

Her chest heaved with the effort of a deep breath. “It sounds so simple, too simple of course, but I want to believe that. Oh, God, how I want to believe.”

“You will. If you listen to what nature has to say.”

“Maybe-will you help me do that?”

Overwhelmed by her need for him, at least at this moment, he nodded.

“I’m sorry I caved in like that,” she whispered. “I-I didn’t know I was going to.”

“It’s all right.”

“That’s what you already said. Cord? I want you to tell me…to tell me I can trust you, that you’ll make it all come out the way we want and need it to. We’ve been through hell once-surely we won’t be asked to survive a child’s loss again.”

He brushed her hair away from her throat, came within a whisper of covering her trembling lips with his own and letting her feel his-everything.

“But you can’t, can you?” she whispered.

“No.”

Despite his hard truth, she held on with fingers that bit into his forearms. “I don’t want to hear you say that. You know that, don’t you?”

“Yes.” More than you could possibly understand.

“No. Yes.” She echoed him while still holding on. “That’s all you’re going to say, isn’t it?”

“Yes.” He winced at the word but it was too late.

“It’s all right,” she said, surprising him. “There really aren’t any other words.”

Because he felt the need to be doing something and remembered that the gesture used to calm her at the end of a long day, he slid his fingers around to the back of her neck and began massaging the top of her spine.

She rolled her shoulders backward and sighed. “You’re so good at that. I’d forgotten.”

“I hadn’t.”

“Oh, Cord, where did it all fall apart for us? Was it because of what happened to Summer and the way I isolated myself, the way we both did? Or was there more to it than that?”

“I don’t know.”

“I think you do. More than we’ve talked about, anyway. But it doesn’t matter. Darn it, nothing does except getting our son back.”

No, he thought. Maybe nothing did except Matt’s safety. And yet… And yet he wanted affirmation that life would go on and he would hold on if… He couldn’t make himself finish.

As her tears dried, she continued to look at him and he had to tell himself she had no idea what was going on inside him. The strong lines of her mouth softened and he again fought the desire to take her-both of them-to places that once had been so easy to reach. Places that would take him away from the reality of today.

“Why do I keep beating myself up trying to reinvent the past?” she moaned before he’d ended his battle. “The past doesn’t matter-I just want it buried”

Can you? Can either of us?

“I’m trying to remember something,” she said after a silence that had become uncomfortable. “Matt came across it at school and brought it home to me. How does it go? ‘The earth does not belong to man-man belongs to the earth. Whatever befalls the earth befalls the sons of the earth. Man did not weave the web of life-he is merely a strand in it.’ Yes. That’s it.”