Nicholas Evans - The Horse Whisperer

'Well, bye Annie.'

'Bye.'

She stood on the porch and watched him get back in the car. He started the engine, tipped his hat to her and pulled away down the track.

He drove for four and a half hours but he measured it not by time but only by how each mile seemed to make the ache deepen in his chest. Just west of Billings, lost in thoughts of her, he almost drove into the back of a cattle truck. He decided to take the next exit and go the slower route to the south, through Lovell.

It took him near the Clark's Fork, through land he'd known as a boy, though there was little now to know it by. Every trace of the old ranch was gone. The oil company had long taken what it wanted and pulled out, selling off the land in plots too small for a man to make a living. He drove past the remote little cemetery where his grandparents and great-grandparents were buried. On another day he would have bought flowers and stopped, but not today. Only the mountains seemed to offer some slim hope of comfort and south of Bridger he turned left toward them and headed up on roads of red dirt into the Pryor.

The ache in his chest only got worse. He lowered the window and felt the blast of the hot sage-scented air on his face. He cussed himself for a lovelorn schoolboy. He would find somewhere to stop and get himself back together.

They'd built a fancy new viewing place above the Bighorn Canyon since he was last there, with a big parking lot and maps and signs that told you about the geology and all. He supposed it was a good thing. Two carloads of Japanese tourists were having their pictures taken and a young couple asked him to take one for them so they could both be in it. He did and they smiled and thanked him four times and then everyone piled back into their cars and left him alone with the canyon.

He leaned on the metal rail and looked down a thousand feet of yellow and pink striated limestone to the snaking, garish green water below.

Why hadn't he just taken her in his arms? He could tell she wanted him to, so why hadn't he? Since when had he been so goddamn proper about these things? He'd conducted this area of his life till now with the simple notion that if a man and a woman felt the same way about each other they should act on it. Okay, so she was married. But that hadn't always stopped him in the past, unless the husband was either a friend or potentially homicidal. So what was it? He searched for an answer and found none, except that there was no precedent to judge it by.

Below him, maybe five hundred feet below, he saw the spanned black backs of birds he couldn't name, soaring against the green of the river. And, quite suddenly, he identified what it was he felt. It was need. The need that Rachel, so many years ago, had felt for him and that he'd found himself unable to return, nor felt for any being or thing before or since. Here at last he knew. He had been whole and now he was not. It was as if the touch of Annie's lips that night had stolen away some vital part of him that only now he saw was missing.

It was for the best, Annie thought. She was grateful -or at least believed she would be - that he had been stronger than she was.

After Tom left, she had been firm with herself, setting herself all sorts of resolutions for the day and the days to come. She would make good use of them.

She would call friends to whose faxed condolences she hadn't yet responded; she would call her lawyer about the tedious details of her severance and she would tidy all the other loose ends she'd left hanging last week. Then she would enjoy her isolation; she would walk, she would ride, she would read; she might even write something, though what she had no idea. And by the time Grace came back, her head, and possibly her heart, would be level.

It wasn't quite that easy. After the early high cloud had burned away, the day was another perfect one, clear and warm. But though she tried to be part of it, performing every task she set herself, she could not shift the listless hollow inside her.

At around seven, she poured herself a glass of wine and stood it on the side of the tub while she bathed and washed her hair. She'd found some Mozart on Grace's radio and though it crackled, it helped to banish a little of the loneliness that had crept upon her. To cheer herself further, she put on her favorite dress, the black one with the little pink flowers.

As the sun went behind the mountains she got into the Lariat and drove down to feed the dogs. They came bounding from nowhere to meet her and escorted her like a best friend into the barn where their food was kept.

Just as she finished filling their bowls she heard a car and thought it odd that the dogs paid it no attention. She put the bowls down before them and went to the door.

She saw him but a moment before he saw her.

He was standing in front of the Chevy. Its door hung open and its headlights behind him shone lambent in the dusk. As she stopped in the doorway of the barn, he turned and saw her. He took off his hat, though he didn't twist it nervously in his hands as he had this morning. His face was grave. They stood quite still, perhaps five yards apart, and for a long moment neither of them spoke.

'I thought…' He swallowed. 'I just thought I'd, come back.'

Annie nodded. 'Yes.' Her voice was fainter than air. She wanted to go to him but found she couldn't move and he knew it and put his hat on the hood of the car and came toward her. Watching him draw near, she feared that all that was welling within her would engulf and sweep her quite away before he got to her. Lest it did, she reached out like a drowning soul to grasp him and he stepped into the circle of her arms and circled her in his and held her and she was saved.

The wave broke over her, convulsing her with sobs that shook her very bones as she clung to him. He felt her quake and held her more tightly to him, burrowing his face to find hers, feeling the tears that streamed on her cheek and smoothing, soothing them with his lips. And when she felt the quaking subside, she slid her face through the pressing wetness and found his mouth.

He kissed her as he'd kissed her on the mountain, but with an urgency from which neither of them now would turn back. He held her face in his hands that he might kiss her more deeply and she moved her hands down his back and took hold of him below his arms and felt how hard his body was and so lean that she could lay her fingers in the grooved caging of his ribs. Then he held her in the same way and she trembled at the touch.

They leaned apart to catch their breath and look at one another.

'I can't believe you're here,' she said.

'I can't believe I ever went.'

He took her by the hand and led her past the Chevy, with its door still open and its lights now finding purchase in the fading light. The sky above them domed a deepening orange till it met the black of the mountains in a roar of carmine and vermilion cloud. Annie waited on the porch while he unlocked the door.

He didn't turn on any lights but led her through the shadows of the living room where their footsteps creaked and echoed on the wooden floor and penumbral sepia faces watched their passage from the pictures on the walls.

She had a longing for him so powerful that as they climbed the wide staircase it felt almost like sickness. They reached the landing and walked hand in hand past the open doors of rooms strewn like an abandoned ship with discarded clothes and toys. The door of his room was also open and he stood aside for her to go in then followed her and closed the door.

She saw how wide and bare the room was, not how she'd imagined it those many nights she'd seen the light at his window. Through that same window now she could see the creek house shaped black against the sky. The room was filled with a waning glow that turned all it touched to coral and gray.