“I think the doctor meant it to be more hopeful than that.” Marin cleared her throat. “I need to lie down. They’ve put a bed in here for me.”
“I’m coming up.”
“You don’t have to do that. Really. We should be home soon enough.”
“Paul’s coming too.”
She looked at Paul and he nodded. She could hear a door open and close on Marin’s end. Water running at a sink.
“The nurse just came in,” she said.
“Do you need us to bring anything?”
“A change of clothes would be nice. A sweater if you can find one. They keep it cool in here.”
“Toothpaste?”
“I got all that at the shop downstairs. But you could call Marlene Silas and see if she’ll keep Sammy awhile longer.” She cleared her throat again and said something to the nurse, but Griff couldn’t distinguish the words. “When you get here,” she said, “if I’m asleep just let me sleep. I haven’t been able to yet.”
The line went dead.
They gassed up Paul’s car at the Mini-Mart, bought cans of Red Bull and a package of powdered doughnuts and didn’t see a single cop on the Wyoming side or in Montana either, making the one-hundred-seven-mile drive to the hospital in an hour and twenty-three minutes.
He dropped her off at reception, and a nurse took her by the elbow and pointed her down the right hallway.
He was awake when she came in, and when she bent to kiss him he rose up out of the bed and wrapped her in his arms, gripping fistfuls of fabric at the yoke of her shirt, as though only the buoyancy of her young body was keeping them afloat. Then he fell away and lay there smiling.
“I thought your face might be crooked,” she said.
The smile moved into his eyes.
“It’s just his left arm that’s weak.” Marin was standing behind her. “And the leg on that side. Did Paul come?”
“He’s parking the car.” She took his left hand in both of hers and he squeezed lightly. Like a small child might.
“See.” He swallowed. “It’s not that bad.”
She smoothed his cheek. “When can we go home?” she asked.
He looked toward Marin.
“We need to make arrangements for physical therapy,” she said. “They’re satisfied with everything else.”
Griff straightened. “The doctor could show me how. Or the nurse could.”
He squeezed her hand. “Marin’s got it taken care of,” he said.
Paul carried their lunches up from the hospital cafeteria and they ate together, and when Marin curled down on the other bed and Einar drifted off she found his doctor, asking enough questions to believe this was something they could do. And that he would improve.
The next morning at Costco, she bought pillows and a blanket and a CD of great performances by the New York Philharmonic, and they got him settled comfortably in the backseat. They played the CD twice on the drive home, Mahler and Vaughan Williams, Barber and Tchaikovsky, Paul following in the one-ton with Marin’s new furniture.
A physical therapist named Shawnee came up from Sheridan on Thursday and by Friday afternoon he could hobble down the hallway without the aluminum walker. Shawnee said she thought a week of that kind of improvement and she could start tapering off. She scribbled down her phone number, insisting it wasn’t a bother to drive up on the weekend if they needed her, and stayed for dinner when she was asked. They learned she was raised on a ranch in Star Valley.
On Saturday morning he fell in the shower. Griff heard his body hit the porcelain, heard him cry out and found him on his side in the tub. He’d dragged the shower curtain off the rod and was holding it over his groin.
“Where are you hurt?” She turned the water off, kneeling on the floor. “Tell me where.”
“Not you,” he said. “Please.”
“Get a chair.” Marin moved her to the side and kneeled down over him, and by the time she returned from the kitchen he was up, sitting on the side of the tub, Marin holding him steady. They got him into the chair with the shower curtain still across his lap.
“I’m going to call Shawnee,” Marin said.
“Nothing’s broke.” He was still having a little trouble getting his breath. “She doesn’t need to drive over here just to look at some clumsy old son of a bitch.”
Marin draped a towel across his shoulders and he tilted his head to the side, digging a finger into his ear.
“I hate getting water in my ears,” he said.
He asked her to leave and Marin helped him into his bathrobe, then down the hallway with his walker. He was only limping.
That night he called for Griff, and when she came in he had the magnifying glass slung around and was holding a book open at his waist. She sat on the side of the bed.
“I’m getting stronger. I can feel that I am,” he said, and when she didn’t respond: “I just fell on my ass. I’ve done that my whole life.”
“You had a stroke.”
“I’ve probably been having them for a year.”
“What am I going to do with you?” Even to her the question sounded like a parent’s.
“Right there’s where I’m going with this,” he said. “I want you to get out and do something with your life.”
“Like what?”
“Whatever in the hell you want to do.” He’d raised his voice, trying to sound mad, but it had no effect. “We’ve talked about this before.”
“I’ve got plenty of time.” She slipped the book from his hands. “It doesn’t have to be this fall.”
“Nobody’s got plenty of time.” He nodded toward the door. “She needs to take care of me,” he said. “We both need it.”
She closed the book and left it on the nightstand.
The next afternoon thunderclouds rolled down off the mountains and the wind picked up and the temperature dropped twenty-five degrees. Four inches of pea-sized hail fell in half an hour and then it rained like a levee had broken in the heavens. An icy mixture filled the borrow ditches.
It cleared overnight and got hot again the next morning, and the nose flies and deerflies swarmed thickly as gnats. The horses bunched in the shade shaking their heads, their eyes swelling from the bites, rubbing their faces into one another’s shoulders. When they couldn’t stand it any longer they pawed at the air and ran.
A den of snakes had been flushed from a dry hillside on Nameit Creek, and the kids there carried hoes when they went out to do their chores, and the clinic called a hospital in Billings to ship down a reserve of antivenom just in case.
She saddled Royal and trailered him over to the corrals and loading chute on Deep Creek. Paul was waiting for her on a well-mannered dappled gelding he called Mister.
They rode the leases up on the mountain, where the cattle were still scattered and edgy, and in the late afternoon they found a heifer and her calf killed by lightning. Their bellies were torn open, and a gang of coyotes sat in ragged order against the skyline just thirty yards away, their muzzles and chests stained with fresh blood. Crowding the treeline was an assortment of raptors and ravens, a pair of golden eagles and a mob of lesser birds drawn to the excitement.
She rested a forearm against the saddlehorn, leaning over it to stare at the dead calf.
“It could’ve been a lot worse.” Paul took a notebook from his shirt pocket and recorded the numbers on their eartags.
“Not for them.” She reined her horse around, and he fell in beside her.
“I took a job with the County Health Department in Billings.”
She stopped the horse, the bird chatter almost making it hard to hear. “No more Africa?”
“You were right. It’s too far away.”
“And you’re bailing on graduate school too?”
“I thought you’d be happy.”
She looked back at the coyotes edging in to finish their meal, and snorted a laugh and spurred her horse forward.
“So we’re done talking about this?”
“I have things to do in my studio,” she said.