A Cowboy Followed His Horse Into the Mountains—Then Discovered a Woman Everyone Thought Dead
Chapter 17
Clara Hayes came home from the hospital on a Saturday in late September, and the town of Blackwater Creek turned out for her like she was a general returning from a war.
They lined the street from the county road all the way to her gate, waving and clapping and ringing cowbells, and some of the women from the church had strung a banner between the feed store and the hardware — WELCOME HOME, CLARA — that snapped in the wind like a flag of surrender. Wyatt stood at the back of the crowd, on the porch of the feed store, and watched her get out of the truck on her own two legs, both of them. She had a brace on the right one and a cane in her hand, but she walked, and she waved, and she cried, and the whole town cried with her.
Tom swept her up in the yard of their house, spinning her around once, gently, like she was made of glass, and the crowd roared.
Wyatt slipped away before the hugging started, but Clara caught him at the edge of the yard.
“You trying to sneak off, Wyatt Miller?”
“Got cattle to move tomorrow.”
“You’ve got nothing of the kind.” She walked right up to him, brace and all, and put her hand on his arm. “You’re coming to the house. With that horse of yours. I’ve got a thing I want to do, and I’m going to need a horse with a steady head.”
What she had in mind, Wyatt learned the next morning, was the river.
She stood at the bottom of her own lane, looking at the creek that ran behind her house — a brown, flashing stream that in the spring flash-flood had grown into a monster and eaten her truck and her old life and nearly her whole self. It was low now, late-season low, easy water, the kind a six-year-old could wade. But Clara Hayes stood at the edge of it with her cane in her hand, white-knuckled, and couldn’t cross.
“I’ve come down here every day since I got home,” she said quietly, not looking at him. “Tom’s too gentle to say it, and the doctors said exposure therapy, which is just fancy talk for standing close to the thing that scares you until your body learns it isn’t dying. But I can’t do it, Wyatt. I get to the edge of that water and my body remembers. It’s like being in that truck again. The water’s coming through the windshield and I can hear it, and I know this little crick ain’t the river, but my body don’t know the difference.”
Wyatt stood beside her, not offering comfort, because comfort wasn’t what she needed. She needed someone to stand at the edge with her and not tell her she had to cross.
“Why now?” he asked.
“Because if I let this little bit of water own me, it’ll own everything. It’ll own the whole rest of my life. And I didn’t survive a mountain to let a creek beat me.” She looked at Adrien, standing quiet at Wyatt’s elbow, patient as a hinge. “You said once your horse has a soft spot for strays. Figured I’d test it.”
Wyatt walked Adrien up beside her, took the near stirrup in his hand. “Mount up. Sideways. Facing forward. You ride him right across. He won’t rush, and he won’t stop, and that water won’t touch you but his hooves.”
Clara looked at the horse, at Wyatt, at the water. She took a breath so deep it moved her shoulders.
“All right,” she said. “All right.”
She mounted up, brace protesting, and settled in the saddle with her hands white on the horn. Adrien walked forward like the decision had been made an hour ago. He stepped into the creek without checking, water rising around his knees, and Clara let out a small, sharp sound, and then she did the bravest thing Wyatt had ever seen a person do.
She closed her eyes.
And let the horse carry her.
The creek was fifteen feet across in a lazy curl of gravel and sunlight. Adrien crossed it in a minute, water splashing over his shoes, and when he stepped up the far bank and stopped, Clara Hayes sat in the saddle with her eyes still shut, and the tears were running down her face, and she was laughing.
She turned the horse around — he came at the pressure of her leg, because she had better hands than Wyatt had ever credited her — and she crossed back, and she crossed again, and the fourth time she leaned down and slapped the water with her open palm, scattering drops like laughter.
She slid off at Wyatt’s feet, bright-eyed, half-hysterical.
“There,” she said. “Now it’s just water again.”