True Colors

On the fifteenth of July, people began showing up at Water’s Edge, uninvited. Each person came with a specific task to do. The 4-H chapter cleaned out the horses’ stalls; the Future Farmers of America helped Henry feed the steers; the Women’s Equestrian Drill Team took over Vivi Ann’s lessons. The word had gone out last week: Noah was coming home at last. And the town rallied to help out Vivi Ann.

She was stunned by her neighbors’ help and grateful for their prayers. In the last six weeks, she and Dallas had been living separate lives, making sure that one of them was always at the hospital. Although she hadn’t told people how difficult it had been, obviously they knew.

“It’s time,” Aurora said, coming up beside her.

“Are you ready?” Winona asked, following close behind.

Vivi Ann hugged them both tightly. Her emotions were so close to the surface right now she was actually afraid she would start crying. “Thank everyone for today, will you?”

“Of course,” Aurora said.

Just then Dallas’s primer-gray Ford truck came out from behind the barn and drove slowly through the parking area toward them. It was an old, rounded model that had seen better days, but the engine worked perfectly. He pulled up in front of them and parked.

Vivi Ann thanked her sisters again and opened the truck’s heavy door. It screeched and rattled, then slammed shut behind her. On the ripped leather bench seat, the robin’s-egg-blue car seat looked bizarrely out of place.

“You ready, Mrs. Raintree?” Dallas said, giving her the first true smile she’d seen in more than a month.

“I’m ready.”

For the next two hours, as they drove down the twisting, tree-lined highway behind a steady stream of RVs and campers, they talked about everyday things—the new school horse that was giving the kids problems, Clem’s aching joints, what to award for prizes at the next barrel race—but when they finally arrived at the hospital, Vivi Ann reached over the car seat and held his hand, unable to think of anything to say.

“Me, too,” he said, and together they walked through the parking lot and into the bright white lobby of Pierce County’s biggest hospital.

In the past weeks they’d become like family within these walls, and they stopped and talked to plenty of nurses, volunteers, and orderlies along the way to the pediatric wing.

There, Noah was waiting for them, swaddled in a blue thermal blanket and wearing a teacup-sized cap over his shock of wild black hair.

Vivi Ann took him in her arms. “Hey, little man. You ready to come home?”

Dallas put an arm around Vivi Ann and drew her close. They stared down at their son in silence and then carried him out of the hospital.

It took Vivi Ann a ridiculous amount of time to get him into the car seat, so much that she was laughing by the end of it.

All the way home, she found herself cooing to him, talking to him in a high-pitched voice that bore no resemblance to her own. He responded by spitting up all over himself.

“Note to self,” she said, laughing. “Keep diaper bag handy.” Looking for a tissue or a wad of drive-in napkins, she clicked open the glove box.

She heard Dallas say, “Don’t!” sharply beside her, but it was too late.

The glove box lid flipped open and she saw what he’d wanted to hide.

A gun.

She started to reach for it, but he said, “It’s loaded,” and she drew back as if stung.

“Why in the hell do you have a loaded gun in your truck?”

He pulled over to the side of the road and parked. They were just past Belfair, at the rounded end of the Canal, where the low tide exposed hundreds of feet of oozing gray mud. Docks jutted out into it, waterless on either side. Boats lay angled on the ground, waiting for the tide to lift them up again.

“You don’t know what my life was like before you.”

It scared her, that simple declaration of a different world; she’d known it all along, but in her naïveté, she’d thought of him as a wounded, abused child. Vulnerable. This was new. This reminded her that he hadn’t been a kid for a long time; that he’d grown into a man that sometimes she hardly knew. Against her wishes, she remembered the fight he’d started at Cat’s, and the steely look in his eyes when a fight had almost started at the Outlaw. And the criminal record he’d told her about. Stealing cars had sounded almost romantic, reckless, but now she wondered. “Okay, but I know what it’s like now and you don’t need to keep a loaded gun in your car. Jesus, Dal, a kid could find it—”

“The truck is always locked.”

“You’re scaring me.”

“I am who I am, Vivi Ann.”