New Year's Eve (6 page)

She looked so sad I could hardly bear it.

“I think about leaving Grady all the time,” I told her. “I have a list of what to pack.”

She put her hand on my arm.

“I might be wrong,” I said. “Maybe yours is real.”

Jade shook her head. “No. I don’t think so. Things aren’t real until you... get together, until you are both... until you’ve talked to each other.”

Sharla came back with a stack of pink towels.

“I guess the whole story is wishful thinking,” Jade said.

Grady woke me up when he climbed into bed beside me.

“You smell good,” he said.

“Hot tub and caramel apple pie,” I said. “Now I know what hand cream to get.”

“Look, I have a sensitive nose. I’ll find you some caramel apple hand cream. Nice angels out there in the back yard. Must have been pretty cold, making them. Where’s the baby?”

“Oops, I left her on the roof of the car...” That was our joke. “She’s on the floor beside me. We made a bed for her with some rolled blankets. Hey, I gave her a bottle of formula. She did spit out the first few gulps. But then she got used to it.”

“Well, about time,” he said.

“Yeah. I’ll nurse her again in the morning after this buzz has worn off. Good to have the option of a bottle though. You were right.”

He sighed and curved his legs behind mine. We lay still for a while.

“What was that last thing?” I asked him.

“The accident? A truck spun out and clipped an SUV. Both totalled.”

“I was worried that it was the buffalo. That caused the accident, I mean.”

“Nope. Those buffalo are off into the hills by now. They go where they want, ignore everything else. That rancher lost one before, a couple of years ago. Never saw it again.”

“Was the accident bad?” I was afraid to ask. Finding people badly injured, or a dead person, was hard on him.

“Nobody died,” he said. “Just hurt feelings and glass all over the place.”

We were quiet for a minute.

“You were out for a long time, though.”

“We just drove around all night. Ron didn’t want to come home.”

I tried to imagine what they would talk about, driving around.

“I always want to come home,” Grady said. He slid his arm under my head. “He’s having a hard time here, with Tim in Vegas and Marie on sick leave with her broken leg. He says Marie’s a great Mountie, that’s one good thing. But he seems pretty depressed.”

I waited. He didn’t continue. I thought he might have fallen asleep.

Grady’s pretty depressed himself. I know that. And when things are bad, he finds talking hard. Sometimes days and days go by before he tells me about things. Before we’re in the same bed at the same time. And both awake—that hardly ever happens any more.

I go a bit crazy when we don’t talk.

“I think about leaving you all the time,” I said, softly in case he was sleeping. “I have a plan. What to take, where to pack things in the suitcases.”

“Don’t think about that,” Grady said in the darkness. “Don’t leave.”

We lay quiet.

“I think about quitting my job all the time,” he said, after a few minutes. “But I can’t quit, there’s the baby.”

“Why don’t you ever call her by her name?”

He didn’t answer.

Because he hates her name. I knew that for sure now. I kicked myself. I shouldn’t have asked him then, when he was talking about quitting. He
should
quit. Get out of this crazy police life before it grinds him too far down.

“Maybe I’m still getting used to her,” he said. “Anyway. Fuck it. Go back to sleep, Princess Buttercup. And Daisy. My flowers.”

In the morning, we drove away.

Daisy was safe in her car seat after nursing again. The formula hadn’t killed her.

Ron came out on the front deck to wave. Sharla was still sleeping off last night’s shooters.

Grady waved back. He rolled the window up quick once we got going.

“Nice visit,” Grady said.

“Nobody died,” I said. He laughed.

It was still pretty cold. Snow had stopped falling. The sun shone high and white. Today was a new year.

“I know where I belong, and nothing’s gonna happen,”
Grady sang.

He has the best voice. I love when he sings. It means he is okay. We are okay.

“She’s so high, high above me, she’s so lovely.”

Daisy watched his face in the rear-view mirror, bright eyes brimming with sadness or laughter. She was too young for us to know which it was.

The wind had cleared the road. It had blown away the hoof prints of the buffalo and the snow stained with blood from last night’s fight. Where the accident had been, I saw broken glass heaped beside the ditch.

Loose snow blew in long strands across the road. They made a new white road following the line of the wind.

I love that sideways road that the wind takes. It ignores everything except what it really wants. It shows where we ought to be going, which is not very often where we are going.

The wind’s road is where I want us to go.

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