The Divide (9 page)

Now, as the plane banked and headed east, the forest skidding in vivid shades of sunlit green across the port-holes, Sarah thought of the body tilting coldly in its narrow case below her in the dark of the hold. The fact of her daughter’s death remained too vast to grasp and perhaps that was why her mind kept flitting strangely to these lesser facts, the circumstantial detail of the girl’s unliving presence.

Standing alone by the open casket at the funeral home, she had been shocked, not at the sight of the body, so prettily, so ridiculously prepared, but at her own sense of detachment. She had been expecting it to be the moment when the bolted floodgates of her grief would at last open. But it had been like watching herself in a movie or through thick plate glass, through which no emotion seemed able to pass. She had put on the sunglasses, which still she hadn’t removed, not because her eyes were ravaged by tears but because they weren’t. She felt like an impostor. And that was probably why she had so cruelly shunned Benjamin’s embrace afterward. She saw—and not without pity—how much it hurt him.

Poor, wretched Benjamin. She took a sideways look at him now, sitting across the aisle. The flight was less than half-full and the seats had arms that could be hoisted out of the way. At Sarah’s suggestion, to give themselves more space, they had each occupied an empty row. He was staring out at the mountains, lost in thought. In his mournful way, he was still a handsome man, though the longer hair made him seem to be trying too hard to look young. He wasn’t as gaunt as the last time she had seen him and the extra weight suited him. She was glad she could assess him like this now, almost objectively, without yearning for him to come back. She didn’t really even hate him anymore.

He must have felt her gaze, for he turned to look at her, cautiously. To mask her thoughts, Sarah smiled and, like a whipped dog sensing forgiveness, he smiled back. He got up from his seat and crossed the aisle to sit next to her. Sarah moved her purse to make space.

“We just flew over the Divide,” he said. There was more than one meaning to what he had said and he quickly tried to clarify. “I mean, the Continental Divide.”

Sarah glanced briefly out of her window.

“Well,” she said. “The other Divide must be somewhere pretty close then.”

“No. It’s some way south and west of here.”

“Oh.”

It was the place where it all began. Or began to end. The Divide guest ranch where they had come summer after summer and had the best vacations of their lives. The place where Abbie had fallen in love with Montana and become so determined to go to college there. And where, six years but what now seemed like a lifetime ago, Benjamin had fallen in love (or whatever it was) with Eve Kinsella and set about the destruction of their marriage.

For a while neither of them spoke. The flight attendant was wheeling a wagon of drinks and snacks toward them along the aisle. They both asked for water. The piped air of the cabin was cold and smelled fake and antiseptic.

“Talk to me,” he said quietly.

“What?”

“Please, Sarah. Can’t we just talk a little? About Abbie?”

She shrugged.

“If you like. What is there to say?”

“I don’t know. I just think that if we talked about it, we might be able to . . . give each other a little comfort, I suppose.”

“Oh.”

“Sarah, you know, we mustn’t blame ourselves—”

“Blame ourselves?”

“No, I don’t mean—”

“Benjamin, I don’t blame myself at all. Not at all.”

“I know, I just—”

“I blame you. You and you alone . . .” She broke off and smiled. There was that woman too, of course. She could see in his eyes that he read the thought. “Well, maybe not quite alone.”

“Sarah, how can you say that?”

“Because it’s true. Abbie didn’t die because she fell or jumped or got pushed off a cliff or whatever it was. She died, Benjamin, because of what you did to us all.”

T
he Divide was a place that seemed to want to keep itself secret. It perched concealed at the head of a split and tortuous valley that descended to another far grander where a highway followed the curves of the Yellowstone River. Beside this highway, for those who could spot and decipher it, there was a sign of sorts. But the gnarled cottonwood to which it had long ago been nailed had all but consumed it and the words now looked like a parasitic scarring of the bark. Some thirty yards on, a road of pale gravel branched away beside a creek and the only clue that it led anywhere was a battered tin mailbox.

Lost Creek, whose course the gravel road followed, was well named. In summer it ran dry or at best was barely a trickle and its banks were rife with chokecherry and willow scrub, their leaves layered with a white dust churned from the road. The water was plundered for the hay meadows that stretched away on either side and for cattle ponds farther upstream where the land began to rise and the grassland filled with sage.

Even with the snowmelt of spring, even in its highest reaches, Lost Creek never truly found itself. But its sibling, across the dividing spine of pine-clad rock that gave the ranch its name, was thirstier and flashier by far. Named for some long-forgotten but doubtless ebullient pioneer, Miller’s Creek brimmed and tumbled for five dramatic miles of bouldered curves and waterfalls and swirling, trouty pools.

It took fifteen minutes to drive up from the highway and only in the last half-mile did the ranch reveal itself. Just as the gradient seemed to be growing too steep and the forest too darkly encroaching, the road broke abruptly from the trees into a bowl of lush pasture where glossy quarter horses ambled and grazed and swished their languid tails at flies. Beyond them, on higher ground and dustier, stood a cluster of whitewashed clapboard stables and a red sand arena and corrals with bleached wood fences. And above all this, encircled by flower beds and lawns, the mountains rearing grandly behind it, was the ranch house itself.

The building was long and low and made of logs and fronted for its entire length by a deck some ten feet wide with tables and chairs where in the evening guests liked to gaze out over the treetops and watch the mountains on the east side of the valley catch the last ocher glow of the lowering sun. The creeks divided behind the house and moated it on either side where both were simply bridged to oval meadows stolen from the forest. Along their perimeters, discreetly placed among the ponderosa pines, were two tennis courts and a swimming pool and twenty log cabins, each with its own porch.

Montana had ritzier ranches, with finer cuisine and glitzier guests. But there were few, if any, so beautiful. The Divide didn’t advertise or tout for business for it had no need. Its guests came by word of mouth and returned again and again. And thus it was with the Cooper family. For the last two weeks in June, they always took cabins six and eight. This was their fourth visit and it would be their last, the vacation that would change their lives forever.

Today was Ben’s forty-sixth birthday and he was dragged from his dreams into it by the most wretched rendition of “Happy Birthday” he had ever heard. His head was clouded from too many beers and too little sleep and the out-of-tune singing entered it like a rusty corkscrew. He opened an eye to see Sarah smiling from the pillow beside him. She leaned over and kissed him on the cheek.

“Morning, birthday boy,” she said.

“So that’s what they’re singing.”

The sun coming through the red-and-white curtains cast a glaring checkerboard pattern on the bare wooden floor and across Ben’s bare feet as he shuffled to the door, pulling on his bathrobe as he went. Abbie and Josh and a ragged choir of conscripts were gathered in the meadow just below the cabin porch, and they cheered as he emerged, shielding his eyes against the sun.

“Oh, it’s you guys,” he said. “I thought there was a pack of sick coyotes out here.”

“Happy birthday, Daddy,” Abbie called.

She had mustered her friends and a couple of their favorite ranch hands. There were eight or nine of them, all grinning and wishing him a happy birthday and making smart remarks about his age. Abbie came up the steps with Josh and they kissed him and handed him a big box wrapped in paper decorated with little cattle brands. Sarah was out on the porch too now, wrapped in her matching white bathrobe. She came to stand between her two children and draped her arms around their shoulders. They were all tanned and their hair tinted even blonder by the sun. Ben had never seen them so radiant, so golden.

“It’s kind of from all of us,” Abbie said.

“Well, thank you. Do I get to open it now?”

“Of course.”

There was an envelope on top and he opened that first. It was one of those cards parents had to pretend to find funnier than they truly did. It had a picture of a dinosaur skeleton on the front and inside said
Happy Birthday, You Old Fossil.
Ben nodded and smiled.

“Thanks,” he said. “I love you too.”

Inside the box was a fine Stetson made of beige felt.

“Wow, that’s what I’d call a hat.”

He put it on. They cheered and whistled. It was a perfect fit.

“Goes great with the bathrobe,” Abbie said.

“How did you know my size?”

“We just went for the biggest,” Josh said.

Everyone laughed and Ben made as if to grab him but the boy dodged easily out of reach.

“Mr. Cooper?”

Ty Hawkins, one of the ranch hands, stepped forward, holding out a little package. Abbie’s two best friends, Katie and Lane, were giggling behind him and had clearly put him up to it. He was a mild-mannered young man with a shock of blond hair and the kind of rugged yet innocent good looks that had weakened the knees of just about every female on the ranch. Especially Abbie. She had made sure she was in his riding group every day since the vacation began.

“The girls reckoned you’d probably need this to go with it.”

Ben opened the package and pulled out a patterned leather cord, braided with horsehair. He knew what it was, but didn’t want to spoil the joke.

“What’s this for?”

Ty smiled. “I think it’s supposed to hold your hat on.”

“They’re called sissy straps,” Katie trilled.

Ben Cooper’s birthday had become a ritual of these ranch vacations and while he considered himself a good sport and enjoyed the attention, he sometimes felt it unfair that his notching of years should be so routinely public. Last year they had given him a red toy Porsche in a box emblazoned with the words
Ben’s Menoporsche.
Though he wasn’t as neurotic about aging as some men he knew, he couldn’t say it was a process he relished: the way your bones creaked when you got out of bed and how your hair seemed to get bored of growing on your head and sprouted in your ears and nose instead. Yesterday in the shower he had discovered his first gray pubic hair and he was trying not to see it as symbolic.

“We better be getting back to work,” Ty said. “Are you riding this morning, Mr. Cooper?”

“If you’ve got a horse man enough for this hat.”

“We’ve got a stallion needs breaking, if that’s okay?”

“No problem. Saddle him up.”

Ben’s riding was another family joke. He brought to it, as he did to most sports, more enthusiasm than skill. Abbie, who had ridden since she was six and had inherited her mother’s effortless elegance, said that on a stationary horse he looked like Clint Eastwood, but morphed, as soon as it moved, into Kermit the Frog.

Ty and the other wrangler said they had better go start saddling the horses for the ride and everyone else agreed to meet at the ranch house in twenty minutes for breakfast. Ben and Sarah lingered on the sunlit porch to watch the little crowd drift and disperse across the meadow.

Lane and Katie were ragging Josh about something and he was pretending to be mad but clearly lapping up the attention. It was good to see. In the past year the boy’s hormones had gone into overdrive. He had started to shave and was growing so fast he could hardly keep up with himself. Fortunately the clothes he liked to wear were mostly big enough for two of him.

Josh had always been the one Ben and Sarah worried about. Perhaps it was simply the contrast with his sister, who had every gift one could wish upon a child. Whereas Abbie had so far breezed through life, her brother seemed to snag himself at every turn of the trail. The very slouch of his shoulders suggested how heavily the world weighed upon him.

He was a gentle soul and sweet-natured and had many other fine qualities, but he lacked his sister’s natural grace and good looks. And though Ben would never have admitted it to anyone, for he knew the emotion to be inappropriate, the love he felt for the boy had always been tinged with something akin to pity. He had witnessed too many disappointments, seen him reflect his own failure on the success of others, watched him watching from the sidelines while peers, brighter or sportier, better-looking or simply more extroverted, gathered the garlands. Ben suspected that Sarah felt the same, but they had never been able to discuss it without it escalating into a row. She was fiercely defensive and took as a personal slight any implication that her son might be less than perfect.

Last summer Josh had been almost chronically shy with Katie and Lane. But judging by the way he was romping off across the meadow with them now, that seemed to have changed. And watching them, Ben dared to hope that things might at last be falling into place for the boy. Children all seemed to have a particular age when they found their stride. Maybe, at last, this was Josh’s. Katie gave him a shove now and ran ahead with Lane, the two of them laughing and taunting him and, like an overgrown Labrador puppy, Josh rollicked off in pursuit.

This left Abbie and Ty walking on their own. Unaware that they were being watched, they moved closer together. Now she leaned closer still to whisper something and he laughed and she tucked her thumb into the back pocket of his Wranglers. Ben and Sarah looked at each other.