Page 42 of Red Boar's Baby

“What?” Costa said, jarred out of a very different train of thought.

“The barn!” Diana sounded outraged. “Look at that color! The least my parents could have done was sell it to someone with a single shred of aesthetic sense.”

She urged Rabbit into motion, and then to a gallop. Costa followed more moderately, looking around as he rode.

He tried to remember the way the place had looked before. He knew the Halversons had made a lot of modifications to the ranch, although it looked like the main house, where Diana grew up, had remained the same—a weathered, rambling farmhouse, the paint long since faded to gray in the desert sun. Costa remembered Diana’s bedroom window well, an opening window on the second floor with a half-dead pine tree just near enough that an enterprising youngster could leap from the window to the pine’s outstretched branch, or vice versa.

The window was still just the same, although the pine was a stump. He supposed the Halversons had considered it unsafe so close to the house. It looked like the start had been made of a rock garden around the stump, but with the property’s abandonment, it was now growing stray clumps of brush and scraggly grass.

He rode around the house and saw that Diana had dismounted at the barn, looping Rabbit’s reins over a fence rail. Once again the sense of familiarity combined with not-familiar dislocation hit him. He didn’t remember what color the barn had been before, but it had definitely been repainted in the last few years. From the look of things, it was supposed to be a classic New England barn red, but the paint hadn’t been chosen well to resist the desert sun, and it had faded to a purplish color.

Costa dismounted and tied his horse beside Rabbit. Meanwhile, Diana had wandered over to the barn door. It was secured with a padlock and chain. Diana gave the chain a tug, but she removed her hand as Costa joined her.

“Don’t worry, I’m not going to break in,” she said with a little sigh.

“My folks probably have a key, since they’ve been watching the place for the owners. I should’ve thought to ask before we came over here.”

Diana shook her head. She turned away, shoving her hands in her pockets, and surveyed the old fencing and the pasture that was slowly being reclaimed by scrubby brush.

“I don’t think it would make any difference. All our stuff’s gone, except the old equipment and anything else my parents sold with the property. There’s nothing of mine in the house.” She slowly took her hand from her pocket and put it over her face. “There’s nothing of mine anywhere.”

“Diana,” Costa said helplessly.

“I hate crying,” Diana said thickly. “Now it’s all I seem to do.”

“You have more reason to cry than anybody I know. Don’t apologize for it.” He reached out a cautious arm, and Diana didn’t resist, so Costa pulled her against him. It wasn’t quite the full hug of yesterday, though he was almost overwhelmed by the sensory memory of having her in his arms. This time, there was a prickly tension in her that he didn’t want to force his way past; part of holding on to Diana was knowing when to hold her loosely. So he let her lean against him until she took a deep breath, drew away, and felt in her pocket for a tissue.

“At this rate I need to start carrying around a whole box of Kleenex,” she said when she had dabbed at her reddened eyes. She shoved the damp tissue back into her pocket and offered him a shaky smile. “If you don’t mind risking more waterworks, can we walk around a little?”

“I think that sounds like a great idea.”

They wandered through the back pasture, flushing a small group of deer. Most of the fence was still there, but enough of it was down that animals could freely come and go. Costa had to keep stopping himself from reaching for her hand; it felt so much like the walks they used to take here as teenagers.

He found himself thinking about something he had read a long time ago about some creation stories, how they told of the creation of the world as a journey taken by a divine being, and wherever it touched its feet or a magical stick or other item, physical parts of the landscape—mountains, rivers, islands—sprang into existence. The landscape was the map of a divine being’s journey. It seemed to him that the landscape of Diana’s family ranch was like that, but it was a map of his history with Diana.

There was the rock they used to lie on to stargaze, the sandy circle that was once a pen where together they had trained Diana’s 4H pony, the meadow where—he vividly remembered—they’d shared a cautious first kiss, and then were so embarrassed about it that they didn’t talk to each other for days.

Up there, behind those scrubby trees, the hollow where they used to take the blanket—the hollow where?—

“I can’t believe they’ve let the place go to seed like this,” Diana said. Her weary resignation was more alarming than any amount of anger. She stopped at a concrete water trough, now dry and crusted with old mineral deposits. “My family put so much work into it. This was their dream. Now it’s just turning into a—a ruin, just another Arizona ghost town.”

“It’s nowhere near that yet,” Costa pointed out.

“Yeah, but in another five years? Fifteen? If the problem is that they’ve run out of money and motivation, it’s not like that’s going to suddenly change. Maybe they’ll sell it to someone who will turn it into a McDonald’s or something.” She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. “Okay, this is ridiculous. Look at me turning into a maudlin, weepy idiot. Do you remember how we used to climb on the edge of this?”

In keeping with the swerve in the conversation, she planted a hand on the wide, flat lip of the water trough, then carefully climbed up and stood with her feet spread for balance.

“This seemed a lot wider when we were kids,” she remarked. “But you can see a lot from up here. Come on.”

“It was easier to climb up when we were kids, too,” Costa grumbled, but he scrambled after her. “You know, you always got me to do the craziest things. Walking fence rails. Climbing on the barn roof. Do you remember that time we decided to see if we could cross the whole pasture by hopping from boulder to boulder without touching the ground? As I recall, you cheated.”

Diana laughed. “AsIrecall, I asked if shifting was all right, and you said it was.”

“Yeah, but I didn’t know roadrunners could fly!”

She was gorgeous, grinning in the sun, her eyes creased with the squint lines worn deep from her outdoor job and the sun backlighting the loose hair around her face. She wasn’t the same girl he had grown up next to; life had worn deep tracks in her, as it had in him.

But he loved her, he now realized, just as he had loved her then, a love that had worn itself into both their souls in the same way that the sun had left lines on their faces.

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