The Ranch (31 page)

“Who said that?” Zoe grinned.

“I did.” Tanya glared at her as they stepped into the main building, and the three of them strode across the dining room a moment later, with Benjamin right behind them. He was sticking to them like glue, and Mary Stuart was determined to ignore him. But when they sat down at the table they'd used the day before, he sat right down with them. Tanya was amused by him, and Zoe liked him too, but neither of them wanted to upset Mary Stuart. They tried to suggest he go sit with his friends, but he absolutely didn't want to.

“It's okay,” Mary Stuart said to them finally. “Don't make a big issue of it.”

“Are you okay?” Tanya asked her pointedly, and Mary Stuart nodded.

“I'm all right.” You couldn't protect yourself to that extent. No matter how much it hurt to see him sitting there, you couldn't create a world without children.

“Nice fax from your husband last night, by the way,” Tanya commented as she drank her orange juice. “Very warm and emotional and loving. Nice guy,” she said, and Mary Stuart smiled. “Sorry I read it, but I couldn't help it Are you going to answer?”

“There's not much to say.” And then she thought of something. The night before had been almost dreamlike, and she was beginning to wonder if it had ever happened, sitting there with Hartley's arms around her, holding her close, and him telling her he wanted to get to know her. “By the way, I clarified things with Hartley last night, about my husband. You were right, I think he did misunderstand what I said. But now he's clear.”

“Did he care?”

She tried to sound cool about it, but the others didn't believe her. “Why would he?”

“Because I don't think he's interested in offering you a secretarial position,” Tanya explained as though she were retarded. “The guy likes you.”

“We'll see what happens,” Mary Stuart said calmly, and couldn't help noticing Benjamin in his red cowboy hat staring at her.

“You look kind of like my mom,” he said, looking at her, “and my Aunt Mary.”

“My name is Mary too,” she said to make conversation, “Mary Stuart. That's kind of weird, isn't it? Stuart was my daddy's name, and he wanted me to be a boy, so that's what they named me.”

“Oh,” he said, nodding. And then, “Do you have any children?” He was far more interested in her than the others, it was as though he sensed something different about her.

“Yes, I have a daughter, but she's very big now. She's twenty.”

“Do you have boys too?” he asked, munching on a Danish Zoe gave him.

“No, I don't,” Mary Stuart answered, and the child was too young to understand the tears in her eyes as she said it.

“I like boys better,” he said matter-of-factly. “I hope my mom doesn't have a girl when the baby comes. I don't like girls. They're stupid.”

“Some of them are okay,” Mary Stuart explained, and he shrugged, unconvinced in his prejudice about females.

“They cry too much when you push them,” he said, by way of an explanation, and Zoe and Tanya exchanged a smile as they listened. Maybe it was good for her to have to talk to him, they wondered silently. Like kind of a vaccination.

“Some girls are pretty brave,” Mary Stuart said in defense of her sex, but he lost interest in the subject and ate a piece of bacon, and a little while later he wandered off again when he saw his father. His mother came into the dining room a little while later too, and Mary Stuart noticed that she was hugely pregnant. Her husband had explained to Zoe earlier that the altitude was making her feel wretched.

“I hope you don't wind up delivering a baby,” Mary Stuart said in an undertone. “She looks like she's having triplets.”

“God, no. There's a hospital here. I don't carry forceps with me. And I haven't delivered a baby since I was an intern. It scared the hell out of me. Delivering babies is a lot scarier than what I do. Too much can go wrong, too many split-second decisions, too many elements you can't control, and I hate dealing with people in that much pain. I'd rather do dermatology than obstetrics,” Zoe said with feeling. Mary Stuart said she thought it would be fun, and a really cheerful job, since most of the time it had a happy outcome. Tanya said then that she wondered what it was like having a baby. She had wanted lots of them when she was young, but as her life had unfolded, the opportunity had never happened. And it intrigued Mary Stuart to realize that of all of them, she was the only one who had ever borne children.

“Maybe it was something subliminal they told us at Berkeley,” Zoe said, smiling at them. She was happy she had adopted.

“I would have loved to have kids,” Tanya said, “I loved having Tony's kids around, they were great children.” She wondered if she'd ever see them again, for more than a few minutes. It was all so unkind, losing them, losing him, and when all was said and done, he could just take them and leave her. It made her think that somewhere along the way she should have had her own kids, then no one could have taken them away, and she'd have had them forever, or maybe not, she realized, as she thought of Mary Stuart.

They finished breakfast just in time, and hurried down to the corral. Hartley was already down there, and he looked pleased to see Mary Stuart. Their eyes met and held for a long time, and he stood very close to her as they waited to mount their horses. The doctors from Chicago were back again, and the same groups formed as the day before. Zoe rode with them, and Hartley rode alongside Mary Stuart, which left Tanya and the wrangler to ride ahead again, and this time he tried to make more of an effort.

“You look very nice today,” he said, looking straight ahead, and sounding like a robot, and she could see there was a faint flush on his cheekbones as he said it. He was really embarrassed, and she tried to put him at ease as they rode along, but it took a while to do it. After a while, he asked her a few questions about Hollywood, the people she'd met. He asked if she'd ever met Tom Cruise or Kevin Costner or Cher, and he told her he'd seen Harrison Ford in Jackson Hole that summer. She said she'd met them all, and she and Cher had been in a movie together.

“It's funny,” he said, looking at her with narrowed eyes, “looking at you, you don't look like that kind of person.”

“What does that mean?” He confused her.

“I mean, you're like someone real, not like some movie star or big singer or something. You're just like a regular woman. You ride, you talk a lot, you laugh, you've got a pretty good sense of humor.” He glanced over at her with the beginnings of a smile, and this time without blushing. “It's hard to remember after a while that you're the one on the CD's and in the movies.”

“If that's a compliment, thank you. If you're telling me I'm a disappointment to you, that's okay too. The bottom line is I'm just a girl from Texas.” She was smiling at him, as he admired the pink T-shirt.

“No.” He shook his head, glancing at her appraisingly with wise eyes. There was a lot more to Gordon than met the eye on first impression. “There's a lot more to you than that. And you know that. It's just that you're not phony, the way they are.”

“The way who is?”

“Other movie stars I've met. They don't even ride when they come here. We've had them all. Politicians, movie stars, even a couple of singers. They just show off a lot, and expect a whole lot of special treatment.”

“I asked for a lot of towels, and a coffeepot,” she confessed, and he laughed. “Besides, I put on the card that I hate horses.”

“I don't believe you,” he said, looking more relaxed with her than he had the previous morning. He had hardly dared to speak to her for most of the day before. This was a lot better. While he chatted with her, he was fun to ride with. “You're from Texas,” he said approvingly. It said something about her, as far as he was concerned. People from Texas didn't hate horses. “And you're just a regular woman.” The funny thing was that she was just that, and he knew it. It was what she had been with Bobby Joe, and Hollywood had screwed it all up, and it was what she had tried to be with Tony. But Tony had wanted a movie star, with none of the problems that went with it. He wanted something that, even with the best of intentions, she just couldn't give him.

“I am a regular woman, but the world I live in doesn't give me much chance to be. I don't have much of a life, to tell you the truth, and I never will now. I hate that, but that's the way it is. The press will never let me have a real life. And even the people who meet me won't. They want you to be what they think you are, and then when they get close to you, they want to hurt you.” Even talking about it, it sounded crazy.

“It sounds awful,” he said, watching her with interest. He was surprised at how much he liked her. He hadn't wanted to, but she was completely different than he'd expected. He had done everything he could not to be her wrangler, and now he was glad Liz hadn't listened to him. She was actually pleasant to be with.

“It is awful,” she said quietly. “Sometimes I think it'll kill me. Maybe it will one day, or a fan will.” She said it so sadly that he shook his head as he listened.

“How can you live like that? I don't care what they pay you, it's not worth it,” he said, as their horses began loping.

“It's not the money. Not entirely. It's what I do. That's my life. I sing. You can't go backward, you can't hide. If I want to do what I do, then I have to put up with all that.”

“It doesn't seem right.”

“It's not, but that's reality.” She didn't like it, but she knew there was nothing she could do to change it. “Other people hold all the trump cards.”

“There's got to be some way to change it, or to live with it, to give yourself a decent life. Other movie stars get away from it, they buy ranches and go places where they can live decent. You ought to do that, Miss Tanya.” He really meant it, and she smiled at him, as their horses slowed down again, and Gordon watched her with admiration. She was a great rider.

“Don't call me that,” she scolded him when he called her Miss Tanya, “just Tanya is fine.” They were almost friends now, enough so to talk about her life. It was like what Mary Stuart had experienced with Hartley. One found oneself talking about the oddest things here. One's hopes and one's dreams, and one's disappointments. It was as though the mountains did something strange and put everything into fast forward.

Hartley was talking seriously to Mary Stuart too, and apologizing if he had overstepped his bounds the night before. When he got back to his cabin, he had been afraid that he might have frightened her by being too forward. They had only just met, and yet he felt so close to her, but she had felt exactly the same thing, and rather than being frightened, she had derived great comfort from it. No one had put their arms around her in a year and she was starving for it. She didn't say exactly that to him, but he understood very clearly as they rode along that she hadn't in any way been offended by his behavior, far from it. And it was a great relief to him, as their horses stopped for a moment and took a drink from a little stream, as he looked at her, and she was smiling. It was magical just being there, and they both felt it.

“All I could think about this morning when I got up was seeing you,” he said, with a boyish grin. “I haven't felt that way in years, I don't even feel like working. And for me that's rare, believe me.” He wrote daily, no matter where he was or how he felt, or what the conditions of his life were. The only time he hadn't written was when Margaret was dying. He had found then that he just couldn't.

“I know exactly how you feel. It's funny how just when you think your life is over, it all begins again. Life always fools you, doesn't it? When you think you have it all, you lose everything, and when you think ail is lost, you find something infinitely precious,” Mary Stuart said thoughtfully, looking at the mountains.

“I'm afraid that God has quite a sense of humor,” he said as their horses started walking again, and she smiled at him. “What do you like to do in New York?” he asked, still wanting to know everything about her. First he wanted to know, and then he wanted the chance to do it with her. He was excited to know she was going back to New York after spending a week in L.A. with Tanya. He had business to attend to in Seattle when he left the ranch, and he had to spend a few days in Boston, but then he was going back to New York around the same time she was. “Do you like the theater?” he inquired, and they talked about it for a long time. He had a number of friends who were playwrights, and he wanted to introduce her to them, to all his friends in fact. There was so much that he wanted to tell her and show her and ask her. It was impossible to stand still. The two of them talked constantly, and laughed, and shared ideas, and they were both surprised when they wound up back at the corral at lunch time, They hadn't even been looking where they were walking. Tanya and Gordon were well ahead of them, and the doctors were bringing up the rear very slowly. And Mary Stuart was just dismounting when a horse suddenly came racing past them. There was a small figure clinging to it, and Gordon had spotted it before they did. The horse was shooting right through the corral on the way to the barn, and he instantly broke into a gallop trying to stop it, but before he could reach it a small form flew through the air, and landed with a hard thump on the rocky roadside. At first they couldn't see what it was, it was a bit of something, but Mary Stuart knew less by sight than by instinct. It was as though she felt it almost before she saw it. And then the others saw too. The little red cowboy hat lay beside the small heap that was Benjamin. His horse had run away with him. And without thinking, Mary Stuart jumped to the ground and ran to him, with Hartley just behind her, but when she reached the child, he seemed lifeless. He was unconscious, and when she bent her cheek to his lips, he was barely breathing. And she looked behind her in terror at Hartley.

“Get Zoe!” she shouted at him, and turned to the child again, afraid to move him for fear his neck or his back might be broken. She was sure he stopped breathing then, but before she could determine it, Zoe was on her knees beside her.

“It's okay, Mary Stuart… I've got him.” There was very little she could do, and like her friend, she was careful not to move him. She tapped him gently on the chest and he began breathing again, and then she lifted his eyelids. He saw nothing, and there was a large wet spot on the front of his jeans, which meant he was deep in unconsciousness and had lost control of his bodily functions. “Do you have 911 here?” Zoe said loudly to the wrangler, and he nodded. “Call them. Tell them we have an unconscious child, head injury and possible fractures. He's still breathing, but his heartbeat is irregular. He's in shock. Get them here as fast as you can.” She looked at him to be sure he understood how pressing it was, and the other two doctors hurried over, having just left their horses. Zoe was still touching him and watching him closely, and Mary Stuart knelt next to the child, holding his hand in her own, although she knew it meant nothing. But she didn't want to let go of him, in case somehow he could feel it. Zoe was continuing to examine him and she looked worried. She was sure his neck wasn't broken, nor his spine, and she was feeling his limbs, when his eyes fluttered open and he started crying.