A/N:
This is a note I probably should have put on my first post a year ago. Everything I write is based on the TV show Longmire. I didn't love the books (though I did love the sex scene in the third one), and I don't consider them in terms of character development, setting, or backstory. I stopped reading them after the first and skimmed the second and third.
The only exceptions, I think, are that I included at some point Ruby's Post-its, and I switched back and forth between Lucian and Lucien (unintentionally, but I never fixed it). So . . . details about Vic's family and/or her home in Philly are purely figments of my own imagination. I know she has brothers in the books, but in the show, to me, she seems like a girl who grew up surrounded by boys, so I went with that, too.
And now our final chapter . . .
Chapter 7
It's yet another lesson: Moving forward after having your heart ripped from your chest and shattered into billions of microscopic pieces is challenging. For example, it's hard to give a shit about anything.
Sometimes she blames him, seethes in the idea that it was all avoidable. If only he'd stayed gone for a couple of months longer, she'd be doing all right. She'd already have gone down this part of the road, and it was in much better condition back then.
Mostly, though, it's just a constant vague ache, a slow process of warping and decaying and splitting and rotting and fading, like the wood on an old barn.
For the first time in her life, her family treats her like she's fragile. Sometimes she thinks they know, but she doesn't understand how that could be. When her younger brother visits, he doesn't punch her in the arm; her older brothers talk to her like she has cancer.
Total lack of motivation aside, she has no intention of being a mooch or of living with her parents forever. Soon after she arrived, she wrote her dad a check for rent. The next morning, it had been returned to her, slipped under her bedroom door. When she tried to reassure her mom that she'd find work soon, her mom said she wasn't worried, told her to take her time.
As loving as her family has always been, low-pressure and empathetic were not terms that previously would have been used to describe them. It freaks her out a little.
One morning after breakfast she's sitting with her mom at the kitchen table, finally sharing the pictures of her post-divorce adventures: Devil's Tower, Mount Rushmore, the petroglyphs, the Grand Tetons, her apartment. Her mom asks questions, acts interested, gushes over beautiful scenery. She's a good mom that way.
After the last picture, the Snake River, Vic swipes once more out of habit, and there he is.
It's a shock that seems to deliver actual electricity. She'd forgotten about it.
When they got back to the truck that day out at the creek, he opened the door for her. He was waiting while she got settled, acting like she was taking forever, teasing her. So she dragged it out by searching for her phone then taking a picture. His hair was all fluffy, and his skin had that post-sun glow.
Behind him is blue sky, paling towards evening, and it brings out the blue in his eyes. He's smiling the wide smile she'd only ever seen in the last two months.
"Is that him?" her mom says, being coy, smoothing down her already pressed skirt.
"Him who?"
She reminds herself to remain calm: There is absolutely no way her mother could know anything.
"The, um, . . . ."
"The Sheriff, Mom."
"Oh," she says, and she's clearly surprised. "The Sheriff. That's not what I expected him to look like."
"He doesn't really look like that."
With the T-shirt and the messy hair, he's got this aging surfer vibe going on, and he looks super mellow. And happy, she thinks. He looks happy.
"He's handsome," her mom says.
"You think?" She plays it off, scrutinizing the picture. "Huh. I guess maybe he is."
There's something uncomfortable, though, something that makes her feel swathed. It occurs to her that maybe the picture seems intimate. Maybe this isn't a picture an employee would have of her boss.
"What, Mom?" she says, closing the photo app.
Something's ratting her out in that picture or on her face, and she's not sure she wants to know what it is.
"Nothing, honey. Looks like you were doing well for yourself."
She wonders what the hell that's supposed to mean, but she keeps quiet. It's not her mom's fault they were so inept.
Upstairs, lying on the twin bed in her old bedroom, she brings up the picture again. She used to look at him and wonder what it would be like to kiss him, or to feel his hands on her, or to have him inside her, and she used to think that's all it would ever be: wondering. That, at the time, had been painful, but it was nothing compared to this. She couldn't have imagined how much worse knowing would be.
On a different day that she also doesn't send out resumes or research law enforcement agencies, she's enduring Two and a Half Men with her dad when she gets the fourth in a string of calls from a number she doesn't recognize in the 307 area code. There's no one in Wyoming she wants to talk to, and if there were, there are two phone numbers associated with him, and that's not one of them. After the second call, she did a search on the number, but nothing came up. She considers the Enterprise guy, or God forbid, Travis, but whoever it is, it should be of low concern. She never answers her phone anyway, and it's hard to stalk someone from 1,900 miles away.
A week later, early in the morning when she's in the family room reading, warming up to job-search related activities, she gets a text from the same number that says, I think about you all the time.
Though in theory this is just as harmless, it's somehow more frightening. It brings back the Gorski episodes, the feeling of helplessness.
She doesn't respond.
A second one, ten minutes later says, Oh, and your tomatoes are delicious.
"What the fuck?"
"Victoria," her mom calls from the kitchen.
"Sorry, Mom."
She runs up the stairs.
Engaging is the worst thing a victim can do, but she's curious. Whoever it is writes full words, so either they have a good phone with autocorrect or they're meticulous or they're not used to texting, or some combination of the three.
She shoehorns herself into a better headspace before she replies.
Who is this?
There's no response.
Over the next half hour, she checks obsessively. She plays blackjack to get her mind off it, but it doesn't work, and as a result, she loses three hundred dollars in fifteen minutes and has to borrow from "the bank."
Then another one comes, and it's a picture. It takes some time to make sense of what she's looking at. They're potted plants, and two of them look like her tomatoes, but that idea is too square to fit into her round mind until she notices the pattern on one of the pots, a native design. It's the pot she found in the alley by the dumpster.
Those are her two tomato plants and the other two pots are the onions and basil, though from this vantage point, they don't appear to be holding up so well. The plants are on some sort of wood platform, definitely not the fire escape where she left them, and which by now, no longer even exists.
A wave of nausea rolls through her. Fear seems irrational, but it doesn't care.
She doesn't respond, but she keeps the phone close. There's nothing for a while, and she has time to calm down only to get pumped right back up when the next one comes in. It's another picture.
She opens it, and right away, she knows what it is. It's a picture of Walt's cabin from a distance, probably in the field, and to the left of the front steps, she can see the four pots.
And this is how mangled her perception is: She thinks the stalker is holding him hostage.
They've done something to him to get to her, and for seconds, maybe even a full minute, she's frantic, and she's hyperventilating, and she's never felt so powerless.
But then it hits her. She's a fucking moron. Her face flushes, and she has an immediate, appropriate, totally different physical reaction.
She almost heads for the bathroom to make sure she looks okay, further evidence of how undone she's come.
Her hands are shaking when she responds.
Walt?
Seven excruciating minutes pass.
Yes.
This is Walt?
Yes.
Longmire?
Yes.
Ten minutes pass while she's trying to untangle her thoughts, trying to get her respiration under control.
Her mom calls through the door, "Are you okay, honey?"
"I'm fine, Mom. Thanks."
She types again.
Whose phone?
There's a short delay, a couple of minutes.
Mine.
You bought a phone?
Yes.
How did you get the garden?
Eight minutes pass, and she realizes she needs time to think, to settle her head. She gets dressed and goes out for a run, and she's gone for forty-five minutes. When she gets back, there are two texts:
Fire escape, and fifteen minutes later, Vic?
She's dripping sweat on her phone.
You climbed down fire escape with pots?
Yes. One at a time.
Nearing end of season.
There's no response for a few minutes, so she takes a shower. When she's finished, there's one.
I'll keep them alive.
There's a natural order to things.
I can do it.
She turns on her laptop and opens the resume file and tries to convince herself she's working on it.
When that grows tiresome, she texts him again.
I miss you so fucking much.
She makes a list in a file she entitled "Job Search" of all the police departments in the general area. She's got twelve when another text comes in.
I miss you too. You have no idea, and right afterwards another one: You probably do.
That's how it starts, and it continues, every day, something.
The first time they talk on the phone, ten days later, late on a Friday night, she cries.
He says, "Don't cry, Vic. This is good," but he sounds kind of watery himself.
By the end of October, everyone has stopped waiting for her to break. Her mom pretends not to notice all the texting, and her dad really doesn't notice.
She sends out her resume with well-written and professional cover letters. She gets interviews, goes to them, does well, gets callbacks, does mostly well, and gets three job offers. But she holds out. She wants it to be a good fit.
On a cold, hazy morning in November, she's out front stretching after her run.
When she stands up to go inside, she has an odd mental moment. She thinks she sees him, standing on the other side of the street. The guy is leaning against a green Jeep Liberty, no hat, no holster, no Sheriff's coat, just an extra-tall but regular looking dude in jeans and a leather jacket.
It's karma, she thinks, for all those times she saw him and wanted to hide.
But then he waves, and it isn't funny. She could be having a stroke, or a psychotic break.
There's something about the way he gestures to her to come over to him, though, something so familiar. It's some form of communication between them from way back that she never thought about, but that she filed away for future reference. Or future verification.
"Walt?"
Her legs feel boneless as she walks towards him. They meet in the middle of the street. It's really him.
It's the best hug of her entire life, and that's saying a lot at this point. She stands on her toes and kisses him, and he's all clean shaven and warm and his lips are soft, and he smells like Wyoming. An orange Prius honks at them, and they move out of the road. It would be easy to get run over by a Prius.
She's a little misty in the front yard when she says, "What are you doing here?"
"I wanted to see you," he says, as though it's normal and rational.
"Why didn't you tell me?"
"Because if you said no and I did it anyway, we wouldn't be getting off to a very good start."
He caresses her cheek with his thumb.
"Start?"
He shrugs. "I hope so, Vic."
She kisses him again because she can, and he's a willing and informed participant.
Her body is all aflutter, and she whispers in his ear, "We should go somewhere."
It reminds her of her crude proposition in the square that night, but it's not like that. It's the opposite of that really.
"I have a room."
"Oh, God," she says. "Please say that to me again later."
Out of the corner of her eye, she detects movement in the kitchen window and pulls back from him, creates some distance.
"How long are you here for?"
"As long as it takes."
The panic starts to build, but at the same time, there's the presence of hope that seems to balance it out.
"What about work?"
"I'm on vacation."
She takes him inside to meet her parents because at this point, what else is she going to do? Her mom acts surprised, but she wouldn't win any awards. Walt stays with them downstairs while she showers and changes, and she doesn't worry about what he might say or what they might say.
Later, in his motel room in the middle of the day, unclothed and spent, he says, "I didn't know if you'd want to do this."
"Why? I didn't seem all that into it last time?"
He smiles, and something inside her flowers.
"Because it makes it all harder."
"Doesn't make much of a difference anymore. We already did the damage I was trying to avoid."
A maid and her cart and their shadows clatter by the window.
"Why are you here, Walt? Really."
"I was out at Foothill Storage last week," he says.
"Yeah?" Her stomach muscles tense.
"They've had some break-ins."
"Bummer."
She feels like a suspect. A naked suspect with her body pressed up against her interrogator's.
He kisses her, tries to make eye contact, but she rolls onto her back.
"I talked to Mitch," he says.
"Good detective work. Talk to the owner."
He flips onto his stomach and searches her face, trying to figure something out, and she knows if she lets him do it for long enough, he will. She puts a pillow over her face.
"Vic?" His voice is muffled.
"I don't want to talk about it." She gets a mouthful of starched motel pillow.
"You still have it."
She takes the pillow off and throws it, not hard, just as an expression of defeat, and embarrassment.
"So?" she says.
Her face is burning up, and he's grinning at her like he thinks it's comical. Or far more insulting, cute.
"It means you're not sure."
"Maybe it just means I'm lazy and irresponsible."
"Except you're not."
"Fuck, Walt. Lay off."
"We can do this, Vic."
He takes his phone off the nightstand and navigates it like an old pro. "Look."
It's a picture of a miniature greenhouse next to what she thinks is the side window in his living room.
"What's that?"
"I told you I'd keep them alive. It's only part of them, but they're all alive."
"That's awesome," she says, but it doesn't deliver the way she wants it to because, honestly, it is kind of awesome.
He puts his phone back.
"So that's what? Some sort of symbol that neatly wraps up our perfect love story?"
He takes her hand, interlaces their fingers.
"Vic, it's messy, and it's flawed, and we have a lot of work ahead of us, but it's still a love story."
