Myka stared into her bowl. Oatmeal, she told herself, you know that it's oatmeal. Liesl had made oatmeal that smelled of cinnamon and was studded with raisins, and although it had been thick, like the oatmeal she was staring at now, it had had a creaminess to it that guaranteed it would slide slowly, delectably off her spoon into her mouth. This oatmeal - she had had to force her spoon into it, just slightly – it would not slide; she feared she would need to carve it. Sensing Mary's anxious gaze on her, Myka swallowed, not in anticipation, and gamely ate a spoonful. She had been wrong; it did have flavor. It was salty. So this was what her own cooking tasted like to strangers. But she smiled at Mary, appreciatively she hoped, and said, "Thank you."
The girl flushed, shaking her head. "I'm sorry, I'll do better next time. I just need to get used to your stove." She wiped her forehead with the back of her hand, leaving a soot streak.
"It's a little cantankerous," Myka agreed, then she pointed to her forehead, drawing a line across it. "You have a soot mark there."
Mary rubbed fiercely at the streak with the corner of her apron while Myka returned to her oatmeal. The least she could do to help out the poor girl was to eat it, although, she reflected as she chewed the second spoonful, finishing the bowl would not be a "least" act. This was her second morning with Mary; the first had occurred several days earlier, the day after she and Pete had gone out to the Donovan ranch for Claudia's demonstration. There, on her doorstep, dawn still only a promise, had stood a girl; she hadn't had time to knock on the door, Myka had risen from bed upon hearing the clattering of a wagon and the jingling of harness, more curious than alarmed. The wagon was rolling away as Myka and the girl stared at each other in the dark. "I'm Mary Jennings," the girl had said, "Mrs. Wells sent me." Once Myka had lit a lamp, she recognized the girl as the one who had served as the maid when she and her father had had the disastrous dinner at Helena's home. Much had changed since then, but Mary still wore the nervous, perpetually startled look of a rabbit, and Myka was the one who heated the water for tea and brought the cups and the remains of a loaf of bread to the table.
They had discussed wages and duties, and Myka didn't know whether she wanted to strangle Helena or kiss her. Actually she did know which one she wanted to do, but it was a different choice now than it would have been just days ago. She wanted to kiss her first and then take issue with Helena's obvious lack of confidence in her ability to look after herself. She had managed well enough before Claudia had loaned her Liesl, better even, in certain obvious respects. While Liesl had lived there, the rooms had never shown to better advantage, but Myka knew that she hadn't. Looking at Mary's hunched form - she was taking small, careful bites from the bread as if she expected any minute to be told to put it down and get to work - Myka wryly asked herself how she might succeed in making the new help miserable.
Despite living well outside Sweetwater, Mary would be making the journey every day to the Journal's office; she was still needed at the farm, and Myka, noting the thin face and the worn clothing, pressed Mary to have more bread and tea. The Jennings farm must not be a prosperous one by the look of Mary's clothing, and she wondered uneasily how desperate the Jenningses' situation must be if Mary's staying in town couldn't even be considered. The rattling of the wagon carrying Mary had been so loud that Myka wouldn't have been surprised to find the wagon in a heap on the doorstep next to the girl. It had sounded as though the only thing holding the wheels and the frame together was a devout prayer.
Not that Myka wanted live-in help. She knew part of the reason that she had left her bed so eagerly was that she had hoped the sounds outside her kitchen door were announcing Helena's arrival. She had realized that they couldn't be, but after the moments she and Helena had had alone in Claudia's library when she had said in explicit invitation, "Come to me," she was impatient for Helena to do just that. When Helena came to her, she wanted no one in the alcove, no one in the kitchen, no one in the parlor or in the office. She wanted only the two of them. There had been too much for too long - too many people between them, too many of the right words left unsaid, too many of the wrong ones said far too often. The scarred and battered furniture, even ancient Bessie and her worn type were too much. All she needed was a single room with Helena in it. That wasn't quite true, one thing needed to be in that room, and Myka blushed at thinking of it, especially as she knew she should be more attentive to the questions that Mary was timidly asking her.
Perhaps if she had paid more attention to her responses that first day, Mary wouldn't now be fluttering about a stove whose idiosyncratic workings clearly flummoxed her and she wouldn't be eating a bowl of oatmeal with the fatalistic resignation of a soldier certain that his current mission would be his last. But Myka had spent much of the first day calculating how long it would be before Helena and Christina could take their leave of Claudia, how long it would take them to return to Sweetwater, and how long Helena would have to wait, once they had returned, until she could slip away. Even as storm clouds swept into Sweetwater and the temperature plummeted, Myka had tried to place Helena's location on an imaginary map, impatiently moving her and Christina past MacPherson's ranch and Sykes's ranch, then reluctantly moving them back because unless their horses were galloping across the prairie, they wouldn't be that far along. She had pushed them back and forth on her map until the snow fell so thickly that she could no longer see the buildings across the street. In the mid-afternoon, the wagon that had delivered Mary to her parted the snow like a curtain, only to be almost immediately obscured by it, as if the snow had had been yanked across a rod. Mary pulled herself up the side of the wagon to sit next to the silent, snow-shrouded figure on the seat, promising Myka that she would be back the following day. But she wasn't, nor did she return for several days after the storm. No one was traveling anywhere. Pacing between the kitchen and the Journal's office, looking out the windows, Myka could only dismally guess at the amount of snow the storm had deposited. She assumed that Helena and Christina were still with Claudia; she wouldn't let herself imagine any other scenario.
A snowfall like that in November would remain on the ground until March; a snowfall like that in March would remain on the ground until July, or so Pete had joked when he braved the drifts to check in on her. The mounds of snow, still impressive the second day following the storm, which was when he had labored against thigh-high resistance to see her, began to shrink, and by the fifth day after the storm, Sweetwater had returned to the muddy mess it had been before. As people finally ventured out of their homes, and the main street became clogged with wagons and riders on horseback, Myka was convinced that every clop and pop as the horses' hooves as they pulled free of the mud only to sink back into it echoed in her head.
Today was the sixth day, and Mary had shown up on Myka's doorstep again, before dawn again. She had sucked in her breath at the sight of the muddy floors, and, after setting a pot of oatmeal on the stove to cook, she had gotten down on her hands and knees to clean the kitchen floor, despite Myka's protests to let it go. Another day or two of muddy floors wasn't going to make matters worse and traveling back and forth to the pump for water to clean the floors just brought more mud in, which necessitated additional rounds of cleaning. But Mary didn't approve of Myka's reasoning, the tense set of her features becoming increasingly pinched, and Myka finally let Mary content herself washing and rewashing the floor while she edited her story of the storm for the paper and the oatmeal, forgotten, cooked so thoroughly that it had lifted almost whole from the bottom of the pot when Mary remembered to serve it.
Myka had attended to small tasks, drawing up invoices, going over the Journal's account book, half-afraid that if she left the office she might miss Helena's arrival because surely, surely they would have started back to Sweetwater already. Helena might have been able to stand another day at the Donovan ranch, but Myka couldn't for wanting to see her so desperately. Late in the afternoon Mary's brother, father, uncle, aunt - Myka couldn't discern the sex of the wagon driver, who was invariably wrapped from head to toe in blankets and shawls - had come in the decrepit wagon to take Mary home, which was why, when there were the sounds of a wagon at the door, this time at the front of the building, Myka frowned and went into the kitchen to find what Mary had inadvertently left behind. She heard the door open and close, and she said loudly enough that she hoped it carried into the office, "I don't see anything of yours in here."
When she turned around, Helena was standing in front of her, weary and literally travel-stained, splotches of mud visible on her coat and skirt. "I think you're quite mistaken." Her voice was all but lost in the thunder of Christina and Claudia entering the office, but Myka had no difficulty hearing her. Helena had said it with characteristic archness, but Myka colored under the frank possessiveness of her gaze.
"I was worried about you," she said softly. "I was afraid you had been caught out on the prairie in the snow."
Christina had seated herself at the desk and was reading the article that Myka had written on the storm while Claudia was wandering around the office, stopping to peer and poke at Bessie. "The cows knew the snow was coming before we did. They grew restless, and then the sky turned all milky-looking -"
"And Claudia and Mr. Jinks prevailed on us to wait until the storm blew itself out," Helena interrupted. "Had any of us known how long it would be . . . ." She trailed off into a frustrated huff.
Claudia said, "We would have stabled her in the barn with the horses. She made Artie seem cheerful by comparison."
"I had reason to get back to Sweetwater as soon as possible," Helena said, her eyes claiming Myka's. Feeling the return of the feverishness of the past few days, the burn more intense now that the object of it was only inches from her, Myka sought distraction in the unexpected changes in Claudia's appearance. As she walked across the office to stand behind Christina at the desk, Claudia awkwardly bunched her skirt and petticoats, lifting them above her boots, as though to clear them of the nonexistent piles of snow on the floor. Her cap of hair looked smoother and less shaggy, the ends of it evenly trimmed. Her gait still suggested the splay-footed motion of a cowboy just dismounted from a horse, but that, Myka decided, along with how Claudia held her dress and wore her hair could be worked on. If Claudia wanted to present herself more girlishly. Myka almost missed the coveralls, thinking that they lent her an odd, waifish charm.
"You look very nice, Claudia," she said carefully.
Claudia looked down at her skirt and then, accusingly, at Christina. "The kid said I needed to practice acting like a girl if I wanted to go to the social."
"Yes, the social!" Christina shouted merrily, nearly jumping from the desk, her enthusiasm alone seeming powerful enough to propel her from her chair. "Are you planning to attend, Miss Bering? Claudia and I are in need of a chaperone. Aunt Helena said that it would be unseemly for her to go, and I won't even bother asking Papa. He says that Dakota Territory has given him such a rash that he can barely step outside the front door." Helena didn't bother to disguise a derisive little laugh, but Christina pressed on, the words becoming a torrent. "I had thought the social might be canceled given the terrible snow we've had, but Claudia says people are so desperate to get out and about now that they would attend a cattle branding if that's all there was. I'm fairly certain that talking and dancing with boys won't be nearly as painful, though I think Claudia needs more convincing. At any rate, would you please consider doing us the favor, Miss Bering? That is, if you are going?" Finally a pause, and then, suddenly flustered, she said, "I didn't think that you might already be going . . . I mean, with someone. Like Liesl is with Sheriff Lattimer."
"She's trying to ask if someone's sparking you . . . 'cause then you probably wouldn't want to go with us," Claudia said. "I don't know why we can't just go ourselves. Or we could have asked Jinksy to come to town with us and take us." She shrugged irritably. "We're going to be in a crowded little schoolhouse, under a hundred eyes. We couldn't do something that would have all the old biddies going if we wanted to."
Myka expected Christina's upbringing to answer for her – "Because it's proper" or "It's what young women who are ladies do" – but her response was so completely practical that Helena might have said it. "Because a chaperone tells all the boys that we're not to be trifled with, that we're worth some bowing and scraping. Boys like having a bit of an obstacle, and Miss Bering can have a very disapproving stare."
Myka hadn't realized until then how old she was. Too old to remember what courting was without Claudia having to explain it. So old that she could pierce the foolish hopes of young men with the gimlet eyes of the most maiden of maiden aunts. As ancient as the fossils in the weathered rock on the Donovan ranch.
Helena was struggling, unsuccessfully, not to laugh. Waving the girls to the door, she said, "Now that you've both managed to insult Miss Bering, I'll have to persuade her to accompany you to the social. Go to the wagon, and I'll be out there in a few minutes."
With cries of "Insult Miss Bering? I was complimenting her, Aunt Helena," Christina dejectedly backed out of the office, turning a pleading face toward Myka. Claudia followed her, picking at her skirts as if she would like nothing better than to tear them off.
Once they were gone, Helena leaned into her murmuring, "How would you prefer to be persuaded, Miss Bering?"
"You do know that Christina's likely to come bounding in here at any minute asking where you are." Myka pushed at her slightly to create a space between them.
Sighing at the boundary that Myka had imposed, Helena said, "You couldn't possibly tell that she had had only Claudia and me to talk to for six days." After a moment, she added, "And Miss Albrecht. Together they were able to persuade or, depending on your point of view, browbeat poor Claudia into going to the social."
"Christina would often sit in the kitchen when she was here and talk to her, and Liesl enjoyed the company, I think." Myka felt guilty remembering how much she had liked entering the kitchen and seeing Christina at the table, relating the events of her day as Liesl baked bread or cleaned the cabinets. Most of the time she had wished that it was Helena who was nodding her head at Christina's chatter, but not always, and she wondered whether she felt guilty because she hadn't wished that Liesl was Helena all the time or because she so frequently imagined Helena in Liesl's place.
She startled at the gentle touch of Helena's fingers on her face, tipping her chin up. "You care for her, Myka, there's nothing to be ashamed of in that." Trying to lighten the moment, she said with mock haughtiness, "Being forced to endure her presence for several days, I discovered that Miss Albrecht has some redeeming qualities, among them being an excellent cook. I fear that you'll not be able to say the same for poor Mary."
"She tries hard."
"Ah, damned with faint praise. But Christina and I decided that we couldn't leave you to your own devices. We feared that you might be reducing to eating crusts." Helena had been edging nearer, and she closed the distance between them. "When does Mary arrive in the morning? If I were to take one of my midnight walks tonight and it led me here . . . I'd want to leave your reputation intact, if little else." The seductiveness of her smile was belied by the uncertainty that Myka sensed behind her words. Apprehensive that come midnight she would find the back door locked? Helena must have spent a portion of those six days worrying that the "Come to me" she had heard as both command and invitation had been revoked without her knowing it.
And when Helena left with nothing more lover-like than a kiss on her cheek but the welcome news that Mary wouldn't be showing up before dawn, or at all, on a Saturday morning, Myka questioned herself uneasily about how ready she actually was for Helena to come to her tonight. If, in fact, she did. Helena had been tired, and neither Christina nor Claudia could be considered restful. It might be just as well if Helena did sleep through her midnight walk.
As she lay in her bed that night, her father's bed, which, if a trace of her father still lingered in it, would do its best to tumble her and Helena onto the floor, she didn't know how she could be filled with an anticipation that, in turn, was so filled with dread. She had wanted nothing more that night when she had kneeled at Helena's side than to take her back to the Journal's dingy rooms and erase what had happened before by giving to her every caress, every kiss that she had shared with Liesl. Because they had been meant for Helena. And through all the ensuing awkwardness with Liesl, the shamefaced creeping into and out of the kitchen and parlor, her stammering apologies that progressed no further than a word or two before Liesl would cut them off with a shake of her head, she had felt the most remorse for the pain she had seen in Helena's eyes. Against all reason, given all that she had said and done or, rather, not said and not done over the past months, Helena had obviously hoped that Myka would be stronger and better than she had proven to be. Had Helena stormed or glared accusingly at her instead of raising a face to her that had looked utterly bereft, Myka might still have felt that she had failed her but not as keenly as she had that night and all the nights since. If she were to be completely honest - and if she couldn't open all the file drawers in her mind when it was dark and late and there was no one to whom she was accountable, really, except herself, when could she? - she too had thought she was stronger and better than what she was.
Staring at the dark mass of the ceiling, Myka was afraid that she would fail her again. That having said "Come to me," she would now say "It's too soon." Too soon after Helena telling her that she loved her but keeping silent about why she had gone to visit MacPherson at his ranch. Too soon after Helena's bewildering decisions not to defend herself against the murder charge more vigorously, particularly her indifferent reception of the new information that MacPherson's housekeeper had provided about the other visitor. Too soon because Myka wasn't sure she could trust Helena's emotional about-face, trust that it wouldn't happen again with Helena spinning around in the opposite direction. Too soon because the part of her that had erected all the file drawers wouldn't let her surrender to Helena so easily.
Then there was the sound of the kitchen door opening and closing, and Myka was frantic in her haste to light a lamp, all thoughts of saying "Too soon" gone. After a soft thump that might have been a chair falling over, Myka's bedroom door opened and a shivering Helena was stepping over the threshold. The black cloak she was wearing wasn't heavy because it slipped off her shoulders with ease. Helena folded it and, with a tentative glance at Myka, as if she half-expected an objection, she placed it on top of the dresser, which was bare except for a hairbrush and a hand-held mirror with a crack in its glass.
She waited by the dresser. She had changed out of her traveling clothes, and Myka could smell the spice of the perfume that Helena specially ordered from New York. Her hair shone wetly in places, and realizing that Helena had bathed, Myka shifted with embarrassment under the covers. That was more than she herself had done, though she had taken greater care than usual in her washing before bed, and the simple thoughtfulness of the act freed something deep within her that Helena's seductive glances and murmurs earlier in the day had failed to do.
"You took long enough," she said, her exasperation feigned, and she swept the covers down on the opposite side of the bed.
But Helena remained by the dresser, and her eyes, in the wavering glow of the light, looked both huge and somber. "I need to tell you -"
So this was it, the truth, finally. It was what she had been waiting to hear since the moment Leena had rushed into the house and told her that the sheriff had taken Helena to jail. No, before that, when she had woken and realized that she was alone in Helena's bed and had been alone there all night. She realized then that as much as she wanted to know the truth, to hear why Helena had relentlessly pushed her away, she didn't want to know it as much as she wanted to know that Helena loved her. Given the choice of the truth or Helena, and how Helena was standing, solemn and ill at ease, as though she expected that there was a choice and that after hearing the truth there would be no Helena for Myka, Myka understood that she would always choose Helena, had made that choice when Helena had screamed at her to leave the jail and she hadn't known what to believe. She would listen to Helena tell her what had happened and why it had happened, but not now.
Getting up from the bed, she rounded the end of it and stopped only when she was practically standing on Helena's toes. Boots, rather. It was too cold to be standing in this room barefoot, but she was, and she was saying "Later, you'll tell me later" as she was starting to pull the nightgown over her head. But then Helena was pulling it back down and saying hoarsely, "I'll take it off," and her eyes weren't somber anymore though still huge and Myka felt that she was vanishing into them as Helena pushed her down on the bed, and as she felt Helena's lips on her neck, biting it in her eagerness, and Helena's hands on her thighs, scrunching her nightgown up and over her hips, she knew the only thing she wanted to know as she plunged deeper and deeper into those eyes, which was that Helena loved her.
She hadn't known that they had left each other alone long enough to sleep until she jerked awake as Helena moved away from her and slid to the side of the bed. "Don't go," she mumbled plaintively as Helena began a low, soft string of curses as she tried to find her clothing in the dark.
"Christina will be battering down my door at dawn, urging me to help her and Claudia get ready for the social," Helena said, her voice heavy with fatigue. "I need to be in my bedroom to tell her to leave me in peace." Myka was trying to light the lamp when Helena's hand held her back. "I said I would leave your reputation intact. I'm trying to be good to my word." Hearing the smirk in her tone, Myka smiled and stretched, enjoying the multiple aches. She fingered what she knew was a mark on her neck. She would have to wear a dress with a high collar, all the better to enhance her role as disapproving maiden aunt at the social.
There were the rustles and whispers of fabric brushing against itself as Helena put on her dress, and then she was back on the bed, her face bumping against Myka's as she tried to find her lips. The kiss wasn't gentle or especially suggestive of the fact that Helena was about to leave her, and Myka, long past being ashamed of her own need, was rolling her hips up and against the covers. When Helena didn't respond to the invitation, Myka took her hand and guided it underneath the blankets until Helena's fingers started to search, seeking her. Their breaths became ragged, but the kiss continued as Helena's hand began to work with greater speed. Ignoring her own flinching because there was no part of her skin that wasn't overworked and inflamed from the overworking, Myka found the rhythm she needed to follow through the pain and she kept pace with Helena's motion until she dragged her mouth from Helena's and cried out so loudly that she thought she heard it echo in the room. Helena's cry was softer but no less intense, and she bowed her head between Myka's breasts. "I think that was the sound of your reputation shattering," she said with a long exhalation that was too satisfied to be a sigh. As a few dogs began barking, they both laughed, and Helena said, "See? We've managed to wake up the town."
"How can I credibly serve as a chaperone now?" Myka stroked Helena's head as it moved slowly between her breasts, Helena kissing their curves until, with an unhappy groan, she sat up and pushed herself off the bed.
"As we all do, darling, with hypocrisy." Helena leaned down again but this time her lips found Myka's forehead. "I know that it's foreign to you, but you'll have to endure it for only a few hours." Myka could feel Helena's lips widen into a smile. "And then I'll come to you again."
. . .
When a wagon creaked to a stop outside the Journal's office late in the afternoon, Myka experienced no confusion about who would be outside her door, and when it swung open with a crash, and Christina hurried in, exclaiming "Miss Bering, are you ready?", she had only to button the last button on her coat.
The spring sun was still well above the horizon - night wouldn't fall until just before the dancing started – and Myka soon grew warm under the coat. But she knew that when they left the social, the air would be chilly, especially so after the stuffy confines of the schoolhouse. Their driver was the hired hand from the livery, and she wondered if he had pulled his hat down over his ears so as to shut out the sound of the giggles and chatter, mainly Christina's, coming from the bench in back of them.
She couldn't help but drowse as the wagon bumped along. She had tried to sleep after Helena had left, but as exhausted as she was, she hadn't been able to relax. Lying on her back, she would close her eyes only to open them and stare at the ceiling, as she had done before Helena arrived, and though she no longer feared that she would fail Helena, she feared that a judge and jury would. Tomorrow, tomorrow she would let Helena tell her the truth, and together they would decide how to use it, but this night, the first part of it, she would give over to Christina and Claudia, and the remainder of it she would share with Helena. So she dozed on the ride because she would have no time the rest of the night to sleep, and she would startle awake when Christina called to her, sometimes to point out to her a bird or a flower and ask her its name, once, scoldingly, to encourage her to go to bed sooner of an evening as Aunt Helena should learn to do as well, but most frequently to ask her about what to expect at the social, how many people would attend, whether there would be a supper, what sort of music would be played and what dances would she and Claudia be expected to know. Myka's own experience of socials was limited, but she tried to answer Christina as best she could. Claudia remained silent, hands tensely clutching the seat of the bench as she looked out at the prairie, and Myka had determined with one swift glance early on in the ride that the swagger that characterized her behavior on the ranch had deserted her. Apparently the only thing that frightened Claudia was the prospect of being asked to dance.
As they drew near the schoolhouse, which was larger than the small one-room structures Myka was used to seeing on the outskirts of farming towns but no less crudely built, they joined a stream of buckboards, buggies, and the occasional rider on horseback. Families waved to them and shouted their appreciation of the good weather, and Christina waved back, enthusiastically agreeing that the day was lovely and perfect for a social. Claudia only huddled deeper into her coat.
The livery's man stopped the wagon a short distance from a group of buckboards and helped each of them down, although Christina barely touched his hand before she leaped from the bench to struggle with a basket in the back. He easily lifted it for her and grabbed Myka's basket as well. There hadn't been much in the kitchen left to bring, not after six days when she had had to rely on its bounty, but Myka had found a few odds and ends to contribute. Liesl had busied herself those tense, uncomfortable days before she had returned to the Donovan ranch cooking and baking, and it was the remaining products of that unhappy activity that Myka had brought with her, as much, she knew, to rid her rooms of the last evidence of her unforgivable error in judgment as to avoid showing up at the social empty-handed. But the man seemed not to find the small basket an unexpected weight, the anger and guilt and regret that had overhung her and Liesl, so thickening the air that Myka felt breathless doing no more than walking from one room to another, had left behind no residue. She would see Liesl here tonight, and while she cringed slightly at the thought, she didn't dread the inevitable awkwardness of having to exchange pleasantries with her when they met. The night when she had kissed Liesl with a blind longing for comfort was rapidly developing the gauziness of an old memory, and despite the pride she took in her ability to remember the most obscure detail, she also recognized when it was useful to have a faulty recollection.
The schoolhouse was already crowded, and though a space for the fiddle players had been reserved at the end of the room where the teacher would lecture her students, it was being steadily encroached upon. Coats and hats and food that couldn't be fit onto the tables pushed against the wall were being taken into the teacher's office, a slapdash annex that had been added at a later date, as testified by the steps that descended to it from the classroom floor. The livery's man had left them to return outside, ready to spend the evening as he waited for them nipping from the pocket flasks that he and many of the other men would have brought. So Myka gathered their coats, which turned into a tug of war with Claudia who had hugged hers tightly to her chest, and stored them with the baskets in the teacher's office. When she turned around to make her way back to her charges, she could no longer see them for the children chasing each other around the legs of the adults, the girls clustered like blooms in their spring dresses, and the young men hovering like clumsy bees about them.
As the girls leaned toward each other, whispering and laughing, Myka spotted Christina, a lone bloom at the boundary but ringed nonetheless by boys. As she tilted her head in amused response to a remark made by one of them, Myka paused in her quick march toward her. It was impossible not to see a young Helena in the unconsciously proud tip of her head but the smile was pure Christina, gay and delighted and without a hint of her mother's mockery.
Unsure whether a stride suggestive of a woman afraid that a prized heirloom was about to be broken was necessary, Myka resumed walking toward Christina but at a more casual pace, one compatible with a woman who might stop and chat with the wives rearranging the dishes on the tables or shepherding the younger children out from under the feet of the adults. Through another gap in the crowd, she glimpsed Claudia, not scowling and not picking at her dress, but animatedly talking to a young man who was blinking at her with an expression equally bemused and awed as he polished the lenses of his eyeglasses. Taking up a position at a discreet distance from Christina, which also afforded her a view of Claudia, Myka pretended to be absorbed by the shifting patterns of people talking, laughing, helping themselves to the offerings on the tables. She nodded to the milliner and her escort for the evening, a clerk from the bank, even the telegraph operator, but her nod to him was stiff; she remembered his jeering remarks about Helena.
When the fiddle players gathered at the far end of the room, more than one man seemed to emerge from the walls to stand in front of her and ask her to dance. They were shy around a woman, these bachelors with their hair scraped to either side of a ruler-straight part and their hands dangling several inches below the cuffs of shirts carefully preserved for funerals and weddings. She could decline their invitations without guilt, claiming that she needed to watch over two girls in her care, but she declined them gently, regretfully, because she had seen how their Adam's apples had bobbed one, two, three times before they spoke, how they had passed their hands over their hair to smooth down nonexistent cowlicks, how their eyes had watered as if a sneeze would be as likely as an invitation to dance. They had been disappointed, and relieved, and while some inexorably moved on to the next unescorted woman of marriageable age, others returned to their self-appointed roles as sentinels of the walls.
Christina flew to Myka with a boy in tow, asking her if she might dance with him. Fixing him with a coolly appraising stare, Myka waited a beat or two before giving him her assent. Claudia, sketching a diagram in the air, was preoccupied with entertainments other than dancing though her young man was tapping his foot in time with the music. Switching her attention back to the dancers, who were practically brushing shoulders with the onlookers in the crowded room, Myka couldn't help but notice Liesl. She was a peacock among duller birds; her dress an incandescent blue, she attracted every gaze in the room. Mouths dropped open and conversations faltered as Pete toiled to sweep her around the other dancers. The only word that came to Myka's mind was "agog," and, remembering that conversation in her kitchen, Myka wondered if Liesl had worn the dress tonight hoping that she might be there to see her. Liesl was lovely, undeniably, breathtakingly lovely, and Myka admitted to herself the uncomfortable truth that she responded to that loveliness - how else to account for her near-constant blushing and stammering whenever Liesl was near? But it was also true that she responded more readily to another's loveliness. Asked to choose between the sun and the moon, she would always choose the moon. As Pete led Liesl past her, Myka offered her a wryly acknowledging smile that Liesl accepted with a slow closing of her eyes.
Later, after she had seen Christina and Claudia scrunched together in a space meant only for one, their respective suitors for the night holding out to them plates filled with slices of cakes and other treats, Myka pushed her way through the people eddying around the schoolhouse doors. She needed to suck in a few breaths of air that wasn't overheated or laden with the smells of bay rum and toilet water and sweat. The girls couldn't get themselves into a delicate situation just by eating cake. She had given her best maiden aunt performance, limiting how many times Christina could dance with the same boy and startling Claudia's young man more than once by tapping him on the shoulder and inserting herself between them. Wandering a short distance away, far enough to pretend to herself that she was the only one standing out on the prairie and looking up at the night sky, she grinned at the crescent of moon overhead and tried to picture what Helena might be doing. Whatever it was she was doing it impatiently, Myka knew, just as she was counting down to the time when she could tell Claudia and Christina that they should be returning to town. Perhaps the sole benefit of playing the chaperone was being able to decide when it was time to go home.
On her return to the schoolhouse, she passed others taking in the night air and as she stumbled over an uneven patch of ground, an arm shot out to steady her. Pete said jovially, "Better be careful, the fresh air goes right to your head." His other arm was wrapped around Liesl's waist, and Myka hurriedly expressed her thanks, eager, now, for the stuffy confines of the schoolhouse. But Pete released her only to ask, "Would you mind keeping Liesl company out here while I go brave the crowds for seconds?"
Taking her embarrassed silence as sufficient response, Pete left them together, but not before leaning in to kiss Liesl's cheek. The kiss stabbed Myka quickly, briefly. It wasn't a lingering pain because she hadn't hurt him as she had Helena and Liesl, but Pete was a man from whom it was too easy to keep secrets, and she had a secret that she wouldn't share with him. It didn't matter that he wouldn't believe her if she told him, it mattered to her that she couldn't be as honest with him as he had always been with her. She would continue to laugh at his jokes and appreciate his many kindnesses, but she would know the difference her secret made even if he never would. Myka rubbed her neck; unsurprisingly, it was beginning to ache with tension.
"He can't be hurt by what he doesn't know," Liesl said softly.
Rubbing her neck in earnest, Myka said, just as softly, "That's not true."
"He's not you." Liesl hadn't said it unkindly, but her next words were in explanation, as if she wanted to ensure that Myka hadn't understood her disagreement as a rebuke. "He doesn't question like you do. You sift and sort, he -"
"Accepts," Myka finished for her. "It's true. He never complains, never sulks because the world isn't always fair."
She hadn't tried to disguise the ruefulness of her tone, and Liesl laughed. It wasn't unmarred by regrets of her own, but it wasn't angry or scornful. "You don't either, you know. If you don't like the answers to your questions, you don't give up. You fight." She hesitated before saying tentatively, "It's why she loves you."
Unable to make out Liesl's expression, Myka could only guess why she had offered it with such hesitancy. Less, perhaps, because she feared she had overstepped and more because she was conceding something, however obliquely, to a woman she resented. Seeming to read the direction of Myka's thoughts, she added, "We had to endure each other's company for almost a week. I learned that she's not a horrible woman."
They both laughed, although there was a wincing quality to it that Myka knew they both felt, and she was grateful that Pete so boisterously rejoined them, whistling and dangling a handkerchief drawn up at the corners to hold the food he had brought from the schoolhouse. He bragged, "The ladies fell over themselves filling it 'cause I'm so handsome." Resting the bundle on the flat of his palm, he released the handkerchief's corners, calling out "Sweets for the sweet, and I'm not talking about the two of you, lovely though you are."
Myka began discreetly backing toward the schoolhouse. But she had taken no more than a few steps before Liesl said to her, "I was wrong about Mrs. Wells. She's not careless of others. I know that you're always in her thoughts."
She's careless only of herself was Myka's silent response, but it wasn't in keeping with the spirit of Liesl's . . . apology, if that's what it was. Maybe it was a peace offering, an olive branch, a sign that someday she might be forgiven. Maybe Liesl already forgave her. Whatever it was Liesl was offering her in the admission, the least she could do was not brush it aside. Helena's insistence upon protecting others at her own expense was noble, Myka begrudgingly admitted, walking with a more purposeful stride to the schoolhouse. As well as impulsive, reckless, and infuriating. So close to the start of her trial, it was all the more infuriating. Just like when she had stormed off to MacPherson's ranch the first time, after the grass fire . . . when Helena thought she had died.
Myka's breath caught so sharply that she couldn't stop a cry from escaping her. She had wondered before whether Helena had been protecting her, but the Berings had no secrets. One night at the Rusty Spur was enough for any man to recognize that Warren Bering couldn't hold his drink or his cards, and as for her, her virtue was in little danger of being assailed by Sweetwater's bachelors. The Berings weren't important, but they, she was important to Helena. Helena standing with her back to her in the jail cell, turning a regretful face to her after Mrs. Grundhofer's account of the "mysterious stooped man," looking at her only to look away. Liesl hadn't been offering her an olive branch, she had been beating her about the head with it, trying to tell her something that Myka knew she should have realized long ago.
She ran to the doors, tripping over the rock that had been placed between them to allow the air to circulate in the schoolroom. Awkwardly catching her balance, she staggered on, pushing against the bodies in her way. It was a tardy, futile panic driving her – people stared at her with alarm, expecting her to announce that the building was on fire – but the knowledge that she was the one Helena had been protecting, even though it came much too late, was a remorseless goad. Claudia was already setting her and Christina's plates on the floor, and Christina was scurrying to the jury-rigged annex to retrieve their coats.
"What's happened?" Claudia approached her, forgetting to lift her skirts, and as she treaded on them, she growled, "Damfool things." Glancing up at the boy beside her, she blushed, but he seemed not to notice, readjusting his eyeglasses in preparation, apparently, to do battle with whatever danger had chased Myka into the room.
"Nothing." If she didn't calm down, she would have everyone running in fright. "But we have to go, now."
She didn't explain what had her so roughly shepherding them through the crowd, and Christina had only time enough to wave good-bye to her dance partners and Claudia to yell an invitation to the boy with the eyeglasses to visit her at the Donovan ranch before Myka was directing them outside and toward the group of wagons. She was calling out to the driver, unable to tell which of the men, standing or sitting on their heels near the horses, was the livery's man. But one of them broke away and hitched a team to a wagon, responding to the urgency in her voice by shouting and cursing at the horses to go faster; Myka could hear him snapping the reins as he wheeled the wagon around.
She didn't explain the reason for their hurry on the way back to Sweetwater, not that Myka could have made herself easily heard over the wagon's creaking and jouncing. She wanted the wagon to be like an arrow, arcing over the prairie to land so close to Helena's house that the windows would rattle in their frames at the thump. Surely the force with which the recriminations rushed through her would power the horses' legs to churn double-, no, triple-time. If not that, the magnitude of her stupidity should be powerful enough for the earth to erupt and fling them to town. Half-a-dozen times or more, she began to rise from the seat, ready to take flight - she would have ridden one of Claudia's rockets had there been one for her to straddle and aim at the sky - and each time Christina pulled at the arm of her coat, shouting above the wagon's noise, "Sit down, Miss Bering. Nothing's worth a broken neck."
Each time Myka felt a wild impulse to laugh because Helena certainly thought her worth a broken neck, or, at best, a lifetime spent in prison. Stubborn, headstrong woman. She would clench her hands into her fists, wanting to beat out the syllables on her thighs, not knowing or caring which one of them she meant, herself or Helena. When the wagon finally shuddered to a stop behind Helena's house, Myka became an arrow, a rocket, springing down and shooting off, not to the kitchen door but toward town, toward the Journal's office. Before she confronted Helena, she needed to know how blind, how careless in her ignorance she had been.
She was breathing hard, drawing air in harsh gulps as she entered the kitchen. They sounded like sobs, and she brushed the skin under her eyes with the back of a hand, but it wasn't wet with tears. Slowing to light a lamp, she carried it into the bedroom, which still held a hint of Helena's perfume. If she stared at the bed long enough, she would see the hollow in the pillow where Helena's head had rested and she would see in the wrinkles and folds of the blankets how Helena's hands had clutched at the material in rhythm with the movement of her hips. She spun away from the bed, placing the lamp on top of the dresser as she opened the topmost drawer and ran her hand along the back of it. She felt the shape of the envelope, and she remembered pushing her sister's letter deep into the drawer, unable to cope with what she knew would be a continuation of Tracy's previous accounts of their father's deterioration, not when she was still reeling from the desperateness of Helena's situation and her maddening behavior. So she had responded to this letter she had never read with a dashed-off note that mainly consisted of platitudes and vague advice. It must have suggested to her sister that, having consigned their father's care to her, she was no longer concerned with the state of his health because the letter she had received from Tracy since then was equally as brief and curtly referred to their father's condition as being "unchanged."
Her hands trembling, Myka tore the envelope open and skimmed the pages filled with Tracy's looping, fussily ornamented handwriting until she saw the word "father." It was there, the reason why Helena had gone out to MacPherson's ranch, the explanation for what had happened to him, the revelation of who had killed him. Hardly in the form of a dictated confession, Tracy's worried descriptions of their father's ramblings of the house late at night, moaning that their mother would never forgive him, his relief that debt collectors wouldn't be pursuing his daughters after his death "because he had taken care of it," his refusal to go to church because "so great a sinner as he had no place among true Christians" allowed Myka to construct a narrative. There were gaps in it that needed to be addressed, but she finally had a bridge between the morning she woke up without Helena in the bed beside her and this morning when she did.
He's gone mad, I swear it, Myka. He mutters about being driven to it, whatever "it" is. He looks at his hands and marvels that no blood is on them. When I ask him what he thinks he's done, he gives me an affronted look and tells me that only God will be his judge and jury. Sometimes I pass his room, and he's weeping; at other times, he's laughing and saying over and over "You deserved it, you -." I can't repeat his language. As the days go by, he seems to unravel the more, talking about a man who was a "blight on the town" and a woman who seems to have taken possession of your soul, Myka. Kevin says he will put a lock on the outside of the bedroom door; he fears for the safety of our children. The letter closed with the following plea: I know neither of us has much in the way of money, but if you can scrape together the train fare, please come and see for yourself how Dad is. When he's in his right mind, he misses you terribly, and I'm in need of my sister's wise counsel.
Myka left the letter in a small heap of pages on the floor and carried the lamp into the office. She needed the light to chase the darkness of her thoughts away. This was the one room that still spoke of his presence. The parlor suggested nothing of his interests; he had whiled away the better part of his evenings at the Spur. The kitchen was unrecognizable from what it was when she had put him on the train to Kansas City; Liesl had turned its grimy unloveliness into a space in which eating was a pleasure, not a chore. As for the bedroom, this morning the bedsheets might have smelled of sweat, but they hadn't borne witness to the loneliness of his shakes and his drink-induced visions of monsters and specters; instead they had borne witness to her and Helena's reclaiming of each other.
Here, at this desk, he had written editorials and articles for the week's edition of the Journal. It was possible that Bessie might even remember his touch. Then Myka, with a fierce twisting of her head from side to side, corrected herself. No, here at this desk, he had drunk from the bottles he hid in the bottom drawers, while she had taken his incoherent drafts and revised them at the kitchen table. Yes, he had occasionally attended to Bessie, but Helena and even Christina were more adept at coaxing her to print. The substance of her father had disappeared years ago, and she had been drifting with him, like chaff on the wind, from town to town. The editor who had braved the wrath of corrupt politicians and their wealthy backers hadn't had the strength to survive her mother's death, and somewhere along the way from St. Louis to the deserts of Nevada and Arizona to prairie towns hardly larger than Sweetwater, he had left her to carry the shell he had become.
Helena was very quiet entering the kitchen tonight. The door emitted a slight squeal and her shoes scuffed lightly against the floor, it was all the noise she made. "How long did you know?" Myka didn't turn to look at her.
"Not long. I knew that someone else had come out to the ranch, and Claudia said she saw him strike MacPherson, but I didn't know who he was. Not until the housekeeper mentioned the argument . . . and the debts." Helena cautiously advanced toward her, as if expecting that Myka would be just as likely to tell her to go away.
She didn't, but she didn't ask Helena to come nearer. She needed to hear it all, to put it into order, to walk the bridge that stretched from the morning Helena had ridden into town, the sheriff's prisoner, to this morning when she had regained Helena but hadn't yet lost her father. "He wouldn't have told you about the notes . . . MacPherson must have told you." She remembered the tension that had seemed to dominate Helena's behavior during those days before the murder, her strained smiles and the silences that replaced their conversations. Myka had sensed Helena withdrawing into herself, never more so than when she joined Helena in her bed, but she had resolved to ignore it, thinking that Helena was worrying about a retaliation from MacPherson that would never come. Since the scandal of moving Sweetwater's lifeline, the railroad, to Halliday had erupted, he was rarely seen in the town, and Myka took his absence as a sign that he was readying himself to move on, to find a place more propitious for his schemes and machinations. "Did he threaten you that he would call the debts in? Disgrace my father before the town?"
Helena must have heard the note of incredulity in Myka's voice because her response was swift and harsh. "You don't understand men like that. Once they've been shamed, as we shamed him, they no longer care what others think; their only thought is to hit back, hard. He wanted to humiliate me as I had humiliated him. He knew that I wouldn't let him call the debts in, but it would have cost him nothing to have your father thrown in jail, either. So I played the whore because that's what he wanted. It's the only form of currency he was willing to trade in, Myka." Her hands had dropped to her sides, and she had turned her palms out, not quite in supplication, but Myka could feel her need. Helena wouldn't ask for forgiveness but she hoped for understanding.
"It's not currency, not to me."
"Yes, I know better . . . now."
Myka finally lifted her head to look at her. She could see the apprehension in Helena's face. "All this time you kept silent about my father's debts, and you've been keeping silent about what he did. Protecting me, I know that's how you've thought of it. What's made you change your mind? What's happened that I don't know about?" She hadn't meant to sound angry even though she was angry. Angry, and fearful too, that this was yet another measure Helena was taking to shield her. From something even worse, though she had no idea what could be worse than finding out your father was a murderer.
"Nothing's happened." Then in a flurry of sweeping skirts, Helena was kneeling beside her, cupping her face as she had knelt and cupped Helena's face following the debacle that had begun at Sykes's ranch and ended with her trying - and failing - to find solace in Liesl. "He's a weak man, but he's your father, Myka. I saw you step in front of a gun for him, let him manipulate your sense of loyalty. Why wouldn't I protect him to protect you?" Helena didn't look away, but Myka could see the sudden remoteness of her gaze and she didn't know where Helena had gone until she said, "I burned the notes, and I put some of MacPherson's blood on my nightgown. I was afraid for Claudia, and I was afraid for you, but I wasn't afraid for myself. Your father and I, we're not so different. We've made far less of our lives than our talents would warrant, and it seemed to me then and for long afterward that I had ended up right where I should be. My life had been one foolish mistake after another, seeking only a disaster to crown it, and at last one found me. But then you." Her voice had started shaking, and Helena stopped, but when she resumed, it continued to shake. "You wouldn't stop, and you brought her to me. I couldn't believe I had had a part in creating something so good and true and beautiful. That's our saving grace, Warren Bering's and mine. Out of our weakness we've managed to produce children who are so much the better part of us." The gaze sharpened, and Helena was back with her, hers eyes bright, not with love but with a terror that had Myka leaning forward and stroking her hair, as she would when Tracy was small and had woken from a nightmare. "I began to hope, to think that, perhaps, the life I had led had been punishment enough for my misdeeds, and then I saw you with her, and I realized that of all the people I had left behind or tossed aside or, God forgive me, sold, the one I couldn't do without was you. The truth might cost me you, but it was also the only thing I had that might keep you."
And then, much like Tracy had done when the nightmare was over but she was still caught in the fears that had prompted it, Helena lowered her head and snuggled it against Myka's belly, and Myka continued to stroke her hair, finding her own comfort in succoring the trembling body pressed against her.