LITMIR.BIZ

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eyes. Too many eyes, all aimed at him.

      “Wayne!” The drink-slurred voice rose above the others. “Wayne!”

      The old man. Drunk, as usual. But not too drunk to climb into a truck and get himself out here. He’d have to rush out of the locker room after the game, find a way to get his keys, make sure he didn’t kill himself—or someone else—getting home.

       If he made it home tonight.

      He pulled back, pulled deeper inside. Stared into the lights, focused on the pain, kept his chin high. He held, held.

      It didn’t bother him, it didn’t matter. Not his fault, not his doing. It wasn’t real.

       “Wayne!”

      Someone laughed. The noise shifted. The crowd, the many-bodied, fickle, vicious thing in the stands, wavered in the dark shadows beneath the lights. A groan, a hush—the mangled-play, bad-call, missed- pass kind of noise.

      His focus slipped, and he lost his way in the darkness, and the scene came into view, indistinct, a nimbus of cold, electric-white sparks at the edges. His father stumbled down the stands toward the fence at the edge of the field.

      The faces, the stares. Horror, embarrassment, curiosity, pity.

      The pity sliced at him, cut away bits and pieces of his resolve.

      The panic clawed at him, ripped through him, tried to drag him away from the torture, away from the pain.

      He stood and held, chin up. He didn’t move. Couldn’t move.

       Couldn’t let them know how much it hurt.

       “Wayne!”

      “Wayne!” Someone in the crowd echoed his father’s loose-jawed, calflike bellow. “Wayne!” Someone else laughed.

       He turned and saw…

      No.

      It doesn’t matter. It’s not real.

      It’s only a dream.

      A dream. Only a dream, nothing real. Only a memory. Too long ago to matter.

      None of it mattered, not anymore.

      Wayne groaned and kicked away the covers, rolling to sprawl on his back in his empty lake of a bed. Boone, his elderly yellow Lab, whined and padded across the floor and lifted his head to fit beneath his master’s waiting hand. Wayne stroked the dog’s fur, finding comfort in the contact with another living being as he lay waiting for the sweat to cool, waiting for the slick, queasy tremors to subside. They always did, after a while.

      He stared at the shadows cast across his ceiling. His ceiling, his room, his house. Thick, sturdy lengths of roughhewn pine stretching to the lofty peak above him, dotted with familiar knots. There’s the one that curves like an Egyptian’s painted eye. There’s the one with the crack like a fishhook.

      He inhaled deeply, settling, and scratched Boone’s ear the way the old dog liked it. In another moment or two he’d head down to the kitchen to start up the coffee and then climb back up here to shower. It didn’t matter what time it was. He’d begin the day, begin his routine.

      He always did, after the dream. The work helped to sweep away the dregs of lingering shame. The dream didn’t matter when he had chores to do.

      He rose and moved through the familiar motions, grateful in these predawn moments for the silence and solitude of his big, empty house. He ran his palm along the satiny surface of the long oak handrail to the ground floor and passed through dim rooms of richly grained wood and stacked rock, rooms done up in the tans and greens that reminded him of the forests at the eastern edges of his land.

      The loneliness faded into the background for a while on nights like this. It took too much energy to pull in, to pull tight, to shove things back inside the shadows he’d fashioned for himself. He was relieved he didn’t have to hide his midnight pain from anyone else.

      He measured coffee and poured water, while the bright lights of his kitchen banished the afterimages of the nightmare. He supposed those moments at the school board table the evening before—that replay of the old panic, when the sweat prickled on his skin and his voice box locked up and refused to move—he supposed it had been a kind of trigger. Most of the time he could control his fear of appearing in a public way. He’d faced it down, often enough, dragging himself behind any number of microphones, forcing himself to take on the presidency of the Cattlemen’s Association and settle into his supervisor’s seat at the county courthouse.

      But when the shower spray hit him, hard and hot, the last bit of his dream came back to pummel him like the water. That last moment, before he’d struggled to full consciousness—that last moment had been a new torture, something he’d never before experienced.

      Maybe he’d never dreamed that part because it hadn’t happened. Maybe he’d invented it—maybe the panic of the evening before had added some new layer to trick his mind and tease at his self control.

      All his calm rationalizing and logical explanations deserted him, sliding and trickling like water down zigzag paths, swirling in a maelstrom as if to disappear down the drain.

      It was no dream. It was a memory, something so painful he’d never revisited it.

      He’d turned and seen…her.

      Maggie Harrison, the most beautiful girl in the senior class. Tall and boyishly slim, cool and self-contained, supremely confident in her brains and her beauty and her close-knit, loving family. She’d held the kind of powerful popularity bestowed on those who let the world know they didn’t care whether or not they possessed it. And the fact that she never used it carelessly only increased its gravitational pull on her captivated friends.

      He, too, had been caught helplessly in her orbit, too attracted to ignore her but too pulled back within himself, too locked away inside his problems to match the ease of her manner or respond to the effortless flash of her smile.

      Even in those rare and precious times her smile had been aimed in his direction.

      He tipped his head beneath the water and closed his eyes as it ran down his face like tears, remembering now in agonizing detail how she’d stood to one side of the game field, moments before accepting the home-coming queen crown, dressed in her sapphire-blue gown, leveling her sapphire-blue eyes on his. There’d been no pity or disgust in her expression—none of that for Maggie Harrison.

      Maggie Harrison Sinclair. She’d always been out of his league, beyond the limits of his possibilities.

      Unlike Ellie, the girl Maggie’s mother had taken in a few years before. Wayne had always suspected he shared a secret, silent kinship with Ellie. They’d been two lost souls longing for family and tied to the land. While he’d labored to rebuild the ranch his father had left in ruins, he’d dreamed of the day he’d call on her and invite her for a ride, to head out toward the aching beauty of the mountains and discuss…something. Possibilities of some kind or other.

      He hadn’t known how to talk to a girl, how to make that first move toward a first date. He’d never figured he’d had a good opportunity, not with schoolwork and ranch chores and sports schedules eating up his time, not with his father sick or staggering around or passed out on some convenient horizontal surface. He’d never believed he had the right, not with the family finances edging near disaster and the future looking like a mighty flimsy enterprise. He wasn’t even sure he wanted to make a future with Ellie. But he figured he’d better start somewhere, or he’d end up alone.

      But then old Ben Harrison had fallen ill, and his prodigal son Tom had come back to help out. Tom had taken one look at Ellie—all grown up, confident and capable—and

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