Chapter Seven
Kid held Lou to him in the glow of the fire of their front room. She had only come to twice since he'd found her on the stair landing. Before he even got in the house, Kid's heart had been racing with fear. He'd left Katy to wander in the barn when he saw that Lou had left the horses fresh water and hay before the storm. Rain pelting his skin, he'd run from the barn and up the porch steps praying to find Lou engrossed in a book, snug and safe by the fire. Instead his ears were first greeted by a chilling baying from Rascal that could be heard before he'd even opened the door. When he burst into the room, Rascal immediately stopped his eerie moan and ran frantically to Kid.
"Lou! Lou!" Kid called out and heard no answer, as he already knew would happen. Following Rascal, Kid turned the corner of the stairs only to find his wife laying on her side, her head cut and bloody. He knew she was unconscience before he reached her.
It had been an hour since then and Lou had barely know where she was when she had briefly woken, confused to the point where she didn't even seem to know what year it was. She'd mentioned the baby, something they rarely spoke of. Kid was beside himself with worry.
Holding a cool cloth to her head, he tried desperately to wake his wife, but to no avail. She was breathing softly, the bleeding had stopped before he'd arrived, so why wouldn't she wake?! Something Emma had said long ago in the early days of the Express came back to him. "Sometimes people need a little time alone to heal before they can come back to us they way they was before." She'd told him this one night when they were sitting alone of the porch and talking about how upset Lou had been that day over some unthinking comment Cody had made about her being better as a boy than a girl. It was a stupid thing for Cody to say, but it had also been meant without malice. Cody had seen it as more of a compliment than anything else.
Emma had been right. Lou had gone riding to blow off steam. When she came back she was full of funny insults to fling at Cody, who good-naturedly allowed Lou an undefended attack.
"Maybe you just need some time to heal, huh, Luv?"
***
Kid,
I've started this letter three times and each time I can't find the right words. I can't describe how much it hurts me to tell you this. Four days ago I lost our baby. I was in the barn when the pain began. Rachael and Buck were with me. The doctor came, but by the time he got here, nothing could be done.
I don't remember much of how it happened, and thruthfully, I don't recall much of the past few days either, until now. It's all been such a frightening blur.
I don't know how I can ask you to forgive me. Everything was fine until four days ago. Now it seems there's not much to the world any more. There's nothing you being here could've done, so please don't think you could've stopped it from happening. The doc says that there was nothing I could have done either, but I don't know if I believe that yet. It seems impossible.
I want to send this letter quickly, so I'll end it now.
I'm so sorry, Kid.
Lou
Louise reread her letter. It seemed cold, disjointed. She hadn't signed it "Love," as she had meant to. She didn't feel she had the right to say something like that in a letter telling her husband that his unborn baby was already dead. She closed her eyes and thought about the fact that Kid was somewhere in Virginia right now, looking at the same stars she saw each night, and maybe right this minute he was thinking that he had a wife who was pregnant with his baby. She felt like the days she'd spent in that blur were days she'd been lying to him.
Before she could read her words again and see more of the heartache she had caused, Lou sealed the letter and took it downstairs to go out to the post office in the morning withthe rest of the house's correspondances. Rachael had suggested a telegram might be faster, but Lou couldn't bare to think of Kid reading that his child was dead through a hand other than her own. As she walked down the stairs, she felt their eyes on her. Silver Spring was sitting at the table as well. She would go back to her camp in the morning. Although earlier, Buck had been bold enough to ask if she'd really meant to go through with it, no one seemed willing to let their eyes rest on the bandage still covering the lower half of Lou's arm.
"Y'all can go on talking, ya know," Lou began, defensively. "I know what I done might not seem right to any of you, but I came back." Her eyes found Silver Spring's and the confidence she found there urged her on, "I came back from the edge and I didn't let myself fall."
***
Lou seemed to be dreaming. She muttered and moaned in her sleep and Kid kept hoping that one of her dreams might bring her back to him. The storm had reached a fever-pitch now. Twice, he'd opened the door to the storm, praying that it would have subsided enough to rush Lou to Doc Barnes. Both times, the rain drove into the house so furiously that Kid was wet in an instant. There was no possible way he could take Lou out in that storm without killing them both, and at best giving her pneumonia.
Absently he stroked Lou's arm as he continued to wipe her brow and pray that no fever would set in. Before he realized it, his fingers were playing over the long, raised scar on the inside of her left arm. The scar was about five inches long, and grew white when Lou's arms tanned in the summer sun. It was something that had always disturbed Kid. The scar symbolized something that he couldn't control. It symbolized the day Lou tried to take her own life.
He recalled the long wait he had before she would tell him how she gotten the scar. He had his secrets and memories that were too painful to share with her, Lou had yelled one evening. And so, she too had a right to something secret and personal. It had killed him to agree with her when he knew the scar was more than an injury sustained while he was away. But when he saw the frightened look in her eye, the look that said if he pressed her to tell she'd turn and run, he stopped his questions. Later that night, Lou had come to him on the porch where he and Jimmy were talking. Jimmy had come to visit them for a few days before heading out further west to persue a gang of outlaws. When Lou asked to talk to Kid alone, Jimmy had kissed her chastely on the cheek and said his goodnight's as he headed off to the bunkhouse. Lou and Kid had stayed on at the old way station while they built their house so that Rachael wouldn't be alone while she waited for Teaspoon to return as well. In hushed tones, so as not to disturb a sleeping Rachael, Lou began her tale.
Kid recalled three things most clearly from that night. The first was an immense guilt of not being able to be there for his wife while she went through all this suffering alone. The second was the smell of Lou's hair as she cried into his chest. It smelled like the honeysuckle he loved so much in Virginia. She'd bought a bottle of the scent at Tompkin's earlier that day and as a result, he forever associated honeysuckle with his wife's proven trust in him. The third thing he always remembered of that night was that a woman named Silver Spring had saved Lou's life.
When Kid and Lou finally got their ranch running, Kid had suggested the name as he watched Lou's eyes tear up at the thought. Silver Spring Ranch was christened with bottles of wine, and a night of merriment. Rachael, a recently returned Teaspoon, Buck, Jimmy (back from another outlaw-roundup), Cody (buzzing through the territory in search of show riders), Jeramiah and Theresa (finally able to be sent for from the orphanage) and Emma and Sam had all come for the occasion. Only the ranch's namesake was missing.
Lou had cried bitterly the night Silver Spring was found dead on the praerie, violated and murdered. "Maybe...in the end...she was able to make it to the edge and jump for herself, instead of being forced over?" Lou had whispered when she found out, trembling in Kid's arms. It was a philosophy she'd learned from Silver Spring that Kid had never fully understood, but he knew how important it was to his wife.
"I think you're right, Lou. Someone as brave as her had to have jumped for herself," Kid replied, as he considered all the brave women he'd known in his life. The woman in his arms was no exception.
"No jumping tonight, Lulabelle," he whispered, bringing his mouth closer to her ear and using Emma's affectionate nickname for her. "No jumping tonight."
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