He said that so easily. “I need you.” I wondered how it was possible that a tough kid like Tag, someone who fought for the fun of it, could admit that to anyone. Or believe it. I’d never needed anyone. Not really. And I’d never said those words to anyone. “I need you” felt like “I love you,” and it scared me. It felt like breaking one of my laws. But at that moment, with the morning looming large, with freedom at my fingertips, I had to admit, I probably needed Tag too.
We would make an odd pair. A black artist and a white cowboy. It sounded like the start to one of those jokes about three men going into a bar. But it was just the two of us. And Tag was right. We were both stuck. Lost. With nothing to hold us down and no direction. I just wanted my freedom, and Tag didn’t want to be alone. I needed his money, and he needed my company, sad as it usually was.
“We’ll just keep running, Moses. How did you say it? Here, there, on the other side of the world? We can’t escape ourselves. So we stick together until we find ourselves, all right? Until we figure out how to deal.”
Georgia
I DIDN’T KNOW HOW to break the news, and I didn’t know how to admit to my parents that they were right and I was wrong. I wasn’t an adult. I was a helpless little girl, something I’d never wanted to be. Something I’d always laughed in the face of. I had been tough all my life. I had reveled in being tough, in being as strong as the boys. But I hadn’t been as strong. I’d been weak. So damn weak.
I had been weak, and my weakness had created a child, a child who had no father. Maybe Moses hadn’t abandoned me—how could he when he’d never belonged to me? I felt abandoned, though. Abandoned and so very alone. In his defense, maybe he was more alone, maybe he was the one who was truly abandoned, but I couldn’t think about him, and when he didn’t come back, it was easier to be angry.
Moses became a faceless man. It was the only way I could cope. I erased his image from my mind. And I refused to think about him. Unfortunately, the faceless man and I had created a faceless child that grew and grew inside of me until it was impossible to keep him hidden anymore. And I broke down in tears, something I’d been doing a lot more of, and told my mom what had happened between me and Moses. She sat on my bed, listening to me talk, the Georgia Shepherd I’d always been—tough, determined, and opinionated—turning into a waffling, quivering woman-child. When I finished, my mother was so still. Shocked. She didn’t put her arms around me. When I dared look in her face she was just sitting, staring at the wall where Moses had painted a man transforming into a white horse. I wondered if I had just become something else before her eyes too.
Even with her shock and her cold reception to my confession, it was a relief to unburden myself. After months alone with my secret, months that had been the most terrible of my life, months of fear and despair, of worry for Moses, for myself, and mostly for a child I refused to give a face to, I laid it all at her feet and selfishly didn’t care whether I was turning her world upside down. I just couldn’t carry it anymore.
When we told my dad, he was the one who melted my mother’s heart. He stood and walked over to me and pulled me up into his arms. And my mother cried. That’s when I knew it was going to be all right and that’s when I gave up on Moses coming back.
Seven years later…
Georgia
A CROWD WAS GATHERED around the wall across from the elevators, making it hard to decipher who was waiting to go up and who was watching. A mural was being painted, and I couldn’t see the artist at work, but the depth of the crowd made me think it might be something special to see if only I had the time or inclination to stand around in a hospital and watch paint dry. The elevator binged and the waiting crowd shifted a little, separating the waiters from the watchers and when the doors slid open I waited patiently for the elevator to empty so I could wedge myself inside and stand quietly with the others while I climbed the floors to my father’s bedside.
Dad had been diagnosed with cancer the week before, and his doctors had moved aggressively. He’d had a large tumor removed from his stomach the day before, and his doctors were hopeful and gave him good odds of being cancer free. They’d gotten most of it, it hadn’t spread, and they had started him on a chemo regimen to get the rest. But we were all scared. Mom was emotional, and I’d ended up spending the night with the two of them, even though I should have been home, keeping things going, and looking after the horses. I wasn’t much help at the hospital, that was for sure. I’d slipped out earlier in the morning and gone back to the hotel room that Mom and I hadn’t really needed, considering we both spent the night dozing in chairs in Dad’s hospital room. But I’d needed a shower, a nap, and some room to breathe, and after I got all three, I was back, ready to spell my mother if I could convince her to step away and do the same.
Hospitals made me lightheaded and elevators did too, so I found a place at the back, called out my floor to a girl who was helpfully pushing buttons, and waited for the doors to close on the silent occupants. We were being entertained by an instrumental version of Garth Brook’s “Friends in Low Places,” which at one point in my life would have made me howl in outrage and loudly provide the lyrics to all the occupants of the elevator so that a truly great song would not be reduced to easy listening. But today it just made me sigh and wonder what the world was coming to.
The elevator doors began to slide toward each other and my eyes rose up to the lights that signaled the stops when a hand shot between the space and the elevator doors bounced back in affront. My boots made me tall—taller than my natural 5’9”—and I stood directly in the center of the car with my back pressed against the mirrored wall. People shifted immediately, making room for one more, but there was nothing blocking my view or my face when Moses Wright stepped onto the elevator. For a few seconds, maybe more, we stood five feet apart, face to face. The doors slid shut at his back, but he didn’t look away. He seemed stunned, floored even. And I wondered if my face registered the same shock. I wished he would turn and face the door, the way normal people did. But he wasn’t normal, never had been, and he remained motionless, staring at me, until I broke eye contact and fixed my eyes on the place where the ceiling and walls came together in the right-hand corner and focused on breathing so I wouldn’t start screaming.