At the precise moment that Nash’s heart is breaking, just as she stands in front of Mrs. Macy Milburn’s agency, holding her true love in her arms, Jane Reynolds Fremont arrives at the train station in Carson City. Someone from Tamarosa Ranch was supposed to fetch her, but no one is there, not a single person, and now her bag seems to have gone missing. What else could possibly go wrong? she thinks. She throws up her hands in frustration, and then she collapses onto a bench, puts her head in her hands, and begins to cry.
As Nash holds that baby close against her and removes Mrs. Fletcher’s wedding ring, she has no idea about Jane Reynolds Fremont. The newest problems, their latest guest—they are all things she’ll learn the next day, when the exhausted and distraught Mrs. Fremont finally arrives by taxicab. Even if Nash did know, though, she would not have been able to think about anyone or anything else right then, certainly not about the way life just keeps going forward, as she prepares herself to hand over the bundle that is Edward Austen. It is the right and true thing to do, she understands. She is tempted to flee with him, to make a new life with him, but that is not what is meant for Edward Austen or even for her.
Now she fills out the paperwork—Mother: Lilly Edwards, Los Angeles. Father: unknown—as Mrs. Macy Miller prattles on in a decisive voice. We will find him a good home, Miss Edwards, she says. I have a list right here. A family in Montana, one in Idaho, several in Colorado…Mrs. Miller’s arms reach out.
It may be the right and true thing, but as Nash kisses that hard little nose one more time before saying goodbye, her heart feels destroyed. Nash buries her own nose in him, and she takes in his smell and the feel of his tiny gripping fingers as if it were a lifetime.
She can barely see through her tears on the way back to the ranch. But when she arrives home, all of the women are there to bring her back in, like a herd of cattle circling around its injured one. Veronica, who has long since missed her plane, is making drinks, and Hadley insists that Nash sit and tell them everything, and Ellen, who has Boo up on her lap, says how proud she is of Nash. The funny thing is, Nash is proud of Ellen, too. She was so strong. Strong enough that she looks different now.
Even Alice is there. Home, finally. She takes her daughter in her arms. “Oh, my girl,” Alice says. “My darling girl.”
It is not in celebration that they raise their glasses, their Moscow mules made of vodka and ginger beer and lime. It is in respect and awe of all they have seen and experienced together. The toast is a promise they all make to one another. The deepest and most unbreakable vow to a bond that needs no words. No one says anything as they raise their arms. There is only the clink of glass against glass.
Nash knows that Thomas is following a good distance behind her. He thinks she can’t see him, but she can. No doubt those girls are in that car, too. Likely, niece Callie has given in and decided to bring Tex along. He is probably riding on his toes, with his nose out the window, catching all the smells he’s been missing while stuck on the ranch so long. When Nash gets back, just before she sends them all home so she can begin to die, she’ll make Callie promise to look after him. The little dog has taken a liking to her.
There are some trips a person needs to make alone, though, and she hopes the four of them will turn back after a few miles, when they are reassured that she is all right.
She is all right. It is all coming back to her. Not only the road and the feel of the wheels beneath her and the steering wheel under her hand, but his sweet scrunched face and wrinkled feet and his warm curved head with the thin, pulsing skin of his fontanel. That’s what Ellen told her it was called, and Nash had thought it a very beautiful word, a gentle, delicate word for the way the small bony plates moved and shifted, the fault lines between them fusing and growing whole.
She cannot imagine whom this tiny baby she has loved her whole life long will have turned out to be. Before her search, the last she’d heard of him was when Stuart Marcel’s sister tried to claim the infant shortly after he was born. Eve Ellings had stepped in on Lilly’s behalf. The father was a quick fling when Stuart was out of town, and Eve—a true friend, as Lilly had said—made that clear. Now it seems he landed all right, into the loving home of Doris and Ned McKinley of Missoula, Montana. What the years brought the child, though, Nash can scarcely imagine. She only knows that on the phone, Michael McKinley’s voice was deep and curious and kind, maybe kind enough to even forgive her. She knows that the time is right to ask, anyway. Time to forgive herself, too, for her part in the events of those days. The horses came back, and, just as Jack promised so long ago, she saw their beauty again, when she was up to her elbows in soapsuds. She has been changed, and been changed again. Her story, the story, is a perfect, perfectly tumultuous, intended circle.
On the seat beside Nash is the photo she will bring Michael McKinley, the only photo of his mother she could find, beautiful Lilly in her hotel scene in The Changelings. It’s as if Lilly is riding with her. Nash turns on the radio but can’t get any station out here in the desert, not even the one with that silly Dr. Yabba Yabba Love, who thinks she has answers to the human heart. If Nash knows anything, it’s this: You could pile up every book and every article and every radio show by every know-it-all who claims to have love figured out, and you could dump them all in the Truckee River. No one knows how to do it, only that we must do it. Love has always been a mystery and it will always be a mystery. It is wild and thundering, a beast of nature. You could try to capture it and sort it and tame it, but it would just keep on being wild and thundering, a beast of nature, through each and every hard and glorious eon, until the very last one.
Nash decides the silence is fitting. The silence is reverence for that very fact.
Still, a person can take silence for only so long. And reverence, too, for that matter. Life is too beautiful and too terrible and too damn short not to celebrate every moment you can. As soon as she sees Thomas’s car pull back and then turn away, going back down its own road, she pops in that CD, the one that poor Deke Donaldson didn’t know was still in the player when he sold her this car. She chuckles at what she got away with. She turns it up. The bass thumps, and so does Nash’s old heart, and the road goes on, and the story continues.