I finished twelve seconds later and five minutes after that I was back in the elevator heading home.
Olivia was leaving the following week to go to Stanford. I didn’t know if I would ever see her again, but sadly the thought didn’t bother me. It truly felt like the beginning of my life, and all I could think about was becoming the best heart surgeon in the country.
CHAPTER 3
What Breaks Us
Avelina
SPRING 2005
Jake was my first kiss—my first everything. After my mom eventually went back to Spain, he took care of me and made me feel safe. We got married in Las Vegas at one of those quickie chapels, but it didn’t matter to us because we loved each other. We sold my three other horses, my truck, and my trailer, but Jake let me keep Dancer. He knew I would never part with her.
I always thought I would go to nursing school or become a veterinarian, but instead, the moment I met Jake, I dropped out of high school and never bothered getting my GED. The winter we got married, we were hired as wranglers on a ranch a hundred miles northeast of Great Falls, Montana. Ranching was something I knew well but it wouldn’t have mattered what I was doing, as long as I was with Jake.
The owners of the ranch were an older couple, Redman and Bea Walker. They didn’t have any children, just hired help, so we lived there in one of four cabins off the main ranch house. Bea cooked our meals while Redman, who got more ornery by the minute, rode around the ranch on a great big bay horse, barking orders at the rest of us. There was also Dale, who was in his forties—he was a large animal vet—and Trish, his wife, who was once a national rodeo queen. Dale helped out on the ranch but his veterinary practice also extended to other ranches nearby. Trish was a wrangler, like Jake and me, which meant she worked the horses and cattle and handled the general caretaking duties around the ranch. There were no children at the Walker Ranch; Jake and I were the youngest, and sometimes Trish, Bea, and the other ranch hands would call us “the kids.” I’d overheard Trish telling Bea that her condition made her barren. I never pried any further to find out what condition Trish had, but I knew Bea had struggled to have children herself, which made her very sympathetic to Trish’s situation. Redman and Bea had one child that I knew of who died at birth, so those who lived on the ranch became their family instead. There was history and wisdom inside of Bea and Redman and a lot of old, painful memories that they’d share as lessons whenever the opportunity arose.
Ranching is a dangerous life and not for the faint of heart. Sometimes the pain behind Bea and Trish’s eyes, which I knew was from not being able to have their own children, made the ranch feel like some sort of graveyard of broken dreams, only made beautiful by the breathtaking landscape, the huge, endless dreamlike skies, the millions of stars we saw on clear nights, and of course, Bea and Trish’s strong female drive to carry on and be mothers to us all.
For Jake and me, our hearts and dreams hadn’t been broken yet. We were excited about life and we talked about it all the time. And we wanted kids. Every time Jake would make love to me, he would say, Make a baby with me, Lena. That’s what he called me for short. This time it will work, he would say, though it didn’t for almost a year.
In the meantime, we took refuge in each other. He wasn’t much more experienced in the relationship department than I was, but he was tender and sweet with me and we learned together. We explored each other’s bodies and our own, and we figured out how to feel good while we were tucked under the thick wool blankets in our tiny cabin at the Walker Ranch.
Jake’s parents lived a couple of hours north, near the Canadian border. We didn’t hear from them much except for an occasional phone call from Jake’s mom. Jake didn’t want me to meet them because he said his dad was a mean drunk and his mom had taken the abuse so long that she was just a shell of a woman.
In the summer of 2004 we did the rodeo circuit again, traveling back to California and down to Texas. Neither one of us ever got national attention but it was what we loved doing. In the fall we would drive the cattle back to the ranch and in the spring we would take them out to pasture.
The winters were long and cold in Montana but we had each other and our horses. Jake had bought me a little herding dog. He was an Australian shepherd mix and he hated everyone. He only had one purpose in life and that was to herd the cattle. We named him Pistol.
The following spring Jake and I made a plan to take the cattle out to pasture and then camp for a week or so in the valley before heading back. Once Redman agreed to it, we decided to think of it as a little honeymoon, even though we had been married for more than a year. We would take our time coming back, fish in the streams, and enjoy nature.
“I want to bring Dancer,” I said to Jake as he sat on the steps going up to our cabin.
“No, she’s no good for this type of thing. You know that. She’s got no stamina.”
I sat down next to him. Tucking a strand of my dark hair behind my ear, he squinted his eyes and smiled, revealing his boyish dimples. “We’ll take Bonnie and Elite. They’re good girls. Okay, sweetie?”
He sat there in his tight Wranglers and cowboy hat set low on his head. His legs were spread wide and his chest puffed out, broad and firm. He had such a strong and convincing presence. I could never say no to him. “Okay.”
“Come here, Lena.” He pulled me onto his lap and brushed my hair off my shoulders to fall down my back. The roughness of his jaw tickled my neck as he laid small kisses near my ear. “You’re mine,” he whispered. “No one else can ever have you.”