Leopard's Kin Page 3
They broke apart to catch their breath and she brought her hands down onto his chest as a barrier. “Very nice,” she whispered with a grin, “but don’t distract me. I’ve a lot to get done yet today.”
Cody kissed her lightly on the forehead and put some distance between them. “You can be frustratingly practical at times, you know,” he jokingly accused. He twisted slightly in his chair so that he could stretch behind them and shut off his computer with a few flicks of his mouse. “I was hoping you’d do all you could to please me since I’m off to California soon. How on earth are we going to start these babies our mothers want so much if we can’t...ahem...connect?” He turned back to look at her with a wicked gleam in his eyes.
Lori shook her head vehemently, glaring at him. “I’m grateful for every one of these trips, then. There is no way we can afford to have a baby right now. Don’t even think about it! And it wouldn’t just be another mouth to feed – it would mean I couldn’t train horses for at least a few months in there, between carrying a baby and then taking care of it after it’s born. And lest you forget, I really did want to look into going to university for some business or farm management courses.”
Because they had married so young, Lori had sacrificed that particular part of her life to get their life established here. Still, she had no intentions of giving up on that dream if she could help it. She wanted to learn as much as she could about how to make her horse training business successful.
Cody’s eyes had gone a soft blue, with a wistfulness in them that surprised Lori. “Yeah, I know,” he said in an entirely different tone of voice from the teasing he’d been doing moments before. “But still...I can’t wait until you’re carrying my child some day. You’re going to be an awesome mother.”
She felt an unnerving thrill of something go up her spine at that statement – whether it was excitement or horror she wasn’t quite sure. To hide her confusion she stood up and adjusted her jeans after his gentle mauling. “Do you want to have lunch with me or not?”
He grinned up at her and nodded. “Of course.”
**********
The night before Cody left for Sacramento, they invited Rita and Sam over for another supper. Since Sam was going with him to California, they had agreed to leave from the Pates’ house the following morning and the older couple spent the night with Lori and Cody. There was an air of excitement throughout the house that evening – big dreams were in the making and Sam was confident that there was a stallion coming home to Canada in the next month. He and Cody pored over the auction catalogue again after supper, laying out plans for how high they would go with each prospect and double-checking bloodlines to ensure they had each colt straight in their minds.
Rita and Lori smiled with affection - and sighed in frustration - in turns and finally chased the men up to their respective bedrooms with the reminder that they had to be at the airport by 9 o’clock.
It was much later – sometime in the small, dark hours of the early morning – when Lori was awakened by the tickle of whiskers on her face and the muted roar of purring at close range. She blinked in a stupor of sleep and could just make out the silhouette of Luke hovering above her. She brought her brows down in confusion – this was a first for the grey kitten. Normally, both he and his sister spent the nights alternating between chasing each other around the entire house and falling asleep wherever they burned themselves out. They weren’t at an age yet where sleeping next to a human had its own warm rewards.
Still groggy with sleep, Lori fumbled a hand out of the covers and stroked Luke’s face a few times, sending him into even louder rumblings. He shoved his head against her hand hard enough for her arm to be raised a few inches and then laid down on her chest. Extending a paw, he reached out and laid it across her lips. Lori giggled at that and pretended to bite it, but he didn’t withdraw. His stare was beginning to unnerve her and she whispered into the darkness, not wishing to wake Cody.
“Luke, what are you doing up here, hm? What’s wrong?”
She ran a hand over his solid little weight of fuzz, then brought her fingers to his cheeks and rubbed them vigorously. He continued to purr, but sleep was claiming her for its own again and her hand fell to the side after a few moments, neglecting Luke. He stood up and nipped her lightly on the eyebrow with his baby teeth. Lori snuffled in surprise and jerked awake again, petting him in reflex as he lay back down.
“What?” she asked as she continued to stroke him. “Why are you up here?”
He of course gave no response, other than to continue staring at her, and she again felt sleep pulling her under. Wary of his tactics to keep her awake, she kept her hand gliding in a smooth rhythm from top of the head to tail and back, over and over, as she began to drift. The last conscious thought she had was that Leia had also jumped up and was lying across her feet. She wondered at that, even as she fell soundly asleep once more.
**********
In the morning, the kittens were back to their normal routine - getting underfoot as the coffee was made - and Lori thought nothing more of the night’s visit. She did a last once-over of the bedroom and bathroom, ensuring Cody hadn’t forgotten anything in his packing, and then settled down to breakfast with Rita, Sam, and her husband.
These morning departures were always rushed affairs, no matter how hard they tried to make it go smoothly and with two extra people in the house, it was even worse. There were always last-minute things that had to be hastily grabbed and stuffed into suitcase pockets and questions flew around the rooms of reminders of what else needed to be taken or what needed to be addressed here at the farm while Cody was gone. It was with a sigh of relief that Lori saw them all out the door and on their way.
Rita was on her way back to their place – even though they ran a lucrative horse business and could afford a multitude of staff to oversee the basic daily upkeep, Rita was meticulous in keeping track of what happened, when, on their property. She would want to be back as soon as possible to check on the overdue pregnant mares, ensure feeding routines were carried out properly and stay nearby for any phone calls of potential clients.
She beeped her Ford F-350’s horn as she pulled out of the driveway and following behind her, Cody blew Lori one final kiss from their Dodge Ram. She waved good-bye to him and let her gaze linger on his face as they smiled at one another. She felt a twinge of profound sadness sweep over her as she watched them disappear down the road and shook her head to clear the melancholy.
“Pull yourself together, Pate,” she muttered as she turned back to the dining room and began picking up the dirty coffee mugs and plates. “It’s not like he hasn’t been gone before.”
Chapter 4
By accident, Lori forgot to bring her cell phone with her when she went down to the barn that day. She spent the morning in ignorance of the outside world’s comings and goings, content to occupy her time in manual labour and the babble of her favourite country station’s DJs on the radio that was perched on a hay bale outside the feed room. It was as she was finishing up the sixth stall that she heard someone calling her name from the house.
She stepped out from the overhang of the barn and saw Cody’s client and friend, Rick Meyer, walking hastily around to the back door. She called his name and started towards him with an apologetic smile. As she got closer, she could see he was clearly agitated about something.
“Lori, where have you been?” he demanded as he rushed towards her. “I’ve been trying to reach you for the last two hours!”
“I’m sorry,” Lori replied, slightly taken aback. “I left my cell phone in the house, but I’m always in the barn first thing in the morning – you should know – .”
He stopped her abruptly by grabbing her arms. “Listen, I need you to stay calm and listen to me, ok?” He shook her slightly and the fear started to creep into her bones. “There’s been an accident. Rita Dennymede called me earlier – they think the plane Sam and Cody were
on went down about an hour into their flight.”
Lori was dimly conscious of an absurd sense of relief that Rick was holding her arms; she thought she might fall over at any minute. “What?” she said in a stupor. “Rita called? What happened? How did she hear?”
Rick shook his head, his features softening slightly. “I don’t know. She’s pretty upset – she asked me to come get you. We have to get to Toronto. She said she didn’t have any other details, except for what she saw on the TV this morning. She thought if we go to the airline they might be able to give us more information.”
Lori was growing drastically colder by the moment. Shock, she thought fuzzily. She couldn’t seem to get her brain to engage. The only thoughts going around in her head were questions. What? How? When? Why? She looked at Rick with eyes gone huge and dazed and tried to focus. Toronto. They had to get to Toronto. Obviously Rick saw something in her face that he had prepared himself to witness; he gently turned her and wrapped an arm around her waist, drawing her up against his body. He led her towards the house this way, keeping her close in case she fell.
He was talking to her, but she wasn’t hearing most of it. She was trying to figure out why it felt as though she were walking in a foot of sand, her footsteps dragging in the wet grass.
**********
In the years that followed, Lori’s perception of the ensuing six days was a mixture of an inexorable grey mist and key moments of painful, utter clarity. She remembered panicking once she settled into the car seat next to Rick, voicing her concern that there would be nobody to tend the animals and Rick’s assurances that he had called a mutual friend to come down. She remembered nothing of the airport but a mass of people who were just as agitated as she, screaming and demanding answers or sobbing and suffering in silence as they dealt with their grief. She remembered hugging Rita, who was with her own support system, and seeing Jesse arrive, so similar and yet so different to his younger brother, and running to him, clinging to him, as the last connection with Cody. She didn’t know when Shannon had showed up – or how she found out – but she did remember it was her hand she clung to and her shoulder she buried her face in when the airline confirmed the plane had gone down and there were no survivors.
Lori lost track of time; she felt as though she were being passed from one set of loving arms to another. But none of them were Cody’s. The exhaustion of weeping and trying to hold it together set in to such a degree that it took several minutes to compute what people were asking her. Questions as simple as “would you like some coffee?” seemed to require intense thought on her part. Would she? Would coffee be good – or appropriate – right now? Did she even drink coffee? She remembered Shannon answering that question for her and later a steaming, soothing cup of English Breakfast Tea was placed into her numb hands.
Much later, somebody (she thought it was Shannon) drove her home from the airport. She expected a quiet house, bereft of Cody’s absence, the same as she had left it that morning. Instead, it was full of family. Her parents were both there – her father in his traditional plaid flannel and workpants, his concern for her etched in lines that made his full moustache look even longer - and her mother, with her perfectly styled, tight black curls, her warm brown eyes and the eternal cigarette casually held between two fingers. Jesse and his wife Anne had made their way to the house, as well, along with another of Cody’s brothers Lori didn’t know very well; one of Lori’s still-single sisters had also come.
They didn’t know what to do, other than hug her, and she was so drained that she asked them to forgive her as she stumbled blearily up to the bedroom with the kittens leading the way up the stairs. She was conscious of silent, sympathetic eyes following her, but sleep graciously claimed her the second she put her head to the pillow.
The following morning, she woke thinking it had all been a dream until she heard the muffled voices below and the sound of breakfast being made. She had been prepared for Cody to be gone for awhile and had a disconnected sense of confusion as to why all the people were in their house. When she realized yesterday’s nightmare had been real, she grabbed the nearest kitten, Leia, and buried her face in the little tabby’s fur. But nothing happened. No tears came. She was still in the most profound shock, feeling nothing but an overwhelming weakness. She couldn’t even lift her head, let alone get out of bed.
It was her mother that came upstairs for her later. She opened the door and sat down on the bed, placing an ash tray on Cody’s nightstand while blowing out a deep exhale of smoke. The kittens departed in a flash, not used to – nor approving – of the smell. “Well, my sweet, you’ve had quite the blow, haven’t you? Do you think you can come downstairs yet?”
Lori swallowed thickly and shook her head, then slid over towards her mom and rested her head on a polyestered thigh. She felt the older woman take another drag on the cigarette, lean over to put it in the ashtray, and then gently begin to stroke Lori’s bangs away from her face as she exhaled the smoke. “Are you hungry?” she asked with sympathy as she continued to soothe Lori’s face.
Another small head shake was all Lori could manage. “I’m so tired. I can’t believe it....” Lori trailed off at that, not sure if it were wise to vocalize any more of the pain she was feeling.
“I know, darlin’ – I don’t think any of us have really had it sink in yet. But I want you to know – your dad and I are going to stick around as long as you need us, ok? As long as you need us. I’m assuming you two hadn’t talked about finances, funeral plans, life insurance...any of that stuff, right?”
Lori wrapped an arm around her mom’s thigh and drew her legs up into the fetal position behind her mother’s back. “No,” she said, burying her face into the gap behind her mother’s knee. “God, no! We’re only 21 years old!”
Her mother made a soft noise in her throat to calm Lori and pressed a little harder around her temple as she swept the thick black hair away. “Okay. I know this is going to be hard to hear, but the airline told Jesse yesterday that the...bodies...will be coming back tomorrow and they want him to go and identify one they think is Cody.”
“Oh, God,” Lori sobbed, repulsed by the thought.
“We’ll have to get in touch with a funeral home if it is him and make arrangements, so I’m going to need you to bear up and help make some decisions for him, ok?” The stroking hand never faltered, but Lori’s mother seemed to be infusing it with strength at the same time. I’m here to support you, it seemed to say, but this needs to be done.
The morbidity of discussing plots and funeral homes went on far too long while Lori lay in the bed, trying to make herself eight years old again. It wasn’t until much later that the immediate reality of life took a grip and Lori sat bolt upright in the bed.
“Has anybody looked after the horses since last night?”
**********
Jesse was already in the barn when Lori got dressed and made her way out to the horses. Unlike his younger brother, Jesse’s blond hair had started to recede so he kept it closely cut, but his blue eyes were the same shade of sky and he had the same distinct angles of jaw and cheekbone. Jesse wasn’t as tall as Cody and his forehead was more reminiscent of the father-in-law Lori had only seen in photos. Still, the resemblance to her husband was there and Lori took an involuntary breath when she saw him standing by Ebony’s stall.
“Hey, Lori,” he said softly in greeting as he haltered the mare.
“Hey, Jess,” she said back. “Were you...um...going to turn the horses out?”
“Yeah. I thought I’d get started on the stalls for you. Everyone’s had hay, but I wasn’t sure about giving them grain.” He finished haltering Ebony, but stood awkwardly by her head, not moving. Apparently she wasn’t the only one who didn’t know what to say.
Lori nodded and moved towards the feed room. “If you can hold off, then, I’ll get that ready and feed them before we turn them out. It’s easier to grain and k
eep everyone respectful if they’re in their stalls when they eat. You can head back to the house if you want and grab some breakfast. It’ll be another hour or so before I’ll start the stalls.”
Jesse nodded and started down the aisle towards her and the exit. “You’re sure?”
“Yeah, I’ll be fine. I kinda need some alone time in the quiet, you know?”
“Yeah, I know,” he said as he reached out and gave her arm a squeeze. “That’s why I came out earlier, too,” he said with a faltering grin.
Lori grabbed the hand that was squeezing her arm and held it tightly for a moment before throwing caution to the wind and giving him a locked-arm hug. He returned it full measure and they both settled each other just by breathing.
“Thanks, Jesse,” she murmured as she pulled away. “My mom told me about Cody. About you having to go identify him, I mean. I’m really sorry you have to do that. I wish...well, I wish a lot of things.”
He kissed her impulsively on the forehead. “It’s ok. Somebody has to do it. And I want to know he’s coming home, you know?” He stopped abruptly and Lori could see the struggle he was under to stay in control.
Lori nodded mutely, blinking away tears. A thought came to her suddenly and she jerked her head up to look at him. “Is your mom ok? I haven’t heard anybody say anything about her yet.”
Jesse grimaced and shrugged his shoulders. “She’s not doing great, no. My sisters have gone to be with her. Because of Dad, you know.” Lori did know. A husband and a son, both gone before their time. Both dead in tragic accidents. The Pate family had had their share of heartache.
It was those thoughts, come back to haunt her sometime later as she was brushing Piper alone in his stall, that finally opened the floodgates. One moment, she was listening to the horses softly eating around her, flicking her wrist in short, deft strokes across Piper’s shoulder and the next she was sinking to the ground at his feet, sobbing so harshly that the tears soaked into the pinewood bedding with tiny pit-patting sounds as she doubled over. She wrapped an arm around Piper’s left front leg to steady herself, her hand still stuck inside the dandy brush, and wailed against his knee. The soft nuzzling of his lips in her hair was her only comfort, but it sustained her until the first well had been tapped dry.