Palomino

29

Alex left the hospital in April. He went home with his mom and dad, and then back to school. He sent Sam a letter every week, telling her that he was just like the other kids again, he even went to a special baseball game every Sunday with his dad, and a bunch of other kids in wheelchairs. He dictated the letters to his mother and Sam saved them all in a special file. She sent him letters too, and bubble gum, and pictures of horses, and anything she found in the gift shop that looked like something he'd like. Their connection somehow made Sam feel stronger. More like pushing on. But the testing time for Sam came at the end of the month, when her doctor brought up the question of going home.

“Well, what do you think? Think you're ready?” She panicked at the thought and shook her head.

“Not yet.”

“Why not?”

“I don't know… I'm not sure I can manage… I'm not… my arms aren't strong enough…” Suddenly she had a thousand excuses, but that the doctor knew was normal. She felt safe in her cocoon, and she no longer wanted to leave. Doctor Nolan knew that when the time came they would have to push her gently, and she would resist them every inch of the way.

Indeed she had a comfortable routine all worked out for herself. Three hours of P.T. every morning, three hours of paperwork from her office every afternoon. The ads, which had won her seven new awards, and among them the much coveted Clio, had long since aired, and she was adding to the campaign with new concepts. Henry Johns-Adams and his friend and Charlie were about to head west to shoot two more ads.

One night Sam called Caroline to try one more time to use the ranch-thinking it would take Caroline's mind off Bill-but she was in for a terrible shock. Caroline picked up the phone, and when she heard Sam's voice, she broke down and sobbed deep racking sobs from the depths of her soul. “Oh, Sam… my God… he's gone… he's gone.” Sam didn't know what to say-indeed what could she say-she simply kept in touch and tried to cheer her up. Now, a few months later, Caroline was still absolutely lost without him, and it killed Sam to hear her so bereft and so broken, her spirit spent, her soul torn, without the man she had loved for so long. It was Sam now who gave her the strength to continue, who encouraged her.

“But I have no one left, Sam. I have no reason to go on. All of my family is gone… and now Bill…”

“You still have the ranch, and me, and there are so many people who care about you.”

“I don't know, Sam.” She sounded so tired. “I feel like my life is over. I don't even want to ride with the men anymore. I just let the new foreman handle everything for me. It doesn't mean anything without Bill, and”-Sam could hear the tears in her voice-“it all makes me so sad.” She had had him buried on the ranch, and there had been a memorial service. He had had his way to the end. He had died as the foreman of the Lord Ranch, and not her husband, though it really didn't matter anymore. Whether people had guessed or not, they had respected both of them, and his loss was felt by many who sympathized with Caro for losing a good friend, even if they didn't know he'd been her man.

There was of course still no news of Tate Jordan. Sam didn't even ask anymore. She knew that Caro would have told her. All of those people she had contacted, all of those ranches she had driven to, and all of the ranch hands and ranchers she had talked to on her trips, and none of them had seen him, no one knew him. She wondered where he had gone, and if he was happy, if he remembered as she did. Now there was really no point in finding him. She had nothing left to give him. Now she wouldn't have let him stay with her. It would have been Sam who would have run away. But she didn't have to. He had already been gone for a year.

It was spring when they finally pushed her gently from the nest, despite her mother's protests. Her doctor released her from the hospital on the first of May, on a splendid warm sunny day, and she went to see her apartment for the first time. She had had to rely once more on Charlie and Mellie, she had had to call movers and have everything packed up in her old place. With the stairs in her old apartment, she knew that there was no way she could manage entirely alone, and miraculously an apartment had turned up in Melinda and Charlie's building. It was a ground-floor apartment with a small sunny garden, and it was going to be perfect for Samantha because it had no stairs, an easy access, and a doorman. It was just exactly what the doctor ordered, and Samantha had instructed the movers to put the furniture as per the diagram she had drawn up for them and just to leave the crates of her belongings for her to unpack herself. It was going to be her first challenge after she left the hospital, and it was a big one.

She huffed and she puffed and she attacked the boxes and she sweated, and once she even fell out of her chair trying to hang a small painting on the wall. But she got up, she hung it up, she unpacked the crates, she made her bed, she washed her hair, she did all the things they had taught her. She felt so victorious by Monday morning that when she showed up at the office in a black skirt and a black turtleneck sweater, with fashionable black suede boots and a red bow in her hair, she looked younger and healthier than she had all that terrible year. When her mother called at noon to lament her daughter's fate, Sam was busy in a meeting. After that she went to lunch at Lutéce with Charlie and Harvey to celebrate her return, and by the end of the week she had seen her first client, and she had handled it with grace as well as ease. It intrigued her to see that men still looked at her like she was attractive, and even her terror that it was pity that motivated the looks couldn't dim the pleasure of knowing that even if she wasn't a functioning woman her femininity still existed. The question of dating was one she had refused to discuss with the psychiatrist at the hospital. She considered that a closed door, and for the time being they had left it alone and worked on the rest. She had made such progress in every other area that they figured sooner or later she would come around. She was after all only thirty-one, and incredibly pretty. It was unlikely that a woman like Sam Taylor would spend the rest of her life alone, no matter what she said now.

“Well.” Harvey, wearing one of his rare smiles, lifted a glass of champagne. “I propose a toast to Samantha. May you live another hundred years, without taking a single day off from CHL. Thank you.” He bowed and the three of them chuckled, and then Sam toasted them. By the end of the lunch they were half drunk and Sam was making bad jokes about not being able to drive her chair. She ran into two pedestrians on the way back to the office, and Charlie took over and pushed her, plowing her cheerfully into a policeman, who was almost brought to his knees.

“Charlie, for chrissake! Watch where you're going!”

“I was… I think he's drunk. Disgusting too, an officer on duty!”

The three of them laughed like kids, and had trouble sobering up when they got back to the office. Eventually they all gave up and left early. It had been a very big day.

That Saturday Sam took her little friend Alex to lunch, the two of them sunning in their chairs. They had hot dogs and French fries and she took him to a movie. They sat side by side in the aisle at Radio City, and his eyes were huge as he watched the show. When she took him home at the end of the day, she felt a little tug at her heart to give him back to his mother, and she took refuge at Mellie's apartment on the way home, where she played with the baby. Suddenly, as Sam rolled her wheelchair carefully and slowly across the room, little Sam stood up, and on tiptoe, with arms flailing, little Sam followed her, as “Big Sam,” as they called her in the baby's presence, sat in her wheelchair and gaped. And then, as the child fell cooing to the rug, Sam shouted for Mellie, who arrived just in time to see the baby do the same stunt again, and she was only ten months old.

“She's walking!” Mellie shouted to no one in particular, “She's walking… Charlie! Sam's walking…” He arrived in the doorway with an expression of shock, not having understood that it was the baby, and then Sam looked at him in astonishment with tears rolling down her face, and then she smiled and held out her arms to the laughing baby.

“Oh, yes, she is!”