"Ain't nobody's footprints out here but Lillabit's." Benj crouched to peek into the tent and address us. I could only see half of him past the privacy flap of oil-cloth, out in the pale almost-morning light.
"Are you sure?" I demanded. Yes, my experience with the "ghost" had half-felt like a dream. But it had half-felt real, too. And me ending up unconscious on the ground, just outside the tent, hadn't been anybody's imagination.
Other than insisting there was no ghost, Jacob had hardly spoken to me. I didn't mind his silence so much, considering that I was currently sitting in his lap, leaning into his broad chest. His head bent over me in part because of the low ridge of the dog tent and in part because he was concentrating on rubbing my feet to warm them.
Maybe I should have pointed out that the ground was frosty, not frozen. My feet would be just fine. But I wasn't stupid enough to reject a foot rub from a handsome cowboy.
I couldn't think of anywhere I'd rather be than snuggled up against even a silent husband. Especially as I tried to piece together what had happened to me. Ghosts probably didn't leave footprints, but I had to consider other options than the supernatural, right?
The sun hadn't even risen yet. Was Benj sure?
"Plenty of prints to choose from," he insisted. "Out here, and over to the side. They are bare lady feet. They're yours."
"But I didn't go to the side of the tent." I got that chill again, nothing to do with the temperature and everything to do with the weirdness. "Could they be Maddie's footprints?"
Jacob's warm, calloused hands stilled momentarily, and he shut his eyes and bowed his head even further. I don't think he was praying. I think he was just tired of my ghost talk.
"I know what I heard," I told him softly.
He sighed and opened his eyes again. His light-brown hair fell over his forehead and into one eye, making him look almost vulnerable. "Ain't no ghost."
"As I recall," noted Benj, "the lovely Dr. Sinclair stood right taller than you."
"Ain't no ghost," repeated Jacob more loudly, for his benefit. "Weren't Miss Sinclair." I had the feeling he wanted to add, Miss Sinclair is dead. If he didn't, it was out of deference to my feelings.
Still, I got what Benj was getting at. "Her feet were bigger than mine," I admitted. "We couldn't wear each other's shoes."
"So ain't it possible," suggested Benj, "that you weren't quite awake when you did the walkin'?"
"Yep." Jacob switched his attentions to my other foot.
"I suppose," I hedged, less convinced. If that mysterious presence outside the tent had been anyone, it had to have been Maddie. The voice had called me Lillabit, and I knew of no other female who used that name.
I'd never sleep-walked before... but there was a first time for everything.
"You're sure the footprints are the same size?" I asked.
"I am" Benj agreed. "And you got this little gap between the toes of yer left foot." He held up one hand, making the Live Long and Prosper sign from Star Trek.
Both Jacob and I studied that particular foot. Sure enough, while the toes of my right foot sat flush against each other, the third and fourth toes of my left foot divided slightly. It wasn't so obvious that I couldn't wear sandals, but I guessed it made my footprint unique. "I broke the middle toe once," I agreed. "So... I sleep-walked?"
"That you did."
At least that explained why I'd grabbed the mirror. Sleep logic isn't the same as awake logic.
I felt marginally relieved, but equally disappointed. I missed Maddie. I missed all of them. How cruel was it, that the only time-traveler left was the one who was probably coming to kill me?
Jacob finally spoke to me, again. "Ain't no ghosts. Ain't from the future. Need you right-minded."
I had to remind myself that I'd given him permission to not believe me about the time traveling. It still hurt, just a little. "I am right-minded," I insisted.
He said, "Good."
He even kissed me on the cheek!
But I wasn't completely sure he believed in my sanity, either.
I pointed this out to Benj that afternoon, while I sat snuggling with Sundae. Have you ever hugged a cow? You really should give it a try. She wouldn't lie down on command, but if she did happen to settle for awhile, during the day, I would sometimes get down on the ground with her. This proved much easier in boy-clothes. Often I would wrap my arms around her neck and pet her slab shoulders and scruffle behind her fuzzy ears. She would rest her brown-and-white head on my chest, and I would tell her all my troubles while she sighed her bovine contentment. At other times, like if I was enjoying a good book, I would use Sundae as a backrest as I sat and read, and she napped and snacked.
Reminder: Not only did I have no female friends in 1878. I had no pets. At one point in my walking, I'd even came across a nest of baby skunks, and they looked so much like kittens that, despite all logic, I'd been very tempted to try adopting one. Instead, I counted myself lucky not to have gotten sprayed, and I made do with my horses and my cow.
See? As I reminded Benj, I really was still sane.
"He knows you are of sound mind," agreed my friend, balancing in that cowboy crouch he and the others found so comfortable, and which I could never manage for more than a few minutes, tops. "I doubt I ever seen Jacob admire a gal so much as he admires you."
Really? I definitely liked hearing that. I even believed him.
Jacob had held me on his lap, and rubbed my feet!
And yet... "Well he sure seemed touchy about--" The ghost. "My dream, and the sleep-walking," I edited.
That didn't feel quite right, either.
Benj reached out and scratched the bridge of Sundae's broad nose, between her huge, long-lashed eyes. "I reckon you should talk to him about the first Mrs. Jacob Garrison."
I said, "Hah." Because I doubted Jacob would ever talk to me about his first wife. "I can hardly get him to talk to me about me. If there's something about Lisle that I need to know, you should probably tell me."
Benj spread his hands, to indicate his helplessness to do such a thing. But he still looked troubled.
Speaking of helplessness and trouble, I asked, "Has there been any sign of Slade Callahan following us?"
Benj said, "Mrs. Lisle Garrison... she struggled some, after the babies."
Wait. I was pretty clear that Jacob only had one child, not counting the little Jacob Jr. I was busy growing inside me. I had one stepchild. At Benj's use of the plural, I sat up from my cow. "Babies?" I knew what that had to mean. "Lisle and Jacob lost a baby?"
Benj worked his cheek. "I ought not to be tellin' you this."
And yet he was. My hand slid protectively over my abdomen, through the rough, brown boy pants I wore. "When?"
"Lost the first afore Thaddeas," he admitted. "Lost the second, after him. I do not believe they tried again, after that."
"That poor woman!"
The way that Benj shrugged--Benj, defender of femininity, gallant hero and true gentleman--shocked me to my core.
I repeated, in a more determined tone, "That. Poor. Woman."
"I thought the same, 'bout the first child. But she was unkind to my pard, and she weren't much of a mother after Thaddeas came. Somethin' went wrong with that gal, and she plumb wore out my sympathies. I only mention it so's you'll understand why Jacob spooks some if he thinks you're talkin' nonsense. Once burned, twice shy."
"What went wrong with her?" My brain was already starting to make a list of possibilities.
Benj shook his head. "Reckon I told you too much already."
"No no no. You can't just dangle that little bit of information in front of me and then shut me out."
"Sweet Lillabit, I would do near 'bout anythin' fer you, and you well know it." And I did. I didn't even need the intensity with which he'd fixed me, with those blue eyes, to believe him. Everything about Benj from the day we'd met spoke to his support of me. "But this is Jacob's heartbreak to tell."
Heartbreak. That meant he could love people.
"Then... tell me something you saw. Not something he told you about her."
He chuckled ruefully. "That man told me near to nothin'. You know full well that if he got wounded, and nobody noticed the blood or the bruise, likely he'd drop dead afore he'd mention it. But what I seen at his house ain't mine to relate, neither."
"And everything to do with Lisle probably happened at the house." That made sense, though I didn't love the insight it gave me into my own future. Only the house was the wife's realm. Everything outside the house was the man's.
Maybe I should enjoy my time sitting out in the sunshine--with a cow--while I could.
Then again, I knew of something that Benj wanted to talk about even less than Jacob's first marriage. "So... Slade Callahan," I said. "How worried should I be about him coming after me, do you think?"
Benj offered Sundae a handful of clover. "You just let me and Jacob worry about Callahan."
"It's hard not to think about him out there somewhere."
As I'd hoped, Benj changed the subject. "All right. I will share one story with you, but if you let on I told, I will deny it to my dyin' breath."
I nodded, anxious to finally learn more.
"This took place maybe nine years back. 'Bout this time of year, as I recollect. Jacob had gotten back to the family after bossin' his latest drive, ready to settle for the winter, and he asked me to ride with him to Austin."
I readjusted my position against the warm, furry backrest that was Sundae. "What was in Austin?"
Benj said, with no amusement, "The Texas State Lunatic Asylum."
"The what?!"
"The Texas State--"
I held up a hand to stop him before he repeated the last two, ugly words. The idea made me sick inside--sick, and a little scared. Yet again, as with during the sheep-discussion, I had to wonder if 'til death do us part held the permanence I'd assumed. "Jacob was planning on committing her?! He didn't, did he?"
"Wouldn't call it a plan," Benj assured me. "More like... scouting out the lay of the land. And it was some lovely land, at that."
"Lovely," I challenged.
"Indeed it was. Two miles north of the city, on a hill with live-oaks and evergreens. Folks would drive out for Sunday picnics to enjoy the view, maybe spot themselves a lunatic or two."
I resisted the urge to cover my ears. "Please don't use that word."
He looked honestly confused. "What word?"
"The L-word. Call them... mentally ill."
"Well. Jacob and me, we met with the superintendent by the name of Graham. Jacob asked what help could be given a... a woman with mental illness. And do you know? The place had much to recommend it. Graham talked about the fresh air and the grounds as therapeutic. Told us how each room had a window, 'cept for the coloreds, who were housed in the basement."
God.
"He explained the patients' schedules, with medicines and exercise and whatnot. If it weren't for the smell there--paraldehyde, I think it's called--the place might have been rest resort."
"Really," I challenged. I'd expected to hear about, I don't know, straight-jackets and electro-shock treatments... although I guess in the years before electricity, that last one was unlikely.
"I was as surprised as you," Benj assured me. "This was afore the place got so overcrowded as it is currently reputed to be. Graham explained about a ninety-day commitment, and I truly thought Jacob would take him up on it. I even thought it might be for the best, for him and that boy. But when we left, all he said to me was, Nope. And we never talked of it again."
That sounded about right--and still so very wrong, too. "Their marriage was so bad, you thought committing Lisle would be for the best?"
"I did. But you ain't married a man who would ask someone else to take on his responsibilities." Finally, Benj smiled again, if ruefully. "Even someone else better trained for it."
"And now he has to worry that I'm going crazy too." My poor Jacob.
"That is my point, Sweet Lillabit. Jacob's got reason enough to spook at yer talk of ghosts and time travel. But he wouldn't commit the wife he had what needed it. You are a far cry from her."
But did she need it, really?
She struggled some, after the babies.
I had a pretty good guess about what might have afflicted my predecessor... and the kind of guilt my husband must be carrying because of it.
"Tell me about Lisle," I asked Jacob, as I snuggled against him that night.
"No." He sounded so tired, I almost felt guilty. Maybe I should have asked him about his dead first wife before the sex... but I didn't love the idea of that segue.
"Why not?" I pillowed my head on his shoulder, my hand on his chest. Little bits of perspiration on my forehead were drying in the chill night air, but his hard arms and his body radiated heat. Damp heat, since he'd sweated some too, but we had our covers, and our tent, to hold off the night air. Even his breath warmed me.
Physically, I felt amazing. Emotionally, I worried about him. A lunatic asylum...?
"You never talk about Lisle," I said.
"She ain't yer ghost neither."
How had that not occurred to me before now?! Isn't the first wife haunting the second wife classic Horror 101?
But there was absolutely no reason Lisle would call me Lillabit.
"I'm not saying there is a ghost—just that it really seemed like there was at the time. You and Benj are probably right. I probably sleep-walked."
"Probably," he grumped.
"Take what you can get, Mr. Garrison."
"Yes, ma'am."
I kind of loved it when he called me ma'am. But he'd distracted me from my initial line of inquiry. "It's just... I've heard rumors about...."
He tensed, beneath me. I think he might have been holding his breath.
"I'm sorry that you and Lisle lost babies."
"Ain't lost 'em. Some as ain't meant to live."
"It must have been a terrible blow, all the same. I can't even imagine...." Except, now I could. My own pregnancy, still invisible to outsiders, had progressed to the point that Jacob could and often did cup my barely there baby bump with his hand. He could only find it because of how skinny all that walking had made me otherwise, but still—nearing the end of my first trimester made Jacob Jr. all the more real, and with that brought real fears. If Maddie, Mitch, and Ted could be wiped out of my life in a matter of moments, and Lisle could lose not one but two babies....
Damn. Bad direction to head, Lillabit. Still, I'd started this for a reason. "Having babies changed her, didn't it?"
Jacob growled the word, "Cooper."
"I only ask because, where I come from, we have a term for that. It's called post-partum depression, and it's a very real thing. It happens because of hormones, chemicals in the brain. It doesn't mean she didn't love you or Thaddeas. It just means she was sick, like... like if she'd caught cholera or something. But it's a kind of sick that made her, what—cry all the time? Withdraw from people?"
It occurred to me that I was completely out of my depth, here. I had never studied this topic, and I had never had friends who had babies.
"Goodnight, Elizabeth."
"I doubt she meant to hurt you." But I was talking from ignorance here, too, wasn't I?
Jacob confirmed that when he said, "She meant it."
Why was he so sure? What had she done?! But he'd been pretty clear about not wanting to discuss it, so I had to take the crumbs he'd dropped and be happy with them.
"Well then—I won't try to hurt you. And I'm not going insane. Even when I talk about ghosts."
For a long moment, I thought maybe he'd fallen asleep. Then Jacob said, "Where you come from."
Because if I wasn't really a time-traveler, then there wasn't really any such thing as diagnosable post-partum depression, or hormones, or brain chemistry.
"Just... trust me on this. It wasn't her fault. It wasn't your fault."
Instead of agreeing or disagreeing, he said, "Keep close to the chuck wagon this week."
"Why?"
"Jest trust me on this."
I shifted my position to crane my head upward and kiss his throat. "I love you, Jacob Garrison."
He kissed me on top of the head. "Good night, Mrs. Garrison."
It would have to be enough.