Alden suddenly trots over to me, beaming.  “You,” he says and promptly drops the chicken feathers in my lap.  I fuss over the bent, half-bald feathers and thank him profusely.  Before returning to his chicken torture, Alden stops and stares at Oz.  Oz stares back.

Once Alden is back at his games, I try to return Oz’s water bottle.  He ignores my outstretched hand.

“Tennessee,” he finally says.  “I’ve been there for a little while.  Got a job, a nice place.”

“And before that?”

“Before that I wandered.”

“Wandered?”

“Yeah, wandered.”

“You come across any other people in your so-called wanderings?”

A roughish smile crosses his face.  “I came in a lot of other people.”

“Jesus Christ,” I hiss, standing stiffly.

“What?” he says innocently.  “You don’t want to hear about it?  I’m trying to evoke some nostalgia here.”

“You’re disgusting, Oz.”

“Probably.  But you’re a shell of what you were, Loren.”

I can’t breathe.  If words could pack a punch, those particular ones are made of pure dynamite.   Oz Acevedo, formerly Oscar Savage, just distilled my worst horror into one sentence.  And he knows it.  He waits for me to say something and I desperately want do want to say something.  I want to cut him as deeply as he’s just cut me.  I want to hurt him.  So I tell an enormous lie.

“I was just a stupid girl.  In the long run you didn’t mean a damn thing to me.”

He doesn’t even blink.  “Ditto, sweetheart.  You were just a ripe cherry to pop.”

I’m shaking.  I’m going to explode.  “God, you’ve turned into such a foul-mouthed pig.”

He answers me casually, like he doesn’t care at all what I think.  “And you’ve turned into a feeble-minded wreck.”

He doesn’t wait around for my response.  He stalks away without glancing back and disappears around the corner of the barn.

Alden remains oblivious that there is anything more interesting going on than the sight of flustered chickens.  Stoically I sit back down and try to banish Oz’s final words from my mind. I don’t know how much the cameras have captured.  At this point I can’t force myself to care.

For the rest of the day I focus on Alden.  I feed him lunch, I tend to his scraped knee, I welcome him into my lap when he asks for a story.  When Ava gets home she finds us on a back porch swing.  Alden shouts with joy when he sees his mother and practically vaults out of my lap and into her arms.  I stare at my sister and her child, at the pure, unsullied love between them.   In a way I’m almost jealous.

Ava sits down beside me and sets the boy in her lap.  She starts chattering about the disastrous cattle roping experience. Evidently Bree ignored all instructions and managed to get thrown from her horse, earning an ass full of sand and gravel.

“Well,” I say with false cheer, “I suppose that’s the end of the Savage cowgirl days.  Perhaps we should try being farmers instead.”

Ava’s watching me.  “Everything okay on the home front?”

No. 

“Yup.  Everything is fine.  If you guys will excuse me, I think I’ll head to the kitchen and bake a cake.”

“I thought you never cooked anymore.”

“I don’t.”

“You used to cook all the time.  Back in the bad old days when we lived here.  If not for you, we would have been eating cheese sandwiches every night.”

“Just trying to contribute.”

“Ren?”

“What?”

Ava sighs and heaves herself up with Alden in her arms.  “I’d better put this kid in for a nap or he’ll be the devil later on.”

Someone has been keeping the fridge and pantry well stocked.  I have no difficulty finding enough necessary ingredients to bake a yellow cake with buttercream icing.  Once I’m in the rhythm of kitchen activity I decide to cobble together a dinner of roast chicken, pasta salad and baking soda biscuits.  The oven is something of an antique but it still works when it needs to.

As soon as I start setting food on the table, my siblings seem to magically materialize.  It’s all too familiar.  Lita floated far above kitchen tasks and we couldn’t exactly eat out every night all the way out here, even if we’d been able to afford it.  If there was any cooking to be done so people could eat, then I was the one to do it.

I wash dishes in the background as Ava happily feeds her son, while Bree grudgingly takes a few bits of salad and then limps elsewhere, when Spence wanders inside looking as rough as if he’d just spent a few hours running with the bulls, which might very well be accurate.

There are cameras.

There is no Monty.

There is no Oz.

The sun is sinking below the horizon by the time I finish putting the kitchen back together.  Cate Camp knocks on the door.   She wants me to know that I seem to have misplaced my body mic.  I don’t answer her.  I’ll play the game again tomorrow.  Tonight I don’t feel like being wired.  In a few hours the crew will drive back to town.  Of course, cameras are installed all over the property but they seem more innocent when they aren’t attached to people.

I invent work for myself by cleaning up the house.  It’s mindless and nearly pleasant.  Anything to avoid thinking about Oz.  Every strange sound makes me recoil though.  I’m always afraid it’s him.  And in a sick way I hope it is him.

Finally the crew departs.  I linger on the front porch with the lights off, listening to the fading sound of the two trucks heading toward Consequences.

Montgomery lumbers up to the house with a cigarette in one hand and a bottle in the other.   He pauses and takes a drag on the cigarette while squinting at the fading light in the western sky.  It looks like he’s already made some progress on the bottle.

“Where’s your fan club?”

He shrugs.  “Gone hours ago.  That bitchy photographer had some ideas but I couldn’t get excited about the idea of more of my dick pics floating around the world wide web so I passed on that.”

“Charming,” I mutter.

“You asked,” he yawns.

“I guess I did. Anyway, there’s food in the fridge if you’re hungry.”

Monty doesn’t answer.  He doesn’t move either.  He just stands there puffing on his cigarette while staring into the distance.  After a full minute of silence he tilts his bottle in my direction.  At first I shake my head but then I take it and cough back a mouthful of liquid fire.  Whiskey.

When I can see straight again I realize Monty is watching me.  “I thought he was an asshole then,” he says. “I still think so.”

“Oscar?”

“Oscar.  Oz.  Whatever.”

“Well, I guess score one for you being right then.”

“I don’t give a shit about being right.  But maybe just because he’s an asshole doesn’t mean he’s a dickhead.”

“Monty Savage Reasoning at its finest.”

“Just saying, if he wanted to really fuck up your life he had his chance.”

“Cameras are still around,” I grumble.  “He’ll get more chances.”

“No he won’t.”

I’m curious now. “Why?”

“Because he’s leaving, Ren.”

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

OZ

Fuck it all.  I’m done.

The way we are with each other, it’s nothing but toxic.

In the afternoon I take a long hike and it’s while I’m among the lizards and the snakes that I think about every word Ren and I have exchanged since I got here.  However hostile she is to me, I manage to one up her every time.  I can’t seem to help it.

Every day I’m becoming a worse version of myself.

Did I come here to mess with her head?  Or did I come here because despite the pain of the past and the silence of five years I still had some hope?  That maybe with one look we would find our way back to those two kids who connected so strongly, loved so hard.

I don’t know the answer.  I never did.  This has been one massive fool’s errand.  The whim is over now.  Loren Savage and I are strangers.  Oscar Savage never existed.  It’s time for me to duck out of this fantasy and return to the world of Oz Acevedo.