Wild Ways. Naomi Horton

and dived into the icy water, coming up sputtering and breathless and shocked fully awake.

      He’d gathered his old clothes up into a pile and burned them, then had cut his hair and burned that, too. He’d made it a ceremony of sorts, tossing a little tobacco into the flames to thank whatever spirits had held him back from dying, smiling at his own whimsy.

      His pickup truck was still in a ditch about a mile down the trail where he’d run it into a tree. He’d winched it out, driven it up to the small meadow where the trailer was and cleaned it up, tossing out the empty bottles and then scrubbing out the stink of vomit and stale sweat and despair.

      He’d started running the next day. It had nearly killed him at first. He would run twenty feet and stagger the next twenty, pouring with sweat and cursing with the pain as every muscle in his body knotted. But after a week or two the twenty feet stretched to fifty, then a hundred, and then he suddenly broke through and was running like a deer. He ran without thought or purpose those first few months, just pounding down the miles like someone trying to outrun his own demons, and maybe that was what he had been doing.

      The healing started sometime during those months. His mind became as lean and healthy as his body, and soon he’d found himself thinking of the future again. Not long-range. Just a day or two at first. But, as with his physical endurance, that got stronger with time and practice, as well. Soon he was planning a whole week ahead, then the week stretched to a month, and somewhere along the line, without even realizing when it had happened, he was thinking in terms of years.

      But until now, those thoughts had been solitary ones. Simple things, mostly, like what kind of water pump to buy when he realized the old one was finally beyond repair, and the best direction to angle the woodshed to keep the snow from blowing straight in, things like that. Now and again he would take on a retrieval job, adding his fee to the pile of fifty-dollar bills hidden behind the paneling in his bedroom closet, but mostly he stayed to himself up here.

      There was always something to do. Repairing leaks in the trailer’s sunbaked hide alone was almost a full-time job, the generator needed regular tune-ups, and there were books to read and wood to chop. It was a simple life, physical and free of the complexities and confusions and complications of the outside world, and he liked it just fine that way.

      Until Mary Margaret Kavanagh had starting turning up in his thoughts for no reason he could figure, and suddenly things weren’t the same at all.

      Swearing under his breath, Rafe turned the key in the truck’s ignition. The engine caught instantly and he gunned it a few times, listening carefully. He’d spent the better part of the morning tuning it up and was finally pleased with the way it sounded, although there had been nothing much wrong with it in the first place. He’d blown out the fuel line, replaced a couple of hoses and put in new spark plugs, and short of stripping the thing down to basics and starting all over again, there wasn’t much more he could do.

      Filling time. Trying not to think of her.

      He refused to let his mind wrap itself around the syllables of her name. He’d been doing that a little too often, too. Her name was like a line of poetry or a bit of music he couldn’t get out of his head, and now and again he would realize he’d been running it over and over in his thoughts like some tribal chant, the rhythm of the words almost hypnotic.

      Mary Margaret Kavanagh.

      Hell of a mouthful. Maybe her parents had hoped she would grow into it.