At Close Range

“A teacher of many hats,” he said, and leaned back in the chair, relaxed for the first time since he’d driven onto the ranch.

She smiled at him—a bit wistfully, he thought. “It’s a dream, I know. But…”

“One that’s already working.” Abruptly, it wasn’t just the job he wanted, but to reassure her that the ranch-cum-children’s-home dream was already coming true.

“Yes,” she said, and gave him the most genuine smile she’d managed with him so far—except when she’d expressed her wish for a miracle.

He felt that smile like a fever coming on, making him feel hot and restless.

“So far it’s working.” She cleared her throat as if remembering she was conducting an interview. “Are you currently teaching somewhere, Mr. Dorsey?”

“Mack,” he said.

“Okay. Sorry. Mack, are you teaching anywhere right now?”

“Nothing to apologize for and, no, at the moment I’m not teaching, so I’d be available immediately,” he said.

She gave him a funny look before making another scratch in her notepad. “And when was the last time you were in the classroom, Mr. Dorsey?”

“Mack,” he corrected. He realized then that she didn’t know who he was, that she didn’t realize that he was the so-called hero of the Enchanted Hills incident. Teacher heroically sacrifices himself to rescue ten students burning in blazing inferno. And what else was an inferno but blazing and what was a sacrifice when he had lived and five children had died?

For a moment, as so often happened, the cries of the children, both rescued and lost, echoed in his ears and his nose stung from the acrid scent of burning schoolrooms.

Corrie Stratton, the woman with the golden voice and the coffee-liqueur eyes didn’t blink. Lady journalist extraordinaire, this tiny scrap of a woman didn’t seem to have a clue as to his identity.

He gave a faint and, he hoped, easy smile. “I’ve been out for two years.”

She looked up at him and raised an eyebrow. He must have made some kind of gesture. He found it somewhat ironic that he’d come to Milagro in part to escape the newshounds, the incessant prying into his life, and was now being interviewed by one of the nation’s leading investigative journalists and she didn’t have a clue about him. Because of that news interest, he had assumed Corrie’s partner, Leeza, had known who he was and hadn’t asked him to discuss his reasons for being out of the classroom for such a long time when he went through the initial phone interview with Leeza and the secondary meeting with Jeannie. He found himself stymied and irrationally resenting having to reveal the truth about his scars and talk about the many things he couldn’t explain away—the pain, the losses. Her gaze traveled from his hands to the scars on his face. “An accident?” she asked.

Could one call a deliberately executed firebomb that killed five children and a cafeteria worker an accident? In a cosmic fashion, perhaps that would be true.

“Yes,” he said, and didn’t elaborate. He was grateful when she didn’t pursue that line of questioning.

She cleared her throat again. “You do realize that you’d have to be living here on Milagro?”

Living on a miracle. Better than the bitter ashes of regret. “That works for me,” he said truthfully. He didn’t add that it would be an escape. A refuge. Just dodging the media would be a miracle in and of itself.

“And that because we’re providing room and board—and a horse, if you want to ride—we’re not offering even close to what could be considered a competitive salary?”

“With the add-ons of the living quarters, food and, of course, a horse, I’m okay with the salary, provided you offer insurance.”

To her credit, she didn’t look at his scars this time, though he could see a noticeable rise in her color. “Of course. That’s a given.” She didn’t look up as she added, “We require a thirty-day probationary period.”

“Accepted.”

Her eyes shot to his. He felt a jolt of something hot and fiery shoot through him. He had to clear his throat before asking, “Are you offering me the job, Ms. Stratton?” Her partners, Jeannie and Leeza, had led him to believe this interview was pro forma only.

For all the nights of listening to her voice in the loneliest hours of the dark, believing her stories, fantasizing about her, he suddenly wanted her to ask him to stay, not because he was qualified, but because she wanted him to. Knowing a fantasy was impossible didn’t make it fade any more swiftly.

“Corrie,” she said, without answering him.

“What?”

“You can call me Corrie.”

It was like being asked to call Dan Rather, Dan, or Barbara Walters, Babs. But whatever he’d thought before coming out here, despite the needs he’d felt when he saw the opening advertised, he wanted this job now. He wanted it more than anything on the face of the earth. “Okay. Corrie, then.”

Her eyes met his and he saw the wary denial in her gaze. Disappointment shafted through him. She would say no. She didn’t want him as a teacher on this ranch of miracles. Then he saw something else in her gaze. Something confused and alluring, a look that had nothing whatsoever to do with teaching.

He rasped, “Are you offering me the job?”

She shook her head, though her eyes implored him to understand something she didn’t voice. He clearly saw her wary rejection. “I…I don’t think I can do anything without the approval of my partners, Mr. Dorsey—”

“Just call me Mack.” Two could play at that game.

“Mack.” He thought she repeated his name as if savoring it. Her eyes flickered and she shook her head. “I don’t think I can—”

A horse’s angry whinny and a child’s scream cut her words off midstream. In the split second of hesitation following the scream, their eyes locked. Hers, he thought, carried a wealth of fear and helplessness, a pleading that he do something. His, he was sure, told her he couldn’t do a thing to help, that people had died because of him before.

But looking into the depths of her coffee eyes, he felt powerless to resist her. Without a word, he shoved away from the table and was through the doors and across the veranda.

From the time of the scream to his leap from the steps, no more than three seconds could have passed.

A flashy pinto, with a small kid of nine or ten looking like a rag-doll saddle decoration, bucked and lurched toward the hacienda steps, whinnying shrilly and trying his best to rid himself of the child-burr on his back. The boy, all eyes and scrawny legs, screamed bloody murder and held on to the saddle horn for dear life.

Without thinking about it, Mack jumped from the bottom of the steps, directly into the heaving horse’s path. The beast shuddered and whinnied anew but skidded to a halt.

Mack heard a swift shriek from behind him. He heard other yells and ignored them. All his attention was focused only on the horse and the small boy perched above him.

The little boy, who had somehow held on during the wild ride, lost his control at the abrupt stop and pitched forward. He somersaulted down the horse’s neck to land at Mack’s feet.

Mack hooked a leg around the boy and flipped him behind him, not worrying how the boy would fare against the dirt, but terrified that the shivering horse would decide to rear and bring its sharp hooves down onto the child.

Though he knew less than nothing about horses, he instinctively reached for the fallen reins of the horse’s bridle and, talking to the horse the whole time, managed to secure them. The horse turned a white, rolled eye in his direction and, trembling, stamped the ground and huffed several times before seeming to realize he was all right.

When he could find his voice, Mack asked gruffly, “Hey, kid, you okay?”

Corrie stood frozen on the veranda steps, both hands holding a scream inside. Fractured images of alternate timelines flashed through her mind, other presents and myriad futures: Mack Dorsey sitting calmly at the dining table, handing over references while Juan Carlos flew across the air to thud on the ground with a final groan of pain. Mack and Corrie laughing over something and Juan Carlos trampled by Dancer’s hooves. A funeral, a pregnant Jeannie crying in her husband’s arms, a headstone with Juan Carlos’s birthdate etched and the death date today. Juan Carlos riding Dancer and Mack Dorsey deciding not to come to Rancho Milagro that fine early spring afternoon.

She heard him ask, “Hey, kid, you okay?”

Juan Carlos sat up, perfectly all right, using Mack Dorsey’s jeans as a pulley. “Y-yeah, I think. Yeah, I’m okay.”

Somehow, Corrie managed to get down the steps despite her watery legs and reached Juan Carlos about the same time the groundskeeper and sometimes groom, Jorge, came limping around the corner of the hacienda, gasping and cursing in little bursts of winded Spanish.

Even as she patted the boy down, trying unsuccessfully to pry him from his grip on Mack Dorsey’s legs, Corrie felt like laughing at Jorge’s bedraggled curses. Juan Carlos, according to Jorge, would fall down a rabbit hole and be twitched to death by bunny whiskers. Juan Carlos, before the day was over, would have his face torn off by magpies and sewn on backward by prairie dogs. Juan Carlos, if he didn’t learn to listen to Jorge, would have to learn the entire alphabet in both Spanish and English backward and forward.

“Niño,” Jorge panted, seeing the boy alive and tremulously smiling up at Mack Dorsey, “next time you want to kill old Jorge, just get a gun, okay?” He bent over, a hand on his chest, another on one knee.