Borrowed Horses (5 page)

I think he could have made partner in California—made enough to buy me a stable full of horses—but I don’t think he would have been happy. My mother offered him a different vision of success.

She’s tough, my mother: not aggressive, but unyielding. After UCLA, I’d bet that she would have moved to Moscow whether my father had come or not, even with no job and a dozen other weighty unknowns. Or maybe this is just the story I’ve constructed for them, based more on the parents I know now than the kids they were then: a freshly-minted law school grad and a college dropout, just figuring out how to live, deciding when to trust love to give up one possible life for another.

We ate potato, cheese, and onion casserole in the nook off the kitchen. My parents never had need of a formal dining room. I can’t ever once remember having a dinner party. Dinner was for family, which included Mouse.

I watched them, trying to figure it out, their love. What was it about my tight-lipped, wise-eyed mother that made my father give up everything for her? A few photos of her from their college days still existed, faded now and dog-eared at the edges. Clearly, she was beautiful. More than that, even. She seemed ethereal in her long calico skirts and peasant dresses. The tilt of her chin was regal even now, like the world couldn’t quite touch her. And yet, she wasn’t warm in the way my father was. I’d seen him chat with Moscow’s homeless in the same openly friendly manner he used with the mayor or the postman. He was just one of those guys who never met a stranger. Mom was more reserved.

The potatoes were warm and silky on the tongue, cheese melting between each layer. My parents had a way of turning the most mundane dish into something sublime. When I was a kid, Dad told me that everything they made was seasoned with love. I’d always written that off as just another hokey parentalism. Now, I wondered if that was true. What my parents had was a rare thing. I’d never seen two adults with that kind of bond.

They wouldn’t approve of what I had done last night, yet I did not feel sorry. In the face of despair, I had snatched back control. Like my father, I, too, could trade one dream for another. Like my parents, I took love while I had the chance.

Packing to go to Jack Stewart’s, I’d asked my parents if they were sorry to see me leave. My father, for once, looked away, dodging the question. My mother smiled. “You were given this talent for a reason, Joannie.” She didn’t mention God, but his guidance was understood. It hadn’t stopped Foxy from aging.

Red calico curtains hung in the window of the nook, the corn-flower-speckled print too regular for constellations, too irregular for pattern. Mom hadn’t mentioned God since I came back, but I doubted either her chair or my failure could shake her faith. She talked of a new local bakery whose bread they’d sell in the Co-op next month. Dad listened with the air of one still fascinated, the way that Dave had listened to me the night before.

My father smiled at me, benevolence in every crinkle of his hooded eyes. “Penny for your thoughts?”

I smiled back. “You think I’m so cheaply bought off, old man?”

My father laughed and winked at me. “That’s my girl.”

Dawn was the closest friend I had had since Mouse, but I hadn’t called more than a handful of times in the years I’d been away. We were friends from the barn, and we talked in person, either on horseback or over beers, rather than on the phone. On the day Foxy was coming back, she called to ask if I wanted to grab lunch. Dick’s was dark and seedy and the food was greasy, but there wasn’t a cheaper beer and burger to be had in Moscow.

While I waited for Dawn, I counted the seconds between the disappearance and reappearance of the red bow of the neon “Miller Time” sign in the small, foggy window. One, two, three, cut out. One, two, three, light up. Dormancy, illumination, dormancy.

Dawn entered, parting the construction workers huddled around the unfinished plywood bar, just another Red Sea. Two watched her enter and begged her to lift her jacket so they could watch her Wrangler Ws as she walked. Dawn left them groaning behind her. I settled back in my chair, distinctly less than alluring in my hospital scrubs, and contemplated the condensation on my glass and the maps it made as it wept.

“So,” she said, “where the fuck’s my gold medal?” Dawn had a way of leveling conversation like a gun. She would call it shooting straight, but there was something simultaneously intimate about it, something like the connection between predator and prey. She had hunted since she was ten years old: deer, elk, pheasant, grouse, turkey. She always filled her tag, then hunted for anyone who hadn’t filled theirs. Not being a hunter myself, I had never seen her in her hunting gear, so I imagined her hunting as I saw her now: a small woman with hair teased three inches high wearing red hot Wranglers, a star-spangled blouse, and an expression that dared you to mess with her.

“Gold medal? Shit,” I smiled. “What makes you think you deserve one?”

“I put up with you, don’t I? If that don’t deserve a gold medal, I sure as hell don’t know what does.”

“By which, I suppose, you mean that you survived two years without me, and deserve a medal for making it so long on your own?”

“It was a pretty amazing disappearing act.”

“Yeah, well, I’m back,” I said and realized that for the first time, it didn’t feel like defeat. Dave had given me his book that day:
The Count of Monte Cristo
, his favorite. I promised I’d read it so we could talk about it later. When his lips touched mine, there was no more Jersey, no more age, no more failure.

“Pick up any cute guys in Jersey?”

I sat back in my chair and rolled my eyes. “Two and a half years gone and I walk right back into the same fucking conversation.”

“In two and a half years, any other red-blooded American woman would’ve had some flings. You got to give me something, Joannie. Keep the conversation interesting.”

“I was a bit busy trying to earn that stupid gold medal, remember?”

Dawn rolled her eyes. “Only you see that as a full time job.”

“There are always men,” I said. “It’s not like they won’t keep.”

Dawn laughed. She was the one person since Mouse with whom I could have this conversation, the one person who didn’t question my sexual orientation simply because I didn’t have a steady boyfriend. “If you change your mind,” she said, “there’s a cutie looking our way from the bar right now.”

I could have told her about Dave, but I didn’t. In a moment, she would’ve seen the hope I would not admit even to myself: two people in an oven-warmed kitchen, making a life together. Dawn would have seen the vacancy where a barn once stood.

For two weeks, I gave Dave every moment, going from night shift work to his hotel room each morning to wake in his arms as if I owned the right to them, sleeping in his bed until lunch when he came to share another hour, leaving for the barn after he was gone again and the apartment was just another empty box. Foxfire was the only truth I’d never been able to deny, but careful to give Dave no sense of my failure, I kept Foxy my secret.

At birth, a human child has roughly three hundred bones, but many of these fuse as we grow. Our adult skeleton only has 206. With age, we grow more rigid. Our underlying structure knits and sets. We begin to break more easily than we bend. I told myself that I was young still; I could still bend. I could find a way to be the Joannie he saw, the only one I’d ever shown him, the one that didn’t really exist.

I watched Dave write in his little black notebook and listened as he read what he’d written, words that made me all puddled, words that made me still, words I’d somehow inspired, words that made me feel I could leap from my skin and exist in some better form, words that warmed poor, dull October into something vivid and rich. I’d listen, feeling like I only now understood what the word “amazement” meant, how it connected to puzzles and to delight.

Then, he’d crawl over the bed to me and stroke my hair until the words faded against the greater truth of touch. I sacrificed all I’d ever believed about myself, and I would have sacrificed it over and over again if only allowed to, but the gold on my false idol only took two weeks to chip.

It chipped under the blade of a word: wife.

His arms wrapped around me, Dave spoke of her, pressing his lips against my head, whispering how little she meant to him, how little he’d known of what love could be until I had taught him. His grip bruised, but I sat stricken in the headlights of another failure. All that night, he crushed my body to his as if he could prevent my escape.

Night shift: I sat in the dim light long past midnight with my humming machines. Under the weight of a heavy apron, my hand lay on my belly. I covered bodies in lead, shielding the vulnerable. I rolled them around on my cold table, positioning them under my cross of light, and took pictures of skeletons. I had to remind myself that I was no ghost. There was something solid in me. Something inflexible and unyielding. Something that, thankfully, would break before it bent.

He’d made no offer to leave her.

Dislocations, compound fractures. I have seen the body when no bones give it shape. I have felt the sag of un-boned flesh, the wobble of it like partially set pudding. It’s not a pretty sight, but it’s a reminder. Without something rigid at the core, a framework, we are scarcely human.

He worked for her father; his livelihood depended on her, he’d said. Excuses.

A human bone is many times stronger than a steel rod of the same weight. When a living bone breaks, it re-knits and grows whole again. The repaired bone is thicker than before, unlikely to break in the same place.

I am not a man of steel, and for this, I am grateful. I am a woman of bone.

I envisioned his wife, an Amazonian Barbie doll. She’d be beautiful, long and leggy. She’d be a woman men would swoon for, someone for whom you’d sacrifice your fondest dreams.

We are never shorter or taller than the bones we inhabit. Our secret, the skeleton, determines our life: our vantage, our carriage, our abilities. Our understanding of and interrelations with the world is determined in part by those bones. Hers would be strong and straight. She would be one of the blessed ones, the gifted ones. She would dress her bones in well-cut, expensive fabrics. She would do her hair and nails. Unlike Dave, she was not a thinker or a reader—that much, he’d told me. She had no need for poetry. She was a person for whom life’s gifts came easily and generously.

I could have justified stealing the husband of a woman like that.

The door opened to a wheelchair, taking me thankfully out of my thoughts. The nurse pushed a chart at me, but I ignored him for the moment, focusing on the patient. The nurse and his chart could wait. My patient’s eyes shifted around the room, and I laid my hand on her quivering wrist to soothe her. She was twenty or so, thin, black-haired and blue-eyed. Her cheek bore a long, straight gash and was quickly bruising. Too quickly, she said, “I fell down the stairs. Ice.” Even her voice seemed to shake.

I didn’t believe the story, but I didn’t judge. “We’ll get you fixed up.”

Her eyes, as they met mine, were full of fear, but she sighed and became calmer. “It’s my ankle.”