Love Story

by Jennifer Echols

  Her mother’s huge house was surrounded by large grassy hills, like a ship rocking in thirty-foot seas. At the bottom of one hill she could see nothing but stars above her in the black sky. Climbing this hill, gradually she saw more and more of the long, low horse barn. No features of the ancient building were visible in the night. It was only a black block obliterating the starlight, one open doorway filled with brilliant light, and the smell of cigarette smoke.

  He was waiting for her.

  She was shocked by the intense wave of desire that swept through her. She had felt this way a hundred times in high school, a thousand times during that shining year in Hollywood when she’d still thought the world was hers. So seldom had she felt this way since—perhaps a few times with the father of her child. Every time he struck her, and apologized the next day, calling up that desire became harder. She picked up speed through the dewy grass until she ran toward that feeling.

  The man had seen her coming and had ground his cigarette under his riding boot. Now he laughed and caught her in his arms and swung her in a circle outside the barn. He had not grown up here like she had. He had grown up somewhere far away but similar, and she felt as if she had known him longer than a month.

  “You haven’t changed your mind.” He set his forehead against hers and chuckled these words to her. He was a tall, strong man with a lightness about him, always laughing as he spoke. He did not judge her for wanting him.

  “I haven’t changed my mind.” She took his rough hand and led him through the labyrinth she knew so well: past the barn office, down the dark main corridor with horse stalls on either side, to the bunk room in back.

  She’d had men here before, when she was a teenager with no business here. She hadn’t regretted her actions then. Now, looking back, perhaps those wild transgressions and her mother’s reaction when she found out had been the hottest fire lit under her feet and had sent her two thousand miles away. She dreaded her mother’s reaction still. But with any luck her mother would not find out until her relationship with this man, exactly her age, was stable and happy.

  “You are a beautiful woman.” He smiled down at her, running his rough fingers through her curls. “Here I thought I’d found a job in paradise, and then from out of nowhere comes an angel.”

  “Not from out of nowhere,” she teased him. “Out of the two thirty Greyhound from Glendale.”

  She bit her bottom lip, wishing she hadn’t made this silly joke. As a teen she would have made dozens of jokes like this in quick succession, daring a boy to keep up with her. The father of her child had taken these jokes to mean she thought she was smarter than he was, and twice this had been the reason he punched her. Exactly twice. She kept score.

  But her new man grinned and lightly touched his fingertip to her nose. Gently he eased her backward onto the sagging mattress covered with a clean quilt faded to pastels. With surprising force he took her mouth with his. She tasted cigarette and mint and comfort.

  Later they dressed. “Put it on,” he joked from the mattress, and she donned her clothes while pretending to move in reverse. She stepped outside the barn with him while he smoked a cigarette. She didn’t smoke, and any other time the smell and the habit would have annoyed her, but they seemed a part of this man, an imperfect but honest part.

  He offered her a cigarette and she should have taken it, and one more. Then they would have remained outside with room to run when the father of her child stormed through the front door of her mother’s grand house and out the side door.

  But she declined, and in the few more minutes she thought she could spare before her mother finally turned in for the night and perhaps looked in on her to make sure she hadn’t escaped again, she asked this kind man to show her the horses. She had seen them all when she’d first arrived home. She had run her hands over them to meet them and had exercised a few of them, but she wanted to see them through his eyes.

  They went into a stall with a massive brown stallion. They moved one stall down to discuss a white colt, then a black filly. The man said he’d heard the filly’s dam had looked exactly like this filly and had been at the farm when the woman left fourteen years before. The woman thought he must be mistaken. She did not want him to be mistaken, but she did not recognize this horse.

  She removed her hand from the filly’s withers and placed it on the man’s chest—with measured speed, so the filly would not be startled. “Did you hear something?”

  The man eyed her in disbelief, then looked in the direction of the barn door. There was a crash, a curse, the woman’s name called gruffly by the father of her child, and more faintly by her mother, in the distance. And then his silhouette filled the open doorway of the stall.

  There was no time to explain to her lover that the interloper was the father of her child, who must have suspected she would run back to her mother and had finally tracked her down.

  There was no time to explain to the father of her child that one should never, ever shout around a horse.

  The filly reared. The woman tried to duck, but her lover was close behind her. The filly’s horseshoe with a thousand pounds behind it struck her in the temple.

  She died instantly, or so they told me. Perhaps they told me that to comfort me, and her painless death was the biggest lie of all. I will never know for sure. I was in the closet with my earbuds in, reading Pride and Prejudice for the fifth time.

  But if she remained conscious for a little while, I know what she was thinking. When you’re starting over and anything is possible, “anything” includes an early death.

  10

  “It’s your first story’s troubled older sister, on crack and in rehab,” Manohar said.

  I was accustomed to the class bursting into laughter when Manohar commented on my stories. This burst was more of an explosion, as if all my classmates had been holding their breath for two weeks, waiting for my next turn to write a story, and Manohar’s next turn to unwrite it.

  “I guess it’s better than your first one,” he said after the titters died down, “but it’s still so unbelievable.”

  Now I understood. Hunter had read my story in the library, run straight to Manohar, and told him what I’d written. Wouldn’t it be hilarious if they teased me in class by saying my story was unbelievable, when it was the truest thing I’d written yet? At the beginning of class, I had thought Hunter looked ill at his end of the table, and I had wondered again whether I’d affected him with my story. Now I knew I hadn’t, and I hated him.

  “Why do you always go first?” I hollered before Manohar could say anything else.

  He looked around. “Because I’m in the chair of being first.”

  I turned to Gabe. “Why does Manohar always go first? It’s not fair.”

  Gabe put his hand over mine and said, so quietly I wasn’t sure he meant the rest of the class to hear, “It’s not a game.”

  He had no idea.

  “Here’s my concern,” I said, and I did mean the whole class to hear. “Manohar announces that my story is unrealistic. He’s put that idea into everybody’s head, and now the rest of the comments will follow along those lines. I wonder if anybody else honestly thought my story wasn’t realistic, or if it’s just Manohar being Manohar.”

  “I thought that, too,” said a guy on the other side of the table, half raising his hand.

  “Me, too,” said Wolf-boy.

  “But this story is set in the same place as my first story,” I pointed out. “Everybody’s comment about the first story was how realistic it was.” Or maybe only Hunter said that.

  “This one is realistic as far as setting,” Manohar explained. “What’s so unrealistic is the over-the-top drama. In your first story you had a young couple going behind the bushes to do the nasty.”

  Summer threw her pen across the table at him. “Pig.”

  Manohar ducked. “At least the first story wasn’t far-fetched. But this time you’ve got a love triangle, and a midnight tryst, and a tragic death. It’s like
a made-for-TV movie.”

  “What’s wrong with made-for-TV movies?” I asked, bracing myself on this slippery slope. “They employ a lot of people—a lot of actors, and a lot of writers.” I was so worked up now I didn’t have the wherewithal to write INTERNSHIP on my notebook.

  “I just think you can do better than that,” Manohar said.

  “How?” I demanded.

  “I think you can write a story more realistic than that.”

  “How do you know this didn’t happen?” I thought I heard my voice ringing around the ceiling, which meant it was way too loud, but the challenge from Manohar had gotten personal.

  “This couldn’t have happened,” he said.

  “How do you know?”

  Hunter cut both of us off. “Manohar, did you ever think the story might be real?” He laid his hands flat on the table.

  “And how do you know?” Manohar asked Hunter. But he slowed as he said this, and I could see on his face that he was registering the fact that Hunter and I had known each other before, Hunter knew my story, and Hunter knew this story.

  “I can see she’s upset.” Hunter gestured to me, then turned back to Manohar. “I put two and two together. I have more highly developed social skills than you. Look at her!”

  Now the remnants of Hunter’s voice rang around the ceiling. The silence that followed was heavy and dark, like the skies outside the window. Tension sped underneath like the traffic zooming by on the street below.

  Whoever spoke next and broke the silence could change the mood of the class and take the floor. I should do this. I should claim agency in the discussion of my own story. This would show Gabe how serious I was about my craft.

  I could not. I kept my eyes on “Anything Is Possible” in front of me, my stomach tied in slipknots.

  “I’m sorry,” Hunter burst out. “Manohar, what I said was out of line. Gabe, I’m sorry for speaking out of turn. And Erin …”

  He paused, waiting for me to look up. He would not go on. The silence would descend again until I acknowledged him.

  I peeked out at him from beneath my bangs.

  “I’m sorry, Erin.” He flashed a confident smile at me, and angry blue eyes. “I know you can defend your own story.”

  “Are you okay?” Isabelle put her hand on his wrist, comforting, as if they were dating.

  “No,” he mumbled. “Tired.” He looked down at the table. “Now I’ve lost my pen.”

  Isabelle and the three other people nearest him ducked their heads under the table to look for it.

  “Brian?” Gabe said suddenly.

  “Me?” Brian blinked at Gabe. “Oh, my turn! I loved this story. It’s a cross between Danielle Steele and National Velvet.”

  The class tittered uneasily and never fully recovered from Hunter’s outburst. Now that he’d planted the seed of the story as real, they tiptoed around my feelings and didn’t say much. I wasn’t listening anyway. I gripped the edge of the table with white fingers and tried to slow my breathing, staring down at my story but hyperaware of Hunter’s presence just beyond my peripheral view.

  I JUMPED UP WHEN GABE DISMISSED the class. “Erin!” Summer called.

  “Can’t stay,” I threw over my shoulder. “I’ll get fired. My boss says seven strikes and I’m out.”

  Gabe opened his mouth as if to speak to me. I hurried past him, out of the classroom building and onto the sidewalk.

  Sharp, cold wind scented with diesel blew into my face. I paused to juggle my book bag and shrug on my coat. Then I hurried toward the coffee shop, past two mounted police officers at the edge of the park, the horses nickering to each other. I tried to shake off my story and the sick feeling I got when I thought of Hunter at the foot of the table. I was making us both sick. We were in New York, starting new lives. There was no reason for us to circle each other slowly, throwing Kentucky in each other’s faces. As I stepped through the employee door, I vowed to bring a smile to customers’ faces for the next few hours, and think of nothing but serving a damn great cup of coffee. There was a first time for everything.

  But when I stood behind the counter to take orders, the table next to the window where Hunter and I had sat was directly in my line of sight. Each time I served a customer and waited for the next one to step up, I stared out at that table, those empty chairs.

  Finally, when there was a lull, I pretended to need chocolate syrup from the storeroom, and I brought my copies of “Anything Is Possible” up front with me. Held my breath while I thumbed through the stack and found Hunter’s copy. Infuriatingly, he’d scrawled his name across the title page without making another single mark.

  Gabe wrote in pencil at the end of his copy,

  Erin,

  I think you are going in the wrong direction.

  Don’t you?

  And then Manohar, Brian, and Summer stepped up to the counter.

  “A latte, please,” Summer said, loudly enough for my boss to hear in the back room, “and draw a little heart in the foam. You’re so good at that.” Under her breath she asked, “It wasn’t really a true story, was it?”

  I nodded, glancing sideways at Manohar and Brian, who were crowding the counter and listening in.

  “But not about you, obviously,” Summer said, “with you being alive and all. Your mother?”

  I nodded.

  All their eyes widened. Summer asked, “Is she—”

  The look on my face stopped her.

  It did not stop Brian. “But … your dad is her husband in the story?”

  “Not husband,” Summer said under her breath. “Father of her child.”

  “Whatever,” Brian said. “What happened to him?”

  I opened my mouth and nothing came out. My mom was dead. Why did their questions about my dad hurt even more?

  “Where is he?” Brian persisted.

  I swallowed. “Vancouver, last I heard.”

  “When was that?” Summer asked.

  “Six years ago.” Six years, three months, two weeks, and three days.

  “And her lover in the story … what happened to him?” Manohar asked. He seemed genuinely curious about this drama in real life.

  “He still works at my grandmother’s horse farm,” I said. Summer looked the question and I confirmed, “Hunter’s dad.”

  “No way!” Brian exclaimed. All three of them gaped at me.

  I glanced toward the door to the back room, expecting my boss to appear with his hands on his hips. I glared at Brian. “Sir, can I take your order?”

  “Does Hunter look like his dad?” Summer wanted to know.

  “Yeah.” If they were not going to tell me what they wanted, I was going to serve them black coffee. I slipped a cup under the tap. “This is to go, right?”

  “Do you look like your mom?” Brian asked.

  “No,” I said. “Red hair skips a generation. I look like my grandmother.”

  “But if your mom and Hunter’s dad hooked up,” Brian persisted, “does that make you and Hunter brother and sister?”

  “No!” Summer and Manohar and I all shouted at him at the same time.

  I glanced toward the back room again. “Look, you’re going to get me in trouble. When I wrote that story, I thought I was getting it off my chest so I could face Hunter head-on. Instead, I feel a million times worse, and I don’t want to talk about it, okay?”

  “When do you have a break?” Manohar asked.

  “Nine,” I said warily.

  “I’ll come back,” Manohar said. Clearly he had his own interpretation of I don’t want to talk about it.

  They took their to-go cups and wandered out of the coffee shop, leaving me to serve strangers and stew in my own juices. And like clockwork, at nine o’clock, Manohar reappeared alone. He gave me a small wave and sat at Hunter’s table by the window.

  I sat down across from him and slid him a latte with a butt drawn in the foam.

  He didn’t even look at it. He focused his dark gaze on me. “Summer didn’t put me up
to this.”

  “Did Hunter?”

  “Hunter!” he exclaimed. “Hunter’s been nuts all weekend. Nuts for Hunter, that is. Quiet and antisocial. I thought he had the flu. Now I realize he must have read your story on Friday.” He leaned forward. “I had no idea your story had a grain of truth to it, Erin. I wouldn’t have said those things in class if I’d known.”

  I blinked at him, not believing at first what I was hearing: an apology, sort of, from Manohar. After all the anxiety he’d caused me over the past six weeks, I wasn’t ready to kiss and make up, but I did manage to shrug and say slowly, “Don’t worry about it.”

  “I am worried about it. I tried to apologize to Hunter after class, and he told me to fuck off!” He collapsed against the back of his chair in exasperation. “I decided to work your end of the equation. Ironically, you seem to be the more reasonable party.”

  I sighed and put my chin in my hand. “Can we get back to the part where you were sorry?”

  He waved his hands in the air. “I don’t want to take it too far, mind you. Knowing that your story is based in reality doesn’t elevate it in my mind.”

  “Thanks.”

  He held up his hands to silence me. “Our instinct is that if we’re taking a story from reality, automatically it will be realistic. But that’s not true. For instance, my father plays bluegrass banjo. He loves country music. He’s a stockbroker but he thinks he missed his calling. And in just about every story I write, I think about putting in an Indian father who plays bluegrass banjo. It’s something familiar to me. I could write the hell out of it. The banjo would make a great symbol. Of something. But people would say my writing wasn’t realistic.”

  I opened my mouth to tell him that this was the most interesting thing I’d ever learned about him, and the most believable. For the first time he seemed like a real person with an embarrassing family in his background, not just a dapper Indian boy with a bad attitude. I would much rather have read a story about his banjo-pickin’ daddy than the dystopian pablum he usually turned in for class.