White Horses

by Alice Hoffman

  “This is bullshit,” Silver said to his brother. “No way that I’m going to New Mexico.”

  “You’re already on your way.” Reuben smiled. Teresa looked at her eldest brother and watched him inhale; his eyes were the same as King Connor’s; when he exhaled, his nostrils grew wide with sweet, heavy smoke.

  “I might jump off the train the next time we stop,” Silver said thoughtfully.

  “Like hell you will,” Reuben said. “You’re looking forward to meeting every girl that lives in Santa Fe. You’re going to try and convince them you’re a movie star from California.”

  “If they want to think that”—Silver shrugged—“how can I stop them?”

  Reuben leaned close to Silver and spoke in a whisper. “I don’t plan to spend the rest of my life in Santa Fe, or in Santa Rosa either.”

  Teresa was certain they would not stay in Santa Fe; this was only a visit. After all, the house in Santa Rosa was waiting for them; the furniture was covered with clean sheets to catch the dust, dishes were still on the drainboard, the two dogs wandered around the yard, escaping every chance they had from the neighbor’s where they had been left, howling at the moon on the porch of the empty house. And King Connors might have returned just as he had many times before; he might be watching TV, pulling the tab off a can of cold beer and wondering where everyone had gone off to.

  “You talk big,” Reuben now whispered to Silver, “but I’m really going to do something. I’m never going back.” He nodded to Dina. “And believe me—she won’t care.”

  They changed trains in Los Angeles. Silver bought more cigarettes at the station, Teresa stared at oil riggings, Reuben closed his eyes and smiled, occupied with secrets all his own. On the new train they traveled through Nevada and Arizona; they spent days on that train, eating the sandwiches Dina had made, watching the moonrise, getting on each other’s nerves. Teresa bought Cokes at the canteen, and forced Silver into playing cards with her.

  “You’re gonna lose,” Silver warned her before each game of gin, but in fact he let her win almost every time.

  They finally crossed the New Mexico state line one morning, but they didn’t reach Lamy, the closest station to Santa Fe, until dusk. When they got off the train, Silver and Reuben carried the suitcases and the boxes tied with blue string. Teresa followed, wishing she had more to carry, a heavy trunk to weigh her down so that she would not rise up and drift into the New Mexico sky. Because it was so late, the family had to share a crowded taxi. Teresa rested her head on Silver’s shoulder and let the chatter of the other passengers cover her like someone else’s hand-sewn quilt. The scent of a flower Teresa didn’t recognize came through the open windows of the taxi, and above the road, in the highest branches of the trees, owls called to each other.

  There were hundreds of red stars in the sky when they stopped in front of the house where Dina had grown up. There was the same adobe wall around the house Dina remembered, the same iron gate draped with dusty roses. Dina rang the bell, and the family waited, listening to the wheels of the taxi as it drove over the pebbles and stones in the road. Before long a young woman, a maid, came to the gate and nodded for them to come inside. They were quiet as they followed her, as if they had all lost the power of speech. Dina’s face was calm, she looked younger: Anyone would have thought that with each step closer to the house a year dropped from her age. The moonlight made paths appear where there weren’t any; the house shimmered and looked twice its size. Teresa was frightened; she had never been away from home before, and this place seemed more and more foreign all the time. Inside, Teresa’s grandmother was waiting for them. Dina had sent a note days before on which she wrote only the time of their arrival and her name. The grandmother’s white hair was pulled away from her face by combs made of shells, there were rings on all her fingers. Teresa looked over at Silver; she knew he was thinking that he could live for year on what those rings would bring in a pawnshop.

  Teresa’s grandmother left them standing; the two brothers held packages in their hands, the twine cut into their fingertips. There was dust on everyone’s shoes, and the train still rolled in the back of Teresa’s head. When Dina greeted her mother, whom she had not seen since the day she left home with King Connors, there were no kisses and no tears.

  “I don’t understand why you came back now,” Teresa’s grandmother said to Dina.

  Dina shrugged; she herself didn’t know. Teresa was tired; she leaned her elbows on a table that was nearly her own height, but she rested her arms too heavily, and the table tilted so that a pair of wooden candleholders fell on the floor. The grandmother looked over at Teresa and her brothers.

  “His?” she said to Dina.

  “Of course,” Dina said. “How many husbands do you think I’ve had?”

  Their grandmother pointed at Silver with her finger. Teresa heard Silver groan. He hesitated and the grandmother smiled. “Don’t be afraid,” she said.

  Silver raised his eyebrows and smiled back. He acted as if fear was a word he knew nothing of. When he walked over to the grandmother, the old woman took his hand.

  “This one is a beautiful boy,” she told Dina.

  When the grandmother took Silver’s hand, the rest of the family knew they had been welcomed to her house. They stayed that whole summer, a season lost in heat and flowers. Teresa spent most of her time in the garden, she followed old paths, she climbed up and looked over the top of the wall so that she could see Santa Fe spread out below in a circle of lights. All that summer Teresa continued to feel like a foreigner. She never learned the names of any of the flowers that grew in the garden, she never found a name to call her grandmother. Silver and Reuben both spent all of their time in Santa Fe, coming home only after dark. For the first time in his life Silver felt rich, and he liked the feeling. Their grandmother had begun to give him money. No one else, just Silver, and he didn’t even have to ask. He had enough for everything he needed, and some left over to bring Teresa presents—sugary candies in syrup, a gold-embroidered scarf, a small wooden puppet that danced on strings.

  Teresa and Reuben were both happy to be ignored by their grandmother. Reuben left the house early, closing the iron gate softly behind him, and Teresa spent most days drawing pictures in the garden with pastels and a pad King Connors had given her for her twelfth birthday. Sometimes, when she was drawing, Teresa saw Dina walking in the garden; Dina didn’t know anyone was watching her, her eyes were wet, her skirt trailed behind and caught on low branches, leaving scraps of material that clung like dark banners. One afternoon Teresa fell asleep in the middle of the day. She dreamed that she was older, old enough to dance with Silver at a party where all of the women wore summer dresses made of chiffon. When she woke up, Dina was kneeling next to her; Teresa wanted to cry, she could not believe she was still only twelve years old.

  “How long did I sleep?” Teresa asked. Her spells had begun to frighten her less and less all the time; they were mysterious still, but comfortable, like a recurring dream.

  Dina shrugged. “Not so long. A couple of hours. Maybe the air here is getting rid of the spells.”

  “I don’t think so,” Teresa said. She didn’t want to give her mother any reason for staying in New Mexico. “It’s just something I’ll grow out of.” Teresa had heard this many times from King Connors.

  Insects flew through the air; Dina waved away the bugs and sat next to Teresa beneath a cottonwood tree. “This was one of my father’s favorites,” she said of the tree.

  “Did you meet my father when you still lived in his house?” Teresa asked.

  “Your father? That big shot couldn’t even stand a little hot weather. I wasted everything on him,” Dina said, dragging a stick over the earth in neat lines. “I was stupid. I was so young I couldn’t see straight.”

  Teresa wiped away the beads of sweat on her face and tried to imagine her mother as a young girl in this garden.

  “I wanted someone to take me far away. Not necessarily to Santa Rosa.” Dina la
ughed. “Just away.”

  “He wasn’t the right one,” Teresa sadly agreed. The right one would never have owned a pickup truck, the right one would never have had such cold blue eyes, so few words of kindness or praise.

  “I guess I should have waited a little longer,” Dina said.

  When Teresa and Dina saw the young maid who had first let them into the house pass by on her way to shop at the market, they were both as quiet as conspirators. The maid’s name was Annette; she had long blond hair and, although she was only eighteen, she had been working for Teresa’s grandmother for three years. Annette probably would have been happy to sit under the cottonwood tree with Dina and Teresa, but they didn’t want her to see where they were.

  “She’s not too smart,” Dina said of the maid when the girl had gone out of the garden and closed the gate behind her, “but my mother could bribe her with one lump of sugar.”

  Teresa was now wondering how it might be possible to know the right one when he appeared. “What would have happened if you didn’t run away?” she asked. “What would have happened if you waited long enough?”

  “I still think someone would have come for me,” Dina said. “Someone would have walked right through that gate. An Aria,” Dina whispered.

  Even now, so many years after she had heard about Arias from her father, Dina found herself listening for them late at night. After everyone else in the house had fallen asleep, she went to her bedroom window and unlocked the wooden shutters and looked toward the mesa, which was still the same blue color it had been on nights when she was not much older than Teresa. But Dina’s belief that an Aria would find her in her parents’ house grew dimmer with each day they spent in Santa Fe; the nights seemed shorter than they had when she was a girl, the time for an Aria to rescue her seemed past.

  In the garden, under the tree which Dina’s father had always watered so carefully, Teresa now wanted to know more than she had been told about Arias before. Dina always talked about them in words so tentative, so blurry, that Teresa had never truly been able to picture an Aria.

  “What do they look like?” Teresa asked.

  “What kind of question is that?” Dina said, annoyed. “I’ve told you—they still ride on horseback, they carry saddlebags that have buttons made out of turquoise …”

  “What color eyes do they have?” Teresa asked. “What color hair?”

  Dina closed her eyes and pursed her lips; her hands shook as though she were in a trance. “Dark eyes,” she said. Her eyes were still closed, her voice was soft and assured. “Dark hair—a little longer than most men wear it. Thin and tall.” Dina opened her eyes. “But not too tall. And they have a certain fire in their eyes—and they’re not afraid of thunder, and they’re quiet—there are times when they just don’t have to bother speaking.”

  It was nearly dinnertime when Dina and Teresa went back inside the house. Silver and Reuben would be home soon, they would all sit around the wooden table in the dining room and eat clear chicken broth, then pork cooked with cabbage and juniper berries. And all through dinner that night Teresa would find she wasn’t able to eat, she would push the food over to the side of her plate. And she would stare across the table at Silver, and think about a man who wasn’t afraid of thunder, a man with dark eyes who was so near to her she could have touched him if she had had the nerve to reach across the dinner table.

  Later in the summer, Teresa decided that if Silver and Reuben could go off and explore Santa Fe, she could too. And so, one night, when fireflies lit the road into town, Teresa left her grandmother’s house. But to reach the center of Santa Fe, Teresa had to pass the graveyard where her grandfather was buried. Dina had taken them all to the graveyard the day after they arrived in New Mexico. They had all worn black, they had bowed their heads; Teresa had been afraid that the bones would rise up through the soil and grab her by the ankle, they would pull her down into the earth, down to the place where worms devoured bright blue butterflies. All around the grandfather’s grave had been the graves of Indians; seashells encircled the mounds of earth, all without headstones, all decades old. This time when Teresa passed the iron gates of the cemetery, she didn’t go inside; she only stopped and peered over the gate, but the iron was so rusted that when she held her lips close to the gate, she breathed in iron. From there till she reached Santa Fe, Teresa ran. She ran down the road with her braids flying out behind her, and she didn’t stop until she reached an open-air café. Even after she had climbed onto the raised platform of the café, she still wasn’t certain that the bones in the graveyard hadn’t followed her into the heart of the city.

  Teresa smelled oranges and wine and bitter limes; she walked across the wooden planks that were painted pale blue, like robins’ eggs, like some men’s eyes. But now Teresa was shy. There were some families having late supper, but mostly the café was filled with men: men were on the outside platform ringed with small wooden tables, men were inside, where the bar and the dance floor were. And so Teresa sat on the wooden stairs; she breathed in the hot night wind that carried insects along in a steady living stream. She was not used to being out by herself this late at night and so Teresa edged closer to a family who sat at the nearest table, and she pretended she was theirs.

  The woman of that family held a child on her lap; the man drank dark beer. As Teresa edged closer to their feet, they knew she was there, but they didn’t ask her any questions, instead they passed her candies, pastel-green mints coated with sugar. Here at the café, the air didn’t smell like iron: here no one wore black. There was music and someone’s perfume, the odor of lilacs and musk.

  The longer she was there, the less nervous Teresa was about being out alone at night, the more certain she was that if someone was looking for her, he would definitely be able to find her at the foot of the steps. Teresa munched the cool-tasting candies and nodded her head to the music playing inside. Each time a lizard crawled out from beneath the blue wooden planks of the café terrace, the family at Teresa’s table called out and tossed pebbles, and the lizard would leap back under the floorboards; Teresa laughed as she heard it scurry away.

  Teresa grew braver; she walked along the terrace of the café, looking through the windows into the bar. Inside, there were candles in glass globes burning on every table. Against the wall, couples sat, talking, taking a break from the dance floor to have a cigarette or to lean their heads against the white walls and kiss. They kissed on the lips, they kissed deeply, and sometimes a man leaned over and kissed a woman’s neck, just the way Silver did when Teresa saw him through the window.

  Once she saw him, Teresa moved closer to the glass; she couldn’t look away, though she wanted to. Silver’s eyes were closed, his mouth moved as if he were drinking a glass of wine. The woman he sat with was Annette; she took her long hair in one hand and moved it away from her neck, then leaned her head back and smiled. Teresa stared as Silver and Annette eased onto the dance floor; they held each other so tightly it was difficult to tell where Silver ended and Annette began. Teresa wasn’t the only one watching; nearly every woman in the café watched Silver, and it was clear each imagined herself in his arms.

  Teresa sat down in an empty chair; Annette slipped her arm around Silver’s waist. When Teresa looked at other men, in the bar or out on the terrace, their faces seemed to disappear; the café seemed suddenly awful: the music was too loud, the dancers barely moved, lizards ran in circles beneath the terrace. Teresa went back to her grandmother’s house. She ran all the way home: she could swear she heard lizards running behind, right on her heels. She went through the garden and into the house; but once she got into bed, Teresa knew she wouldn’t be able to sleep. And later, as she lay between cold sheets, Teresa listened to Silver slam the iron gate shut just before dawn and her eyes were open as Silver walked down the hallway to his bedroom, humming to himself, never imagining that anyone had seen him at the café—or that anyone felt betrayed.

  In the days that followed, Teresa found herself wishing for a w
ay to get back at Silver. One evening, as she walked in the garden, Teresa saw Reuben sitting in a wrought-iron chair, smoking a cigar and staring at the sky. She was still furious at Silver, and she thought that maybe Reuben could be her favorite brother.

  “What do you want?” Reuben said when he saw her, and when he spoke his voice sounded just like King Connors’s.

  “When are we going home?” Teresa asked, thinking of the quick lizards at the café.

  “Sooner or later,” Reuben said. He exhaled, and smoke rings circled them both; he suddenly began to confide in Teresa more than ever before. Maybe he confided in his sister because it was dark or because no one else could hear, maybe he was not so much talking to Teresa as he was just talking. Reuben told Teresa that he had been working; in a local market he crated fruit, sticky with sun, covered with flies; he lifted wooden crates full of live chickens; he worked a cash register and drove a pickup full of groceries all over town. All of this so that he would not have to go back to Santa Rosa. Instead of going back home, he would go to Los Angeles. He was sick of how Dina treated him, tired of Silver always being the favorite. At least King Connors cared about him, he had phoned Reuben at his job, and Reuben now carried their father’s address in Los Angeles in his shirt pocket.

  “Let me go with you,” Teresa whispered.

  The moon was high, insects spun in the air, Teresa slapped mosquitoes back against the night.

  “Now you just shut up about all of this,” Reuben said. He had almost forgotten Teresa was there; he was wrapped up in his own plans. “If anyone asks you, you don’t know where our father is, understand? And when I leave, you sure as hell don’t tell anyone you know where I am.”

  She hadn’t really wanted to go with Reuben, she had only wanted to go away and teach Silver a lesson. Teresa glared at her oldest brother; no matter how disappointed she was in Silver, she saw now that Reuben could never be her favorite. “Go ahead,” she said to Reuben. “Go to Los Angeles. I don’t care.”