But Teresa wasn’t waiting on the porch, she was already more than fifteen miles west of Villa Lobo. She had walked most of the night, following the river until she was exhausted and soaking wet. She had kept to the higher ground and had managed to avoid the wont of the flooding, although she continued to slip as she walked, and her clothes were coated with mud. Before dawn, when it was still raining hard, Teresa stopped and huddled under her rain slicker with Atlas curled up by her feet. She fell asleep, but that night she didn’t have any dreams, and the rain continued to fall so that Teresa was surrounded by a circle of water, and the floodline that was only a few yards away continued to rise. For the first time in months Teresa welcomed a sleeping spell rather than feared it; now that Silver was on his way she was sure he would find her. She had been sleeping for nearly ten hours when Joey finally decided to go to the sheriff’s office and report her missing.
He filled out all the correct forms, and then he drove up and down the River Road and through Villa Lobo looking for clues, hoping that he might discover where it was she had gone in the middle of the night. After several hours spent searching without any success, Joey went to a roadhouse on the River Road and ordered a beer, and he began to wonder if she had planned to leave him all along, if she had bought her wedding dress just to placate him, if she had planned to disappear on a night when the air was cold and rain was certain to wash away her footprints; perhaps she had never really loved him at all. Joey spent all afternoon in the roadhouse, ordering one beer after another, and so when Silver arrived at the trailer camp it was deserted. Silver knocked on every trailer door, and then he sat up on the hood of the Camaro and he feared that he had stumbled onto a ghost town, or that Teresa had given him the wrong address by mistake. By the time Joey got back to the camp, Silver was pacing back and forth in the yard; as soon as Joey got out of his car Silver ran over to him, and then he stood much too close. If Joey hadn’t been drunk he might have taken a swing at Silver, but instead he reached out, as if to shake hands.
Silver didn’t bother to act polite. “I just want to know one thing,” he said to Joey. “Where’s my sister?”
The more beer Joey had had the more he chose to believe that Teresa hadn’t really decided to leave him, she would have come back to him if she could. And if she didn’t return to him it was because she had been trapped in the flood; Joey imagined that she had been caught in a thicket of brambles, unable to move as the water rose higher and higher, until she was submerged in a deep green pool where water lilies surrounded her and frogs perched on her shoulders before diving into the water.
“She’s gone,” Joey told Silver.
He knew right away that he was facing Teresa’s brother, the one who didn’t want them to marry; but that no longer mattered to Joey, there was no longer anything to argue about. Joey walked toward the trailer, stopped only when Silver put a hand on his shoulder.
“What do you mean gone?” Silver asked. “She was expecting me. She wouldn’t have left.”
From where he stood in the trailer camp, Joey couldn’t tell if he could really hear the river rising or if he was only imagining the sound of a fast current. He breathed deeply; the river was everywhere, it filled up his chest.
“She took off last night,” he told Silver, but even as he spoke Joey had the oddest sense that Teresa was with him, he could feel her presence in the air, in the earth beneath his feet.
“You’re trying to put something over on me,” Silver said. “I know she’s here. You’ve got her hidden somewhere.”
When Joey opened the trailer door, Silver rushed inside, but Teresa wasn’t there—the trailer was empty. Silver stood and stared at the unmade bed, at the white dress hanging in the open closet, at the unwashed dishes in the sink. And in that dark trailer two men who didn’t know each other stood less than five feet apart, and each was convinced that if he closed his eyes he would be able to see Teresa, would feel her palm on his forehead, her touch light as air, her heart his alone.
Teresa woke up after nearly twenty hours of sleep; it was late afternoon, dragonflies skimmed over the surface of the river, water lilies that had closed against the rain now opened, and their petals were white and pale green. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky, and, aside from the dangerously high level of the river and the dampness of the earth, last night’s storm might have never happened. The sky was so calm that the rain might have taken place only in someone’s dreams. Teresa was miles away from Villa Lobo, and when she walked to the river to wash her hands and face it was so quiet that she couldn’t even hear her own footsteps. When she bent down and put her hands in the muddy edge of the river, Teresa noticed that in the center, far beyond the banks, there was a pool the color of blue china, a pool that looked as deep as an ocean. It was so silent by the river that she couldn’t hear anything more than the slow hum of the dragonflies’ wings; at last she whistled for Atlas. The old dog appeared from the north, his coat thick with mud. Teresa patted the collie’s head, then reached into her backpack for a tin of sardines and shared them with Atlas. After they had eaten, Teresa walked the few yards to the river and threw clear stones into the water just to hear a sound. Each time a stone fell the sound was like a bell, and each time fish jumped, biting at the movement, hoping for mosquitoes or bread.
When Teresa had left the trailer she hadn’t given one thought to where she was going, and as long as there was daylight she could persuade herself that she wasn’t lost; she imagined that she was at a wild picnic at which Silver would show up sooner or later. But as the hours passed, and the sun began to disappear, slowly swallowed up by the foothills to the west, Teresa grew panicky. There were shadows everywhere. There was too much sound now—tentative deer edged toward the water, the trees moved and seemed to have a life of their own. Teresa was afraid to stay where she was, but when she thought of leaving and trying to find her way back to the River Road she grew even more frightened. Her clothes might stick to brambles, flocks of wild birds might attack her and carry her off to the treetops holding strands of her hair in their beaks.
To calm herself, she thought of the ways Silver might find her. She wished that she had left a trail behind her: the stones of a necklace, shreds of material from her blouse, hard crusts of bread. And if he found her, Teresa wondered if she would go away to Mexico with him. In Mexico no one would know them: they could use different names and rent a house far up in the hills, they would never have to see any strangers, never have to speak to anyone but each other. Maybe then she could forget all those times Silver had turned away from her, maybe then she could forget that she had given up hope, that she was sure she would have to wait forever for him. She would no longer remember Angel Gregory; she would finally be able to stop thinking about the night when she had felt closer to him than to anyone else in the world, a night when their combined memory of Silver had seemed more real than Silver did himself.
As it grew darker still, as the moon rose in the sky, Teresa doubted that Silver would ever be able to find her here in the woods, even if he had a map and water in a canteen and a satchel full of fruit, even if he carried fistfuls of diamonds that shone bands of light in front of him like a thousand lanterns, he might miss her, he might walk right on by. But all of those years she had spent waiting for him now left her without the will to move. And so Teresa stayed right where she was. Atlas watched her, puzzled, not understanding why they stayed in a place where everything had the scent of the river, a place where the frogs were as loud as trumpets and the moon seemed much too far away, and animals and birds moved above them, climbing from one branch to another, so used to the silence that they didn’t even notice that a woman sat alone, her knees pulled up, her skin still damp, as if permanently coated with raindrops. And later that night Atlas couldn’t restrain himself any longer, he went off in search of the animals he heard moving through the woods. And as he followed raccoons and bats and the frogs who moved from log to log near the river, Teresa fell asleep. She slept in spite of herself, and
in spite of herself she dreamed. In her dream she heard the grass beside her rustle, and when she turned to look, it was not Atlas who had returned, it was not an Aria who had found his way to her in the woods, it was only a small dark horse who stood beneath the nearest pine tree.
The horse was so close to her that its hoofs grazed the yellow rain slicker on which she rested her head. He was so close that Teresa could see his breath, she could see that his mane was red, the color of a heart or of certain roses. In her dream she pretended to be asleep, but she was watching as he passed by her, watching as orange birds of paradise were leveled beneath his hoofs. If she had reached out her hand then, she could have touched him, but instead she let the horse walk past her, toward the river.
There was a splashing sound and Teresa got up and went to the riverbank just in time to see the horse diving. He was graceful, an expert swimmer, the water rolled off his dark back and shone in the moonlight. Water weeds and flowers attached themselves to his mane as he grazed on the wild iris which grew along the farthest banks. Teresa could now see that, although the horse’s mane was red, his coat was the same color as the river—Egyptian brown, juniper-bark brown, brown as sand along a foreign beach. Teresa could see the bits of purple iris caught between his teeth, the petals were the color of amethysts or of rain that falls at night. Finally he floated downstream, he floated west in silence, without a struggle, without even seeming to move. And before Teresa knew it, the horse was out of sight and the river didn’t have one ripple, there wasn’t one sign that he had ever been there, nothing but logs and tadpoles and smooth clear water.
Teresa might have gone on sleeping for hours if that splashing sound wasn’t louder than ever, even though the horse had long disappeared downstream. When she opened her eyes she was instantly awake, instantly surrounded by the night and by the sound of something drowning nearby. Teresa got up and ran toward the river, following the sound; she ran right past the banks where the horse in her dream had slowly chewed on new irises. She could barely see; the water was past her ankles before she knew that she had reached the river. She stumbled over a half-submerged log and then was suddenly knee-deep; her hands were covered by invisible mosquitoes, her skin itself seemed to sing. Teresa heard Atlas before she saw him; it took a while for her eyes to adjust to the darkness and to being awake. In her dream the horse had seemed to carry its own strange light with it; now everything was black, and the air itself was thick as soup. So when Teresa dove into the water she was simply following a sound: the sound of a heartbeat in water, the whisper of lungs too tired to breathe. She swam away from the bank, and when she reached the center of the pool that was as deep and as blue as china she finally saw Atlas; he was drowning, he had gone down for the third time, his long hair rose to the surface in clumps that were thicker than rope. Atlas had followed the frogs along the slippery tree trunks submerged in the water, and after he fell the water seemed to draw him to the center, right into the middle of the deepest pool.
As she swam toward the dog, Teresa noticed that the water hitting against her skin was as loud as thunder. She grabbed Atlas and lifted his head above the water, she held him around his middle and steered through the pool with her elbows and her toes. After she had managed to swim out of the deep pool, she breathed easier, and when she reached the riverbank she pulled Atlas out behind her. She put her ear to his chest to listen for breathing and found there was none. She knelt down beside him and pushed on his back, and slowly water seeped out of the collie, but he still looked broken to Teresa, and much smaller than ever before. She pushed on his back for what seemed like forever, and then when she put her ear to his chest again she heard the thick unsteady intake of air, the promise of breath.
It was then Teresa began to shiver, then she felt the cold air reach through her water-soaked skin and turn her fingers and her toes blue. She stood, then bent down to pick up the dog. He was ten times as heavy as he had been in the center of the pool, but she heaved him so that he rested on her shoulder. She could smell the river on his fur and on her own skin. She could no longer see the moon, but there were thousands of stars and Mars was in the easternmost part of the sky. Teresa stood up with the dog balanced on her shoulders; the hiking boots cut into her ankles and Atlas was heavier than a sack of stones, heavier than saddlebags filled with gold. All the same, she managed to carry him as she walked in the opposite direction from the one planet she could see in the sky. She walked away from the river, in the direction of the foothills. She walked for what seemed like hours, through thorny wild blackberries that blocked their way. And when the sky began to grow lighter, when it was nearly dawn, Teresa walked out of the woods.
Above her, in the foothills, she saw the shadows of a farmhouse; she started up the dirt path which led to the house, she climbed slowly, exhausted by the weight of the dog and her own soaking clothing. What began as a rocky stretch soon became a field of artichokes; large purple flowers had been left to wither and go to seed, the earth had been smoothed by the hoofs of cattle and sheep. She tightened her grip on Atlas; burrs dug into her fingertips, the hiking boots now left a ring of blood around her ankles. Above her, clouds moved faster and faster all the time; above her, seagulls cried. Teresa continued to follow the rutted path right to the door of the farmhouse; from the ridgetop where the house had been built she could now see the mouth of the river far below. Black rocks formed the gate that opened to the Pacific, and as Teresa watched, the river rushed forward, turning to saltwater in the blink of an eye, in those very last hours of starlight, just beneath a ridgetop at the farthest edge of the west.
Teresa slept in a brass bed, covered by a quilt that had been handed down through three generations. She slept for only a few hours, waking before noon. For the first time in years she didn’t think of Silver in those first moments of being awake, instead she felt the cold thrill of having come to this place alone, and she thought of long evenings, cities she had never been to, the possibility of falling in love rather than being fated to it. When she went downstairs, barefoot and wearing borrowed blue jeans and a sweater, her eyes touched upon everything in the house, as if she had just arrived in a foreign land. In the kitchen, next to the gas stove, Catherine, the woman who owned the house, was boiling brown eggs over a low blue flame. Atlas slept on a flannel blanket that cushioned the hard pine floor. Teresa crouched down next to the dog, the mane of hair around his neck still damp.
“That dog’s going to be fine,” Catherine promised. She turned off the flame under the pot of eggs. “All the water’s out of him, and now he just needs to rest.”
“He looks so tired,” Teresa said.
“I’ve got something he won’t be able to resist,” Catherine said. She went to the refrigerator, got a bottle of milk, and poured some into a frying pan. Then she put the pan down on the floor, right in front of the collie’s nose; Atlas lifted his head, and when he began to drink, the two women smiled at each other in triumph. Later, when Catherine’s husband, Dan, came home with their ten-year-old son, Mark, they all rigged up a box so that they could take Atlas outside to lie in the sun.
“You’re lucky you both didn’t drown,” Dan told Teresa. “We went down to the river this morning and it’s risen more than fifteen feet. The beach down by Goat’s Rock is nearly washed away.”
And even then Teresa didn’t feel that she had done anything impossible by escaping the flood and carrying the collie for so many miles. What seemed impossible now was waiting all those years for Silver, waiting all that time for a night when the moon was orange and full, so close to the ground that it brushed against the highest branches of the eucalyptus trees. What seemed impossible was never feeling the strange sort of daring she now felt. And later, when it was nearly time for Teresa to leave, and Catherine pointed out that her long hair was thick with brambles and that knots the size of sparrows were woven through the strands, Teresa reached into a kitchen drawer and pulled out a pair of scissors.
“Let’s cut it,” Teresa suggested.
Catherine touched her own hair. “Oh, no,” she said. “You don’t want to do that.”
At night, when she was a child, when she spent hours listening to crickets, Teresa would often lean so far out her window that her braids would reach halfway down the wall of the house. Now she insisted that Catherine cut her hair; there seemed no point in brushing out the tangles. They compromised, and when Catherine was through, Teresa’s hair was still long, it nearly reached her shoulders, but it was lighter, it circled her face, the strands surprising her by curling around her forehead. And when Teresa telephoned Bergen, calling collect from the phone in the living room, her haircut was the first thing she told him about.
“Wait till you see it,” Teresa said. “I look brand-new.”
“I’m not as interested in haircuts as I am in Silver,” Bergen told Teresa. “He left here four days ago and he said he was driving straight to Villa Lobo to see you.”
“I’m not there,” Teresa admitted. “I ran away. I’m not getting married.”
“No?” Bergen said. His throat felt dry; he looked over at Dina’s blue and white dishes. “Are you not getting married because of Silver?” he forced himself to ask.
White Horses Page 28
