The Pillow Friend

by Lisa Tuttle

  Although she'd lost her appetite she wolfed the sandwich down and drained her glass of iced tea, eager to get home, back to her mother, to something like normality.

  But her mother wasn't home when they got there.

  “Where is she?”

  “She's probably on her way.” He sounded unconcerned.

  “But where . . . ?”

  “Maybe you should ask her that.” His voice was even, uninflected, unemotional as it had been all evening, yet she heard something horribly grim and final in it. She suddenly didn't want to ask him anything more, and escaped upstairs to her room. When she had unpacked and put everything away, she stretched out across her bed with a book and sometime while she was reading, half-listening for the sound of her mother's return, she must have fallen asleep.

  When she awoke the next morning her mother was there but her father wasn't. There might not have been anything unusual about that—even though her mother spent the day in her room with the curtains drawn—except that he didn't come home that evening, or any other.

  He had moved out, into an apartment he must have rented while she was gone. He had already taken all his clothes, his collection of Texana, his leather recliner and a few other things he cared about—if she hadn't gone straight up to her room she might have noticed the things that were missing earlier—but what difference would that have made? He hadn't even taken the opportunity of his time alone with her to explain what he was doing, or why; to assure her that he still loved her and wanted to spend time with her; he hadn't said, like the father in a book she'd recently read, that he wasn't leaving her but only his wife—no, he had left them both, and if there was an explanation for why he'd gone she never heard it.

  In the midst of the nightmare, while her mother was still alternately hysterical or heavily tranquilized, either making frantic plans for her new life or lying weeping in bed for hours, school started, and Agnes found it a relief to get away. But there was no escape.

  Everyone at school seemed to know something about it, or wanted to, and she wasn't sure whether the questions or the sympathy were more annoying. Then came something worse: Nina told her that she'd seen her father strolling along holding hands with some girl out at Northwest Mall. After that she didn't feel much like talking to Nina.

  She wished she could just forget it. She wished it had never happened. But wishing changed nothing.

  One morning, instead of getting on the school bus, she took the city bus instead, and went downtown to the bus station. She had most of her summer's allowance still unspent, as well as the twenty-dollar bill her father had tucked into her book bag sometime before. It was far more than she needed for a one-way ticket to Camptown.

  At the place in the woods where the dirt road split in two, one path leading to the house and one to the pond, the horse met her.

  She felt fear at the sight of him, and then remorse. He'd gotten so thin! His ribs showed, his bloodshot blue eyes bulged from a long, bony skull, and his mane and tail were matted with burrs. He was the very picture of a neglected animal, and it was her fault, she knew, for abandoning him.

  But that didn't make sense. Before, he had always looked well-groomed, well-fed—but she had not fed or groomed him—apart from picking occasional burrs out of his tail. She had given him apples and carrots to munch and once they had shared a box of vanilla wafers, but apart from that he must have survived on the grass and weeds he cropped everywhere they went. Not until now had she wondered where he went when he wasn't with her, where he sheltered at night. Not until now had it occurred to her that he might need food and shelter and that there was no one else to take responsibility for him but herself.

  Easy tears sprang to her eyes. How could she have been so horrible? People who abandoned their pets, the helpless animals dependent on them, were the blackest of villains. She had never imagined she could be one of them. She hadn't thought, and that was her crime. She had wished without thinking, without understanding or accepting the consequences.

  Marjorie had warned her.

  But she'd come back. This time she would not let him down.

  “Oh, Snowy, I've missed you so much!” She threw her arms around his neck and inhaled the dusty, salty, horsy smell of him, felt the muscles trembling beneath the skin, heard him snort, and knew beyond a doubt that he had missed her, too. Maybe it wasn't a warm stable, a pile of hay and a currycomb that he needed but only her presence to make him sleek and contented again. He was her wish . . . so what was she to him? Was she his creator, his god? It was a troubling thought, and rather than pursue it, she went with the horse to a nearby tree stump where she could mount him.

  Immediately he took off running, flinging her forward onto his neck. But although she clung to him, frightened, for a moment, she soon found her seat, and the glory of his speed, his power between her legs, lifted her out of fear and worry and everything else. There was nothing but this moment, the wind drying the sweat on her face, the sunlight hot on her bare arms, the dusty, resinous smell of the woods and the all-encompassing rhythm of his gallop bearing her along, taking her out of herself, melding them into one creature, at one with the natural world around them.

  Although it seemed that he ran for a very long time, eventually they ended up, as they always did, at the edge of the pond. When he put his head down and began cropping the grass she slipped to the ground. She was hungry, too, but she had brought nothing to eat. She had expected to have lunch with Marjorie. Yet now when she thought of confronting her aunt her mouth went dry. Her aunt wasn't going to let her stay; the fact that her parents had split up might win her a little sympathy, but not enough. Marjorie didn't want the responsibility—she'd made that clear enough. She'd send her straight back to Houston.

  She stripped off her clothes and walked down to the water's edge. It was deliciously cool as she waded in, especially where the bottom dropped away and she had to swim. For a little while she could enjoy herself in the water and not think, but eventually, as she lazily dog-paddled, her eyes fell on Snowy Miles and the anxious guilt returned.

  She couldn't just leave him here a second time; she would not. He might die over the winter without her. She wondered how long it would take to ride him to Houston—a couple of days? Three? She wondered where they would stay at night, and how she would manage to find her way home through the strange, traffic-filled streets once she reached Houston city limits. And then what would her mother say when she turned up with a horse? She'd probably have a fit. She'd never let her keep him. But she had to. She had to make her mother understand. . . .

  She rolled onto her back and floated, staring up at the empty blue sky. She didn't want to think about all that, about how she was going to explain the inexplicable, how this horse might be incorporated into her new, fatherless life. If her parents really got divorced, they might be poor. There wouldn't be any money for extras like stabling a horse. How could she make her mother understand that Snowy wasn't an extra, wasn't a luxury, but a necessity, her responsibility? She wished she could just stay here. She didn't want to take Snowy into her own unhappy, complicated world, but to stay here with him in his. To extend those few summer weeks into a lifetime of riding through the woods in silent communion. Her idea of perfection.

  So why shouldn't she wish for it? It was what she really wanted, more than anything else in the world, so it had to come true. At first her thoughts were chaotic, trying to marshal an argument, trying to think of all the little wishes she would have to make to build the edifice of the world she wanted, and then she decided not to bother. Snowy had come in answer to her wish without any logic to his appearance, so why shouldn't her life change just as simply?

  “I wish I could be with Snowy forever,” she said to the blue sky above. “I wish I never had to go back to Houston but could just stay in the woods with Snowy forever.” It was so like a prayer she had to put her lips together quickly to keep from saying “Amen.”

  There was a muffled thudding sound. She performed a quick half-
roll that brought her upright, treading water and facing the shore. The horse was no longer peacefully grazing. He was running straight at the pond, right for her.

  She stared, mystified, half-expecting him to perform some trick for her. When he plunged into the water she still didn't understand—she remembered one especially hot day when she had tried to lure him in, using an apple as bait, and how he'd made it clear to her that he had no liking for bodies of water, no matter how shallow. It was only when he drew closer, and she could see from the way he strained to keep his head above water, from his rolling, bloodshot eyes, how much he disliked this, how much it went against his nature, that she glimpsed the truth. And when he still kept coming straight at her, making no attempt to turn aside, his powerful hooves lashing out directly at her, she knew that he was coming to kill her. Not because he was evil or hated her, but because it was her wish. He would kill her and die himself, and they would be together forever.

  She tried to swim backward, tried to swim away, but fear and the water together straitjacketed her. Or maybe it was her own wish which kept her bound and struggling before his approach.

  “No,” she screamed with all her might. “No! I wish you were gone, not me, not me!” And then, as he was nearly on top of her, she managed to plunge to one side and swim a little away from him.

  She felt something, a heavy blow, a pain in her heart that took her breath away, but somehow managed to keep swimming, and she swam without looking back until her knees sank into the mud and she couldn't swim any farther, until she was crawling and stumbling ashore.

  Only then, on dry land, did she risk pausing to cast a glance back over her shoulder. Then she turned around and stared.

  The pond was empty. Empty and, on this hot, windless day, as still as if its waters had not been disturbed by anything for days. With its empty, quiet, glassy sheen it was a perfect mirror of the sky.

  She began to cry. Only when her lungs ached as she struggled to draw breath did she become aware of another, worse pain, and looking down at herself she saw the mark on her naked chest. It was on the left side, between shoulder and nipple, a reddish contusion, horseshoe-shaped.

  IMAGINARY MEAT

  I go; but remember, I shall be with you on your wedding night.

  —Mary Shelley

  Jeder Engel ist schrecklich.”

  The words lifted her out of her seat; she quivered and was still, shocked awake and throbbing with attention.

  The dull honors presentations, the students with their stumbling or fluent readings of English, French and Spanish texts, had nearly sent her to sleep. Roxanne, seated beside her in the warm, dark auditorium, had run out of caustic comments, and not even the faint hope of hearing her own name called for some unimagined achievement (most original book report? best poem to be rejected by the school magazine?) was enough to keep her focused in the present, until those words, the familiar, foreign words that opened Rilke's Second Elegy. She stared at the boy on the stage as if he were the poet reincarnate.

  The boy's name was Alex Hill. He'd been in her social studies class last year, and he was assistant poetry editor—the position she had applied for, not realizing then that only students in the Special Progress English stream ever made the staff—on Visions, the school magazine. She had been aware of him without any particular feelings: he was just another “good” boy, tall and skinny and bespectacled (like herself), nonathletic, nonpolitical, studious.

  And he liked Rilke. He'd actually chosen to translate one of the Elegies, and he'd won this year's German prize for it—he wasn't even a senior, just a junior like herself.

  As she stared the stage lights combined with smears on her glasses to give him a halo. He looked as glorious and terrible to her as the poet's angel.

  It had finally happened. One week shy of her seventeenth birthday, she had fallen in love.

  She sought him out at lunchtime to tell him his translation had been brilliant and his prize well-deserved.

  He looked apprehensive, as if he was waiting for the stinger to her compliment.

  “I mean it,” she said earnestly. “Believe me, I've read all the translations there are, and even tried to work out one of my own—hopeless, of course!—so I know what I'm saying.”

  “Well, thank you, uh—”

  “Call me Grey. It's Agnes, actually, Agnes Grey.”

  “Sure, right, I remember. You were there that night we collated Visions. But you're not in my German class—you must be in Biedermann's?”

  “I'm not taking German. I wish I was, now, but I've been doing Spanish since junior high and if I switch it'll just screw up the language credits I need. I'm not very good at learning languages, but I thought I might try German when I get to college.”

  Bushy eyebrows moved together above the horn-rims. “So if you're not taking German . . .”

  “Oh, I read the Elegies on my own! In English, of course, but it was a dual-language version, and then I found another translation and, well, with the differences, I really wanted to read him in the original. He's such a German poet, don't you think? To try to understand him. So I got a German dictionary, and read everything I could find about Rilke and the poems, and—oh, I'm sorry, I'm keeping you from eating!”

  “That's all right. I'd say sit down, but—” He gestured at the table she was leaning on, which was full. One of the other boys, a heavyset blond, had obviously been listening to their conversation, and his interested gaze made her abruptly self-conscious.

  She straightened up. “Oh, that's all right. I haven't got my food yet, anyway. And my friend always saves me a seat. I just wanted to say congratulations, you deserved it and I really loved your reading, and all that.” She gave him a little wave and wandered off to get in the line for food even though, for once, she had no appetite.

  The next time Alex saw her, passing her in the hall at the end of the day, he smiled and said her name.

  She felt as if he'd blown up a balloon full of happiness and she'd swallowed it. She felt as if she could fly away, and even just the memory of his smile would keep her from coming back to earth for a long, long time.

  Roxanne drove her home from school that day, as she often did, and noticed her friend's unusually buoyant mood, but was willing to accept that it was a natural reaction to the fact that her seventeenth birthday was on the immediate horizon, and after that, only a week of school stood between them and the freedom of summer vacation.

  Agnes generally kept her friend well-informed about her emotional landscape, but she didn't feel like talking about Alex Hill just yet. She wanted to luxuriate in the experience of being in love by herself for just a little longer. She wasn't ready to hear why he wasn't good enough for her, or that he already had a girlfriend; she wasn't ready for plotting ways of “getting him.” For the moment, anyway, the feeling was enough.

  So she didn't invite Roxanne in to talk—they both had exams to study for—but waved good-bye to her in the parking lot, then walked around past the small, kidney-bean-shaped swimming pool and let herself in to the apartment she shared with her mother.

  For the past three years, since her parents' divorce, this two-bedroom, two-story apartment in a small complex off Westheimer, near Post Oak, had been home. Although she didn't think her mother believed her, she really preferred it to their old house. She loved that her bedroom had a telephone jack and a balcony overlooking the swimming pool. She loved the swimming pool; she didn't miss the loss of their country club membership at all. And they were now within easy walking distance of a shopping center. It wasn't the mall where a lot of the kids she knew liked to hang out, but it had a drugstore with a soda fountain, a Mexican restaurant, and a record store, and she and Roxanne met there several times a week.

  Really, she didn't miss anything about the old house, her old life, except her father. She missed him a lot; she always would. At least, she missed the person he had been.

  The person he was now didn't seem to love her anymore.

  Now that he had
remarried and moved to Dallas she hadn't seen him for a whole year. She didn't know if he ever even thought about her now.

  If her father had become a different person, so had her mother, but with her mother the change was for the better. Once she got over the initial trauma of it, her husband's desertion had galvanized her. There were no more days spent languishing in bed in a darkened room, no more blank, icy moods that lasted for days, no more fantasies about her great acting career. Instead, Mary Grey woke up and, with no one else to do it for her, took control of her own life. She got a sales job at Sakowitz, she made new friends, and she became much closer to her youngest daughter. The twins had their own lives up in Austin; it was just the two of them now.

  But lately that closeness had started to itch. Maybe because she no longer had to fear her mother's icy withdrawals and she dared to disagree with her. Maybe because as she was growing up she was discovering that her mother could be wrong about things, they argued all the time. They sniped at each other, and picked and criticized every trivial detail. Mary objected to her daughter's unkempt appearance, to her refusal to wear makeup, to the “Sisterhood is Powerful” button on the strap of her denim shoulder bag.