Chosen by a Horse

by Susan Richards

  We kept the car running with the heat on high, but I shivered anyway. It was all nerves. I was terrified to be that helpless, in the middle of nowhere. I glanced at the gas gauge, imagining a worse disaster. If we ran out of gas, we might freeze to death. The gauge showed three-quarters full. We were about two hours out of Ithaca with another four hours ahead of us. It seemed impossible that we’d ever make it home. But in the state I was in, it seemed that nothing good could happen. I was shivering so hard my teeth chattered.

  Dorothy was the picture of calm, one hand resting on my arm while the other fished through my purse looking for my cell phone. “We’ll call your chiropractor to see if she can meet us at the office.”

  I nodded my head. “Good idea.”

  She pulled out my cell phone and flipped it open. There was no reception. Zero. We would die in a dead zone, one of life’s little ironies. My brain careened through a list of people I’d heard of who’d frozen to death: Shackleton, Mallory, Doctor Zhivago—almost. Maybe we’d be asphyxiated first. I opened the window a crack, and a blast of frigid air swept across my face.

  “There’s a police car behind us,” Dorothy announced.

  “He’ll think I’m stoned,” I mumbled. Still, I was relieved. Maybe he’d help Dorothy get me into the backseat.

  A face appeared at the driver’s window wearing wraparound sunglasses and one of those tan wide-brimmed state-trooper hats.

  “What’s the problem?” he asked, opening my door and bending down to peer into the car. The car filled with cold air as the wind blew the door hard against his back. He reached behind him to hold it open with one hand while removing his sunglasses with the other. His eyes scanned the interior of the car before coming to a rest on mine. His face was pale and chubby; he couldn’t have been more than thirty.

  I explained about my back. “I just need to lie flat.”

  “Sure you don’t want an ambulance?” he asked.

  God, did I look that bad? “No, no,” I assured him, “if you could just help move me.”

  “We’re not supposed to do anything medical, ma’am,” he said, sounding doubtful.

  “It’s not really medical,” I pleaded, “it’s more in the category of helping an old lady cross the street.”

  He smiled at my stab at humor and seemed to consider the options. He looked up and down the highway.

  “We need to get you off the road,” he said. “This is a bad place to stop.”

  “My friend can drive,” I told him, “if we can just get me out of the way.”

  Maybe he could tell I was the kind of person who wouldn’t sue even if he dropped me on my head, or maybe he just wanted to hurry us off a dangerous spot on the highway. Whatever it was, he finally agreed to help move me.

  He opened the hatchback first so when they got me that far, they could just slide me in like a two-by-four. Then, as gently as he could, he pulled me out of my seat into a standing position. I teetered between him and Dorothy with my arms around their shoulders, letting them support all my weight so there would be no compression whatsoever of my spine. The pain was horrible anyway, as though someone were cutting me in half with dull scissors. Every time my back did this, I wondered if I’d ever be able to walk again. It seemed impossible that such pain wouldn’t cause permanent damage.

  They lowered the top half of me into the car, letting my knees bend so my feet were still on the road. Then the trooper opened the back door and knelt inside, pulling me the rest of the way into the car by my armpits. Flat on my back, if I didn’t budge an inch, I was pain free. At the moment, it seemed like a miracle.

  “Thank you,” I said, releasing a long sigh. Dorothy handed me the plastic bag with the snow and packed various things around me to prevent me from rolling. We thanked the trooper again and then we were on our way.

  With every bump and jolt of the car, the pain returned, but I was so relieved to be moving in the direction of help, it no longer panicked me. When we got closer to home, we’d call my chiropractor again. I thought about Lay Me Down and how glad I was that this hadn’t happened before we’d gotten her to Cornell. However bad this felt, Lay Me Down’s problems were far worse, and I was grateful I’d been able to accompany her to the hospital.

  On Christmas morning I woke up after an uncomfortable night’s sleep, knowing that I didn’t have to do anything. There was no way I could. There would be no barn chores, no counseling clients through the Christmas blues, no putting in an appearance at my neighbor’s annual Christmas party, and no meeting Hank and his daughter for Christmas dinner across the river. Hannah would take care of my horses, and, at noon, some angel from a home-help agency was coming to give me a bath. Aside from the possibility of a late-afternoon visit by one or two friends, that would be the highlight of the day. Maybe the home-health aide would even change my sheets!

  My world had shrunk to the size of my king-sized bed, which was piled with books, magazines, and videos I had to hold in my teeth as I crawled on my hands and knees to insert them in the VCR across the room. Next to me, spilling off the bedside table onto the floor, were water bottles, open boxes of crackers and rice cakes, a box of clementines, vitamins, a big bottle of ibuprofen, a couple of empty soup bowls, and a half-eaten box of Whitman’s chocolates. Every time I crawled to the bathroom I had to navigate through the clutter to get there.

  As long as I didn’t move in certain ways, my pain was no longer excruciating. Though I was still unable to sit up or walk, I recognized subtle signs of progress. Things didn’t seem too bad.

  A few hours later, I was lying back with my eyes shut, luxuriating in the warmth of a lavender-scented bath. Kneeling on the floor next to me was the home-health aide, a middle-aged woman with graying hair who’d brought along her knitting and a photograph of an orange kitten she’d gotten herself for Christmas. She had a southern accent and told me she’d been born in a log cabin in Missouri.

  “I’m the oldest of eleven. I’ve been taking care of someone my whole life,” she said.

  Did she mind? I couldn’t tell. She seemed easygoing, the kind of woman who never complained about anything.

  “But I’m not here to talk about me,” she said. “Tell me how you’re doin’, honey?”

  I opened my eyes and turned to look at her. Her glasses had slid to the middle of her nose and I could see how twinkly and blue her eyes still were. “I feel pretty good.” I smiled at the kind face. “I’ve managed to get out of Christmas.”

  A funny little laugh escaped from her throat and she bent over slightly, feeling for the cameo pinned at the neck of her blouse, as though checking to see if she was still properly covered. “Me, too!” She rocked on her heels, trying to contain her laughter. “Don’t you just hate Christmas!”

  After my bath, she changed my sheets and then sat in a chair knitting while we watched a video. As we said our good-byes later that afternoon, we agreed that, without question, it was the best Christmas we’d ever had.

  [ 16 ]

  A WEEK LATER I was up and walking but not ready for the twelve-hour round-trip car ride to bring Lay Me Down home, so Stan and Carol agreed to get her without me. The day they left, I spent forty-five minutes on the phone with Dr. Rebhun, who described the tests, the results, and the options. The tumor was large, invasive, and inoperable. Because of its location in her brain, it had been inoperable from the day it had formed. Horses bled to death on the operating table when they tried to remove tumors that near the eye. For Lay Me Down, the only “options” were when to euthanize her, now or later.

  “You’ll know when the time is right,” Dr. Rebhun said.

  “How?” I gripped the phone with both hands. “How will I know?” What I really meant was, I don’t trust myself to know.

  Dr. Rebhun was quiet for a long moment. Then he said, “If I knew, I’d tell you.”

  His voice was kind, apologetic. We were no longer talking about medicine. On the subject of euthanizing, my judgment was as good as his. That’s what he was telling me.
He couldn’t save her and he couldn’t tell me when to kill her. She was out of his reach.

  When Lay Me Down returned from Cornell, I called Dr. Grice. I asked her how I would know when it was time to euthanize Lay Me Down, but what I was hoping was that she’d make the decision. She didn’t. Her answer was just as vague as Dr. Rebhun’s.

  “It wouldn’t be wrong if you did it now, and it wouldn’t be wrong if you didn’t,” she said.

  I was sitting at the kitchen counter, looking out the window while I was talking to her on the phone. The horses were eating the morning hay I’d scattered on top of the snow in the pasture. Lay Me Down was wearing her blue coat and standing next to Hotshot. Georgia and Tempo were together, several yards away. All four of them were in the sun. The thermometer on the tree near the window read thirty.

  Suddenly I knew what I wanted, what I wished for Lay Me Down before she died. A spring day full of the smell of moist earth and sweet new grass when she could stand in the sun without her coat. If I was to play God, I wanted to give her a sunbath. It meant keeping her alive for four more months, until April. I had no idea if that was possible, but it was my goal. I told Dr. Grice.

  “Yes,” she said, “horses love the sun.”

  I didn’t really know what facing death meant. I knew more about avoiding it, about drinking and sleeping around to blot out the memory of death and, later, about choosing loneliness over the possibility of facing more grief. Being with Hank was more of the same, a relationship with a built-in ending. If you didn’t care much, there was nothing much to lose. It was a lifestyle.

  It was a lifestyle I’d had to relinquish because of a sick horse. Cornell was our last hope and now that that hope was gone, there I was, facing the thing I’d tried to avoid all my life. Loss. This one felt as big to me as losing a dear friend, a relative, anyone I’d ever loved deeply and unconditionally. Maybe loving a horse was like that because they were big, or because you expected them to live so long. Maybe because having a horse meant your life had been touched by a beautiful mystery.

  After Cornell, Lay Me Down was different. She moved to the edge of the herd and dozed standing up while the others ate hay. She didn’t sigh as much and her eye contact was less sustained. Before Cornell there had been an exuberant quality to her affection, an intensity. She used to lock me in her gaze as soon as I appeared on the horizon, and I’d feel pulled toward her by that stare. Now when she saw me, she looked briefly, then looked away. That was normal for horses but not for Lay Me Down.

  At first I thought her distance was because she was recovering from her ordeal, her journey and everything she’d been through. But weeks later she still seemed aloof.

  “I think she’s depressed,” I told Allie in my barn one January night as I turned on the light.

  We watched Lay Me Down’s breath billow over her hay in long white puffs. Hotshot stood outside her stall door, blinking at the sudden illumination. Georgia and Tempo were eating hay across the aisle in Tempo’s stall. Lay Me Down was royal blue from head to tail, dressed in her full winter gear: hood, neck cover, and blanket. I slipped my hand under her blanket and checked along her side for shivering. She felt warm and fuzzy.

  For once Allie didn’t accuse me of anthropomorphizing. “Could be the anesthesia,” she said. “Sometimes it takes months for the effects to wear off.”

  Lay Me Down had greeted our unexpected night visit in her new, more casual way: a glance, a faint sigh, and then she went right back to eating hay. I missed the way she used to be, her engaging stare, the big wet sighs misting some lucky recipient, usually me. Everything I wore was covered in horse snot or sticky from peppermints. Even my car was never without the wide gray lick marks swirled across the windows. And recently, Lay Me Down’s teeth had left a jagged white trail across the smooth red hood. I couldn’t feel angry even though I tried. A horse shouldn’t be allowed to eat your car. I’d said no and pushed her away, but there was no threat in my voice, nothing that would frighten her.

  It would have been different with Georgia. With Georgia I would have rushed at her in a fury of waving arms and loud nos, and she would have flicked her tail at me and trotted, stiff-legged, to a safe distance to wait until I had returned to my senses. No matter what she had done, it was never Georgia’s fault. I was the crazy one who periodically exploded for no good reason. Morgans are without contrition, the Who, me? of horse breeds.

  Lay Me Down had enough contrition for both of them. Maybe too much, like people who apologized when someone else stepped on them.

  “Maybe she knows she’s dying,” I said. I felt funny saying this out loud in front of Lay Me Down. You never know.

  Allie shook her head. “She’s not dying.”

  For a second I felt elated. Dr. Rebhun was wrong. My smart friend was about to tell me what we could do to get rid of this tumor. “She’s not?”

  “Not for a while.”

  My elation vanished. My smart friend was being literal. Lay Me Down was eating hay, not dying. What would dying look like?

  “Think she can make it to April?” I asked.

  Allie looked at her bad eye. “I don’t know,” she said.

  No one I asked could tell me when to euthanize Lay Me Down. I called Dr. Grice back and made arrangements for her to come twice a month. Dr. Grice would measure the growth of the tumor, check Lay Me Down’s vital signs, and give me medicated drops to help keep the eye moist and clean. Then I hung up and called Clayton Barringer. He had a backhoe and dug graves for the town cemetery. He also dug horse graves. I wanted to bury Lay Me Down on my property but didn’t know if a hole could be dug when the ground was frozen. Should he dig it now, before the frost line got deeper?

  “Frozen ground’s no problem,” he said, air whistling between missing teeth. “Call me the day before. That way it’ll be ready and the vet can do it right by the hole. Is the horse strong enough to walk to where you want the hole dug?”

  Something I’d never thought of, how to get Lay Me Down from where she died to where she was going to be buried. This was part of not facing death, having no plan for the obvious. I’d never thought about this, but it made sense. Bring the horse to the hole and euthanize her there. Creepy but practical. It was better than whatever the alternative was. Dragging? Part of knowing when to euthanize her meant not letting her get so weak she couldn’t walk. But what if it happened suddenly? What if she was normal one day and the next day couldn’t get up?

  “I don’t know,” I said. I resisted the urge to apologize, to cry, to ask him to come over and shoot her between the eyes right then and take her away so all signs of her were gone by evening chores. I resisted the urge to explain why I didn’t know if she’d be able to walk to her own grave or not. It didn’t matter.

  I heard him light a cigarette and blow out the smoke. “Don’t you worry,” he said after a long pause, “I’ll arrange him in the hole real pretty.”

  I resisted the urge to say her.

  Facing death meant getting up every cold dark morning and walking to the barn and doing exactly what I always did. It meant going to work and coming home and going back to the barn to do evening chores. It meant sticking to the routine. Was I the only one who didn’t know that facing death meant facing life? They were exactly the same. Even Georgia seemed to know this. It must have been obvious to her that Lay Me Down was sick, but it made no difference. She still hated her. She still chased her away whenever she got the chance.

  Hotshot stuck to his routine, too. The ugly pink growth, now the size of a tennis ball, didn’t change his ardor. When she came back from Cornell he was the only one I allowed out to greet her, the only one of the three who would give her the wholehearted welcome I wanted her to have. And he did. He sniffed and nickered the length of her until she grew annoyed and flicked him away with her tail. Already I was sad, thinking how he would miss her. I got a taste of it when she was at Cornell, watching him look for her up and down the fence line several times a day. He’d stand at the gate and whinny
in the direction of the pasture where he’d first seen her. There was something almost unbearably sweet in his thinking she might be there, just across the pond where he couldn’t see her. What must he think of me? That I would separate him from her for no reason?

  At the beginning of February I got around to making some New Year’s resolutions. It was a short list, only one item: end the relationship with Hank. My resolution was connected to Lay Me Down. Life is short, do what matters. My horse was dying and sadness made me bold, woke me up, gave everything an edge, a now-or-never quality. Lay Me Down was my muse, my inspiration to find meaning in loss, to make peace with it, to find the beauty in it. If nothing else, to see the truth of it.

  A few weeks earlier Hank had given me an ultimatum. Either we lived together or he’d end our relationship. He wanted me to move there, into the house he had shared with his wife, with his Hudson River School paintings, his brown linoleum kitchen floor, and his blue Mexican water glasses with the air bubbles. I felt as if he was asking me to slip into someone else’s old dress. I never seriously entertained the idea, but I had put off telling him because that was what I did. I avoided endings. Besides, I didn’t take his threat seriously. This was a man who had waited six years to call me. It was important to take my time, chose the right moment. This was someone’s heart. Then something right out of a movie happened.

  “Sorry about you and Hank,” a woman we both knew said to me in the grocery store. “I didn’t think he was the kind of man to go for someone that young.”

  It was as though she’d punched me. I gripped my cart, hoping she didn’t realize it was holding me up. “What?”

  Her hand flew to her mouth. “You didn’t know?”