The Yonahlossee Riding Camp for Girls

by Anton Disclafani

  It was pouring outside, in buckets. I flung myself from chair to chair, bored to death. I wandered into my brother’s room, opened the door without knocking. He looked afraid, but he turned back to what he was doing when he saw it was me, not Mother.

  “A nest,” he explained, as I stood over him, “of baby squirrels.”

  “Only two?” Sam had raised squirrels before, but usually there were more of them. They were so ugly, the size of mice, hairless and pink, their eyes sealed shut. Sam had nestled them in an old blanket. It seemed impossible they would grow to be squirrels.

  “A raccoon got the rest.”

  One of them shifted, and I reached my hand down to touch one—

  “Thea!”

  “Sorry,” I said. “I forgot.”

  “Mother would kill you,” I said, after a moment. She didn’t allow Sam’s animals in the house.

  Sam smiled. “No.” He shook his head. “If she saw, her eyes wouldn’t believe it.”

  But chances were Mother wouldn’t come to Sam’s room again; she’d already made the beds and straightened the upstairs.

  I watched Sam try to feed one of the squirrels with one of Father’s syringes, absent the needle.

  “Is it milk?” I asked.

  Sam shook his head. “Cow’s milk would kill them. It’s sugar water, warmed. They’re doing better now, I think.” The squirrel opened its mouth and began to suck, and even I was excited, in spite of myself. “There,” Sam said, “there.”

  I watched him for a few moments. “There, there,” he said, over and over, a refrain for the nursing squirrel.

  “Why do you love squirrels so much?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “Why do you like horses so much?”

  There were so many reasons, but when I tried to name one good one, I couldn’t.

  “See?” Sam asked. “And besides, I don’t love squirrels. I just . . . I like being outside. I like the natural world.”

  “The natural world,” I repeated.

  “Yes,” Sam said. “The natural world.”

  He began to murmur to the squirrel again, and I fell back onto the bed, and closed my eyes against the sound of his voice.

  I lay there, close to sleep, hearing my brother’s pretty voice, still pretty even as it turned deeper and deeper, as it had over the past few months, changing to match his increasing height. My brother was a flower, unfolding, shooting toward the heavens.

  —

  That night I went to his hotel room. It looked lived in, unlike mine. There was a jam jar filled with flowers on the bureau, and three snake skins, almost completely intact, with tiny holes where eyes used to reside. I touched one of them, very lightly.

  “What happened to your terrariums?” I asked.

  Sam perched on the edge of his bed, watching me.

  “They’re gone.”

  I nodded. “I’m leaving,” I said.

  “I know.”

  “You could leave, too. They would let you.”

  My voice sounded too urgent. But he should leave, too. He should not let this swallow him whole.

  When he finally spoke, his voice was a challenge.

  “But I don’t want to leave, Thea. I don’t want—” And he paused, but no, it was more than a pause. He stopped himself from saying whatever terrible thing he was going to say. But I knew.

  “To be like me?” I asked.

  He looked away. I knew I was right. It was not fair, of course. I had been made to go away. I had not abandoned him on purpose. But in the end I got the better deal. There were so many accidents in the world, some happy, some not. I would take what I had gotten.

  I went to my brother and sat down next to him on the bed. My twin would not leave because he was a better son than I was daughter; he could not leave because he could not imagine life without them. Sam wasn’t brave. He never had been. He was loyal and true and still belonged to my parents in a way I never would again. He wasn’t brave, but one person could only be so many things. He was still my parents’ child, and perhaps he always would be. Only time would tell.

  “You’re a Florida boy,” I said. I reached into my pocket and pulled out the handkerchief I had taken with me to Yonahlossee. It looked no worse for the wear. I put it in his hand and closed his fingers around it.

  He looked at it, and then at me. “Yes,” he said softly, with his new voice. “Yes, I am.”

  —

  That night I lay in bed and tried to summon Sissy’s eyes, Mr. Holmes’s elegant hands, Naari’s dainty face. But I could not remember. Everything was slipping from my mind. I rose and dressed in my Yonahlossee uniform; it was the only thing that fit. The clothes still smelled of Augusta House, and I tried not to cry, I tried not to want something I could never again have.

  Outside, the air was thick with moisture, the moon hung over us like a fat face. There were a few people, scattered on the sidewalks. A door swung open and I glimpsed a crowded, smoky room, a man in front of a piano.

  “Excuse me, miss,” someone said, and I realized I was in someone’s way. I stepped to the side and a man walked in front of me, and I recognized him as the bellhop my mother had almost forgotten to tip. A woman was on his arm, but I could only see the back of her, her sheer dress, her black hair. He gave no sign that he recognized me. I watched him slip away into the night, off to another place, or perhaps his home, where he would touch his girl, she would touch him, and the night would open like a flower.

  I walked and walked. An hour, two. I lost track of time. I thought, foolishly, that I might see Sam. I knew he wandered at night. I knew he roamed. But there was no sign of him. I walked away from the streetlights, in the darkness. Mother had not taught us to fear the world; she had taught us to scorn it.

  I finally arrived at Church Street, visible from a block away. I knew it would be busy here, or if not busy, alive in some way. There were people going places, people returning, always, always.

  The sky zippered open, as it did in Florida, suddenly and violently, and the lightning lit the sky in a way that was beautiful and fierce. I was unafraid. Nothing in the natural world scared me. This lightning was far away, and I was surrounded by things taller than me, where the lightning would strike first.

  I sat down on a covered bench, next to an old woman who was clearly waiting for a train. She asked me for the time and I looked at the giant clock above us and told her. She did not thank me; she was agitated, and I understood why.

  “I’m going to Miami,” she said. “And my train is so very, very late.”

  I almost laughed. Miami. Sam had told me there were thousands of acres of land there, abandoned by their owners, our uncle just one piece of it.

  I understood the woman’s agitation. She was waiting to be taken away from this place. She was dressed like someone from another century, long, long skirts, a blouse that hid even her wrists. And she was from another century, I realized. She had been born long before me, and I knew someday some impetuous girl would think the same of me: that I was old and foolish, dated, born too long ago to matter anymore.

  I sat there and waited for the train with this woman. I tried not to fear the future. I hoped it would be kinder than the past.

  On my way to Yonahlossee, all those months ago, I had watched my father’s profile as he drove, and felt ashamed. I hoped I would not always feel this intensely. But then I knew I always would. It was my nature.

  I sat on the bench and felt the strong wind whip my ankles and tried to keep ahold of all my memories. I touched Sissy’s necklace. I saw myself in future trains and wondered who I would travel with. I wondered where we would go.

  I would travel nowhere with Georgie, who died six days short of his twenty-fifth birthday. I never saw him again, I never saw Aunt Carrie or Uncle George or their former home in Gainesville. Georgie would never be himself again, a curse worse than d
eath. If he had died right away, the circumstances surrounding his death would surely have been examined more closely; mercifully for us, Georgie lived. However briefly.

  Mercy eluded my aunt and uncle, who tended to Georgie for the rest of his life. At Yonahlossee I only remembered Georgie and his family in the past tense, I tried never to think about what my family, especially my cousin, was doing in the present. It was perhaps a flaw in my character that I could forget so easily about my wounded cousin. That’s what I thought then. Now I’m glad I was able to put it out of my head, to survive. We did not speak of him often, but my father revealed to me, one night when he was very drunk and old, long after my mother had died, that Georgie often succumbed to terrible rages, that the part of his brain that controlled anger was damaged in the accident. The accident.

  My mother became an invalid, locked herself in her room most days and tended to her migraines. I was sent to a proper boarding school, in the Northeast, a place of my choosing. There was a stable nearby, where I continued to ride. I exercised the horses of the rich, which was a good way, I learned, to put myself on a horse when I couldn’t own one. I thought of Leona in those days, wondered how exactly she had found her own way onto the back of a horse again. I was certain she had; how was the only question.

  I left the South. My brother stayed put. He lived his life with my parents, who stayed in Florida but did indeed move to a foreign and strange south Florida, to a busy, bustling Miami, where my father continued to practice medicine.

  My father never saw his brother again, but he continued to send him money. I saw the letter once, folded around a check: to George Atwell in Centralia, Missouri. Citrus continued to be good to my family; it kept us afloat in the thirties, and in the forties it made us wealthy again. It saved us, allowed me to go away to school, allowed us to live some semblance of the lives we had imagined for ourselves.

  After Georgie died, Aunt Carrie sent us his obituary, cut from a newspaper. There was a note folded over the clipping, in Aunt Carrie’s hand: “He has left us.” She and Uncle George thought that there had been a fight between the male cousins; I’m fairly certain they never knew my part. I would have cut my tongue out of my mouth before telling them, and Georgie—well, if he even remembered what had happened, he was not quite right, they would not have, I am almost certain, believed him. I have lived my life and Georgie is a shadow, Georgie is a person who I once loved, whose death I had a hand in. He is a ghost. My ghost.

  I am certain Sam did not mean to kill Georgie. He was a boy, turning into a man. He did not know his own strength. It was a series of events, Sam. A series of events.

  I never told a soul about what I had seen, my brother raise his rifle and strike Georgie in the head. Did my father know? He was a doctor, surely he could have told the difference between a wound from falling and a wound from force. But only God knows this.

  I came home twice a year, two weeks for Christmas and two weeks in the middle of the summer. One twelfth of the year. In a way our relationships remained the same—my father was still distant, my mother difficult. But the qualities of those feelings were complicated now by what I had done, by what my family had done to me. It’s difficult to say what Sam thought about everything—we were twins, we never had to articulate our feelings to each other, we just knew. But not anymore, Sam and I didn’t know each other, it was safe to say, any longer. He was distant and pleasant when I was home, which was the worst punishment I could think of, to treat me like a stranger. I never cried again in his presence, nor he in mine.

  I came back and was able to eat meals with my family, discuss matters of no consequence, sleep in the same house as they only because of Henry Holmes. Only because he made me understand the exchange my parents had made. Me for Sam. But I had made the first trade: my brother for my cousin.

  I experienced true love, joy, when my children were born, grief again when I lost a child in my fifth month. I had a life, separate from my family and what had happened when I was a child. And horses were always a part of my life, a blessing; taking comfort in them had always been something I’d done by instinct, and it was an instinct I never outgrew. I took pleasure in how good I was in the saddle, how well I knew my way around a horse. I was good at something in a way most people are never good at anything in their lives. Horses were a gift; how many people have such a constant in their life, separate from the rough and often beautiful mess that is their family?

  At Yonahlossee I learned the lesson that I had started to teach myself at home: my life was mine. And I had to lay claim to it.

  When I returned from the Northeast, I was always surprised by the palm trees, the blunt heat, the moisture in the air so heavy it was almost sickening. My parents lived in a neighborhood where they could see other houses from theirs; they lived in a house that was beautiful and cold.

  Sam decided to be a doctor, like Father. He stopped exploring the natural world. He spent all his time inside, now, and when I was home I would study his cheek, made pale by his preference for the indoors; when he turned toward me, there was a flash of skin, a succinct feeling of desperation. We were lost to each other. At Yonahlossee I learned to live a life without my brother; I learned that what once seemed impossible was not. And my life all to myself was easier, in many ways. Lonelier, but a twin is as much a burden as a pleasure. I did not know life without him, we had a language all to ourselves in infancy, we shared a womb. When everyone else expected one—my mother, my father, my grandparents—we were two. And it is not easy to be two people where there should have been one. If there had only been one person, then Georgie would still be alive. Because no one else besides Sam would have cared so deeply, so irrevocably, about what his other half had done.

  My parents had sent me away because they saw I was a girl who wanted too much, wanted badly, inappropriately. And back then all that want was a dangerous thing.

  Woe be to you, Thea, Mr. Holmes said. We were in his library, surrounded by his books. My blouse was unbuttoned. He took my hand and kissed my thumb. Woe be to you for wanting too much. He kissed my wrist. For wanting so much. He lowered me down onto the couch, my uniform hiked over my hips.

  I wanted everything. I wanted my cousin. I wanted Mr. Holmes. I was a girl, I learned, who got what she wanted, but not without sadness, not without cutting a swath of destruction so wide it consumed my family. And almost me. I almost fell into it, with them. I almost lost myself.

  But I was too selfish. I wanted, as Mr. Holmes put it, too much. And none of it was a decision, a list written out, a plan articulated. We have no say in who we love. And woe be to all of us, for that.

  Woe be to Sam, who never left Florida, who never lived in the world beyond its shores. He had a wife, he had a family. He did not have his twin. Woe be to Mr. Holmes, who I never saw again, who surely felt me as a loss, as I felt him. Woe be to Mother and Father, who allowed what I had done to unravel their lives. Woe be to Georgie most of all, whose first love was his last, who has turned to dust now, a stone in a Missouri cemetery the only evidence that he existed, proof that he lived and left some mark. Evidence that he existed, but not that he loved. I am proof that he loved. And perhaps that was my most important task, in this life: living a life for both me and him. Seeing things that he never did. Doing what he could not.

  But woe be to Thea—no. Take it back, Henry. And surely he would have, if he had continued to know me. Surely he would have seen that my life was full, and rich, and my own.

  A photograph would hang on the wall outside Mr. Holmes’s office, though I would never see it. I would never return to Yonahlossee, or my home in Florida. The photograph would serve as a reminder to him. A reminder to everyone that Theodora Atwell and Naari had won the Spring Show in 1931. I had left in disgrace, but still my picture would go up. It was tradition.

  —

  I heard a train in the distance, the familiar whining. The woman next to me stood, my presence forgotten.
Woe be to us. The memory sprang up, unbidden. One of the countless afternoons we spent with each other, all flooding out now, flooding out of my head and turning into so much vapor. I faltered. I put my head in my hands.

  But no. I looked up again. The train made its slow ascent into the station, and the woman marched into the rain, though it would be minutes and minutes until she was allowed to board. But she didn’t care. She simply wanted to leave.

  I thought of my picture in the Castle, which neither my parents nor Sam would ever see.

  But what would future girls see when they looked at the photograph during their daily comings and goings, peered closely? Not the shade of my hair, rendered colorless by the photograph. Not Mr. Holmes, who stood beyond the frame. Not anything, really. Just a girl on a horse, like so many other girls.

  Acknowledgments

  A deep debt of gratitude to my agent, Dorian Karchmar, who took on Yonahlossee when it was barely a manuscript, and guided me through many revisions. It would not be a book without her.

  Thank you next to my editor, Sarah McGrath, whose care and insight made the book so much better. At Riverhead Books, thank you to the entire amazing team and especially Geoff Kloske, Sarah Stein, and Jynne Dilling Martin. At Headline, my UK publisher, thank you to Claire Baldwin.

  At William Morris Endeavor, thank you to Simone Blaser, Tracy Fisher, Catherine Summerhayes, and Eugenie Furniss.

  I owe many thanks to the creative writing departments of Emory University and Washington University, respectively—the former, where I took my first creative writing class; the latter, where I received my MFA and then taught while I wrote Yonahlossee. At both schools, I studied under many fine professors. A special thank-you to Kathryn Davis, who has always been my most enthusiastic cheerleader, and Marshall Klimasewiski and Saher Alam.

  Thank you to Tim Mullaney, David Schuman, and Curtis Sittenfeld, for support while I wrote.

  Thank you to my mother, for teaching me to love a home. Thank you to my father, for driving me thousands of miles to and from the barn. And for not letting me go to law school. Thank you to my sister, Xandra, who has always been my biggest champion. As I grow older, I feel increasingly lucky for the love and support my parents and sister have always offered.