Dark Horses

by Susan Mihalic

  Except for the sugar-cube photos, I hadn’t been aware my father was photographing me. The pictures were luminous, some so beautifully lit and rich in depth that they looked like paintings, an incredible achievement considering they’d been made with a phone. I was mystified by his failure to share every one of them online, and then, although there was nothing obscene or in poor taste, an unsettling intimacy began to emerge. I was seeing myself through his eyes.

  I came to a series of burst shots made at several frames per second, creating a slow stop-action movie that I envisioned him watching repeatedly. I was showing Will my horses. I knew exactly where my father had been standing—outside the feed room with Eddie—so he’d shot the images at a distance. Motes of hay dust starred the lens. In the rich, buttery light, how Will and I felt about each other was plain.

  For weeks, my father had known I was lying to him.

  A knock came at the passenger window of the truck, and I nearly levitated, fumbling with the phone as if I’d been caught stealing. Will started awake.

  “Jesus,” I said. “It’s Gertrude.” Our breath had condensed on the windows, but I recognized her general outline. I opened the passenger door.

  Her eyes were watery. My stomach plummeted.

  “A nurse just told us surgery’s going well, but he’ll be in there several more hours. You should go home.”

  “Home?” I repeated, stupefied by the scare she’d given me.

  “Yes, home. We’ll be here. Come back in the morning—real morning, when the sun’s up. Will, can you take her home?”

  “Yes, ma’am, if that’s what she wants.”

  I hesitated. “All right. But you’ll call me if there’s news?”

  “Of course. Safe home now.”

  The employee apartments and the farmhouse were dark, as was the barn, but the house was still lit. My father had never been casual about who had access to the house. None of the employees would have trespassed, even to turn out the lights.

  Will stopped in front of the porch but made no move to get out.

  “Will you stay?” I said.

  He turned off the engine.

  Inside, I switched off the porch light. Mirrored in the glass of one of the windows flanking the door, I looked like a character from a slasher flick.

  “I need to clean up.”

  “I’ll fix you some tea.”

  Upstairs, I started filling the tub. I returned to my bedroom, left my father’s cell on my nightstand, gathered clean clothes, and retrieved the bourbon from my boot. I took a big swallow on the way back to the bathroom. It burned my throat. I set the bottle on the floor by the tub.

  The blood on my shirt had soaked through to my skin. I peeled it off. No way was all that blood coming out. I’d throw it away tomorrow. For now, I dropped it in the hamper.

  When the tub was full, I lowered myself into it, sucking in air as hot water hit torn flesh.

  I took another drink of bourbon, pressed my fingertips into my eyes until agony became merely pain, and took a good look at myself. My shoulder was bruised from hitting the ground when Jasper went down. My breasts and hips bore marks from my father’s fingers.

  I wanted to get really, really drunk.

  No, I didn’t. I’d never be like Mama, weak and out of control.

  But that didn’t stop me from taking one more drink before I washed myself clean.

  I dressed in a fresh T-shirt and sweats, picked up my bottle, and opened the door to the bedroom. Will had turned back the covers. A tray on my nightstand held buttered toast and a big mug of tea.

  He straddled the seat of my desk chair, his chin resting on folded arms. His eyes went to the bottle.

  “I’m not drunk.”

  He shrugged. “You’ve got a right to be.”

  I offered him the bottle. He took it and drank but remained in the chair while I sat on the edge of my bed and bit into the toast.

  “Aren’t you eating?”

  “Not hungry.” He capped the bottle and set it on my desk. “Just sleepy.”

  I hesitated. “Why don’t you lie down with me?”

  He didn’t answer immediately. “You finished there?”

  “Yes. I’m not really hungry, either.”

  He moved the tray to my desk and turned off the overhead light. My bathroom light was still on, and in semidarkness, he pushed off his sneakers.

  “Don’t get undressed.” My voice was rocky.

  “Just my shoes.”

  Both of us got under the covers, lying stiffly apart.

  I could continue to allow my father to control me, or I could take control.

  I moved closer to Will. He put his arm around me. Tentatively, I rested my head on his shoulder.

  “Okay?” he said.

  “I will be,” I said, with more assurance than I felt.

  - twenty-seven -

  I WOKE UP in my usual state of denial—everything bad that had happened had been a dream—and then I became aware of arms around me. My body jerked to attention. Not a dream.

  Also, not my father but a boy who loved me. His breath tickled the top of my head.

  The piercing computerized beeps of the cell phone made me lurch for my nightstand.

  “Eddie?”

  “He made it through surgery.”

  I pushed back the covers. “I’ll be right there.”

  “Take your time. He’ll be in recovery a couple of hours.”

  Will made more toast and tea while I took a shower, but neither of us had any more appetite now than we’d had a few hours ago. Before we left the kitchen, he removed my fleece jacket from one of the hooks by the door. “Here.”

  “It’s going to be ninety today,” I said.

  “Not in the hospital.”

  We had a stop to make first. Will turned the truck between the stacked white limestone walls at the base of his driveway. We followed its meandering path through the woods, crossed a bridge over a stream, and rounded a curve, and the house came into view, a series of staggered white cubes three stories high with floor-to-ceiling windows of black glass.

  “Holy cow.”

  Will chuckled. “Yeah, it’s unexpected, isn’t it?”

  We followed the driveway around the side of the house, pulled up outside the garage, and entered through a door to the kitchen, where his parents and sister were finishing their oatmeal at a granite-topped island.

  “How’s your father, dear?” Mrs. Howard asked as Will bent to peck her forehead with a kiss.

  “Out of surgery,” I said. “That’s all I know.”

  “Tea or coffee?” Mr. Howard asked.

  “Coffee. Thank you.”

  Will went upstairs, and I took a seat at the island.

  Carrie, in her nightgown, her hair hanging over half her face, gazed at me with her visible eye. “Will talks about you a lot. Can I come see your horses?”

  “When things settle down,” Mrs. Howard said. “Roan’s father was in an accident last night.”

  Carrie went still. “A car accident?”

  Will’s parents exchanged a look as Mr. Howard set a mug of coffee in front of me.

  I added cream from a miniature pitcher. “He was hurt by one of the horses.”

  “Is he going to die?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  Mr. Howard held out his hand to his daughter. “Let’s get dressed for school.”

  “I’m tired. I think I should stay home.”

  “Uh-huh. Let’s go.”

  He picked her up, and she looped her arms around his neck, resigned to a school day.

  “Anytime she hears the word ‘accident,’ ” Mrs. Howard said, “she thinks someone’s died.”

  Will came back wearing his school uniform, his tie unknotted, his hair damp.

  “You’re going to school?” Mrs. Howard said.

  He nodded toward me. “She insisted.”

  The expression that streaked across his mother’s face was too quick to read, but she said to me, �
�So you’ll be all by yourself at the hospital?”

  “Gertrude and Eddie have been there all night.”

  “I’ll move some appointments around. That way, you won’t be alone all day, and you”—she looked at Will—“won’t worry.”

  Protest surfaced like a reflex, but I squelched it. I could use some support.

  * * *

  EDDIE AND GERTRUDE slouched in chairs in the ICU waiting room on the third floor. Gertrude’s eyes were closed. A small collection of vending machine coffee cups was arranged in bowling-pin formation on the end table beside Eddie.

  “Good timing,” he said.

  Gertrude sat up, stretching.

  “They’re moving him to a room. The critical care intensivist”—Eddie enunciated the words carefully—“is supposed to come talk to us.”

  “The what?”

  “ICU doctor. That’s what they call them now.”

  “Good to know.”

  He gave me a half smile.

  We waited. I tried to visualize a good outcome. Maybe my father would be the world’s healthiest, happiest quadriplegic. He was strong and athletic, so he had a shot at healthiest. There was no chance he’d be happy.

  A petite woman in a physician’s white coat approached.

  “You’re Mr. Montgomery’s family? I’m Dr. Lopez. I’d like to talk to you about what’s happening.”

  I absorbed the litany of damage done and repairs made. My father lay in a medically induced coma. A shunt drained the fluid leaking from his swollen brain. A ventilator breathed for him because the drugs used to keep him comatose relaxed his diaphragm muscles, which were also compromised by the spinal injury. The surgeon had removed his spleen and one-quarter of his liver. Because of internal bleeding, he’d received several liters of blood.

  I couldn’t form a single intelligent question. Gertrude and Eddie were silent, too.

  “You can sit with him,” Dr. Lopez said, “talk to him if you like, but he won’t be responsive. Be prepared. He looks rough.”

  She led us down the hall to a nurses’ station surrounded by glass-walled patient rooms. In turn, a nurse showed us to a room where a bald man with sunken eyes lay in a bed on the other side of the glass.

  The ground started to drop out from under me, but this wasn’t my father.

  “This is the wrong room.”

  “No, sugar,” Gertrude said. “It isn’t.”

  * * *

  GERTRUDE AND EDDIE were ragged with stress and lack of sleep, but they were reluctant to leave until I convinced them Mrs. Howard planned to spend the morning with me.

  When they left, I was as alone with my father as I could be in a glass-walled room.

  I sat in a visitor’s chair and looked down at my lap and listened to the horribly human sound of the ventilator, each inhale a gasp, each exhale a forceful puff.

  I ventured a glance toward the bed. He was largely hidden behind a cluster of monitors and machines. A blanket covered him from mid-chest down. His shoulders were bare. His arms lay peacefully at his sides.

  Chills had risen on my own arms. I pulled my fleece collar more tightly around my neck.

  I wondered if he were cold.

  Not that I cared.

  With a mighty eye roll, I sidled between the monitors and among the hoses and tubes to touch his shoulder. Warm. Did he have a fever? I couldn’t decipher all the numbers on the monitors, but I worked out blood pressure, oxygenation, heartbeat, pulse… and temperature, 100.2. But he was in ICU, and nurses were watching him.

  My eyes followed the brace that led from his shoulders to the halo immobilizer. Sutures sprouted from his scalp. His face was swollen and misshapen, his eyes so blackened that they looked like empty sockets. A tube secured with gauze and tape jutted from his mouth and fed via hose to the ventilator. I lifted the edge of the blanket. Thick dressings covered the surgical incisions. Black and purple bruises splashed across his torso like paint.

  I put the blanket back in place. Then I tugged it up to his shoulders.

  “Knock knock,” Mrs. Howard said from the open door. She held a large paper cup from Murphy’s Coffeehouse. “Will said…” Her eyes moved past me. “Oh, my dear.”

  I extricated myself from the machines and hoses. “Thank you for coming.”

  She held out the cup. “Will mentioned you like hot chocolate.” She pulled her chair close to mine, and we sat down. “What are the doctors saying about your dad?”

  I relayed what Dr. Lopez had told us.

  “We’ll do whatever we can to help. You helped Will so much after Steve died.” She smiled slightly. “Carrie wasn’t kidding. He talks about you all the time.”

  Funny to think of Will telling his family about me when I’d have chewed my tongue off rather than mention him to my father.

  Mrs. Howard stayed until late morning, when she had to leave for a meeting she hadn’t been able to cancel. We were strangers, really, but she was kind and easy to be with, like Will. I wondered what it would have been like to grow up in the Howard family instead of mine, but it was a fantasy I couldn’t sustain—I didn’t have enough experience with warm and loving parents—so instead I began to think about who I should notify of my father’s accident.

  I searched the contacts list on his cell for Vic and sent a text: It’s Roan. Daddy’s in ICU.

  He called immediately.

  Vic knew horses were living creatures who sometimes spooked, and he knew Diva, so he absorbed the how of the accident without question. He was more concerned about my father’s condition and prognosis, but after I told him, there was silence. I checked the screen to see if the call had dropped. Then I heard a sob.

  Stonily, I listened to Vic cry for my father. When he stopped, he offered to write a statement on my behalf about both accidents, my father’s and Jasper’s, for release on the SNN website.

  Instantly I was resistant. No one would speak for me ever again.

  “I’d appreciate your posting it,” I said, “but I’ll write it.”

  “Okay, but your phone will blow up as soon as it’s up. Do you want to refer people to me?”

  I hesitated, but he’d only be a conduit for information. He wouldn’t be speaking for me, not the way my father had.

  “Yes, thanks. I’ll send something over.”

  After we hung up, I dictated a text. I aimed to keep the statement short and simple, but when I reviewed it, I’d only covered the facts. There was no warmth to it. I added, Jasper was one of a kind. So is my father.

  One of a kind, yes. One kind of man, no. Everyone saw him differently. Only I saw all the pieces of him.

  We would appreciate your good wishes. I’ll update Vic Embry on my father and Diva as more information is available. Please contact him with any questions.

  Perfect, Vic replied by return text.

  Probably not, but at least the words were mine—no Love and hugs.

  Vic sent me a link to the post on the SNN website, and shortly afterward, my father’s phone began beeping with calls and plinking with texts. Not everyone followed instructions. I dismissed most of the calls, but I talked to Frank and texted with Jamie for nearly an hour. Then I searched for information about induced comas, traumatic brain injury, and C4 paralysis. I read about specialty hospitals and rehab facilities and imagined my father slowly turning to dust in a room off a dim, echoing hallway.

  Will wished Diva had killed him, and were my father conscious, he’d consider death a kindness. But I didn’t foresee myself kicking the ventilator plug out of the wall, even as an act of mercy.

  * * *

  AFTER SCHOOL, WILL saw my father for the first time since he’d had dinner at Rosemont.

  His face was set and hard when he came into the room, but at the sight of my father, his anger and hatred gave way to shock.

  “Jesus. He doesn’t look…”

  “Alive?” I suggested.

  He shook his head. “Human.”

  In the late afternoon, we drove to Will’s house, wher
e he went inside to talk to his parents while I waited in the truck with the windows down, listening to the stream bubbling under the bridge that crossed their driveway.

  He returned shortly with a duffel bag, which he tossed in the back of the truck.

  “Any resistance?” I asked.

  “Nothing significant. You know how parents are.” He stopped. We had different frames of reference for how parents were. “They’re in there reassuring each other that the circumstances are special.”

  We stopped next at the farmhouse, where Gertrude fed us an early supper of chicken and dumplings while we discussed a schedule for the next few days. She and Eddie would take turns sitting with my father during the day. I’d walk to the hospital after class and relieve whoever was there.

  Eddie poured himself a pint glass of Guinness. “What about Arlington?”

  I shook my head, saying no to both Arlington and more dumplings. “I’m going to withdraw. I’ll shoot for Bromont.”

  “And training?”

  “Frank offered to help.”

  He nodded.

  “But I’d rather train with you. You know as much as Frank. You know as much as my father.”

  Eddie studied his glass. Below the caramel-colored foam, the Guinness looked like creosote. “When do you want to start?”

  “Tomorrow.”

  “Why don’t you wait until exams are over?” Gertrude suggested.

  I shook my head. “I’ve already missed three shows, and Bluegrass…” Bluegrass had been a disaster in all regards. “Arlington will make five. I can’t lose any more ground if I’m going to have a shot at three-stars next year.” Three-star competitions were prime hunting ground for the U.S. team. I looked at Eddie. “We may need to add some winter shows. And I’ll need another horse.”

  “One thing at a time,” Eddie said. “I’ll see you at the barn at six tomorrow morning, ready to ride.”

  Gertrude wasn’t as clueless about my ambition as Mama had been. She might not understand why I was so driven, but she accepted that I was. “Tomorrow morning’s going to come early. Go get your things, sugar. I made up the guest room for you.”