When Secrets Die

by Lynn S. Hightower

  Her mother had sent the horse to a trainer once, someone known to work slowly and with kindness, but he’d sent the mare back in two months, bringing her himself in his silver six-horse trailer and battered pickup truck. Emma had been watching, listening. She remembered his heavily gloved hands and the matter-of-fact way he led the horse out of the van; she remembered the mare rolling her eyes and snorting as if she’d never seen the barn before, quieting only at her mother’s touch, but still dancing sideways at every shadow and sound.

  The trainer had just kind of shrugged at her mother. “The mare’s just too old—experience wise, if you know what I mean—for me to make that much difference. I’m wasting your money, and to tell you the truth I’d rather be working a horse where I can make a difference.”

  “She’s a good horse,” her mother had said.

  “I don’t mean that.” The trainer had pointed to the grooves over the mare’s eyes. “That’s always the sign of a kind heart and an old soul, but she’s never going to trust me or anybody else enough to get where she doesn’t spook six ways to Sunday over every little thing. I’ve sacked her out; she’s better. But if you don’t work with her every day, she’ll just go back to her old self. You’re not going to get the spook and run out of her—not with those bloodlines, and not with the kind of past she’s had. Course, you can get another opinion.”

  But Emma’s mother had not wanted another opinion, and she’d seemed content to just ride Empress around that round pen, and gradually the horse had calmed down and learned that riding wasn’t so very bad. She’d walk around that pen quietly with her head down, instead of nose to the air like she’d been when Emma’s mother had first brought her home. Emma remembered somebody stopping by watching her mom on the horse, and saying what a quiet little mare she was. She remembered how her mama had grinned at Emma over the woman’s head and then just smiled and said “thank you very much.”

  She was a smart horse. She’d had a bad infection once, and Emma’s mother had to inject her twice a day with penicillin, a painful shot, and yet Empress had stood quietly, and her mother had been able to administer the shot in the mare’s short, stocky neck, with one hand, while holding the halter with the other.

  And while the house might be kept half-assed, the barn was always clean and organized, and one thing Emma remembered more than anything was leading the mare into her stall at the end of the day. In her memory it was always fall, and chilly, and getting dark early enough that it was dark by the time Emma brought the horse in. She remembered the red and gold of the leaves, the crisp chill in the air, and the way the barn looked, all lit up, as she walked in the dark through the field. Empress would trot along beside her, anxious for her bin of sweet feed, and the evening pleasure of slowly munching the orchard-grass hay after the lustful gorging on feed, the stall clean and pungent with the smell of cedar wood shavings, a bucket of cold clean water, and the mineral block the horse liked to scrape with her teeth. Emma loved tucking a horse into a stall for the night, and no matter what anybody told her about horses being better off outdoors twenty-four hours a day, she knew that Empress, at least, liked the coming and going, in the barn, out of the barn, and being snug inside a clean, well-bedded stall with plenty of good food and clean water, a bit of apple or carrot, and always a kind loving word.

  Her father had sold that little country cottage where she grew up, the three acres with the sagging tobacco barn and the little round pen, and the paddock circled by the black four-plank fencing that had to be patrolled and maintained. She had a strong memory of her mother, in that torn blue flannel shirt she used to wear around the barn, hammering away at some sagging board with a mallet because as usual she’d misplaced the hammer, and the mallet worked better anyhow.

  Her mother had depressions. Times when she was listless and sad. She still did the mom things—the laundry was clean, if not folded, the meals were cooked—but only the bare minimum was done, and then her mother would spend hours curled up with a radio, unmoving and dull. It was something that Emma accepted then and now. A brilliant exuberance like her mother’s was often balanced, or, more accurately, weighed down, by dark things. It had driven her father nuts, and she had memories of him shouting at her mother, telling her to snap out of it, and her mother telling him to go to hell.

  It was the horse who always brought her mother out of the dark periods. Emma learned to facilitate with small steps—just an invitation to come with her to the barn and keep her company while she groomed the horse. But then she’d hand her mother a brush, and the very act of stroking the horse seemed to provide some kind of comfort for her mother’s soul. It was hard to explain, but something Emma felt herself. She had not gotten the depression gene, but it was something that ran strongly in her mother’s family, from what she gathered from little hints about sour maiden aunts or angry cousins. For that reason, Emma saw depression as a sickness, not a weakness. Nothing shameful, mainly just miserable, something that had to be taken care of so it could pass. She watched Blaine and found that her daughter had the same tendency. One could not be sure—all adolescents had bouts of depression—but Blaine seemed to hit the searing depths, like her grandmother. Depths that made Emma read up on antidepressants. It was a subject of conversation she learned to avoid. She found that the word depression meant other things to other people, and that she was rare in her inclination to take it in stride, like a sprained ankle, a tendency to freckle and burn in direct sunlight, an allergy to wool.

  Emma had canceled all her dance lessons for the week as soon as the article in the paper came out. She knew it was the worst thing she could do, but she did it anyway. She wasn’t ready to face people. But it was a mistake staying in the house all the time. She needed to get out. And she knew where she wanted to go. She gave Wally another pat and wandered through the house, looking for her car keys.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Emma’s mother was buried in one of the smaller cemeteries—nothing at all like Lexington Cemetery, with its cultivated gardens, lush walkways, and historical significance.

  Emma knew her way on the worn, snaking asphalt drive that wound in figure eights in and around the various graves—some marked with small headstones, family plots made noticeable by large monuments proclaiming their surname as if it were an advertisement. Her mother was buried in one of the newer sections, and when she had first been laid to rest, it had one or two large old trees, and a lot of new saplings. Emma supposed that she would always think of it as one of the newer sections, though the saplings were tall now, and lush, the grass thick and well rooted for not being recently dug up.

  The tombstone was a doublewide, the plot next to her mother on reserve for her dad. He had remarried several times since, and Emma looked forward to the day when his latest wife would put him defiantly to rest into a cemetery of her own family choice, hopefully miles and miles away from Kentucky, and her mother’s own resting spot. Then Emma would have the headstone removed and a new one put in, this of rose marble, and bearing her mother’s name only, and it would be back to back with the small white lamb that marked her son’s resting place. She would have liked to have them side by side, but it was only back to back, head to head, that was available. She had been surprised to learn that you can bury more than one person in a grave; you could bury up to three. The knowledge had been given to her with kindness and a practicality regarding the cost of funerals.

  She’d brought Neddie a toy. Wrapped up, because like all small children he had loved presents. It was a little thing, a Pez dispenser in the shape of a dinosaur. He’d have loved it, and really, it was not quite a good idea for his age, as he’d have chewed the head off, possibly choking—Ned put everything in his mouth in the universal way of toddlers. But it posed no danger to him now, and she left it in the paws of the lamb that marked his grave. She stroked the head of the lamb, taking small comfort in the rough concrete, running a finger along the carved edges of the stony ears.

  She did not feel guilty about being ready
to be happy again. Her son’s death would stay with her always, like a scar on her cheek, and it was an integral part of her, that regret, that missing him, but she was ready now to be happy again.

  Except she was never quite sure that she’d followed the rules for a proper show of grief. There were rules about such things, and while the rules might change with the people around you, they were as tangible as the ground on which you stood. And if you violated those rules—it was as if you had cut the ground from beneath the feet of the friends, acquaintances, and even strangers who watched your sorrow so judgmentally. They did not know what to do with their discomfort, but they sure as hell knew who to blame.

  People were so odd in their expectations. You were supposed to grieve forever the loss of a parent or child, but to do it in such a way that you never intruded upon their happiness. Make sure to keep the anger out of the way. And please, no self-pity. You are never supposed to get over it, but you are also supposed to almost, but not completely, hide this fact. The thing is, when they look for your grief, sniffing away at your tragedy like dogs in the woods, they want to be rewarded with the smell of something. There had to be something tangible for them to see, something to let them know that it was there, as if it not being there meant that it could come from behind and mount a surprise attack. People had to see something to validate their pity for you, and to separate you from them, so that they were always safe from bad things, because they don’t know how you handle it, they simply could simply not.

  Her mother, on the other hand, had been expected to be brave, and to pretend that nothing had happened and that her life was still happy thanks to courage, tenaciousness, and the art of medical science. Because her mother had taken that mare out to ride, out of the round pen, on just the kind of October day that Emma liked to remember, and the horse had spooked and bolted and after three years in the round pen, well, hell, her mother just didn’t have the legs she used to when she really rode, and down she’d gone, breaking two of the vertebrae in her back.

  The strange thing was her walking back to the barn—catching the horse first, leading her along as she limped across the pasture, calling to the house, to Emma, who was annoyed at being interrupted, couldn’t her mother see that she was on the phone, did she always have to call her like that, and in that tone of voice?

  Her mother had looked scary pale. She had gone into the house to lie down and handed the horse over to Emma, warning her to cool the mare down and to rub her with a rag, one of those old cloth diapers, her mother liked those best. Emma had been annoyed, but immediately solicitous because her mother had looked off, sort of, and mother and daughter were very close, close enough for Emma to understand something was very wrong.

  Her mother had made it in the front door, getting no farther than the couch, and if she’d looked pale at the barn, she was chalk white by the time Emma made it back to the house.

  “You’re okay, then,” her mother had said, as soon as she’d set foot in the door. “She didn’t give you any trouble?”

  “No, Mom, not really.”

  “And she’s okay.”

  “She’s fine, Mom. Can I get you something? Some Advil and a Coke? Do you want me to call Dad?”

  “Your father?” Her mother had thought about it. They were not close, her parents, something Emma had not noticed at the time, thinking, as everyone does, that her family was the soul of normality. It was mainly Emma and her mother, and the animals—Empress, whatever dogs or cats they’d had at the time. Once, for a brief while, there’d been a bird.

  “Mom, you really should let me drive you to a hospital.”

  “I think you’re right.”

  That sentence had heralded the beginning. That sentence had woken Emma up, and let her know that things with her mother were very, very bad.

  Emma had put the seat as far back as she could on the Mazda, and added a blanket on the bucket seat and a pillow, and her mother had cried, suddenly, when she was helping her to the car, slipping against the side door because she couldn’t make her leg work or support her weight. Emma had caught her, awkwardly, and sort of rolled her into the front seat, and she had been rended by the tear track in the dirt on her mother’s cheek. Jesus, even when they’d had horrible childhood accidents or illnesses, involving vomit, blood, and stitches, her mother had always had her take a bubble bath first, and put on clean clothes.

  They had joked on the way to the emergency room. Carrying on mock mother-and-daughter fights—now, now, watch your driving, slow down, and all that, though Emma, unlike her usual habit of “driving like a Frenchman,” her mother always called it, kept her speed so slow that she was passed, honked at, and cursed by impatient drivers on that long drive in from the farm.

  They’d been rescued at the turnoff onto Old Frankfort Pike from Pisgah, the vet that saw to Empress driving up behind them in his truck with “Woodford All Creatures” stenciled on the side. He’d honked and gotten out and appeared at Emma’s elbow, his sunburned face and permanent eye crinkles as welcome as Superman in a cape.

  “What’s wrong, Emma? Kitty? Did you fall off that damn mare?”

  “It wasn’t her fault.”

  “No, it was yours for taking her out of that round pen.”

  Emma had flushed and been ready to defend her mother—after all, the last thing she needed when she was hurt was to be yelled at—and her memory of how she herself had complained about having her phone call interrupted by her mother’s call for help was conveniently, though temporarily, absent.

  But her mother had chuckled, and told him not to try and boss her around, and he had said heaven forbid, and Emma had been relieved, so very relieved, because even if she was eighteen, and mature for her age, sometimes you did want the grown-ups to take over.

  The vet, Dr. Bender—Martin, her mother always called him—had opened the car door where her mother was sprawled, saying, “Lady, you don’t look too comfortable.”

  Emma remembered very well how she had looked across at him and saw the way his smile had faded, saw the way he frowned when her mother said she couldn’t roll sideways, she’d tried and she just couldn’t no matter what. Emma had expected things to get more complicated then, had expected him to tell her to follow the truck, or call an ambulance, or even drive his truck, but they’d actually gotten simpler.

  “Hop in the back there, Emma, while I move my truck to the side of the road. I’m going to drive you all into the University Med Center.”

  “Baptist is closer,” Emma’s mother had said.

  Martin Bender hadn’t argued, and he hadn’t moved Kitty an inch. He’d just driven them straight to the emergency room, telling them about a cow he’d delivered after coaxing her out of the pond where she’d been stuck, mired in mud and labor pains, all the while folding in precise little questions about how Kitty had fallen, and where she hit, and where it hurt, and the details of how she actually got up and walked, and other things that made Emma think that everything might be okay. Only his tone of voice, his air of something bad, told her something different. Still, she hung on to that one thing, that her mother had walked back to the barn. It was the other thing, her mother saying she could not roll sideways, that kept her hands bunched into fists.

  It was a long, slow process. There were a lot of tests. But the end result was a wheelchair, the special kind where patients can move only their arms and their shoulders, and her mother had been ten days home from the hospital when she’d called Emma to her room. It was cold then. January. Christmas nothing more than the memory of a family straining to pretend a joy in the holidays that not a one of them felt.

  They had talked for a long time, the two of them, Emma sitting by her mother’s bed. Her mother was her old self, like she hadn’t been since she’d gotten hurt, and Emma had remembered thinking, Okay, I can do this. I’ve still got her, she’s still here. One is understandably selfish about one’s own mother.

  “Emma, honey, I need your help.”

  “Of course, Mom, anythi
ng. Tea and toast?” Emma made her mother toast broiled in the oven on white bread, a delicate, perfectly buttered treat her mother praised to the skies.

  “I need something different from tea and toast. I need you to go to the drugstore for me, and get my prescription refilled. And I need you to bring me in that bottle of Maker’s Mark we have next to the china cabinet in the kitchen.”

  “You just got your prescription. I saw Dad bring it in last night.”

  “I know. And I want you to go and get the refill.”

  Emma had taken a long, slow breath, and her mother had put a hand on her head. “If there was any other way, I wouldn’t involve you, honey. I’m not asking you for a decision. I’ve made that myself.”

  Emma had known, of course, what was in her mother’s mind. She had heard the angry conversations behind bedroom walls, her mother railing at the doctors for refusing to help her do what she wanted to do, at her husband who had found the cache of pain pills she had so carefully saved away. He had taken them from her like you might snatch a cookie from an overindulgent child, and her mother had not even looked at her father since then.

  “You can say no, Emma. You can say no, and I won’t be mad at you. I’ll just find another way. But if you help me, you’ll just make it easier for me. I won’t stay like this. I won’t be brave. For me, this is not a life.”

  “What about me?” Emma had said.

  “Honey, you’re eighteen, well, nineteen now, and you have two years left of college, and then you’re going to grad school in Denver just like you planned. I’ve got all that money set away.”