Who lives here? I thought. For a moment I was sure I’d step into rooms I’d never seen before.
Do you remember when we visited Edinburgh, we went to a pub called Deacon Brodie’s? You told me that Brodie had inspired Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. By day he was a respectable cabinetmaker; by night he became a burglar, robbing the people who bought his cabinets. “Surely everyone feels like that sometimes,” you said. “Like inside us are two people who want completely different things.”
I was still sitting in the parked car, still trying to remind myself I was Marcus and Trina’s mother, when you appeared in your bathrobe. At the kitchen table I gradually returned to myself. I told you about the police, the glove. Suddenly it occurred to me that you might mention the break-in to Jack; he might tell Hilary; she might worry about Mercury. I could see you were bewildered when I swore you to secrecy.
What happened the next day was nothing I planned. The police came back early to finish their report and were gone by the time Claudia arrived. At lunchtime she and I were in the office, eating our turkey sandwiches. The clock above the filing cabinet sounded like a man with a little hammer. “Tell her, tell her,” he was saying.
Instead I praised last night’s pecan pie: not too sweet. Then I mentioned that the police had come by that morning. “There’ve been a couple of break-ins in the neighborhood,” I said. “They want us to update our security. I thought I’d make some calls.”
“That would be great,” she said. “The other day Helen was telling me about the summer two horses were stolen and a third poisoned. They never did find the culprit.”
So you were wrong, I thought. They did steal horses in Massachusetts. And Mercury was so well trained he would be easy to steal. I arranged for the workmen to come when Claudia was busy, minimizing work and cost. When she queried the latter, I invented a windfall. Some bonus stocks had finally matured. My Christmas present to the stables.
“Viv,” she said, “that’s so generous of you.”
I tried not to think about my credit card bill. That afternoon, when I rode Mercury, I raised all the jumps.
WHEN I WAS TRINA’S age, I loved stories about the great hunters who could track a bear to its cave, find the buffalo by the way the grass bent. Later, in my office near the Prudential Center, I sometimes thought of myself as a modern hunter, tracking the market. So I noticed that Claudia was drinking more mint tea, that she asked me to lift a bale of hay, but I didn’t follow the signs to their conclusion. When I came into the office the day after the security lights were installed, and saw her sitting at the table, clasping her head, my first thought was that she’d discovered the break-in.
“Do you have a headache?” I said.
Silently she pointed at a chair. I stared out the window, longing for a bird to fly by, or a plane, anything to fill the empty sky.
“Viv,” she said. “I’m pregnant.”
I was so happy I nearly knocked her to the floor. When we stopped laughing and embracing, she told me she was nearly nine weeks. Around the time I lectured Rick, one of his sperm, more intrepid than its owner, had reached its goal. “Have you told him?” I asked.
“Not yet.” She was smiling and frowning at the same time. “But already everything’s different. For nearly three years I convinced myself that his going home to Nan every night was proof he loved me. He tells me the truth, not Nan! He hurts me, not Nan!” She shook her head in amazement. “Now I’m scared. If his first reaction to the baby is fear, or anger, then my love will sink without trace. Whatever happens, I want this baby.”
“Oh, Claudia,” I said helplessly. A flock of black birds flew by the window.
“I was worried about you too,” she said. “That you’d think I was crazy to keep it.”
I said again I was thrilled; this was the best possible news. When did she plan to tell Rick? After the holidays, she said. With his sons coming home for Christmas, and Nan’s father visiting, he couldn’t cope with one more thing. Then she swore me to secrecy, even from you.
As I helped the next rider to adjust her stirrups, I thought this was the best possible news for me too. Now Claudia wouldn’t care how long and hard I trained Mercury.
I came home to find Marcus and his friend Luis making tacos. After dinner, when they were playing in the basement and you were in your usual position, reading a book, the TV on mute, I seized the opportunity to tell you I’d changed my mind about Greenfield.
5
WITH YOU UNAVAILABLE IN one way and Claudia in another, I turned increasingly to Hilary. We each had something the other wanted. She knew about Mercury’s past. I knew about Jack’s. In the weeks since she’d confided their relationship, I had begun to get used to the idea. The week before Christmas, we met at the reservoir to go for a walk. It was a cold, clear afternoon, a half moon already rising over the straggly oaks. We talked about holiday plans. She had decided not to go to Ontario, flights were so expensive, and would spend Christmas here with Jack. Then I brought the conversation around to Mercury. Did she know how Michael had come to own him?
“Only bits and pieces,” she said as a golden retriever loped past. “He was working at a stable in Kentucky when he won a mare in a bet. He started breeding her. Mercury was the second foal. By the time he was a year old, Michael was obsessed with him. This was the horse he would ride to victory. Then something bad happened—I don’t know what—and he moved back to Ontario.”
She stepped squarely on a frozen puddle. “For a while it seemed like a good move. He worked hard; his boss appreciated him. But last winter he became convinced that Mercury was in danger.”
“Why would he think that?” I pictured the black glove lying on the ground.
She made an exasperated sound. “Why would Michael think anything? He got it into his head that someone was riding Mercury secretly. He started spending all his time at the stables, sleeping in Mercury’s stall. He even went so far as to make a will and take out life insurance, two things I never would have expected of my brother. My parents were beside themselves. All he could talk about was Mercury and the Spruce Meadows derby, this big show in Alberta. They gave up on him, but I never did. I hate that he’s dead, and I hate that nothing came of his dreams.”
His dreams aren’t over, I wanted to say; I can take Mercury to Spruce Meadows. But she was pointing at the sky. Four mallards were flying across the half moon. “Would you like to come to dinner on Christmas Eve?” I asked.
SOMEHOW, DESPITE YOUR MOTHER’S absence, we got through Christmas. Then we came home from the Frog Pond, and you told me Claudia had left a message. At first all I heard was her anger. Only when I pressed repeat did I grasp that there’d been a second break-in. I walked back to the kitchen, counting my steps. When we’d had our fight and you’d blamed me for the things you’d promised never to blame me for, I headed for the door. I needed to see Mercury. You stepped forward, your face furious, blocking my path. Finally I had reached you.
How cheerful you were that evening with Merrie and her daughters. Meanwhile I looked at my watch twenty times an hour, wishing them gone. I had given you your chance; I had tried to tell you about Mercury. Now what I wanted was for you to go back to being oblivious. I did the dishes, hoping you’d fall asleep. But upstairs you were still awake. We made angry love, and afterward my dreams were full of violence. A stranger wrapped his hands around my neck. Ice cracked beneath my feet. Flames leaped from doors and windows. The next morning, even before I opened my eyes, I knew I was sick.
Hours passed like a clap of the hands. It was eleven; it was four; it was dark, and the air smelled of fried onions. By the next day, as you and Trina came and went, offering drinks and magazines, my head had cleared. I kept thinking about Michael: his fear that someone else was riding Mercury, his falling at a jump, an accident that was perhaps not an accident. Had someone spooked Mercury? Or rigged the jump? Perhaps that someone had followed Mercury to Windy Hill and was now breaking in during major holidays? Even in
my feverish state I recognized an insane hypothesis, but everything about Mercury was insane: his intelligence, his strength, his skill. How could I protect him?
I remember when Edward had that operation that involved cauterizing parts of his brain, you showed Marcus a picture of the brain in a medical textbook. “It’s like a maze,” he said. “Not really,” you said, “because people are lost in a maze. More like a busy city with lots of streets and lots of people dashing around, most of them knowing where they’re going.” Now, as if a town crier were running through the streets of my brain, the question came to me in headlines: HOW CAN I PROTECT HIM?
On the fourth day my fever was gone. Standing in the shower, I felt I had passed through some disaster. On the other side everything was clear. I phoned Helen, and she answered as if people often called at 7:00 a.m. I said I wanted to make sure Claudia hadn’t left yet. “Please don’t tell her I’m coming,” I added.
“You girls,” she said.
After days lying in bed, just to step outside made me happy. As I scraped the windows of my car, I took big gulps of the frigid air. Driving to Helen and Claudia’s, I kept to the speed limit and stopped neatly at every intersection as if that could make up for my bad behavior. My footsteps were the first leading to their front door. The new snow squeaked underfoot.
“Oh, it’s you,” said Claudia.
Even at this early hour her face was glowing. How could Rick not notice? She led me not to her part of the house but to the living room, where only six weeks before we had celebrated Thanksgiving. Now she chose an upright wooden chair. I chose another. She didn’t turn on the light, and I could just make out her expression of faint boredom. She was interviewing me for a job, a place in her affections, and she didn’t expect me to get it. But as soon as I spoke—I don’t know how to tell you how sorry I am—her boredom vanished.
“You don’t know?” she said scornfully. “I’m the one who doesn’t know anything.”
In Ann Arbor we used to play a version of truth or dare. How badly could we behave without destroying our friendship? Would we still be friends if one of us burned down a bank, or dated a forty-year-old, or became a Republican, or ate horsemeat, or cheated on an exam? Later, sharing an apartment, we had more serious arguments. She thought the company I worked for did shady deals. I thought she sometimes gave false hope to pet owners. But all these ruptures were minor compared to her fury now. How could I have treated her this way?
I had planned to beg for forgiveness, but I couldn’t help fighting back. “You have a grudge against Mercury,” I said.
She flung out her hands. “Viv, you’re crazy. I don’t have a grudge against Mercury. He’s Hilary’s horse, she pays his fees, end of story.” Then she listed my mistakes. I’d been late for lessons. I hadn’t noticed a horse was lame. I’d failed to check a delivery. Samson’s water bucket was frozen.
“I’m sorry,” I said again. Stealthily I tried to invoke her pregnancy. “You seemed so on edge, I didn’t want to upset you.”
At last she gave a small groan, not so much accepting my apologies as worn down. “If you’re going to keep working at the stables,” she said, “you have to pay attention to all the horses.”
From my first week at Windy Hill, we had run the stables as equals. Now I heard the threat; we were equals only by her choice. I promised everything she wanted. Then I asked humbly about the break-in. She told me the details: the ladder, the hayloft.
“The police said our biggest worry is arson,” she said. “If someone drops a cigarette, the barn would catch fire in a second.”
She stood up; my interview was over. I hadn’t gotten the job, but I hadn’t been rejected outright. As I walked back to the car, the snow was silent. I understood Claudia’s anger. What I didn’t understand was how she, who could find a good word to say about the most spavined, swaybacked, knock-kneed, badly trained horse, could be immune to Mercury. Not just immune, but hostile.
At the stables, on all sides, I saw the effects of my absence. Mercury turned his back on me. Only after I had brought him some alfalfa hay and talked to him for ten minutes did he nudge my shoulder. I fetched a notebook and began to check the horses one by one, making a list of what needed to be done. By the time Matheus and Felipe arrived, I had turned the page.
“The police were here again,” Matheus said. Beneath his woolen hat his face was dark with stubble.
“Someone broke in through the hayloft. Did you see anything?”
“Not me, not Felipe. Trust me.”
“No one thought it was you. Can you do the stalls?”
“No problem.”
The phrase lacked his usual cheer. For four years he and I had worked easily side by side. We were all—owners, students, stable girls, employees—in this together, shoveling shit as fast as we could. But that morning everyone was gloomy and irritable. One of our best students burst into tears when I told her to shorten her stirrups. Bridget, who’d been boarding horses at the stables for twenty years, complained that her stall hadn’t been mucked out. Normally Claudia would have made a joke, and they would each have seized a fork. Now she said curtly, “You can’t expect everything to run like clockwork over the holidays.”
“What did I do to deserve that?” said Bridget when Claudia was out of earshot.
“Breathed,” said Matheus, who was passing with a load of hay.
No one had connected the second break-in to Mercury, but when I went to get his saddle, it was on a different peg.
YOU USED TO TEASE me about reading my horoscope in magazines. Did I really believe that a twelfth of the population was going to have a good Thursday because the moon was ascendant in Jupiter? No, but that didn’t stop me from enjoying the optimism that came with reading that the day was especially promising for business, or romance. What I do believe in is fate, moments when the people and events in my life line up, like iron filings in the grip of some giant magnet. Fate saved me in the subway, made you talk to me on the train, brought Mercury to Windy Hill. And that afternoon, in the produce aisle of the supermarket, it nudged me once again. I was reaching for a cauliflower when I saw our former student Tiffany standing a few feet away, holding a box of pasta. I wished her a happy new year and asked what she was doing there. The store wasn’t near her house.
“Visiting a friend,” she said. “Mom texted me to pick up some things.”
I offered her a lift home. When we were both in the car with our groceries, she asked after Sir Pericles. I told her he was fine. Then, we were idling at a red light, she said, “Dad’s in trouble again. There was a fight in a bar, and when the police came, he had a gun. He wasn’t using it or anything.”
“Where did he get a gun?”
“I don’t know. New Hampshire? That’s where he got the last one.”
It wasn’t even news to her. Guns, police, prison, that was the world she lived in. I found myself asking if she’d like to help exercise the horses. The last thing I needed was another fight with Claudia, but I remembered all the times when I was Tiffany’s age and the only thing that made me feel better was riding. Outside the triple-decker we tapped our numbers into each other’s phones.
“I’m sorry about your dad,” I said.
She picked up her groceries and reached for the door. “Mom says he’s the baby of the family. He’ll grow up one of these days.”
You made the same comment, I remember, when I came home from my eye exam and reported that I still had 20/20 vision.
6
WITH CLAUDIA’S PERMISSION, I bought eight fire extinguishers, stationed them at key points in the barn, and summoned everyone for a fire drill. No one smokes anywhere in the buildings or within a hundred feet of them. If you smell smoke, call 911 and get the horses out. Matheus said he’d found a cigarette in the arena. Was it okay to smoke there? No, not okay. Charlie volunteered that a couple of the parents sometimes smoked.
“We’ll put up signs,” I said, “and make sure everyone knows the rules.”
Fo
r a few hours I felt better; I was protecting Mercury. Then I thought, Who was I kidding? A burglar wasn’t going to obey a No Smoking sign.
The next afternoon Claudia asked if I could take Helen to physiotherapy, while she met with a prospective boarder. It was the first hint she’d given that we were still friends. As I was driving to their house I suddenly wondered if Helen might have guessed about Claudia’s pregnancy. What would I say if she asked? But her first question, when she and her walker were safely stowed in the car, was, “How’s that horse of yours?”
I told her we were working on spread jumps. Mercury could clear almost anything, but he didn’t like extending himself. I was worried about our training schedule: that I was pushing him too hard in some areas, not enough in others.
“Maybe you should consult Garth,” she said. “He’s giving master classes in New Hampshire for the next couple of months.”
Garth was a legendary teacher in our riding circles. At once I was sure he could solve my problems. “That’s a great idea,” I said. “I’ll phone tomorrow.”
A truck passed us, spraying grit. Little pieces pinged against the hood as I asked Helen if she had ever thought of competing outside New England.
“I wanted to, but the best-laid plans . . .” She’d been about to qualify for the regionals when she got pregnant. She didn’t ride for three months and then miscarried. “It caused a lot of grief with my husband. He couldn’t help blaming the horses, and when I started riding again, it was different. I still loved it, but I didn’t have that drive. The first time I saw you ride, I knew you did. Of course Claudia’s green-eyed about Mercury.”
Mercury Page 14
