Remember My Beauties

by Lynne Hugo

  While I’m up on Spice’s back, I try to stay disciplined but keep glancing across the pastures toward the house as I lead him around to check how he’s walking. I end up flopped forward with my head on his mane and my arms in a hug around his neck. If emotion were a chemical that dissolved bones, that would explain it. Family. I don’t know that I’ve ever thought about what I feel for them before now in this absence. It doesn’t matter whether it’s named habit or duty, need or longing, a bravery that makes people avert their eyes from its sadness or the unlikeliness of love. It just doesn’t matter. It’s inescapable. My parents drove me away, and I left. Yet every day the phone rings and it’s not my mother, not my father, I’m hurt again. And I think this: really, I’m doing this to hurt them back. It’s got to be killing Daddy not to be able to be with the horses, just like it’s killing me. Good. Mama’s got to be going crazy with the agency people. Well, fine. I’ve always given in. Not this time.

  I try the crook of my arm to clear my own sweat, which runs down my face and confuses itself into the stale tears that have been starting and stopping the whole time I’ve been here. There’s too much, and I end up having to take off my shirt, wipe myself down, and put it back on when I groom Charyzma last, remembering when her foal Dance was born.

  It was Carley who put together the foaling kit. And Carley put down every bit of the straw for the foaling stall. It was ready a good four weeks before Charyzma was due. She used a warm washcloth on Charyzma’s teats as soon as she started to bag up because Daddy told her it would help a mare get ready to nurse. We both cried when Dance came out, and, oh my God, when he first got up on his feet! “Remember how beautiful that was, girl? Dance all wobbly and trying to nurse and Carley helping him find your teat, with Daddy telling her what to do. You were always such a good mother. I thought I was one, too. We nursed our babies, didn’t we girl? We took care of them.” I stroke her forehead and then lay my face against hers. “I don’t know what happened, Charyzma. I tried, I really tried. She used to be so different than she is now, and I’ve just lost the knack. She’s gone. Everything’s gone. I don’t know when I’ll be back.” I say it again, crying, to each of them. “I’m so sorry. Be good. Be careful. I love you. I don’t know when I’ll be back.”

  I’ve allowed forty minutes to make it to the rehab center before the day treatment staff leaves. I drive with windows open and air conditioning on high, adding to the worry folder in the drawer of my mind labeled Horses, next to the one for Winter, when the horses will need better shelter, hay, and grain. Charyzma, especially, will need to be reshod soon. We need the farrier out there. He’s scheduled to come the last of the month. But I can’t think about that now, so I try opening the Carley drawer of my mind instead.

  I know Crossroads Center from when Nadine was an inpatient. They’re good about letting family know what’s going on. Without “breaking confidentiality,” as they put it, they let you know if things are “going well” or “not so much.” Depending on who’s around and who’s not, it’s possible to pick up little beads of information from different staff, like pearls scattered from a broken necklace, and string them together on your own. The trick is to be there. Nobody will say anything over the phone. Any nurse or aide could get nailed for breaking the law, but almost every one of them has a heart. They have their own histories. Half the nurses have professional manicures or frosted hair or both, but, still, they have their own lives to endure, and on some faces the texture of the past or present shows. The male staff have an earring in one ear, bleach their hair like the women, and it seems everyone sports a cross hanging from a necklace, the more ornate the better, as if it’s part of the unisex uniform: navy or maroon scrubs over a T-shirt, white shoes, Crossroads ID badge, crucifix.

  It’s a brick-and-concrete building, new enough and really not the dead ringer for a prison that Carley makes it out to be. As if she’d know. Gardens at either side of the entrance in front of the shrubbery look like they have a case of heat exhaustion: some gone-to-seed red-and-white geraniums and silver-white dusty miller that’s already bolted, wilted and flopped over, arranged in-between. Oh hell, who cares? is the message from the maintenance department. Half-mature silver maples measure the parking lot, with benches between where day treatment patients who don’t have licenses or cars anymore wait for their rides. And after they hit the vending machines, practically everyone congregates out there to smoke between classes and therapy sessions. This probably used to be a farm, which is why the land was already cleared. Some family had to sell their home. A family like mine.

  A bus stop is tucked by the highway frontage, a little weather shelter with a bench inside. Since she’s not here by court order, Carley can sign herself in each day, but I’ve insisted on driving her back and forth. It comforts me to wait in the car and watch her walk in the door in the morning and walk back out in the afternoon. It’s starting to cause a problem at work, though I’m working through my lunch hour to make up for leaving to pick her up and then going back to work. And I turned down overtime this week. Carley said she’d just bring a book and wait on one of the benches, but I don’t feel right about it. On Monday I thought I was on time, but she was waiting outside in the heat, her face an overripe pink petunia. She wouldn’t look at me, and I thought she seemed sick. She could have waited inside.

  All the spots in the shade of the skimpy maples have been taken, and I know I’ll hear it from Carley—that I’ve come inside and embarrassed her, oily-hot, wearing boots, disheveled. “Why didn’t you wait in the parking lot?” she’ll hiss. By then, with any luck, I’ll have caught at least one staff member walking through.

  “You got her back already, Miz Butler? He musta worked fast. Carley doin’ okay now?”

  “What?”

  The aide, a hefty black woman of about forty named Donna, looks at her watch. She’s wearing print scrubs and looks tired, her makeup wearing off, though she smiles at me. “Thought Carley said she probably wouldn’t be back for the last group today. Dentist get the crown on that tooth?”

  “She told you she had a dentist appointment?”

  Donna’s lips tighten and turn down. Her tone is resigned even though she phrases it as a question. “You mean she didn’t? You didn’t pick her up?”

  “No.”

  “The other days? Root canal?”

  “Not hardly. My God, has she been … ? Carley signed a contract with her social worker.”

  “I’m sorry. I really wasn’t supposed to say. Privacy law. But I’m glad I ran into you.” She puts her arm around my shoulder in a half hug and whispers, “Don’t give up.” Then she steps back and says, “I’ll have her social worker paged. You have a seat, please.” I could almost see inside her brain: Uh-oh. Hand this one off quick. Donna gestures toward the chairs lining the wall. Her thighs rub, a faint sandpaper sound, as she reverses course down another hall.

  In the corners of the room are faux wood tables with thumbed magazines and lamps. Shoulder-high silk ficus plants with Spanish moss at their bases stand watch in two strategic spots on the linoleum floor. Undistinguished institutional noises: the clang of a mop against a pail, an industrial sink rinsing trays on the other side of swinging doors. A woman wearing an ID comes out of the inpatient wing with a therapy dog, a chocolate Lab, tail wagging furiously. I’m about to waylay them when the loudspeaker comes on, and it makes me self-conscious as if even the dog will guess the summons is about my daughter, who’s added rehab to the list of what she can’t do right.

  “Annie Brooks to the lobby area, please.” They are seamlessly polite here, where everyone’s lives are ripped and frayed. I hold myself still in the chair and wait for the tall pretty blond social worker, who’s too young to have suffered her own children lying about more than how many cookies they ate. I’ll bet my half of Eddie’s precious house that Carley’s with Roland right now. She’s cooked up this story, looked her social worker, nurses, and even the most experienced aides in the eyes and lied about how I was picking her
up to go to the dentist. Only it’s Roland who picked her up and not to go to the dentist. He’ll have her back maybe fifteen minutes before day treatment ends, and she’ll sit outside to wait for me just as if she’d been here for every session. And she knows she can pull it off because no probation officer will be called if she’s not here; I protected her from that. Or I protected myself.

  Breathe in, breathe out, I prompt my lungs, but then I smell myself: horsey, stale sweat, and it’s as if even my body is saying, You shouldn’t have come, you shouldn’t know this, you don’t belong here. And that is what has happened since Carley was a child. No matter what she does, in my quietest moments, I end up feeling more wrong than she. Then the familiar inland wave rises: Damn her. Damn him.

  Before Annie even makes it to the lobby, I am out in the parking lot. I have to do something to relieve this unbearable tightness in my chest, the pressure that threatens to explode or dissolve me. I cannot be this helpless. I know this much: Roland will be stoned, and there’s one thing I can do. Hide. Wait for him to drop Carley off. Call the police with a DUI tip right before I pick her up. And hope his truck is loaded up with every poison he uses, every poison he sells.

  Flies and heat and She didn’t come again. The sunstruck pasture slowed. Afternoons, the herd grazed the good green grass that spread out from the back pasture fence line where the big oak, maple, and yellow poplar trees at the edge of the woods made an umbrella of shade. Undergrowth pressured the four-board fence from the tree side. The water in the ponds dropped more but was still cool from the spring that fed it.

  The sound, someone coming to the house, happened often. Because it was never The Right Sound, Spice was uneasy. The day a deerfly stung the edge of his eye, his head and ears went up as he squealed, then snorted and took off in a gallop, creating a brief panic for the others. None of them had picked up danger, but now the herd spooked and moved, Charyzma breaking into a canter. All rotated their ears to listen, moved heads to look for movement, re-checked the air for the scent of a predator. None sensed anything but Spice’s alarm. As he galloped toward the front pasture and barn, Spice’s right front hoof came down in a burrow as he was settling down and ready to turn in a trot back to the comfort of the herd. Still, he was all right, though his eye stung and swelled. Charyzma and Moonbeam nickered to him. Afterward, the horses stayed closer together.

  She didn’t come. They were on their own again.

  Flowers Smattered on a Tired Brown Landscape

  “WE GOT TROUBLE,” CAL said as soon as Eddie was in the door. “Number-one trouble.”

  “Do not tell me I have to take ’em back to the eye doctor. Not that it wasn’t wonderful, what with your mother freakin’ out when he dilated her eyes, cryin’ she was blind as Hack. Getting them outta there and in the car while you were in the bar, too shit-faced blind yourself to notice that it was a cross-dresser buying your drinks.” Eddie complained about it every day, still pissed off. It hadn’t really been a cross-dresser, but Eddie telling Cal it had been was great revenge for being stuck with handling everything alone at the eye doctor’s office. Now Cal was out of his mind about having kissed what Eddie had him convinced was definitely not a woman.

  Eddie hadn’t wanted to come out here today. The hours at the plant had stretched out like some damn taffy pull he couldn’t get off his hands. He wanted to flop on the couch in his own air-conditioned family room with a cold beer, alone with the remote control. Instead, he’d had to go to Wal-Mart’s pharmacy and pick up refills, then go to the food side and get the stuff on Cal’s list.

  “Oh Jesus,” Cal snapped. “Shut up ’bout that. I’m talkin’ ’bout the horses. Dad made me walk out to the pasture today to check on ’em again. Like I know anything, which I stupidly pointed out, so then he wanted me to bring ’em in so he could check. Managed to talk him outta that since it’s a hundred fifty degrees in the shade. I think one of ’em’s not walkin’ right. Everything I know could be scratched on the head of a pin, except that if something happens to one of the horses and we didn’t do the right thing—whatever the hell that is—we’re dead men. Think we better get the vet.”

  “Did you tell Hack?”

  “You crazy? I swore on the family Bible—well, if we had one—they were all perfect. I dunno if something’s wrong. Could be. Always a big fuss about horses’ legs.”

  “There’s a problem with that vet thing. Vet’s a friend of Jewel’s. Patched up Carley. Did ya know that one?”

  “No shit. A vet?” Cal snickered.

  “I swear. Jewel’s pulled off some shit, but I still can’t get over that one. See … no police report.”

  “Yeah, Ed, I get it.”

  “Is that you, Eddie?” Louetta called from the living room, where the early news blared from the TV.

  “Yeah, Lou,” Eddie raised his voice, throwing it to the living room. “I brought you those sugar-free red Popsicles.” Then, to Cal, “… speaking of which, they’re probably melted.”

  “Jewel comin’ back, Eddie?” Louetta sounded breathy, or maybe it was tired.

  “Sorry, Lou.”

  Eddie rooted through the grocery bags on the kitchen table and crossed the kitchen in two long steps to deposit a yellow box of six Popsicles in the freezer. “I see you didn’t do laundry. Isn’t she out of clothes?” At the top of the basement stairs, a pile of dirty clothes languished.

  “Why don’t you try it? Anyway, back to that horse …” Cal said.

  “Which one?”

  Cal sighed, disgusted. “Like I’d know? A black one.”

  “Hey, man, I wouldn’t know, either. Don’t know why I asked that. Got a beer?” Even as he said it, a red flag went up in Eddie’s mind. Jewel’s own horse was black. He knew that much.

  “Help yourself. So we get a different vet,” Cal said.

  “I dunno. I think they’re like pediatricians or something. You don’t switch around. They all know each other, too, I think. Maybe. Where’s your phone book?” While Eddie went back to the refrigerator for a beer, a few bottles laid on their sides, effectively hidden in the far back on shelves behind the bulkiest groceries, Cal retrieved a phone book from under an array of dirty dishes that clanged as he moved them aside. There was no counter space uncovered.

  “Hey, throw me one, too, and replace ’em, huh? They’re in the broom closet, behind the vacuum cleaner. Be careful Ma doesn’t see you in the hall.”

  Eddie traded Cal a beer for the phone book. He headed out of the room, then shrugged, came back, and used the side of one arm to clear a space on the table to set down the beer and the floppy book while he went to fetch replacement beer. He came back into the kitchen, one in each hand as if they were flowers, and hid them where the two cold ones had been.

  Cal’s calloused thumbs pushed off the metal cap on his beer. He stood, pondering the chaos of the kitchen, while Eddie looked under V in the yellow pages. “How do you spell Vet-ra-nar-ian?” Eddie asked.

  “Skim through the V section, I guess.”

  Eddie closed the book, keeping his forefinger in the beginning of the Vs as a place marker, holding it against his chest with his right hand. He pushed the heel of his left hand around the socket of his eye, pressing against his headache and the weight of his worries. “Gonna cost a fortune. Vet always costs a fortune. There’s gotta be another way we can get this done,” he said to his brother-in-law. “Let me think.”

  “Now hold up. Is that gonna smell the same as you fartin’? Care to do that outside?”

  The stars had aligned for once, and volunteering to take Carley to rehab the next morning actually scored Eddie points with Jewel, like a two-for-one sale. He’d expected her to be suspicious since he’d never done it before, still pissed about Carley living with them, and then, bingo, it turned out Jewel needed the help because they gave her overtime at the office, and she was all grateful. It would definitely be a good day to buy a lottery ticket.

  Eddie glanced at Carley in the passenger seat, but she kept her eyes resol
utely ahead as if staring down a target. “So she caught ya, huh? How dumb was that, thinkin’ you’d get away with cuttin’ out of rehab? Did you get high, too?” He’d hardly spoken to her since last week when she’d done it, but now he had to.

  “Buzz off.”

  “Well?” Eddie persisted. Holding the wheel with one hand, elbow resting on his thigh, he reached across his body with the other to flick ashes out of the open window. He wore a baseball cap with a Cincinnati Reds logo, jeans, a plain white T-shirt, and his required company ID on a lanyard around his neck. Jewel said the picture on it made him look like a felon.

  Carley sighed. “Can you just leave me alone?” Her hands were clenched together, one thumb worrying the cuticles of the other hand. Chipped black nail polish. Neither short shorts nor tank tops were allowed in day treatment, so she wore jeans with large manufactured holes and a pink T-shirt that read, I’m With Stupid. Roland had “liberated” the shirt for Carley from a souvenir shop in Gatlinburg, outside which he’d met a connection, which was why they’d made the trip. Eddie considered the shirt an ideal summation of Carley’s situation. Jewel did, too, of course; in fact, it was Jewel who’d first made the point about the shirt. Perfect irony, she’d called it. As he drove, Eddie had a moment of intense homesickness for how they’d once agreed about everything, how in love they’d been, her body pliant and needing him. He wanted a do-over, all the way starting from when they’d gotten married with such clarity.

  Eddie jerked his thumb toward the shirt. “Your mom’s right about him, y’know. She’s not right about everything, but she’s right about him.”

  Carley made a production of shifting her position in the seat to put two-thirds of her back to Eddie and look out the side window. She held her silence for a while but then said, “What’re you doing? You were supposed to turn left on Marquette.”