“Vivian? It’s you, right? I’m sorry for just coming by like this, unannounced, I guess, but, well, could I—come in?”
Yes, this was a boy from her new school, from Merriam Prep.
“It’s just me,” he said. “Wade Fisk.”
LITTLE SNAKE, WYOMING MAY 21, 2015
GRANDAD’S BEEN WALKING around the house like he forgot something, eyes searching, one hand worrying at his beard. It’s not just the house he wanders; he’s out in the corrals now. I can see him, from my bedroom window, standing with Mama’s mare. He’s got a hand on her—out of fondness, but also, I suspect, for balance: two old animals leaning into one another.
He wanted me to write Mama about Chap, about the fact of her still being alive. She’s ready to go—every day that’s plain—but Mama asked us to try to wait for her to put Chap down.
A thousand times I’ve been told, that mare is the reason for us living in Little Snake, and for our livelihood. We’re the only event horse breeders in all of Southern Wyoming that I know of—as if we needed another thing to set us apart. That mare’s a miracle horse, Grandad always says, before looking to me for my reliable eye roll.
Chaparral, a 16.2-hand Andalusian Warmblood cross, heavy-footed over fences, but a quiet, rhythmic galloper and a liquid mover. Up until now, anyway. Horse is thirty-two years old and it’s clear in the way she lists, the give of her back, and that blank fly-stalked stare she’s giving Grandad now.
Grandad bought her at a meat auction in ’88, looking to buy a new school horse for the ranch he was working then, thinking he’d prove to the ranch’s owner how well he could read an animal, registering its soundness of mind and the willingness of its heart even when staring down its final day. When the auctioneer brought Chap to the block, she was so underweight her head looked like an anvil, but her bone structure—apparent as it was—was solid, and there was still interest in her eyes. With no meat on her, Grandad was the only bidder. Hauling her home he was figuring she’d be best for his older students, for the adults, but when he walked her off the trailer, that mare fixed those interested eyes on my mama and the two stepped toward one another until the mare’s muzzle was in the cup of Mama’s hands and their heads had tipped together, announcing their inseparability.
A school horse paid for itself, but to keep that scrawny mare as her own would come at a cost, so Grandad had Mama start working at the ranch, symbolically at first—she was only ten that year—but soon enough Mama became necessary to the day-to-day operations. Right up until ’93, when the fire broke out and they came here. Never looked back, that’s something else Grandad always says.
He’s the only one of the three that got out of that fire without a scar from it. Mama’s is a braided line of white flesh, like a whip of flame licked her arm, thinning and disappearing at the base of her neck. Chap’s is worse. Almost her whole left flank, from her belly to her ear, was burned—not just singed fur, but skin blistering, falling away down to the angry pink. Grandad says an injury like that can kill a horse from the shock of it alone. But not Chap.
Seven horses died in that fire and everything on that ranch—all but an old house and half of a barn—burned to the ground. It’s not something Mama or Grandad talk about much. So I might not know anything about it if not for the scars and the fact that when there’s news of a fire elsewhere, a look settles over each of them, their breath stopped in the grip of their memories. I swear, sometimes, I can feel the heat and shine of that fire, but it’s no memory. More a sensation, like a scrap from a forgotten dream rising up in the early morning and then, just as swift, gone again.
I was born eight months after that canyon burned, to the day: July 2, 1994. Course I came early. “Early in every way,” Grandad says. Mama was only sixteen.
When Grandad came in from the pasture, he stood in the kitchen looking at me like I might ask him a question. “No,” he said, finally. “I don’t think she’s going to wait. I don’t think that she wants to wait any longer at all.” He meant Chap, of course, because we don’t know when Mama’s coming back. And he’s right, it’s been too long since she called. But Grandad’s the one who’s really grown impatient.
When he isn’t walking around like he’s mislaid his keys, he is preoccupied with the phone. If he has forgotten anything, it is how to wait. And yet we have always waited. We have always been the mountains and Mama the rain—never predictable, but always, eventually, coming back through.
In 2003, when the Iraq war began and everyone in Carbon County heard that Mama was embedded there, they seemed to believe that all the images we were seeing—the statue of Saddam being pulled to the ground, the actual Saddam dragged from the earth like Hades himself—were Mama’s alone. Truth was, she spent the first weeks of bombing in northern Iraq, in Kurdistan, far enough from the “shock and awe” that there was time to ask people if she could take their picture before she did. She was already known for her pictures of people’s faces, for getting them to look back. Pictures that let you think you know a person. In Kurdistan it was eager-eyed men ready for America to drop its bombs, wanting regime change, believing their lives could only be made better. But Mama understood her images would exist in a context that wasn’t yet known. She’s always lived at the flash points—running toward the explosions—the moments when the course of history shifts. Like Grandad says, Mama’s just different from the rest of us.
That same year, the boys in school, the ones with older, enlisted brothers, were suddenly talking to me, asking if Mama had been with the 3rd Infantry, the 2nd Marine Brigade. I was nine. I said I didn’t know and they shot finger guns at me.
When the pictures changed, when the images were not of a cut-and-dried “victory,” but of the actual shit show that was happening, everybody still thought Mama was the messenger. She had made her way through Baghdad and down to Najaf and that was where she still was when a car bomb killed 124. She took pictures of the dead, before their mourners came to lower the lids of their eyes. Mama said she saw their souls leave and that she took those pictures for the people who killed them, hoping against hope that they could be moved—maybe that’s ridiculous. Maybe compassion is weak. I read that in an interview, knowing Mama would have been looking at her hands, shaking her head, dismissing her own answers as she gave them.
In ninth grade, I heard two boys talking about me in the hallway at school.
“What about Charlie?” one of them said.
I could tell by the way they were walking and talking, the haughtiness of their stride—that I should stay unseen. I was by then the full-chested, broad-hipped woman that I had fought so hard not to become.
“Yeah, Charlie’s got great tits, but I heard her daddy’s a turban head—”
These were boys, I knew, who’d lost brothers in the war, whose prejudice would only deepen with time. But I can’t say I hadn’t started wondering about my father by then. In some weird way, I wanted what most girls my age wanted: the approval of strangers. Except my stranger was the father I didn’t know. Sometimes he was a face in our photo albums that I didn’t recognize. Other times he was every man my mother’s age in town. I assumed he was young, that it had been a fling, an accident—that’s the word I think of most often when I wonder how I got here. I only feel trepidation, even fear, when I imagine asking Mama about him. She has never known her own dad. Why should I need something different?
“A turban head, huh?” Nat Hinkley said. Mathew Hinkley, Star Footballer, Killed in a Firefight. Casper Star, front page. “So that’s why they breed them silly Arabians out there.”
I didn’t set those boys straight about anything, but what we actually breed are sport horses—not breed specific, but a mutt of a horse meant to excel at three-day eventing, some inevitably stronger on one day over another. Like any of us.
With its dressage test, cross-country run, and stadium jumping, the three-day started as a cavalry test, checking the readiness of a horse and rider to go into battle, so it kind of makes sense that Mama says
it was good training for being a photojournalist, for a life of chasing after catastrophes. Though now winning just looks like coming home alive.
I still haven’t told Grandad that I haven’t been writing to Mama, that these pages aren’t for her at all. But he is right about the mare. She’s got that faraway to gone look in her eyes.
Downstairs, just now, the phone has started ringing and Grandad has shoved back from his chair so hard I feel it hit the wall, the vibration coming up through the floor.
Grandad’s voice is muffled, but I can hear that quiver he gets. It’s the way he always sounds when an animal is sick.
Or when there’s been news of someone‘s dying.
He’s calling up to me.
I don’t want to go.
TOPANGA CANYON, CALIFORNIA LATE AUGUST 1993
AFTER THE HORSES were loaded for Fresno, Wade called shotgun, but June edged him out—it was her car, after all, and she was the one letting Rory drive. Rory slid the driver’s seat forward, dried her hands on her britches, and tried to shift. June reached over and turned the key in the ignition. Rory dropped her head to the wheel. “Right,” she said. “Maybe I am nervous.”
“For sure,” June said. “That’s half the fun.” Robin and Tomás had already left with the horse trailer, but the haul was heavy, and Rory planned on catching up to them soon enough.
Wade leaned into the front seat. “Dad would fucking kill you for this, Butch.”
“Ah, but the beauty in this scenario, Wade, is that Dad’s not fucking here.”
Rory knew Mrs. Fisk wouldn’t be coming to Fresno either, that she’d be busy with the PTA, a bake sale, her book or tennis club—preoccupied with looking the part of a perfect mother, as June put it. “Just don’t kill me,” Wade said. “My life’s just begun.”
Rory had discovered that driving was not so unlike riding a horse, a matter of thinking two steps ahead, but turning onto the 101, she felt the one significant difference: You had only yourself to trust.
June grabbed Rory’s arm. “Shit, not too fast.”
“Oh, let her have her fun,” Wade said above the wind, laughing. “Dad’s not here, right?”
For a while they flew along, from the 101 to the 405, June’s hair whipping around her face, and then, just before they met the 5, Rory had to slow to a crawl.
June popped in one cassette after another, the tape deck spitting each of them back out.
“We should have left your car with Johnny,” Wade said, before putting his headphones on, making stabbing attempts at the lyrics to “Been Caught Stealing.” He’d left his Scout with Johnny, for some souping up of the engine.
It was an hour before they’d inched their way onto the Grapevine—a steep stretch of the 5 that nosed over the San Bernardino Mountains—and at the first plateau, there was the beacon of a gas station and a convenience store, and in the lot Robin’s black F150, and the ten-horse trailer with the Leaning Rock crest.
“About time,” Wade said, ripping off his Walkman. “I’m famished.”
“And I’ve got to pee,” June said, already scrambling over Rory, saying, “Don’t let Robin see you driving. She’d definitely tell my dad.”
“Ouch,” Rory said, laughing. “Jesus, okay.”
June was scuffing her way inside, knock-kneed, trying to hold it, the backs of her leather huaraches flattened under her heels. Wade ran past her, then beat her to the door in mock slow-motion.
Instead of following them in, Rory stopped at the trailer, stepping up on the fender to reach inside and stroke Chap’s head. “Hey, lady.” The mare had been sulky all morning, even lethargic. Rory heard Tomás moving around inside the trailer’s narrow tack room. She still felt awkward with him, a mix of shame about Gus and embarrassment over her having taken up with the Fisks. She whispered into the silky pocket of Chap’s muzzle, “You worried we aren’t ready for this, my lady?”
Gus had gotten up to see her off that morning, waking before dawn, like they used to. He had fixed her toast and juice. “You’re at home on that horse, Rory. Always have been. Don’t let it matter who else is competing.” Mona had stayed in bed, impervious. “Bring home a ribbon,” Gus had said. It wasn’t a real possibility, she knew. She was just glad to be getting away.
The bells on the door jingled as Rory stepped inside the store, but no one turned around. They were all by the magazines, clustered together: Wade, Robin, June, and a few of the younger barn brats whose mothers had come along to groom them: to French-braid their hair, iron their shirts, sweep their tack trunks clean so they’d have somewhere to sit in their Bermuda shorts.
“What are you guys looking at?” Rory asked.
A hand shot up from the midst—Wade’s hand, holding a magazine. “I’m in fucking Entertainment Weekly!” His hand dropped back down and the huddle around him tightened. Rory had to wedge her way in, as he read aloud, “Wade Fisk, son of prominent Beverly Hills plastic surgeon Dr. Preston Fisk.”
“You read that already,” June said.
“Spice hadn’t heard it. Dad is going to shit,” Wade said. “He’ll get fifty new patients off this.”
One of the mothers reshouldered her purse and led her daughter away, the others following, noses up, their doe-eyed daughters looking back at Wade.
“You’re a pig,” June said.
“Oink, oink.”
June bent, tugging her sandals fully on. “That headline—it’s going to crush her.”
“No, it’s not,” Wade said. “How would you know, anyway? You don’t know my Viv.”
Rory looked at June, but June wasn’t looking back. To Wade, June said, “She’s got to be more human than you are.”
“She’s not all dark and brooding, Butch. I mean, look at her. Look at how good she looks! What woman wouldn’t love this?” He smacked the splayed pages with his hand. “I’m buying ten of these,” he said, pulling them from the rack.
June shook her head, moving to the soda machine. Rory picked up the last magazine.
“Living It Up After Baby Brother’s Death. Vivian Price Frolics in Malibu with Son of Doctor to the Stars …” They were on a beach, together, sitting in the shade of an empty lifeguard stand, Vivian leaning back against Wade’s bare chest. Not just leaning, her head was thrown back—laughing. The teal blue bikini top, her white denim cutoffs, and Wade’s fingers across her bare belly, tickling her.
Living it up.
Ice cubes were tumbling from the ice maker into the bucket of June’s cup.
“You knew?” Rory asked.
“He always gets what he wants.” June shrugged, alternating pumps of Orange Crush and 7UP.
Rory hesitated, then said, “Is this why you asked me if—” She stopped.
“If what?”
“Nothing.”
“What, are you jealous?” June asked.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Rory said.
On the stillest of nights, lying in bed with the window open, Rory could sometimes hear Vivian swimming. But she only closed her eyes then, just waiting for the lapping of the water to stop. She didn’t want to be who she had been on the night of the accident. There had to be a Before and an After Rory. After Baby Brother’s Death. But this picture—the look on Wade’s face, his slavering mouth—woke something new in Rory, a thought that, maybe, she was supposed to protect Vivian Price.
“I just didn’t know.” She closed the magazine and returned it, nonchalantly, to the rack.
“That Wade’s not beneath porking the bereaved? Yeah, well, he’s not.”
“Does he know about that night?” Rory asked. “About my room?”
“About your view?” June shook her head no. “Even twins keep secrets. Besides, you said you weren’t looking anymore—” She sucked on her straw. “And I think I trust you.”
Outside, Wade was back in the car, sitting shotgun, looking at himself in the rearview mirror.
“You should,” Rory said.
“Good,” June said. “Okay, then.” She was going for
the door.
“Hey!” The woman behind the cash register, dressed in a hot pink muumuu, stood up. “Those sodas aren’t free, you know.”
“She’ll spot me,” June said, pointing at Rory, the bells on the door already jingling.
“Right,” Rory said. The cashier looked at her now—a deep furrow in her brow, rolls of flesh at her neck—and sat back down. “How much?” Rory asked. The woman held up two fingers, and went back to watching her show on the television above the register.
It wasn’t the first time Rory had stolen something. There were the cigarettes from Mona, the work gloves she’d charged to Carlotta’s account. Then new spurs, the watch for the cross-country run. But those were things that she needed for Fresno, things that Carlotta, if she’d been lucid, might have gifted her anyway. So this was different. Back by the freezers, out of view, Rory rolled and tucked the magazine into the back of her britches, leaving her shirt hanging loose. Holding herself upright to keep it from jabbing or, worse, sliding out. She put a five on the counter. The woman never took her eyes off the television as she handed Rory her change, saying, “Your friend’s a real cheapskate.”
* * *
SARAH DID NOT want to speak about Charlie anymore.
There was something so messy about continually discussing “her loss.” There had to be a cost-benefit equation to it all. Or, rather, she felt she was owed. These last two years, the pregnancy and the first stage of mothering, had cost her a certain self-regard. Could she get that back? What of her son’s solid little hand gripping her finger? His warm, snot-stifled breathing against her shoulder? The heft of him in her arms? No, of course not. No. No. No.
“Let us be frank,” Sarah said to Shrink. She’d taken to saying this too often, but it elicited a wry inner smile, as if “Frank” were someone she might very well become. “It’s been good for me to be here, I can acknowledge this, but what am I gaining now?” What she meant was, did Shrink actually think that she was coming out the other side of this with her mind intact? She’d seen her son’s body turned into a wrung-out towel. Charlie, her son. And she’d thought of him as the boy. What kind of a mother was she? The bewilderment in that man’s eyes as he was led away—it had mirrored her own. He wasn’t evil. Or rather, if he was, she was, too. Jorge Flores. Gus Scott. Sarah Price. Her name was inextricably linked to theirs. Sarah Price, no longer just the daughter of Leon and Eleanor, wife of Everett. How was she to attend a cast party again? Raise a glass in honor of her husband? Look her daughter in the eye?
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