She’d seen the picture of Vivian with her new boyfriend. The woman orderly with the bread loaf feet had brought her a copy of the magazine, believing, it seemed, that it was every mother’s dream to see her daughter with a doctor’s son. Or maybe this was like the bird sounds, playing on loop, intended to create a confused docility.
Shrink wrote on her pad of paper, nodded, bounced her pointed shoe, her stockings shushing together. Her mother, Eleanor, had worn stockings.
She hadn’t spoken much about Eleanor with Shrink. She wasn’t sure she knew anything about Eleanor anyway, not really, everything about her having been in accordance with Leon. “Yes, my mother would have done well in a place like this,” Sarah said. “Removed from him.” Whenever Leon was undergoing an episode—believing himself capable of superhuman feats—he would persuade Eleanor to go with him on one of his reckless drives to nowhere. Drives that always ended in an infraction of some kind, just enough to jolt him back into himself. And Eleanor, knowing exactly what she was in for, just tucked her purse in the crook of her arm and waited for him to hold the door. And every time they returned—the car parked cockeyed on the front lawn—Sarah would be seething. “How could you get in that car with him?”
“And you know what she would say to me?” Sarah was reporting all of this to Shrink. “She said—as calm as one of your orderlies over there—she said, ‘How else did you expect me to get home?’ Just like that. Ha,” Sarah said, “ha,” sitting back in her chair.
She waited for Shrink to scribble on her paper, diagnosing her mother: Enabler. Codependent. Unstable. Her father: Bipolar. Clearly bipolar. Wasn’t that what they called it now? Not just a rich and entitled drunk, but actually split, divided by extremes. Two sides, no dawn, no dusk, no in-between—no matter how hard Sarah had wished it.
“What do you think she meant?” Shrink asked.
“She meant,” Sarah said, “that he was her home, Leon, her husband.”
“Your father.”
“Mm.” Sarah hadn’t understood this about Eleanor until now, not with the clarity that came from saying it out loud. “No one else mattered to her except him.”
Shrink made an unintelligible sound and began scribbling. Sarah had a sinking feeling. Everett, she had always needed his approval.
She let her eyes settle on the painting on the far side of the wall, a remedial bit of landscape with a rudimentarily drawn Cape Cod–style house that reminded her of the summer home of a friend from boarding school. They’d run off there together on the weekends, telling the headmistress they were going home. Surely the house was still there, the street still lined with aspens and maples, probably still in that friend’s family. New England wasn’t like Los Angeles, always shedding skins like an ever-fattening reptile.
“Do you want to get home, Sarah? You must miss your husband.”
Talking to Shrink was like talking into a tin can, her voice distorting down the string. “Yes,” Sarah said, resigned. “Yes, of course I do.”
“Sarah,” Shrink said, “it is my recommendation that you be removed from mandatory watch. In other words, when you feel ready, you are free to go.”
Sarah pictured a mattress on a curb for anyone to take, the hand-drawn sign: FREE.
“It means you only have to be here if you choose to be.” Shrink removed her glasses and dangled them over her bouncing knee, shush, shush. “It seems to me, Sarah, that you are no longer a threat to yourself or to others.” Though this was a statement, Shrink’s eyes were questioning. It was too obvious to remind her that we are all always a threat to one another, so Sarah remained silent and Shrink seemed pleased by her lack of response. “Neither I, nor your husband, will have the legal ability to keep you here any longer, Sarah. You can go home now, if that is what you would like to do.”
* * *
RORY’S DRESSAGE TEST was stiff, lifeless even. Chap was apparently apathetic under the pressure of competition. Still they were sitting in ninth with a score of 58.2, good enough. June’s test had been as expected: She was sitting in second with the lower, more desirable score of 42.8—the points being a tally of faults in their ride. June was off with Robin now, walking the cross-country course again, saying she’d see Rory at the upper dressage ring soon, as everyone was going up to watch Mark Adler’s test.
Mark Adler was a two-time Olympian who’d flown in his most prized horse: Cosmo’s Waltz, a seventeen-hand, dapple-gray Thoroughbred stallion. A horse with bloodlines back to Native Dancer, or some esteemed racehorse, anyway. Without June, Rory wouldn’t have known any of this. She was bringing her camera up to the ring.
Wade was already there, still on Journey, still in his coat and tails. “Aren’t you gonna ask me my score?” he hollered over to her as she crested the hill.
“Sure,” Rory said, steering Chap up beside him. They were the only ones on horseback. The rest of the audience was in the bleachers. “Tell me your score?” Wade made her tired now.
“Forty-one point eight,” he said. Journey blew the dust from his nose.
“Really?” One point better than June.
“Don’t sound so surprised.” Journey’s neck was dark with sweat, as if Wade had worked the horse into a frenzy before their test even began. “You more upset that I’m ahead of you? Or more worried about June?”
“Worried? No,” she said. “It’s great. I’m happy for you.”
“Of course you are, Spice. Of course.”
Rory ignored his practiced wink. She untwisted the lens cap from her camera, tucking it in the waistband of her britches. In the farthest warm-up ring, Cosmo’s Waltz was an ivory silhouette, but unmistakable: his sheer size, Mark Adler’s black top hat and tails a thin exclamation mark above him.
“That camera’s a wreck,” Wade said.
“I know,” Rory said. There was a crack in the viewfinder and a light leak she’d yet to diagnose.
“Where is June, anyway?” Wade asked. Rory spun the camera on him: click. “Hey. Warn me first, would you?”
She’d never caught him off guard like that before. “Maybe next time,” she said, smiling. Maybe he’d tipped off the photographer—the paparazzo who’d photographed him with Vivian.
“Can you believe people trailer from all over the country to train with this guy?” Wade said, watching Adler in the distance.
“Yeah,” Rory said. “I can.”
June had said Adler interviewed potential students and only invited a handful to ride in his clinics in Colorado. Rory imagined a log cabin office against the foothill of a mountain, horses in buffalo-checked blankets, and heated, indoor arenas. “June should ride with him,” Rory said, knowingly baiting Wade. “She’d get in.”
“Not a bad idea. A consolation prize for when I beat her. How’s she doing anyway?”
“Doing?” Rory asked.
“I’m planning on winning this one. I’ve never beaten her before, but it’s good to take her temperature. She takes shit hard, you know? She’s sensitive.”
Rory looked down, adjusting the f-stop on the Canon, willing him to keep talking.
“You know how she can get. All down in the dumps. Shit’s brutal for her already, you know?”
Rory didn’t know, not really. But there had been a few times in the parking lot, when they weren’t talking, and June seemed to have gone somewhere else.
“They say you’re born like that,” Wade said, pulling his gloves off. “That there’s no choice.”
“Depressed?” Rory asked.
“No, Spice. Not depressed.” He put a finger to one nostril, snuffed up his nose, then spat into the dirt. “Gay,” he said. “Born like that. At least that’s what I heard, but there’s no telling Dad that. He says it’s bullshit. Says June needs to stop playing around. She’s gotta have some choice, right? People decide not to do shit all the time. Like you, Spice, am I right?”
“What?” Rory said. The camera took on an inordinate weight in her hands. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
&nbs
p; “Come on,” Wade said. “You could go either way, I know it.” His voice had a bite to it. Chap shifted beneath her. “I’ve seen you looking at me, Rory. At least you got a picture, right? It’s too bad I’m already taken.”
“You’re wrong,” Rory said. She wanted to throw the camera at him.
“Figures they were walking the course,” Wade said then, standing up in his stirrups. Rory turned to see what he was looking at: June and Robin coming up the hill.
“I swear Robin plays favorites,” Wade mumbled. He put his hand to Journey’s neck. “I need you to promise me something, Spice.” An urgent whispering.
“What?”
“It’s crystal clear my sister likes you—so I need to know that you’re not going to mess with her. That you’re not gonna go and break her heart. Comprende?”
“I’m not,” Rory said. “I wouldn’t.” She was remembering June’s mouth, the warmth of her breath, the air pulled out of her own lungs. The question that had been there, between them.
“Keep it friendly, Spice. Just friends. I’d like to win and beyond that I am not a fan of her getting hurt.”
“We are just friends,” Rory said. Robin and June were fifty feet off still, but jogging toward the ring.
“So you promise,” Wade said, not asking.
Nothing had happened. June was her friend. “I promise,” she said.
And then June was there, looking up at her, wild-eyed, her cheeks shot red, sucking down a bottle of water. “Did we miss it?”
Rory shook her head. “He’s still warming up.”
“See,” Robin said, a consoling squeeze to June’s shoulder. “All good.”
June turned to Wade. “How was your score?”
Rory watched him, anticipating his shit-eating grin. But then he lied. “I didn’t wait to see.”
Rory felt an unexpected flash of fondness for him, but just as quickly it was gone.
Adler’s number was being called and he was trotting Cosmo toward the ring in front of them. Rory pulled a small clean rag from her pocket, wiping the camera lens clean. “You’re such a professional,” June said, looking up at her, a gleam in her eyes that—with Wade watching them—Rory found newly embarrassing.
Chap raised her head from the ground, flicking her tail, calling off flies. If Rory was going to take Adler’s picture, she needed Chap to be still, to be the sloth she’d been all morning. Adler turned up the ring’s centerline and Rory set her focal point on Cosmo’s big marbled head and, looking into her viewfinder, a fantasy swam up: she’d sell Adler a photograph, earn back some of what she’d spent being here. Even above the stallion’s forceful trot, Adler’s hand stayed so quiet he could have carried a glass of water.
The cigarettes, the gloves, the spurs, the magazine—even coming here, to Fresno. These were all things Rory wanted, but that she knew weren’t rightfully hers. And every one of them had called to her with the same tugging desire, like thread stitching in and out of her, the needle focused on what she had to have next. And now, watching Adler ride, seeing through the camera’s lens the minutiae of signals he was exchanging with his horse—the stallion’s hooves hovering in midair before coming down again—what Rory wanted more than anything was to be one of Adler’s students. And there was that hard snag of a knot: that could never be, not for her. It wasn’t a thing she could steal.
“God damn,” June said.
Adler turned up the centerline again—his test nearly complete. Through her lens, Rory saw the stallion’s wide dark eye roll toward them. Chap’s tail swished again. Rory went to advance the film, but she’d shot the whole roll. She swung the camera behind her, watching now like everyone else. Cosmo halted square: his legs parallel to one another, his neck round, his mouth engaged yet relaxed on the bit. The audience took a collective breath. But then, as Adler went to remove his top hat and give his final salute to the judge, Cosmo reared up, his front hooves boxing the air. Adler lost his balance and his top hat fell from his hand as he tried to collect his reins again, the hat rolling like a tumbleweed to the outer edge of the ring. Chap’s body swelled beneath Rory. Cosmo came down hard and bounced right back up again, taking massive backward steps, his haunches flexing. Rory already had a hold on her reins, realizing—as Cosmo raised his upper lip to smell the air, inhaling deeply—what she had failed to recognize earlier: Chap’s apathy was a sign of her being in estrus. A fact this stallion was clearly aware of. Adler had dismounted and was trying to assert dominance, to back Cosmo down by raising his hand to the air, but the stallion broke free of him and was charging in their direction, his ears laid flat back. June and Robin ducked toward one another, Robin yelling, “Holy shit.” Wade was turning Journey for the barn, but none of them were as fast as Cosmo and he was on them, spinning his haunches around, kicking out, the shining metal of his shoes flashing toward Journey before turning again, his teeth bared: believing Journey was his competition for the mare.
Rory was spurring Chap up the road, her camera behind her, beating out the rhythm of the mare’s strides. She heard the audience’s screams turn over into relief, then polite applause, signaling Adler had control of his horse again. Rory didn’t look back; she didn’t need to know. She was swept up in the escape, in the mare’s newly awakened gallop, already thinking about the next day of competition.
* * *
“DOES SHE KNOW I’m coming?” Gus asked.
Sonja had offered to brave the drive up the incline to Carlotta’s house, leaving Gus without an excuse. His cast had been removed, but he was in a brace and using a cane now.
“I didn’t tell her, if that’s what you mean,” Sonja said, pulling the van door closed. Behind the wheel, she locked her elbows and leaned forward, as if to plow the van up on arm strength alone. Gus saw her take one quick glance at the edge: a two-hundred-foot drop. At the top, Sonja parked outside Carlotta’s garage, then turned to him, as if they’d been quarreling the whole way up. “Even if I’d told her, she’d never remember anyway.”
He hadn’t been up to see Carlotta since early July. She’d been lucid enough then, touching his shoulder the way she always did, a love pat that said, Stay the same.
They found her outside, on the porch swing, her chin in her hand, not registering them. Sonja called to her in a high, practiced voice. The nurses hadn’t been dyeing her hair and the white was half–grown out and wiry as a mane.
“Will,” Carlotta said. Will was her son, Bella’s younger brother.
“Not Will.” Sonja sighed, helping Gus up the steps, with a hand to his elbow.
“Well, hurry up and come here, sit with your mother,” Carlotta said.
“Will isn’t coming.” Sonja said sternly. To Gus, “She keeps asking for him.”
Will was a grown man, forty-something and far more crippled than Gus. As far as Gus knew, it had been decades since Carlotta had seen him. He had lived with Bella ever since he was seventeen. It was one of Carlotta’s horses that had left him paralyzed and neither kid had spoken to her since, believing she had been to blame. The story was, Carlotta had raised the fence one morning, hiking it higher than Will had ever jumped a horse before, insisting he could do it. The horse stopped short and Will went flying, soaring through the air like a trapeze artist, only to drop like a stone onto the jump stand, his body bouncing, then twisting; his spine was damaged in three different places. Bella was in her final year of college, but she came home early to take care of him. “They’ll love me when I’m gone,” Carlotta would say. Bella had never liked horses anyway.
Sonja waited while Gus used his cane to ease himself down into the swing.
“My god, Will, you don’t look any better at all,” Carlotta said, searching Gus’s profile, trying to make sense of him.
A pair of Keds, bleach white, sat beneath the slats of the swing, an identical pair on her feet. Gus had made efforts over the years to keep Bella aware of what was happening to her mother—leaving messages on her answering machine, never answered. As far as Gus knew, Bella’s
introduction of Robin Sharpe was the only meaningful interaction she’d had with Carlotta in the twenty-odd years since Gus had known her.
Sonja brought out a stool and propped Gus’s booted leg on it.
“Isn’t she your biggest fan,” Carlotta said, turning her nose from him, acting like a scorned girlfriend.
“I don’t know about that,” Gus said.
His own mother’s dementia had come as no real surprise: an inevitable paring down of a life lived up against her husband’s hardness. But Carlotta! Gus had had a faith in her ordinarily reserved for the immortal.
“So, how is your sister?” Carlotta asked, in a tone of a practiced formality.
Gus debated answering as Will. He sensed Sonja inside, listening. “If you mean my sister Joy, she’s good. Real good.”
Truth was, it had been a while since he’d phoned her.
Carlotta looked down at her shoes. “Damn it,” she said. She pinched the thin length of her nose. “Joy’s the one with the breeding barn, isn’t she?”
“That’s right. Quarter horses. She and I used to work sheep there, in Wyoming.”
Carlotta poked her finger at the Keds beneath her. “I’m obsessed with them,” she said. “I have this feeling I’ll need them at any minute. I don’t know where it is I think I’m going in two pairs of shoes. Where would you go, Gus? If you could?” She’d emerged from a revolving door, mid-monologue, her voice confident.
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