Prepare Her

by Genevieve Plunkett

  The family of five did not tip. At the end of the ride, Beth helped them down from their horses at the hitching post and gave the youngest boy a sugar cube. He had calmed down since the incident in the cornfield, but it had taken some time before anyone could understand him.

  “Farmer! Farmer!” he had cried before putting his hands over his ears and slumping forward in his saddle. It seemed that he was terrified that they would encounter a farmer on their ride, as if farmers lived in the center of cornfields, like a Minotaur in a labyrinth. Beth had tried to comfort him.

  “Farmers like to be in the shade this time of day. Out of the sun,” she said, taking hold of the boy’s reins so his pony would walk beside her horse. But the boy only shrieked louder.

  “You mean, ‘In the dell?’” he cried. Beth had caught the mother’s eye from the back of the line. The woman shook her head severely, as if the boy’s crisis was a commonly occurring and much-loathed family drama.

  Once the family was gone, Beth untacked the horses and aimed the hose at their backs, where the saddles had made them sweat. She concentrated on the stream of water, watching it waver beneath her thumb, while the horses twitched their bellies against the droplets rolling down their sides. Beth set the hose down on the dirt and began to untie them. Once they were all free, there was a moment of quiet. The horses stood in front of the barn, water and dirt swirling around their hooves, as if they did not know what to do. Then, with uncanny precision, each animal faced the barn and walked inside. Beth watched them turn at right angles into their stalls, leaving behind the empty, freshly swept aisle. Again, she was not surprised. She had done this. She had willed it to happen. The water continued to run from the hose, creating a puddle at her feet, and she felt the goose bumps spread across her back, like liquid.

  The man returned that afternoon. Again he was wearing white sunscreen and an orange reflective vest. Below were long cargo shorts and a pair of tall rain boots, which nearly reached the bottom of the shorts, leaving only his red kneecaps exposed. He had not called ahead of time to make an appointment.

  “Hi,” he said, when he reached the barn. Beth wondered if he had come to complain about something and wished that Angel was there and not driving around to flea markets. Her pile of dusty saddles had grown past the rim of the big trunk and was spilling over the edge. The leather was stiff and cracked, with the flaps bent upward. Neither of them knew how to soften them. The man stood in front of her, clasping his hands, his eyes set back in restful self-assuredness. It seemed that he was expecting her to do something. He was so content to stand there without speaking that Beth suddenly feared that he was there about something else entirely. Maybe he knew about what had happened with the horses. He had taken her picture, she remembered. Maybe there had been something revealed in the photograph that could not be seen with the naked eye. An aura. Some kind of misty apparition. The man reached beneath the orange vest into a pocket in his shirt and brought out a checkbook.

  “Forty for an hour?” he asked her.

  Beth led them up the path on her dark mare. The sun was high and white, the heat descending every time the wind let up. They passed some old apple trees, holding small, stony pieces of fruit. They passed a gray shed beaten flat on one side. Somewhere, beyond a far tree line, there was the sound of a tractor, fading in and out as it rounded the field. The man was silent, but Beth could hear his horse’s careful steps. Big Red’s hooves were almost as large as dinner plates, and they made a sound like crushed porcelain every time they landed on the rocky path. She twisted around and saw that the man was looking up at the sky, dreamily, with his hands brought together at his belly.

  “Lean forward when you go up the hills,” Beth told him.

  She watched him try to stand in his stirrups and then fall heavily back into the saddle. He looked at her helplessly.

  “Think about using your center of gravity to balance the horse’s,” she explained. The man brightened at this and lifted himself, once again incorrectly, but with more confidence.

  “Perfect,” she said. She remembered the terrified boy from earlier. She had a feeling that no one in that family was going to address this apparent phobia of his, that he would carry his fear of farmers silently and with shame, until it was buried by adolescence. Beth felt as though she understood the reasoning behind it, how quickly a figure as simple and seemingly harmless as a farmer could turn sinister with the right dose of imagination. She wished that she had said something more to the boy after the ride, as he had stood in front of her, chewing his sugar cube. Only she did not know what. It was not part of her job.

  The lookout at the top of the mountain was a small grassy clearing by a ledge where the tree branches bent low, creating a hole in the forest from which the riders could peer out at the sky. Beth and the man loosened their reins, letting the horses drop their heads. For a moment, there was only the sound of the horses’ teeth tearing at the grass. Beth watched the white body of a hawk drifting upward. The gaps of light between the leaves swam around, blinding and watery. Beth could hear the man beside her creaking in his saddle as he adjusted his position. She turned. He was sitting with his arms at his side, staring at her with muddy, cold-blooded eyes.

  When she saw it, she first imagined that it was the result of some embarrassing accident. Perhaps it had been jostled loose from all the riding, she thought. Or maybe the man had released it to relieve some kind of discomfort created by the saddle. There was something lifeless and extraneous about it, like a battered finger. It should not have been so dreadful, lying there, lamely, against the tough leather of the saddle, and yet Beth felt something inside her constrict, drawn in against danger. She could not look the man in the eye. To see his face, she thought, would be to know his intentions.

  “There’s been a mistake,” she said, her eyes turning to the ground. Her voice was thin. She was ashamed of the sound it made and then was overcome with shame, for the whole, ridiculous situation. There they were, she thought, on horses! Horses! She felt her mare’s step beneath her, as if it were her own, as if she had sprouted long, stupid legs and didn’t know how to use them. She was too high off the ground. The world around her, with its waving branches and blinking rifts of light, was unstable, riotous. Had they not been on horses, she thought, she would have done something more. Something assertive. But it was as though they were communicating through puppets, or trying to have an argument on stilts. Trembling, she turned her mare on its haunches and started back down the mountain.

  “Lean back in your saddle as you ride down the hill,” she called back to him. She knew that the man’s horse would know what to do. It was a good, sound-minded horse, who’d once been tangled in a fence ribbon, and acted bravely, she thought. And she was thankful for it all the way down.

  Your Next Breath

  Kitty heard that the woman’s body had been found “in a state of decomposition.” She knew that this meant that it was awful—too awful to describe to the public. It would have seemed sadistic to do so, in even the coldest, most clinical terms, like explaining to a small child the manner in which their dog had died. She knew that it must have been the kind of sight that her father would have seen during his years as a detective, the kind of atrocity that he must have carried home with him, she imagined, stuck to the inside of his head, like the smoke damage on the ceiling above their stove. Her father was always promising to have the ceiling fixed, or to have it “looked at,” which sounded hopeful and vague enough for Kitty’s mother, who was probably too tired to care much about it, as long as it was out of her hands. “It’s being looked at,” was a phrase that people could live on for a long time.

  There were so many ways of being delicate with reality. “A state of decomposition” did not really tell you anything, but you felt comforted in knowing that you had been told all that you ought to have been told. You were given a sense that someone else—some other person of qualified constitution—was handling the psychological aftermath. The truth was that there was n
o such person.

  Growing up, Kitty had overheard all sorts of details about crimes or horrific accidents that had happened in town. There were many nights that she had risen innocently from her bed to use the toilet, only to become transfixed outside her parents’ bedroom, her father speaking to her mother about things that had not made it into the news articles. When Kitty was in the tenth grade, a girl in the grade above her went missing over the Christmas break. It was very cold—even for Vermont that time of year—and a search had begun at the lake, which was frozen over. Volunteers had gathered to break the ice, to look under the water, volunteers who must have eventually hoped to find the girl—even if it meant confirming the worst—just so they could go home and eat a warm meal. And those who might have been hoping this got their wish. The girl’s body was discovered wedged under the ice where the lake narrowed and the current picked up. This was what the people at Kitty’s school knew, although the announcement of the death did not mention the cause or circumstances. This was what the volunteers knew, those who had come close to the body and those who had found only snow and more snow. Kitty, however, who should not have known anything, had heard her father talking about a diary that was found in a pillowcase, tucked under the girl’s bed, in which the girl had expressed her wish to die. “THEY WILL ACCEPT ME, OR I WILL DROWN.” An ultimatum, probably never spoken aloud, and found only when it was much too late. But, Kitty had wondered, had the girl, in writing these bold words, really known what she was committing herself to? Was the pain of being misunderstood by her peers, or her family—whoever “they” were—worse than the panic of being sucked into the dark water, of throwing out your hands and meeting the slick underside of a layer of ice? Was it worse than the realization—that slow chill of perfect comprehension—that there was no one around to line up your next breath?

  Kitty experienced an echo of this feeling years later, when she heard about what Danny had done to that poor woman. This was not just a rumor, or a terrible misunderstanding. Danny had, in fact, taken a life and he had done so intentionally, followed by a full confession. Kitty had first thought of Danny’s hands, the countless times that they had reached for her, the ease with which they found her in the mornings, like the flowing of water downhill, or a puppy stumbling blindly to its mother. He had always been warm, stripping his clothes before bed, while she shivered and closed the window that he had cracked when she was not in the room to protest. She tried to attach something predictive to his unnatural warmth of body. “Cold hands; warm heart,” she had heard people say. Could the opposite apply? When she remembered how she had once craved the heat of his skin, her body bristled—even in the wake of his crimes—her breasts, which had always felt the cold most acutely, piqued with a faint stirring of longing. She told herself that it was a very faint stirring. It was only a physical inclination, which would always lag behind the mind in integrity.

  There had been a dog, a stout, medium-sized dog with a stump for a tail that wiggled happily, although the tail had seemed to Kitty like something that should not have the power of animation. The dog belonged to Danny’s landlady but had access to the entire apartment complex and preferred to spend the nights with Danny, who allowed her to lick his dirty dishes, even the steak knives, which had made Kitty nervous. Besides the tail stump, there were other things about the dog that had irritated Kitty during that time, mainly that her name was Mama, but also that Danny insisted on showering her with affection and expensive dog food.

  “You already pay rent,” Kitty had liked to remind him. “You shouldn’t have to feed the woman’s dog as well. Have you called about the leak above the shower yet?” Kitty often felt that Danny was a bit naïve, or, at worst, that he was using naïveté as a disguise for laziness.

  “Oh, Mama,” he would croon, and the dog would lay her fat head in his palm while the stump twitched obscenely.

  Kitty felt that the town’s response to the news was eerily understated. People were, of course, shocked. Old high school friends of Danny’s seemed to find comfort in the notion that the Danny that they had known—the old Danny—would be the one to occupy their memories. They believed that they could break their love for him in two, discarding the half that was spoiled. One man had made a statement on his online profile: “I don’t care what he did. Danny will always be the boy with dimples who could not ride a bicycle.” There were people doing their part to preserve versions of Danny that were inarguably lovable, but no one was showing up to challenge his guilt. The notion that Danny was still existing and sitting stagnant in a prison cell did not seem to register with anyone whom Kitty talked to.

  The woman’s name was Angelica Place. When Kitty saw the pictures of her on the news, she thought—and could not help but think—That woman is too much for Danny, which did not really mean anything, except that Kitty had always pictured Danny dating a certain, docile type of woman. Angelica was broad in her features, with shoulder-length black hair and a petulant, downward turn to her mouth that somehow indicated humor and intensity and worlds of strength. The news said that she had been an accomplished English show jumper, on track to the Olympics. They stressed this point, as if to say that denying this woman her glory was crueler than denying her her life. There were also images of her horse, a charcoal-colored gelding with a distinguished sloping face—a Trakehner, the caption read, which Kitty had to look up and found to be a breed originating in Prussia, known for its aptitude in dressage. Kitty found herself preoccupied with these details—Angelica’s potential, her handsome face, the handsomeness and good breeding of her horse. The news stories were a source of outpouring for this woman’s merits, as if the world were insatiable for proof that she did not deserve to die.

  Kitty and Danny had cut contact a decade ago out of respect for Kitty’s husband—now ex-husband—Drew. Drew had not liked Danny, and it was not just because he and Kitty had dated.

  “I believe the man to be a sociopath,” Drew had said of Danny, and it was much easier for Kitty to agree than to be caught defending a man for whom she was no longer supposed to have any emotional investment. What Kitty had never dared voice to her husband, or to anyone else, was that Danny had said the same of Drew, when Kitty first began dating Drew.

  “Oh, Kitty,” he had said to her, for they used to keep in touch, now and again meeting for coffee. Danny stirred crystals of raw sugar into his latte and licked the spoon. “I’ve known Drew since elementary school. I’m pretty sure that he’s a sociopath.” Danny’s reasoning stemmed from a sixth-grade trip to a veterinarian’s office, where eleven-year-old Drew had opened a can marked BIOHAZARD and tried to touch a pile of surgical waste.

  The girl who had thrown herself into the icy lake used to be in Kitty’s homeroom. Kitty remembers now that they had known each other, very briefly, in this way. The girl, whose name had started with an M—McKenzie? Madeline?—would slump over her desk and inspect the strands of her long, honey-colored hair until she found one that was split at the end. Then she would, with great concentration, snip the affected strand with her shiny, acrylic fingernails. This behavior might have been interpreted as sullenness, but Kitty supposed that it was no different than her own inclination to fill in the typed letter Os in her science textbook with a ballpoint pen. She was not supposed to do this, but she sometimes felt that she could not relax, that she could not breathe as deeply, if she did not just fill in the Os—and possibly the lowercase b’s and p’s.

  After M’s death, a lecturer was called in to speak to grades nine through twelve about the dangers of bullying. The students were encouraged to break up their cliques, to smother their solitary, unpopular peers with acceptance and friendship. If it was discovered that even one person was sitting alone in the cafeteria at lunchtime, then it would be considered the failure of the entire student body. This came as terrible news to Kitty and others like her, who looked forward to their lunch break so that they could put on headphones and daydream. What had been her one solace became representative of an overall failure
to be kind.

  In truth, M had not been a victim of bullying. She had seemed to fall comfortably into the middle range of most categories, of beauty and intelligence and athleticism. She was perfectly passable, which, in high school, could have been considered a blessing. Her father, a short-statured and likable man, ran a small landscaping business in town and her mother volunteered three times a year to hand-make every costume needed for the school plays. It was a tremendous feat that no one could turn down. It would take ten volunteers to replace her. When she insisted on continuing this tradition after her daughter’s death, the theater director was cornered into a deep and humble acceptance. Black-and-white playbills were printed in M’s memory.

  Kitty could not remember anyone having anything cruel to say about M, or any instance of someone treating her unfairly. No one that Kitty had talked to could remember such a thing.

  “She was just there,” one boy from her gym class said. “And now she’s not.” Perhaps it was exactly this kind of existence that M had decided to rid herself of.

  After he and Kitty lost touch, Danny purchased a small house on some wooded property that had no potential to be anything other than a ditch-ridden, barely traversable maze of sticks. Angelica’s body had been found someplace in the midst of this, buried under a heap of large stones.

  “To keep the coyotes away is my guess,” said Kitty’s father, who had since retired but was kept well informed of the town’s criminal activity. His theory was weakened, however, by the fact that whoever had arranged the rocks had spared the woman’s face, leaving it exposed to the elements. Kitty did not want to suggest that Danny had intended this part of her to be the scavengers’ first target, or that, alternately, he had returned to the scene afterward and moved the stones away, to get one last look. Both scenarios could, in Kitty’s reasoning, be taken as a sign of sentimentality. She had known Danny to be sentimental.