Borrowed Horses (19 page)

That day seemed to be one chest x-ray after another, reminding me that the heart was grey and bulbous, just another ghostly cloud of organ through the lens of my machine. I spent the day telling people to take a deep breath and hold it, and I seemed to be holding my own, thinking of Jenny’s tense voice on the phone, and her tenser silences. Did she know about Dave and me? Had she guessed? Had he told?

I beat her to the barn by a good hour and a half. I walked to the back pasture and stared at Zephyr for twenty minutes or more. No x-rays were needed to see her bones: She wore them, or they wore her, or they
were
her—not much else to her. But I could see what Eddie saw in the composition of her bones. The angles were all precisely right.

She’d been starved though, and her bones were surely weakened by malnutrition. Jumping was one thing, landing another. If it was too depleted, that perfect canon bone might shatter on the landing side of the first big fence she took.

My fingers traveled again to the lump of pain where her teeth had latched on. They’d been strong enough.

Foxy saddled, I rode the hills, wandering their gentle ups and downs. Jenny had arrived by the time we got back. She said nothing to me. Only the redness in her eyes spoke, but I could not translate the language of color. I wrapped Foxy’s hocks with magnets and brushed him leisurely, appreciating more than ever how quiet he was. I picked his hooves and, as always, he turned his large head to me, brown eyes softly asking for the carrots in my brush box. I broke each in half and held the pieces first back by the girth, then low between his hooves, making him stretch for each. The research was mixed on the effectiveness of carrot stretches, but if they bought us even one more day, I’d do them.

Foxy back in his stall, I returned to Zephyr, still turning the puzzle that was Jenny over in my head. Did she know? About Dave and me?

I could confess. Before she said anything, I could tell and ask for penance. But she couldn’t know, could she? Why now?

Zephyr grazed, ignoring me completely. Not even an ear flick. I was invisible, unworthy of notice. I picked up a stone and tossed it at her feet. Foxy would have galloped across the pasture at that, but Zephyr just turned away, pointing her ass at me, lazily swatting at flies with her thin tail.

I had not called Eddie that weekend, and I had not called Timothy. Mom’s relapse had pushed everything else to the back burner.

I sighed. “Why should I make anything of you?” I asked the mare. “What’s in this for me? More fucking bruises?” I snorted and watched. A breeze tickled the loose hair at the back of my neck. “You don’t even want to be a show horse anyway, do you? Not that you know what it’s like, there in the ring with everyone watching. Everyone cheering.”

A cowbird settled on the mare’s withers. Grasshoppers jumped away from the scythes of her teeth. I thought of all the ways she could hurt me. A hoof to the arm, a broken bone, and I’d be out two months or more. A hoof to the gut, intestinal damage. A hoof to the head? I didn’t want to think about that. Retardation? Death? I’d heard the stories. Yet all were better than the blow to the heart that love inflicted.

A second cowbird joined the first. Zephyr ignored them. She looked so tranquil like this.

“I don’t hit horses, you know.” My words evaporated in the arid afternoon. “Only you. I’m not sure I like what you bring out of me.” I closed my eyes and let my mind stray. Timothy’s hair, dark as mink, begged petting. Around him, I wanted to be soft, but softness was for the weak. Weakness led to errors in judgment. Softness had led to Dave.

Zephyr turned and bit at a fly. The snap of her teeth, the only sound, was quickly consumed by the summer’s still.

“Oh, to hell with you,” I said, but I kept standing there.

Moments passed. Nothing was my fault, and it was all my fault.

“If I work with you, you’ll only make my life hell. Frustrating me, biting me. I can’t even jump you yet, your flatwork is so bad. If I’m going to get stuck doing flatwork, I might as well be stuck on Foxfire, a nice horse.”

Zephyr walked a few paces to a fresh patch of grass. I threw up my hands and walked away.

When I walked in, Jenny was just finishing off Zip, wiping his face with a soft cloth to remove the sweat marks where the bridle had been. “How’s Zip coming along?”

Jenny didn’t look at me. “All right, I guess. Still a pain in the butt”—she blushed and hastened to add—“not like Zephyr, though.”

I tensed against her judgment. “Do you want to just follow me home?” I asked.

In my rearview, Jenny’s Taurus wound over the gravel roads. She was a safe driver. I slowed to adjust to her.

At my apartment, we ordered pizza and turned on Monday night football. We sat back on the sofa, me with a beer, her with a pop, both of us waiting. The sofa’s loose spring dug into my shoulder, but to move away now would be to fail Jenny again.

Jenny stared at the screen impassively, uncharacteristically somber. Glum. Her silence baffled me. I focused again on the game. “Come on,” I said, “that was flagrant.” The holding went unpunished.

The pizza man left us our dinner.

“Dave might call.” Jenny’s eyes never left the screen.

“O.K.,” I said. I picked my slice, pulling the cheese apart with quick fingers. “Are you guys O.K.?”

She still didn’t look at me. I tore off my crust and ate that first. For a full minute, I was convinced she knew everything and was giving me a chance to apologize, but no, I decided, I was being paranoid. How could she know? Why would she be silent if she did? The Eagles kicked a field goal. Finally, she said, “He’s mad at me, but it wasn’t my fault.” Her voice was matter of fact. She didn’t whine. If anything, she sounded tired—exhausted.

Relief flooded in like oxygen after a held breath. It wasn’t my fault—she didn’t know.
He
was mad at
her
, the hypocritical bastard. I wanted to laugh. I nearly smiled before I remembered that, for her, nothing had changed. “What happened?”

Jenny sipped her pop and watched a couple of plays before answering. Dallas’s running back juked and darted but failed to make a first down. After the punt, a foot cream commercial came on, and Jenny spoke at last. “We had some money sitting in the bank. Money market. Whatever.” Her eyes didn’t leave the screen. “We talked to the financial advisor last month and he wanted us to put it in funds, but Dave never gave the go ahead. The guy kept calling, and I kept trying to talk to Dave about it, but he always said he was too tired to think about money.”

She sighed and looked at the ceiling, and tears wavered at the bottom of her eyes, but she refused to let them fall. “His job’s tough. I know that. I know he doesn’t get along with everyone, that they blame him for not working his way up, but the money was just sitting there, and something had to be done, so I did it. I told the guy to move the money.” She sipped her Coke again and returned her eyes to the screen. The tears had vanished. Her eyes looked vacant now, like those of a dead woman’s. “When I told Dave, he hit the roof. He said it wasn’t my money—said I didn’t know crap about money, and even if I did, I didn’t have the right to touch it.”

I sighed and watched as the Eagles made a first down. “What a jackass.”

“Maybe I shouldn’t have moved it.”

I tried to imagine my way into her problems—too much money and questions of how to invest it. A problem I could only wish for, yet here she was with tears sliding down her face. “Was Dave planning on spending it on something?”

“I don’t think so. We’ve got a savings account for stuff like that.” She blushed. “You know, the liquid funds.”

I didn’t know. I reached for a second slice of pizza, conscious that Jenny hadn’t even offered to split the bill or pay the tip. It probably never occurred to her. The Eagles rushed for fifteen yards. “Why didn’t you come over here first thing this morning?” I asked. “You know, if Dave’s being a jerk, you always have a place to stay.”

“I had some stuff to do first.”

I looked over and raised an eyebrow. She met my gaze with a darting glance of her own baby-blue eyes. “The house was a mess,” she said. She was smiling now, embarrassment pinking her cheeks. “Mondays I vacuum, clean bathrooms, and wash the whites.”

“You cleaned the house?” An interception, but I ignored the TV.

“And I made dinner.” Jenny looked over at me again quickly and then feigned at watching the game.

“You knew you were coming here.”

“Dave’s dinner.” She laughed at herself as she said it, and there was more than a trace of embarrassment in her voice. “It’s in the fridge with a note on the door telling him how long to cook it.”

I smiled, remembering how much I liked her. “Un-fucking-believable.”

Before Jenny could respond, the phone rang. Dave’s voice was low and steady. “I need to speak to my wife.” Not Jenny but my wife. Possessive.

I held the receiver to my palm but didn’t bother to lower my voice. “It’s Dave. You want to talk?”

“Should I go home?”

“Hell no. Not if you don’t want to. Stay as long as you need.”

Jenny held out her hand for the phone, and I slipped through the vertical blinds and walked onto the balcony, shutting the glass door between us.

Twilight. In the parking lot below, a girl in an Arby’s polo hurried from her car, pulling a grease-stained visor from her hair. I’d been that girl, just off dinner rush and hungry for quiet. Her door slammed and she was gone. She would shower away the itch of grease and microwave a frozen entree, turn on the television and watch its flickering light alone. Even now, was I so different?

In the stillness of the evening’s warm gloaming, night really did feel like it was falling, like the impossible sky above lowered closer to Earth to cover us like a blanket, falling slowly but unstoppably, dark as molasses, falling like I imagined one fell in love.

In town, no crickets sang the sky down, and the leaves were, as yet, too green to rustle in the slight breeze. The stars remained cloaked by townlight and the lingering light of dusk. I wondered how my mom was doing.

The door slid in its tracks behind me. “I told Dave I wasn’t ready to come home. He didn’t apologize.”

I nodded.

“After the game, I’ll probably go.”

“You don’t have to. If he doesn’t cough up an apology, you stay here.” Dave was alone, like I had been so many nights. He could stay that way.

The night’s quiet filled the spaces where speech had been. The ghost boxes of apartments sat squat against the sky. Jenny said, “No, I should go back. I just want to see when he’ll apologize.”

“When? Not if?”

“He will.” Jenny picked at the peeling paint on the railing, flicking a chip over the side. As hard as I looked at her, I couldn’t tell what she was thinking. The thought surfaced again: What if she’d known about Dave and me this whole time? What if she was just one of those women who swallowed infidelity as a part of marriage? I swallowed the last sip of my beer. “Well,” Jenny sighed. “I guess I’ll go watch the rest of the game.”

I stayed at the railing a moment, the empty bottle heavy in my hand. I wanted to fling it over the railing, to watch its glittering arc as it condensed and distilled the glow of the distant streetlight, turning end over end. I wanted the violence of its final smash as the spray of shards skittered across asphalt. It’s what we were heading toward, Jenny, and Dave, and me.

But I recycled the bottle, like any good Northwestern girl, and opened a fresh one. Puddles of cheese grease congealed on the now cold pizza. Jenny and I didn’t talk. We ate and watched as each team strategized, threw, darted, ducked, did all they could to move toward their goal, only to punt in the end.

When Dave called midway through the fourth quarter, he apologized. Exiled to the balcony once more, I surveyed the parking lot again while he and Jenny talked. I lived among students. Rows of old American cars sat idle, dull and unwaxed. In the building across the parking lot, two guys came out to drink coffee on the deck. Their soft laughter floated toward me. I stood silent and alone and thought of Timothy and how much I would rather be sharing a pizza with him. The softness of his shirt might brush against my arm, a warm thought.

All thoughts seemed to circle back to the brush of flannel on skin. Jenny and Dave talked and talked, and the night grew cooler. My jacket was only on the other side of the door, but I couldn’t open it, couldn’t again wedge myself into their intimacy, however silently. I looked again for stars I couldn’t see, as if they could provide a navigable direction.

Finally, the door slid open behind me. Jenny smiled sheepishly. “I’m heading out.”

“You know you don’t need to,” I said.

“It’s O.K. He said he was sorry.”

Yes, I thought, but not sorry enough, not sorry for me. “He was wrong,” I said. “He should be more than just sorry.”

She looked at me oddly. My tone was too harsh. Her tears had long dried.

“Or go home,” I said. “You know him best.” She didn’t know him at all. “Just remember that while there are women in Idaho—me, Connie, Dawn—you always have a place to stay.”

Jenny only nodded. “It’s time. I appreciate it, though. Letting me come by and all.”

“Any time,” I said. If she hurried, she’d be home before the two-minute warning. I crammed the pizza box into my fridge, and settled back into my easy chair. It smelled faintly of moss and earth. How well it curved to fit the contours of my back. As I finished my beer, Dallas threw an interception and the Eagles scored. Life was better alone. I needed money and a horse; that was all.

Bodies in Motion

S
eptember rolled on, and the mornings grew cool. That morning, I pulled on my old sweatshirt and soccer shorts, laced my shoes, and hit the road. The grasshoppers were almost gone now, but birds still sang. It felt good to run that day, a way of exorcising something, sweating it out. My legs and lungs felt endless. I could leap tall buildings, I could stride out and out. The early air was clean and pure. Thank God for this. For actions without words. For my moving body. For a space where I could exist alone in the world. Thank God. I was powerful; I was in control; I was a runner.