Eugenie is still upstairs, crouching against the wall where she fell. She appears catatonic. The man is still on the top step of the porch and has dropped his head into his hands. Because of the open door, I have a clear view of him and I wouldn’t have it any other way. His shoulders are rounded, and he may be crying. I don’t know and I don’t care.
At first there are two cruisers, but before long other vehicles start to arrive. The man is handcuffed and bundled into the back of a car. Kindly women in plain clothes pry the little girl off me—it takes some doing, since she seems to have associated me with safety—and take her into another room. Others go upstairs and
kneel beside Eugenie. I am taken to the kitchen by two uniformed officers to fill out a statement.
When I’ve added every last detail I can think of, I sign it and push it across the table at the officer sitting opposite me.
“What’s going to happen to them?” I ask as he picks it up.
“He’ll be cooling his heels for a while, that’s for sure.” He runs his eyes across my handwritten statement. “What’s this say?” he asks, leaning forward and pointing at a word.
“Sockless.”
“And this?”
“Unwashed. Sorry. My writing’s not great at the best of times, and I’m still a bit shaky.”
“That’s understandable,” he says. He clicks his pen open and prints both words above my loopy handwriting. Then he hands the sheet back to me. “Here. Initial both places.”
“What’s going to happen to the little girl?” I say, taking the pen.
“Child Protective Services is evaluating the situation now.”
“And Eugenie?” I say.
The other officer, who is filling out a form, sets his pen down and looks at me. His stark gaze is accusatory. “Why do you want to know?”
“No reason. Just curious,” I say quickly, looking from officer to officer. “I mean, I did kind of get thrown into the middle of the whole thing.”
“So you’re taking that horse, right?” says the nice one, giving me an opportunity to look back at him—which I do, gratefully.
“Yeah. I guess so,” I say. “My, uh, boyfriend runs the Day Break Horse Sanctuary.”
Boyfriend.
That word becomes troublesome when you’re nearly forty.
“Is it registered?” he says.
“Yes. He gets called out to cases like this all the time.”
“Good. Then I won’t have to—”
“Annemarie!” cries a hoarse female voice.
I twist in my chair and see Mutti cross the kitchen at a near-run. When she reaches me, she puts a hand on the back of my chair and runs her eyes frantically over my body. “
Mein Gott,
what is going on here? What happened?”
“A ‘ten-sixteen,’” I say, reading from the top of the evil officer’s report. “A domestic disturbance,” I continue.
Understanding dawns on her face. “That brute out front? Did he touch you? Because so help me God, I will rip out his spleen!”
The eyebrows of both officers shoot up.
“Mutti! I’m fine. He never touched me.”
Mutti halts, presses her lips together, and continues investigating me with her eyes. When she’s finally satisfied that I’m fine, the lines disappear from her forehead. She makes the sign of the cross and takes a seat in the only remaining chair.
The men exchange glances.
I sigh. “Officer Pitts, Officer Ewing; my mother, Ursula Zimmer.”
Mutti nods at each of them. “It is very nice to meet you.”
“Likewise,” Pitts says unsurely. His eyes dart sideways.
“Are we finished here?” I ask. “Because that pony’s chariot just arrived, and I’d like to catch him before he wanders off.”
“I think we’ve got everything we need. I assume we can call? I’m pretty sure we’ll be laying charges about the animal as well.”
“I should hope you would. And yes, by all means, call anytime,” I say, pushing my chair back and rising. I grimace and grab my hip.
“He hurt you! I knew it!” cries Mutti. “I’ll kill him!”
“No he didn’t!” I hiss. “I slipped in the mud. In the rain. Back at Dan’s place.” I add each detail separately, watching her fury deflate in stages. “Really,” I say firmly.
She stares at me for a moment longer. When she’s finally sure she believes me, she rises and places her hands on her hips. “So, where is this horse?”
“God only knows at this point,” I say. “With any luck, not out on the highway.”
“He’s still out back,” says Officer Ewing. “And he’s got a bit of a temper from the looks of it.”
“Yeah, well, you would too if you’d been living like him,” I say grimly. Then I turn and limp from the kitchen.
Mutti follows me, watching my progress carefully—I can feel her eyes all over me. When we get to the living room I lean back and whisper, “Mutti, could you
please
refrain from threatening to kill people in front of police officers?”
“Hrrmph,”
she snorts, raising her chin and making it pointier.
I’ve never known how she manages that.
When we round the corner and the bedraggled little horse comes into view, she stops in her tracks.
“
Mein Gott.
He is full of parasites.”
“I know. He’s a mess.”
“Go get in the car. I will catch him.”
“No, I’ll help.”
“With that leg? Get in the car.”
“It’s my hip. Besides, he’s full of piss and vineg—”
Her arm shoots straight out, index finger pointing through the house. “In the car, Annemarie!”
I make my way carefully around to the front yard. It’s full of vehicles, the porch buzzing with activity.
As I climb obediently into my car, Mutti marches back to her truck. She opens the passenger door, removes a bucket, halter, and lead rope, and disappears behind the house. Moments later she reappears with the pony plodding beside her, stretching his nose out toward the grain. He follows her straight into the trailer without so much as a moment’s hesitation.
I shouldn’t be surprised. Everybody obeys Mutti.
In a few minutes, we’re on our way. When we get back to Day Break, Mutti stops, opens her window, and beckons me forward with her hand. I pull up beside her and run my passenger window down, leaning over so I can see her.
“Where should I put him?” she shouts over the sound of our combined engines. “The quarantine barn?”
“No, Pregzilla’s in there.”
“Who?”
“Maisie. The pregnant mare. Put him in the paddock on the far northeast side, the one with a shelter. I don’t want him anywhere near the other horses till we’ve had him checked out. Think I should call Walter tonight?”
“No. He’ll be fine until morning. You go on back to the house.” She runs up her window and wends her way behind the quarantine barn.
By the time Mutti joins me in Dan’s trailer, I’ve found the larger clicker and am watching a bluish gray image of Maisie sleeping.
“Well,” says Mutti, coming to a stop and putting her hands on her waist. “At least everything there looks okay. How’s your hip?”
“Pretty sore.”
“Have you iced it yet?”
“No. I’m not sure Dan even
has
ice.”
Mutti goes into the kitchen and opens the freezer. I hear her wrestling with something—particles and shards of ice ping and tinkle as they hit the interior walls of the freezer, and then she appears with a frost-covered bag. She bashes it against the side of the sink a few times, and then brings it to the couch.
“Someone needs to defrost that thing.” She hands me a bag of peas. “There is nothing in it but snow.”
“Maybe I’ll do it tomorrow,” I say, leaning to one side and pulling open the waistband of Dan’s pants. I insert the bag of peas and press it against my hip. “Ooh! Aah!” I say, sucking air in through clenched teeth.
“Mmmm,”
says Mutti, looking dubious. “Be careful you don’t flood his kitchen.”
“Mutti!”
“I’m just saying…” she says, casting her eyes
around the room. She points at my beer, which is looking sad and flat. “Is that new?”
“No. Alas.”
She whisks it away, washes the glass, and puts it back in the cupboard.
“Is the ice helping?”
“Not really. Now it feels like a toothache.”
“Try heat. Take a bath.”
“Are you kidding?” I snort.
Mutti shoots me a glance.
“I would have cleaned it, but with my hip and all…” I look sheepishly into my lap, letting the sentence trail off.
Mutti disappears down the orange carpeted hallway. She returns immediately, rummages under the kitchen sink, and goes back with a sponge and canister of Comet. The sounds of vicious scrubbing, sloshing, swishing, and slooshing emanate from the bathroom, punctuated by water running full blast.
Sometime later, I’m relaxing in a deep bath with my eyes closed and a wet washcloth over them.
“Here,” says Mutti.
I yank the washcloth from my eyes, prepared to be outraged that my mother has entered the bathroom and is standing beside my perfectly naked self. But when I see that my mother is handing my perfectly naked self a freshly poured beer, I sit forward, feeling effusively thankful instead.
“Oh, Mutti,” I say. “Whatever would I do without you?”
“Indeed,” she sniffs. “I’m leaving now. There’s spaghetti on the counter. It was all I could find. Call if you need help with that mare.”
After my bath, I return to the kitchen on a considerably loosened hip and snarf the spaghetti. Then I bring Dan’s pillow and comforter from the bedroom to the couch—after first covering said couch with two layers of sheets to protect myself against potential dust mites. It’s not Dan’s fault—the thing’s just old.
The incident with Eugenie has left me feeling a little ill. Even if the authorities are now aware of her little girl, whose name I never found out, what can they really do? How much harm has already been done? And will they send her back to one or both of her parents? The thought makes me weepy for Eva.
My daughter has never gone sockless, has never had hair matted from neglect, but neither has her life been idyllic. I suppose it probably looked that way until last year when Roger and I divorced, but even before then I’d racked up fifteen years of parental faults. Roger racked up a few of his own, to be sure, but in a way he’s lucky: he’ll get to use the benefit of our combined experience raising his second family, an option that’s closed to me.
But as unfortunate as that is, it’s largely beside the point because I’m nowhere near finished with Eva. She’s not just the concentrated point of all my hope—the one and only repository of my DNA—she’s a good kid, a smart kid, who just happens to act out in all the currently fashionable ways when frustrated. And what frustrates her is me.
Hell, I frustrate myself. I’m starting to feel stolid, lumpish, and definitely in the way.
So what’s wrong with me? Am I so fearful that she’ll
be injured riding that I’m willing to let her skid off the rails in every other aspect of her life? Because that’s completely ridiculous. I might as well keep her from riding in cars.
Maybe it is time to see a therapist. Not because I’m crazy, but because maybe it’s time to get the opinion of someone who can objectively weigh the statistical chances of a crippling accident against the advantages of structure, goal, and harmony. Certainly I—with my reconstructed face—am not that person.
I consider calling Eva tonight, but some deep inner switch warns me against it. This train of thought is too new. I don’t want to make a proclamation I’m going to regret.
I turn on the foal-cam and watch Maisie snooze for a while. Then I switch to the eleven o’clock news and help myself to the other beer. For medicinal purposes, of course. Then I lie back against the pillow, which smells like beautiful, beautiful Dan, and pull the covers up to my chin.
Birds are singing. A male voice blares in the background. I blink a few times. A predawn glow suffuses the room.
“—we’re expecting a beautiful day, Louisa, with almost no chance of precipitation and highs of almost fifty-six degrees—”
Springing upright, I seek the large clicker. I snatch it from the floor and stab the Input button. The screen switches to black and white.
Maisie is on her side on the ground. Her uppermost hind leg is stiff, quivering.
“Oh shit!” I scream, leaping off the couch.
I stuff my feet into my mud-encrusted boots, snatch Dan’s lumberjack coat from the coat tree, and bolt across the thickening mud, too full of adrenaline to take anything other than vague notice of my screaming hip.
Please let her be okay,
please
let her be okay,
please
oh
please
Lord, please don’t let anything be wrong—
I stagger into the barn, flick on the light, and approach Maisie’s stall as quietly as I can, although I’m breathing heavily from my sprint. I peer through the bars of her stall with trepidation.
She grunts as a contraction hits and her hind leg stiffens almost like in rigor mortis. A white bubble appears at her vulva, and disappears when the contraction ends.
It’s the amniotic sac—the birth is imminent.
“Okay, okay, okay,” I chant, sliding the door open. “Everything’s going to be okay.” Despite my protestations, my heart is pounding.
Maisie jerks her head up and looks at me. I freeze, worried that she’ll try to get up. I’m about to back away when she groans and drops her head into the straw.
“Good girl, good girl,” I say, leaning over and dragging the foaling kit in behind me.
I kneel behind Maisie and tuck the sheet from the top of the kit, still folded, beneath her haunch as a landing strip for the foal. Then I fumble through the kit, seeking the flashlight.
Maisie lifts her head and grunts, rolling slightly onto her back.
“Oh, I know, Maisie. Believe me, I know,” I croon, although in fact my own labor went terribly wrong before it ever progressed this far. Her grunt turns into a groan, and her body seizes. The bubble reappears.
I crouch behind her with the flashlight, urging her on. “Come on, Maisie! Come on!”
This time, when the contraction ends, the bubble stays. The clear membrane is veined and filled with swirling opalescent liquid. In the center is a small dark thing.