Harvesting the Heart (49 page)

just
inches away from a horse, its fermenting breath hot on my ear. I put
my hand against the wire mesh gate that separated the horse's stall
from the main aisle of the stable. The horse whinnied, and its
jaundiced teeth curved around the chain links, trying to bite at the
flesh of my palm. As its lips brushed my skin, they left behind a
green slime that smelled faintly of hay.

"I
wouldn't do that if I were you," a voice said, and I whipped
around. "But then again, I am you, and you are me, and that's
the beauty." A kid no older than eighteen stood propped on a
strange skinny rake beside a wheelbarrow piled with manure. He wore a
T-shirt colored by a fading portrait of Nietzsche, and his
dirty-blond hair was pulled away from his face. "Andy's a
biter," he said, coming forward to stroke the horse's nose.

He
disappeared as quickly as he'd come, behind the cage door of a
different stall. The barn was about half filled with horses, each of
them different from the others. There was a chestnut, with hair the
same shade as mine; a bay, with a coarse black mane. There was a
white Thoroughbred, straight out of a fairy tale; and one tremendous,
majestic horse hovering in the shadows, the color of a pitch-dark
night.

I
walked the length of the aisle, passing the boy, who was heaving wet
tufts of hay into the wheelbarrow. It was clear that my mother was
not in this barn, and I sighed in relief. I turned to a small table
at the end of the aisle. It held a wooden chest and—of all
things— an Astrid Prescott photo desk calendar, opened to the
current date. I ran my fingers over the misty image of Mount
Kilimanjaro, wondering why my mother couldn't have escaped the
way Nicholas's mother had—months at a time, but always with a
promis^to return. Sighing, I turned to the facing page. Neatly
lettered beside the printed hours were female names: Brittany, Jane,
Anastasia, Merleen. The handwriting was my mother's.

I
remembered it from before, although when she left I hadn't been able
to read it. I remembered the way her letters all sloped to the left,
in spite of the fact that every other written word I'd ever seen
leaned a little to the right. After all, that's what the sisters
taught me later in penmanship class. Even when she wrote, my mother
bucked the system.

I
did not know what I planned to do once I had found her. I did not
have a speech ready. On the one hand, I wanted to stare her down and
yell at her, one minute for every year since she'd left me. On the
other hand, I wanted to touch her, to feel that the substance of her
skin was as warm as mine. I wanted to believe I had grown up like
her, in spite of the circumstances. I wanted this so badly it hurt,
but I knew better than to hedge my bets. After all, I was not sure
if, when it came down to it, I would throw myself into her arms or
spit at her feet.

I
became aware of the blood in my body, which surged down my arms, down
my sides. When I remembered well enough how to move again, I pushed
through the fear that hung like a net and walked to the boy in the
stall. "Excuse me," I said. "I don't mean to bother
you."

He
did not look up at me or break his rhythmic shoveling. "What are
you," he said, "but a speed bump on the autobahn of life?"

I
did not know if he expected an answer, so I took a step into the
stall, feeling the damp, soft hay give way under my heel. "I'm
looking for Lily Rubens," I said, trying out her name on my
tongue. "I've come to see Lily Rubens."

The
boy shrugged. "She's around," he said. "Check the
ring."

The
ring. The ring. I nodded to the boy's back and walked down the
stable's aisle again, staring at the telephone tucked against the
wall and waiting a moment for magic to happen. What did he mean by
the ring?

I
slipped out of the dark barn and stepped into such bright sun that
for a moment the world was only white. Then I saw the brook, running
on this side of the stable as well, and a big metal hangar that
reminded me of a roller-skating rink in Skokie that had been turned
into a flea market. Right beside the barn I had been in was another
barn, and down the bend of a little hill was a third barn, built into
the slope of a terraced field. There were two gravel paths, which
split to either side of the hangar. One seemed to go across a field
where a big horse was bucking, and the other sidelined the little
brook. I took a deep breath and set off down that one.

The
path forked again at a sturdy wooden fence. It either continued
up a heathered hill or let you through a gate into a big oval
littered with fences and bars and redwood barricades. Riding along
the edge of the oval, toward me, was a woman on a horse. I could not
see her face, but she was tall and thin and seemed to know what she
was doing. The horse shook his head from left to right. "Jeez,
Eddy," she said as she came by me, "take it easy.
Everyone's got to deal with the bugs. You think you've got a monopoly
on them?"

I
listened carefully, trying to remember my mother's voice, but I
honestly wouldn't have been able to pick it out from others. This
could be my mother—if I could just see her face. But she had
rounded the curve and was now riding away from me. The only other
person there was a man, kind of short, wearing jeans and a big polo
shirt and a tweed newsboy's cap. I could not hear his voice, but he
was calling out to the woman riding.

The
woman kicked the horse, and he began flying around the edge of the
track. He jumped a thick blue wall, and then another high rail, and
suddenly he was coming a hundred miles an hour directly toward me. I
could hear the heavy breath of the rider and see the flared nostrils
of the horse as he thundered closer. He wasn't going to stop. He was
going to take the gate next, and I was right in his way.

I
crouched down and covered my head with my arms just as the horse came
to a dead halt inches in front of me. His heavy head was above the
gate, his nose grazed my fingers. In the background, the man called
something out. "Yes," the woman said, looking down at me.
"It was the best line yet, but I think we've scared someone half
to death." She smiled at me, and I could see that her hair was
blond and her eyes were brown and that her shoulders were much wider
than any I'd ever seen on a woman; that she wasn't my mother at all.

I
mumbled an apology and headed up the other fork of the path. It
opened into a vast field that was sprinkled with buttercups and wild
daisies, with grass growing higher than my thighs. Before I saw them,
I heard the rhythm of their hooves—
da
da dum, da da dum—
two
horses tearing across the field as if they were being chased by the
devil. They jumped a brook and ran up to the fenced edge of the
pasture. They lowered their heads to graze, their tails switching
back and forth in metronome time like the long swinging hair of
exotic dancers.

By
the time I returned, there was no one riding in the little oval. I
headed back toward the barn where that boy had been, figuring I could
ask for better directions. As I walked up the hill, I saw the man who
had been calling out the things I couldn't hear, holding tight to a
thick leather strap that was clipped to Eddy's halter. He held a
dripping sponge in his other hand, but as soon as he touched it to
Eddy's flank, the horse twisted away violently. I kept my distance,
half hidden. The man dripped the sponge over the horse's back, and
again it bucked to the left. The man dropped the sponge and lightly
whipped the horse twice across the neck with the strap, then tucked
it over the nose and through the muzzle of the halter. The horse
quieted and bowed his head, and the man began to talk softly, running
his hand over the horse's spine.

I
decided to ask this man about my mother, so I stepped forward. He put
down the sponge and lifted his head, but his back was to me. "Excuse
me," I said quietly, and he spun around so fast that his hat
came off and a thick tumble of dark-red hair fell down.

This
was not a man. This was my mother.

She
was taller than I was, and leaner, and her skin was the color of
honey. But her hair was like mine, and her eyes were like mine, and
there was no mistaking it. "Oh, my God," she said.

The
horse snorted over her shoulder, and water dripped off his mane to
form a puddle on my mother's shirt. She did not seem to notice. "I'm
Paige," I said, stiffly, and impulsively I held out my hand to
shake hers. "I'm, um, your daughter."

My
mother began to smile, and it melted her from her head to her feet,
making her able to move again. "I know who you are," she
said. She did not take my hand. She shook her head and knotted her
fingers around the leather lead. She fidgeted, scuffing the toes of
her boots in the loose gravel. "Let me get rid of Eddy,"
she said. She pulled on the lead and then stopped to turn back to me.
Her eyes were huge and pale, the eyes of a beggar. "Don't go
anywhere," she said.

I
followed a few steps behind the horse she led. She disappeared into a
stall—the one the boy had been cleaning—and slid the
halter off the horse's head. She stepped out, latched the mesh gate,
and hung the leather contraption on a nail pegged to the right of the
stall. "Paige," she said, breathing my name as if it were
forbidden to speak aloud.

She
reached toward me and touched her palm to my shoulder. I could not
help it; I shivered and stepped back. "I'm sorry," I said,
looking away.

At
that moment the boy who had been working the stable earlier appeared
out of nowhere. "I'm done for the day, Lily," he said,
although it was only noon.

My
mother dragged her gaze away from me. "Josh," she said,
"this is Paige. My daughter, Paige."

Josh
nodded at me. "Cool," he said. He turned to my mother.
"Aurora and Andy need to be brought in. I'll see you tomorrow.
Although," he said, "tomorrow is just the flip side of
today."

As
he walked down the long aisle of the barn, my mother turned to me.
"He's a little bit Zen," she said, "but he's all I can
afford right now."

Without
another word, my mother walked out of the barn and headed down the
gravel path toward the field that ran to the left. When she reached
the field she propped her elbows against the wooden gate and watched
the horse at the far end. Even at this distance he was one of
the largest horses I had ever seen. He was sleek and sable-colored,
with the exception of his two front legs. They turned pure white
halfway down, as if he'd only just stepped into heaven. "How did
you find me?" my mother asked nonchalantly.

"You
didn't make it easy," I snapped. I was fuming. My mother didn't
seem the tiniest bit put out by my appearance. I was more rattled
than she was. Sure, there had been that shock of surprise, but now
she was acting cool and relaxed, as if she'd known I was coming. This
was not the way I'd thought she would be. I realized that at the very
least, I'd expected her to be curious. At the very most, I had wanted
her to care.

I
turned to her, waiting for a splinter of real recognition to hit
me—some gesture or smile or even the lilt of her voice. But
this was an entirely different woman from the one who had left me
when I was five years old. I had spent the past few days—the
past twenty years—conjuring up comparisons between us, making
assumptions. I knew we would bear a resemblance to each other. I knew
that we had both been driven away from our homes, although I didn't
know why she had left. I imagined that I would meet her and she would
reach out her arms for me and there I would be, in the place where I
always knew I would fit best. I imagined that we would sound the
same, walk the same, think the same. But this was her world, and I
knew nothing about it. This was her life, and it had gone smoothly
without me around. The truth was that I barely knew her when she left
and that I did not know her now. "A friend of mine introduced me
to a private eye, and he tracked you to Bridles & Bits," I
said, "and then I saw the ceiling."

"The
ceiling," my mother whispered, her thoughts far away. "Oh—the
ceiling.
Like
Chicago."