The Tin Horse: A Novel (38 page)

My God, was
that
why Mama and Papa said nothing? Because they couldn’t be sure, and they needed for Barbara to be Kay Devereaux, alive and well in Colorado Springs? And wouldn’t I at twenty have taken apart every “proof” Philip gave them, more intent on truth than on comfort?

Harriet spends nearly an hour examining photos, one hand holding the magnifying glass and the other tensely twisting her hair; she doesn’t even touch the brownies. Then at last she takes off her reading glasses, rubs her eyes.

“They say that twins have trouble forming attachments as adults,” she says. “It’s especially true of identical twins, but it can apply to fraternal twins, too. They’re always looking for the kind of closeness they had with the twin.”

“Are you saying … what, that I have a neurotic need to find her? That I haven’t been able get close to people because of her?”

“I wasn’t talking about you. Look at her. Four husbands.”

“Then you do think this is Barbara?”

“Yes. Maybe. No. All of the above.” She runs her hands through her tangled hair. Then she gives me a therapist look. “What happens when we call and Cowgirl Kay says, ‘Barbara who?’ ”

“She might not say that,” I reply, though again I think of the daunting reality of Kay Devereaux Cochran Applegate Farris Thorne.

“Oh, Elaine.”

“So do you think we
shouldn’t
contact her?”

“I just think we need to anticipate how she’s going to respond—and how we’ll feel. And I’d like to consider the option that you’ve achieved one of the best possible outcomes by solving the family mystery, and maybe we
should
leave it at that. But let’s not make any decisions now. How about if we both sleep on this and talk tomorrow, all right?”

“All right.”

“No decisions right away. Promise me.”

“Um,” I say noncommittally.

We embrace. I give her half the brownie to take home.

“Promise,” she says again as she leaves. As if she can see the idea that’s entered my mind.

It’s a crazy idea. She’s right about sleeping on all of this. But after she leaves, I’m too keyed up to go to bed. I turn on the television.

There’s a TV show on that I actually like, but after ten minutes, I realize I’m not following it. I take out a deck of cards; solitaire is a surefire way to distract myself.

I can’t do it. Really
.

Still, I abandon the solitaire game and turn on the computer and swear out loud because it takes so long to boot up. I feel … impatient. Annoyed.
Alive
. As I print out flight schedules, I dance around the room, a fierce old woman’s dance.

Harriet with her “Barbara who?” got me thinking. There is no satisfactory way to contact Barbara, for the first time in more than half a century, over the phone. I have to be there, to see her face the moment I say, “It’s me. Elaine.”

Cody has an airport. From there, I’ll need to get to the OKay Ranch, which, according to the brochure, is thirty-seven miles out of town, twelve of them on a “scenic highway”—in the Rocky Mountains. In the middle of winter. It would be smart to wait until spring. That would give me time to plan my approach carefully, and I wouldn’t have to drive on mountain roads in January.

But what did Josh say after he drove me back from Barstow?
Call me the next time you feel like taking a road trip
.

P
EARL PUT HER ARM AROUND ME WHILE I RETCHED OVER HER FLOWERS
. Then she led me inside to the familiar site of our serious conversations, the love seat, which sat against a cream stucco wall in her Spanish-style home.

“I’ll be right back,” she said, hurrying into the kitchen. She returned a moment later with a glass of water, as well as a damp towel that she mopped over my face and arms.

And I sobbed out my story.

“He never stopped loving her, did he?” I wept.

“Shh, Elaine. Shh.”

“You knew! You warned me he might just be going with me because I was her sister.”

“But I was wrong. Anybody who’s seen you and Danny together wouldn’t doubt that he loves you. Danny and Barbara, I don’t know. There’s just something between them.”

“Sex?”

“Oy. Any eighteen-year-old boy, it’s sex. Elaine.” She searched my eyes. “You and Danny, have you …”

“I wanted to! Today. That’s why I …”
And Barbara got there first
.

Oh! I felt like I’d been punched in the stomach. I’d been focusing my hurt and anger on Danny. Now the sense of betrayal shifted to Barbara, and I was shattered. As if, compacted into that irredeemable moment when I opened Danny’s door and saw her, was the pain of her having been his first love; and so much deeper than that, it was the rivalry I’d felt all of my life as I competed with Barbara for Mama’s love … and again and again, Mama chose her. I let out a wail.

“Elaine! Elaine!” Pearl cried, but I raged around the room sobbing, pushing away her efforts to calm me. Why had I run away like a child? I wanted to be back at Danny’s, to pound my sister until my fists were bloody. At least Danny had a reason for betraying me: he had never gotten over her. But Barbara? I pictured her standing behind him, disheveled and flushed—
triumphant
? Was she deliberately trying to destroy me?

“Elaine!” Pearl grabbed my arm and thrust a glass of amber liquid at me. “Drink this.”

I took a gulp. Whiskey, nasty-tasting. I downed the whole shot and found my voice. “How
could
she? Does she hate me?”

“Darling, I don’t know why she … Here, sit.” She wrapped her arms around me. “I wish there was something I could say that would make this not hurt so much.”

Pearl held me as the afternoon softened into dusk. Between my spasms of tears, there were also quiet times when I simply floated, exhausted and empty.

During one of those calms, the phone rang. Pearl had ignored several calls earlier, but this time she asked if I’d be all right and went into the kitchen to get the phone.

“Your mother,” she said when she came back a few minutes later. “I said you were going to have dinner with me. All right? I was just going to make a salad and boil some potatoes.”

“Fine,” I said, though I couldn’t imagine forcing anything down my throat.

“She asked about the party tonight. I said you were upset about Danny leaving, and you didn’t think you were going to go.”

Oh, no, the party
. But maybe the excuse Pearl had given Mama would
work for my friends, too. Certainly Danny wouldn’t breathe a word of the real reason I was missing.

“Tonight do you want to stay here?” Pearl asked.

The question thrust me into the future, the eternity in which I had to sleep barely three feet from Barbara. Just thinking of it made my skin crawl.

“Aunt Pearl, please,” I begged, “can I move in with you?” She hesitated, and I pressed on. “I’ll tell them I need more quiet so I can study.”

Pearl sighed. “You and your sister are going to have to talk.”

“Please? I’ll pay you for room and board.”

“Lainie, I don’t know.… I’m going to go make dinner now, okay?”

She returned to the kitchen. And I huddled on the sofa, a girl whose problems a few hours earlier had been limited to the challenges of being a freshman at USC and Danny’s departure for war.

Unless I’d been living in a fool’s paradise. With a floaty clarity (I’d drunk the whiskey on an empty stomach), I considered the possibility that this wasn’t the first time Barbara had been at Danny’s. Hadn’t I wondered what she was up to, leaving the house every afternoon long before she had to be at work? Maybe her secret was that she was seeing Danny on the sly … the way I used to see him when he was
her
boyfriend, I thought, the guilt from that time flooding me. If Barbara had walked in on us in Chafkin’s storeroom, how would she have felt?

“It’s not the same!” I protested out loud. If God was trying to give me a taste of my own medicine, God had it wrong. Not that my behavior hadn’t been contemptible, but we’d been kids then. Now we were on the brink of our adult lives.

But they couldn’t have been seeing each other behind my back. Even if I believed Barbara was capable of something so lousy, Danny never would have hurt me like that.
Would he?
In the venomous whisper of doubt I heard the rationalizations he used to give for sneaking around with me, and I wondered if I had utterly misjudged his character, if instead of complicated, forgivable reasons for his behavior, he was simply a manipulator who liked playing one of us against the other. I would come to see Danny as a man who enjoyed subterfuge for its own sake. I don’t think he had
become that man yet; it wouldn’t happen until the war. But that afternoon I glimpsed it, and it chilled me—or so I imagined when I looked back and dissected my failed first love. But that cool, rational exercise wouldn’t happen until years later.

That day at Pearl’s, I was like a wounded animal, burrowing into her love seat … and freezing into stillness when I heard someone walking up the porch steps. A voice called through the screen door, “Mrs. Davidoff?”

Danny
.

“Mrs. Davidoff?” he called. “I’m looking for Elaine.”

It was dusk, the room in shadow. Hoping he couldn’t see me, I held my breath.

But Pearl came in from the kitchen. “Danny, wait just a minute,” she called.

I jumped up. Whispered, “No.”

Pearl put her hands on my shoulders. “I’ll send him away if you want me to. But you’re not going to have another chance. If you don’t see him and he goes and gets killed in the war, will you be able to forgive yourself?”

“I’d like to kill him myself! Now.”

“I know. And he deserves it.”

But Pearl was right. Everything that Danny had been to me, I couldn’t refuse to see him the night before he left for the war. “Let him in,” I said.

“Light?” She nodded toward the lamp.

“No!”

Pearl told Danny I was here and held open the door for him.

“I’m sorry,” he mumbled to Pearl.

Then he was inside. My
bashert
. He stood tentatively, facing me … in a way that reminded me of the glorious night when he’d stood naked before me. A roaring filled my head, and my legs dissolved. I sat down, willing myself not to faint.

“Danny, you take care of yourself, all right?” Pearl said. Her back was to me, so I couldn’t see the look she gave him, but he seemed to shrink several inches.

“Yes, ma’am.”

Then Pearl left the room. Left me alone with him.

He took a few steps toward me and fell to his knees. “Elaine, I’m sorry. I’m so, so—” He choked on a sob. I had never seen Danny cry, not even as a child. For an instant, my eyes welled up. That made me even more furious at him.

I slapped his face so hard my hand stung. “How could you?”

“I’m sorry. I’m sorry.” He took the slap, just kneeling there and weeping.

“How could you? With her?” I slapped him again, feeling a savage joy at hurting him.

“Elaine, please!” He grabbed my hands.

“Let go of me!”

“Please, I’m leaving tomorrow. Can’t we talk?”

“Let me go!”

He released me but scrambled to his feet, out of range of my slaps.

“Did you
fuck
her?” I spat out. I had never spoken that word before. Saying it made me feel grown-up and mean.

He wiped his eyes on his sleeve. “No. I didn’t … make love with her. Elaine, I love
you
.”

“Have you been seeing her?”

“What do you mean?”

“Have you been seeing her in secret?” I studied his face, alert for any subtle shift in expression that would tell me I’d hit a nerve. But he looked stunned, and I believed him when he said no. Yet that didn’t dampen my rage.

“Please, the whole thing was crazy. It’s like I’m in some kind of fever, getting ready to leave. She came by to wish me luck, and she gave me a kiss goodbye, that was all, but then … you know.”

“Then
what
?”

“I feel terrible that I hurt—”

“Did she give you a blow job?”
You do that with Danny, right?
she’d said to me.

“Elaine, won’t you let me apologize?” Now
he
sounded angry. Had he thought shedding a few tears would fix everything? Did he think I was so hopelessly in love with him?

“Did she?” I said. “Don’t lie to me!”

“Okay, yes. But it was only—I’m being completely honest with you, okay?—it was because she used to, back when we were going together.”

“How come you never asked me to?” I demanded.

“To give me a … You’ve got to be kidding! I have too much respect for you. I didn’t ask
her
the first time, she just did it.… Look, I don’t blame you if you hate me right now. I deserve it. But I’m leaving tomorrow. Won’t you wish me luck?”

I hope you get killed!
But just thinking that made me feel sick.

“Good luck,” I said.

“I love you.”

He paused, and I formed the response in my mind:
I love you, too
. I had felt that way until only hours ago. I had loved Danny with no reservations, nothing held back. As deeply as he’d hurt me, still in the balance between love and loathing, there were years of love. And this might be the last time I would ever see him, the last time I could tell him. Part of me ached to say those words. And part of me felt like saying them would twist a knife in my gut. I had clamped down on my tears, but now I wept.