Let the Tornado Come: A Memoir

by Rita Zoey Chin

  She led him into the indoor arena, where a crowd of people, including Laura, had gathered in the corner, waiting for the big showdown: Claret against Jane. “You might not want to watch this,” said one of the women, smirking. This was the same woman who’d once said to me, apropos of nothing, that her horse hated my horse, to which I responded that only people hate. But this time I ignored her and the rest of them, and Jane ignored them, too, as she began to walk Claret around the indoor. “He’s scared to go to the far end,” I said.

  “He’ll be all right,” said Jane, steadily leading him away. When they got near the far end, he tried to turn around, but she stood with him and coaxed him on, and he went with her. I could see in his eyes that he was nervous, but one thing I knew about him was that he wouldn’t do anything he didn’t want to do. She walked around once each way, while everybody watched, and then she stuck a foot in his stirrup and hoisted herself over him from the ground—a feat most people can’t do. “Uh-oh,” someone said.

  When Jane asked Claret to trot, he went forward without shaking his head. But when they approached the far end, Claret started to spin. Jane was fast. She sat into the saddle and spun him the other way, then patted his neck and told him he was a good boy. And he went forward. It had been so long since I’d seen him truly move that I’d forgotten how lithe and lovely his trot was. Laura muttered to one of the women beside her, “She rides balls-to-the-wall. I could ride like that, too, if I wanted.”

  Jane rode Claret perfectly, her ponytail swinging jubilantly behind her. She asked him to canter, and he cantered as if he were in the middle of a show ring. I wondered if some part of him was aware of the crowd that had gathered, if maybe he was showing off just a little. I looked at his eyes, and this time they were shining.

  Without acknowledging the crowd to my right, Jane rode up to me. “He’s actually a really nice mover. But do you want to know what the problem is with your horse?”

  I nodded. “Yes.”

  “He’s a righty—stiff to the right and hollow to the left. Imagine you’re on a mountain, and you feel someone starting to pull you off. You’re going to resist and pull the other way. That’s what happens to Claret when you pull on the right rein, which is where his imbalance is. He thinks you’re pulling him down the mountain, so he pulls back. And when he feels he can’t get away, he starts to fight.”

  I nodded again. “That makes a lot of sense.”

  “I know there’s a lot more going on than that,” she said, “but from a training perspective, that’s something I can help with. That’s why we do dressage—to help the horses, and riders, be balanced.”

  I wanted to sprinkle yeses all over Jane like confetti. Yes to balance. Yes to that kickass ponytail. Yes to Claret.

  After that, Jane rode him around some more, and with nothing but a happy horse to watch, the crowd trickled out. I didn’t see Laura leave, but I was grateful to look over and find her gone.

  Jane came back a few days later and gave me a lesson. It had been a while since I’d ridden, but she made me feel brave. “Look how happy he looks. He likes when you ride him.” I sat up a little taller.

  “That’s it,” she said. “Now be aware of his right rein—instead of pulling on it, just lightly sponge it with your hand. Let him know you’re connected to him. You’re communicating with your hand but giving him room to move at the same time.”

  I squeezed the rein in my right hand like Jane told me, and Claret’s neck softened.

  “Good. Now let him feel your legs around him. Give him a little tap with your inside leg when he starts falling in, and balance that with the outside rein.”

  Again, I did as she instructed, and Claret responded by balancing himself. “It’s like a constant conversation, riding—isn’t it?” I said.

  “That’s exactly what it is,” she said, smiling. “Yeah, I think you two are going to be just fine. Now give him a pat and tell him he’s a good boy.”

  Now it was my turn to smile. I reached forward and stroked his neck with my hand. “Good boy!”

  Jane came up and patted his neck, too. “You can ride him alone, too, you know.”

  “Really? Everyone’s been saying how dangerous he is.”

  Jane shook her head. “I’ve seen dangerous horses, and yours isn’t one of them. You can do it,” she said. “I know you can.”

  The day after Jane came, I walked into the arena. Three people were riding—including the woman who told me her horse hated my horse—and Laura was giving a lesson to one of them. Her voice was shrill, but I didn’t look at her. I looked at Claret. “You just listen to me, okay?” I said, stroking the side of his face. As I walked him to the mounting block, I could feel everyone’s eyes on me. I hadn’t ridden Claret on my own in ages, and I knew they all thought I was crazy. But I didn’t care. I took a deep breath and mounted my horse. “We can do this,” I said, reaching forward to give him a pat on the neck. We started off by heading down the long side. “That’s it, that’s a good boy.” I didn’t stop reassuring him, which was, in part, a way of reassuring myself. Claret’s ears turned back toward me as I spoke. “Okay, so we’re heading to the far end now, and I know this has been scary for you, but you can do it. I’m with you.” Avoidance is what panic eats for breakfast, Norm had said, and I didn’t want to keep avoiding things. I gave Claret another pat and made sure not to pull too hard on his right rein. Then I did what Laura, a lifetime horsewoman and trainer and competitor hadn’t been able do: I rode Claret to the far end.

  That’s what panic taught me.

  I thought about Gerta and Laura and even the woman who tried to ride Claret on the trail—how, despite their experience and their will, and my deference to that experience and will, Claret said no to each of them. It turns out that what he’d been asking for all along was for me to take the lead—for me to trust myself.

  It was as if Claret knew. He didn’t shake his head or kick or spin or buck or back up. He just kept going. We kept going, two wild things.

  FIFTY-FIVE

  Larry’s coworker was hosting a backyard barbecue, an ordinary thing that from the start didn’t feel ordinary. It happened in increments, all the ways that day felt familiar. It started with the thick summer heat, a wall of it. It started with the tall grasses past the yard beginning to bend, with the new ledge of cool air arriving at our table like an announcement. “There’s a storm blowing in,” someone said. But the gray sky, which seemed to keep hovering lower and lower, did nothing to stop the din of the party, the rhythms of voices, people carrying heaped plates to their tables, the kids springing up in the bouncy castle pitched on the other side of the yard.

  Larry and I left our table to get dessert, and as we stood on the line, a fair-skinned girl walked past us, skinny and slightly pigeon-toed. Though I had never seen her before, I recognized her. (I have always been pigeon-toed, a trait my mother tried unsuccessfully to rid me of when I was young by making me stand with my spine straight against a wall, my toes turned ballerina-style outward while balancing the Baltimore yellow pages on my head.) I recognized this waifish and awkward girl as kin.

  Across her nose was a cut, which appeared to be recent, and in the few seconds it took for her to walk past me, I thought so many things, the loudest of which was be careful. I had once thought the same thing while sitting on my front step in the grip of panic, but this felt different—this girl worried me for a reason I couldn’t quite place. She touched something visceral in me. And then she was off in the yard somewhere, and the new cool wind started lapping at us, and I asked Larry if he was really going to eat the two pieces of cake and piece of pie he’d loaded onto his plate, and he said, “It’s a party,” and I smiled, and he smiled.

  He hadn’t even made it through the first piece of cake when his coworker’s wife came to the table and put her hand on Larry’s shoulder. “A girl fell out of the castle,” she said. “On her arm. I think she might be hur
t.”

  I knew instantly who it was. Larry got up, and I followed him, and we both saw her at the same time, the cut across her nose, her pale face now bleached, and her forearm misshapen, bent the wrong way. As we approached this young girl, I wasn’t sure what would happen. Despite Larry’s many years of medical training and practice, he had a phobia of one common medical problem: broken limbs. They terrified him. If we were watching a movie and he thought someone was about to break an arm or leg, he’d run out of the room, then call to me from afar, “Did it break? Could you hear it? Could you actually see it?” You couldn’t even talk to Larry about a broken limb without him shuddering. We looked at each other briefly, as if to say, Here it is, that scary thing. But he didn’t pause: he went right up to her.

  She was whimpering lightly, and her lips had a blue cast from the shock. “I’m Larry,” he said, “and I’m a doctor. What’s your name?”

  “Alyssa Mayberry,” she said.

  “So you fell, huh?”

  She nodded.

  “I’m going to take a look at your arm, okay?”

  She nodded again, and Larry gently took her arm into his hands. You could see the dip where it had broken in half. Larry asked if she could move her fingers, and she wiggled them. He asked her to squeeze his fingers, and she did, quite hard, and I said, “You’re strong,” and she smiled a little.

  The aunt who had brought Alyssa to the party said she would call the doctor, and I said, “Her arm is broken. You need to call an ambulance.” And I could still hear my mother’s voice from all those years ago, after I’d run through the glass door: Call a fucking ambulance! So they went to call an ambulance, and Larry kept hold of her arm, one hand on either piece, as if he were willing it to fuse back together, as if his hands could make it so. At one point, Alyssa reached her other hand out and took mine. She just held my hand like that. There was no fear. There was a child who was counting on us to be calm, so we were calm. We spoke to her in such quiet voices. And there was a weighty stillness among the three of us as we all held on—a stillness that made everyone else stay back and watch from a distance. And soon Alyssa stopped whimpering, and the blue hue of her lips began to fade. An occasional drop of rain touched one of our faces while we waited for the ambulance, but none of us moved for what seemed like a very long time, until finally we could hear the howl of sirens approaching.

  Things moved quickly then. The EMTs asked Alyssa her name and her age, which was nine—the same age I was when I broke the glass and my mother tended my own injuries. When they wrapped Alyssa’s arm in an air cast, I saw then how broken things can be held together, how they can heal. I saw how the bad things we fear might happen do happen and, with courage, sometimes we can be the ones to make them okay. I watched Alyssa be brave, and I watched Larry be brave, and I knew that when it came time again for me to be brave, I would think of her—the child who needed us to be calm, the child who let me hold her hand—and I would be brave. When the EMT asked if she was ready to go, she stood up from her chair and walked, in between the two men, to the ambulance. “At least it wasn’t my leg!” she told them in a chipper voice, and her gratitude traveled back to us, covered the distance she was making, and would make, and does still.

  FIFTY-SIX

  On an icy morning, Jane came to get Claret and move him to her barn. I must have looked nervous, because she smiled at me and told me everything would be okay. And in that moment, I trusted her, in part because I trusted myself, and because I’d stayed true to Claret and believed she’d seen in him what I’d seen: a horse that, in the right environment, could flourish. He could be brave. His body could become strong. He could be happy. And I believed Jane could teach us, and that Claret and I could teach each other.

  Unlike the first time I tried getting him on a trailer, this time Jane walked him on easily. He and I were both ready to leave. Laura stayed out of sight, and as I drove away from her barn for the last time, I remembered those words that had rung through me with such velocity: I know what I need. As soon as we arrived at Jane’s barn and unloaded Claret, I took his lead rope and stood with him on the gravel road outside the barn. He was alert—his eyes intently scanning, his ears pricked forward—but he seemed relaxed, as if he knew he was someplace good. He pressed his nose into my hand, and I gave it a little squeeze. “I’m here,” I told him. Then I showed him around the barn, and he put his nose on everything.

  As Jane began riding Claret, it was as if he’d forgotten the great ride they’d had together when she’d first come out to Laura’s barn to meet him. Now he was consistently defensive, and this worried me. He still kicked and bucked and backed up. But Jane was unfazed. “He just needs to learn I’m not going to fight with him. He’s a sensitive horse, and he needs time to understand that he’s safe and that he’s not in trouble. And I have to be clear about what I ask, which, right now, is to simply go forward.”

  What I learned quickly about Jane was that she rode each horse differently. She considered the whole horse, each as its own individual with its own physical and mental characteristics, and Claret was the only one she took her spurs off to ride. “He doesn’t need them,” she said. And no matter what he did, she stayed calm. If he backed her into a wall, she waited until he went forward, then patted his neck and told him he was a good boy. There were no miracles, but Jane was patient and fair, and slowly, Claret began to respond. Instead of kicking five times during a ride, sometimes he would kick only once, and eventually sometimes not at all.

  Jane was kind to Claret. If he got nervous on the crossties, she didn’t yell at him or leave him there alone. Instead, she joined me in feeding him treats until he forgot about being nervous. Jelly Bean Therapy we called it.

  Usually we could figure out what he was spooking at—a towel on the floor, a beam of light from the window, a barn worker carrying a ladder—but one day while he was on the crossties, he started eyeing the empty mat below him, cocking his head and snorting and jittering about. “There’s nothing there!” I said, nonplussed.

  Jane laughed. “He sees his shadow. He’s spooking at his own shadow.”

  “I know how you feel,” I said, patting the side of his face. “I know exactly how you feel.”

  Soon I developed a routine with Claret—little things we could count on that brought us both comfort. Every time I entered the barn, he whinnied, then nickered, then poked his face through his stall window. “C-Monster!” I’d exclaim, leaning forward to kiss his nose before feeding him a carrot. After I put his bridle on, I patted his forehead. And at the end of a ride, I breathlessly flung my body over his neck and told him he was a good boy. In his stall, I gave him his favorite cookie with the peppermint on top, and he wrapped me against his body with his long neck. Then there were the things I whispered to him each day before I left. One of those things was always thank you.

  After a while, Claret stopped kicking and bucking and backing up and started to become fit and more confident in his work. But Claret’s headshaking didn’t stop, and that still made him difficult to ride. We worried that his bit was bothering him, so we tried different bits and then a bitless bridle, but nothing seemed to make a difference. Then someone suggested it might be neurological. I had three different vets come out to examine him, but they found nothing. Upon their advice, I tried him on different allergy medications and steroids, but none of them helped. And then I came to the heart-wrenching conclusion that I might have to send him to a field in Florida where he could retire.

  When I discussed all of this with Jane, she convinced me to try one last thing: a complete workup at Tufts animal hospital. “Then you’ll know for sure what you’re dealing with.”

  FIFTY-SEVEN

  As we pull into Hanscom Field, a small airport about twenty minutes from our house, I want to beg Larry to turn around and go home. Instead, I tell him I’m cold, and he parks the car and takes off his leather bomber that he bought from a pilot magazine, and hands it to
me. For a long time, he’s been asking me to go up with him in the Warrior, a small single-engine plane that he sometimes rents, and today I said yes. Since he started taking lessons, he’s earned not only a pilot’s license but his instrument rating as well, and now he’s talking about going for a commercial license. “What, in case you can’t find a job as a brain surgeon?” I teased. But I know the reason: ambition, pure and simple. If there’s more to learn, Larry wants to learn it, and flying is no different.

  I, on the other hand, had been steadily rejecting his invitations for the past two years to take to the sky with him and learn a little something for myself. “One day,” I’d always say. “Soon.” Planes in general scared me. Small planes terrified me. And every time Larry asked me to go with him, it felt like he was asking me to die.

  But I once told Larry that he had to be more than his fears. And each time I said no to flying with him, I was not more than my fears, and I was missing another chance to know him—which is why I do not ask him, when we pull into the parking lot at the small airport, to turn around.

  Before we arrived, I asked him a plethora of what-ifs—what if the engine stalls, what if we get a bird strike, what if lightning strikes the wing, what if we hit wake turbulence, what if I throw up?—to which Larry steadfastly reassured me that all will be fine, that he can land the plane even if the engine fails, that he has checked and rechecked the weather and there is nothing but clear skies, that a bird strike simply won’t happen, and even if it did, he could still land the plane, that we won’t get close enough to another plane to hit wake turbulence, and finally, that the plane is equipped with two paper bags, should I decide to throw up.