Let the Tornado Come: A Memoir

by Rita Zoey Chin

  When we arrive at the plane in the lot, it appears smaller than I’d even imagined. “I think there are some birds bigger than this,” I say, but Larry is already focusing on his preflight routine, examining the wings, checking to see there are no deformities in the flaps and that the ailerons move up and down; checking the gas tank, and taking a fuel sample to confirm it’s the right kind of fuel and that there’s no water contamination; examining the wheels, the lights, the rudder and elevator of the tail, and, of course, the engine. Larry helps me climb up onto the wing to get in, and when he shuts the door, I am once again reminded of how small this plane is. My stomach is doing a wobbly jig, and I keep catching myself holding my breath, while Larry starts the plane and begins checking gauges. He turns on the radio and hands me a headset so that we can hear each other once we get going. For a moment, my nervousness abates as I watch him, the shine in his eyes, the knowledge, the quiet pride. When Larry was a year old, he was sent away from his parents on a plane. Since then, he’s never asked for much from anyone; he never wanted to scare anyone away. And though I’d been saying no to him for two years, he never got mad or even let his disappointment show; he simply kept asking, the way a boy might ask, earnestly, with hope. Larry turns to look at me, and his voice fills my headset. “Are you ready?”

  I gulp. “Yes.”

  Larry pushes the button on the radio, and I can tell he’s still a little shy to speak to the people on the other end. “Hanscom Ground, Warrior Two Six Three November Delta, ready to taxi with Bravo.”

  Their response comes through my headset, too. “Warrior Two Six Three November Delta, Hanscom Ground, taxi to Runway Two Niner via Juliet Echo.”

  “Roger. Juliet Echo for Runway Two Niner, Two Six Three November Delta.”

  As we taxi to the runway, I take a breath and let myself be excited. Norm once told me that anxiety is a form of constricted excitement, and I can feel the truth in his words. On the adjacent runway, a plane takes off and another lands while Larry has returned to checking his various gauges. He turns the wheel back and forth and revs the throttle, then calls the air traffic control tower for clearance. “Hanscom Tower, Warrior Two Six Three November Delta, holding short, Runway Two Niner, request closed traffic for pattern work.”

  “Warrior Two Six Three November Delta, Hanscom Tower, clear for takeoff. Make left closed traffic.”

  “Roger. Clear for takeoff.”

  Larry begins to accelerate, and pretty soon we’re racing down the runway in the heart of the plane’s loud growl. Larry is focused ahead, touching different instruments, and then suddenly we’re off the ground, hovering over the runway. As we ascend, my stomach wavers, and I close my eyes. I can feel the pull of gravity, the fight in my bones. Surrender, I tell myself, and when I open my eyes, we’re already high over the trees.

  As we crest our projected altitude, Larry banks the plane, and I watch the sun fatten to an orange globe while the moon presides over the darker half of the sky, a silver-white disk. I feel like a child, like we are both children, like Larry took a toy and made it airborne, and we are at the start of an adventure.

  “Do you like it?” Larry asks.

  When I agreed to come with Larry, I never expected to like it. But as I watch him doing this thing he loves, as I watch the earth and sky—so much of it at once—I learn something I thought I already knew: that the only way to truly trust someone is to risk what you think you can’t risk. “I love it,” I say.

  But we agreed to take it slowly, so after a few minutes, Larry calls in for the landing. As we descend, I feel like we’re taking a piece of sky back with us. And when we touch down, it’s smooth all the way.

  Back at home, I retire to my office to write about our flight. I want to remember always how swift Larry was with his knowledge, how graceful. I want to remember the moon, how it hung over the airport, how even after we landed, I couldn’t stop staring at it. I want to remember the feeling of elation I had as we tied the plane back down: the feeling of moving toward another fear, as if into a headwind.

  FIFTY-EIGHT

  On the day of Claret’s trip to Tufts animal hospital, I drove to the barn wondering if Jane’s mother, an experienced horsewoman who helped Jane at the barn and who was going to drive the trailer to the hospital, was going to talk the whole way or if she’d let the rain speak instead. Quieted with my own anxiety, I was hoping for the latter. But I didn’t have to wonder for long.

  “My mom will take Claret in the trailer, and you’ll meet her there,” Jane announced, walking briskly down the aisle just as I was reaching my hand into Claret’s stall for a first hello. “We’ll pick him up from the hospital later.”

  Though I knew the answer, I asked the next question anyway. “How do I get there?”

  When Jane confirmed that I’d have to take the highway, my first thought was to tell her that was impossible. But as I heard the words in my head—I can’t drive on the highway—I knew I couldn’t say them out loud. I couldn’t let myself be that helpless.

  I admired Jane. She was a cowboy at heart. She was kind to horses—she always considered what the horses were thinking and feeling, which was so different from the ways Gerta and Laura had treated Claret—but this kindness was balanced by a calm refusal to back down. “They’re prey animals,” she reminded me once, “and I make sure they know they’re my prey.” It was her fearlessness and strength that kept her on every spinning, bucking, rearing horse that dared to challenge her. It kept her safe. And every day that I trained with her, I swallowed a little of that strength as my own. “Show me you’re going to stay on,” she’d tell me as Claret and I trotted around the indoor. “Make me believe that if he spooks right now, you’re not going to fall off.” It was a matter of intensity then: a focused mind, firm but quiet hands, a strong core, steady contact between my legs and Claret’s body. It was a matter of trust. I trust that I will stay on, that I will lead this horse, that he will trust me as we go.

  Not wanting to admit my highway fear to Jane, I quickly sifted through my other options—calling a taxi and being late to the hospital or driving with Jane’s mother and being stranded there without a car—and realized they weren’t options at all. Claret needed me. I needed to be there, for him and for myself. It was a matter of trust. So I got into my car, took a sip of water, and started down the road.

  As far as I can remember, I have always yearned for the road. Since I was four and my father drove us through Times Square, I fell in love with the world of driving, with the changing snapshots of movement, the lights, the buzz, the luminous earth going by mere feet, and sometimes inches, outside the window. It is hard to think of my life in any significant way without thinking of being in cars. When I was a child, the car represented safety, a place for music, a place to be closer to my family than most other times. When we were in the car, my parents never hit me. I could watch the sides of their faces without reproach. I could pretend that every song was being sung to me or that the happy songs belonged to me. I could memorize every word. Sometimes I wanted us to never get out, even if that meant that my mother and sister and I would drive around forever looking for my father’s car. Sometimes even now, I’m still there, on one of those damp summer nights, breathing in that air. Sometimes even now I am a runaway, a girl for whom the road, simply, represented hope. Back then I always sensed there would be a turn that would be the right turn, a street that would be the right street, one where a house would be, where a mother would be, where the life I so desperately wanted would be. As long as I was on the road, I could carry that hope. Even when I was afraid of the highway, I never stopped carrying it.

  And as I drove down the road toward the highway, with this chestnut horse I loved in a trailer in front of me, I realized that just as I had climbed out of my childhood, pried the vines from around my ankles, and emerged into the light, I had to take my last steps through panic. When I’d quit drugs, I put on the one dress I had, pow
der blue with buttons down the front, and I walked several miles up the road to apply for a job selling carpet. I was still recovering from the ways my addiction had ravaged me, and I had to stop along the road several times to steady myself. When I got to the carpet store, the manager liked me—I could tell by the way he kept touching the end of his pen to his lips as he pondered the answers I gave his questions—but because I didn’t have a high school degree, he couldn’t hire me. But when I’d set out that day, I was determined to get a job. And I did. When he said no, I walked across the street and got a job as a waitress instead. Then I went home and slept for a long time. When I woke, I played music. I cooked French toast the way my grandmother had, crisp on the outside and soft in the middle. I went about each small step of living believing in the next step. That was it. One step and then the next. It was the kind of present-time I’d been accustomed to, and it served me well. Right now we are here. All we can do is try and take our next step the best we can. For me, driving was the last thing panic still had of mine, and I was ready to take it back. Here was my next step.

  The highway ramp came quickly but not too quickly. As I merged onto the 495, I was grateful for the steady spring rain, which seemed to soften everything. My heart was hammering, but I kept my eye on the trailer up ahead. Inside of it was Claret, and we were two wild things. I am with you, I told him as the rain scattered over my windshield, and as I said it I knew I wasn’t saying it to him alone.

  A team of doctors and interns greeted us at the entrance to the hospital, and Claret was besotted with the attention, looking everyone in the eye, poking his nose out to look for treats. Tufts animal hospital was a strange place, with huge long corridors and vast rooms with abandoned medical equipment lurking in the shadows. It was in one such room that we were waiting for a doctor to come examine Claret’s sinuses with an endoscope. While we waited, I walked Claret around and let him sniff things. Then we stood in the center of the room while a crew of eight interns gathered off to the side and observed us. Claret started to fidget, so I pressed my hands into his back. I massaged along his spine, and he turned his head around and began to massage mine. I heard a small murmur among the interns and looked to see them smiling. “We’ve never seen that before,” one said. “That’s some bond you two have.”

  As they sedated Claret, I stood beside him, my hand firmly at the base of his neck, and remembered his prepurchase exam a year and half earlier, when I’d held the weight of his head in my hands and knew that, whatever his tests showed, I was already his. Now, in this strange large room, I watched the doctor, an elegant woman who spoke with her eyes, insert the scope and gently glide it up Claret’s left nostril, then the right, while he stood calmly, occasionally swaying a little on his feet, his eyes closed, as if deep in a dream. I didn’t take my hand off of him, and in a few moments of wooziness, I realized I needed him to steady me at least as much as he needed me.

  The doctor’s findings confirmed what the first vet had diagnosed him with: allergic rhinitis. Claret’s chronic allergies had caused scarring to the inside of his nose. She explained that this scarring could cause his nose to feel funny—itching, tingling, pressure—and could be the reason for his headshaking.

  The next day, they put him under general anesthesia for a CT scan. I wasn’t allowed to be there for that, so I came in the evening when it was over, and the same doctor reported that the results of the CT were normal: there was nothing neurologically wrong with Claret. “We’ve just brought him out of Recovery, so he’s still a little shaky,” she warned. As I walked into the wing of stalls, I called to Claret, and I heard the faintest nicker in response. When I saw him, my knees stuttered, and I had to grab on to the door of his stall to right myself. His eyes were swollen almost shut, there were small trails of blood seeping from his nose, and he was shivering. I immediately opened the door to his stall, but one of the techs stopped me. “He’s too unsteady right now. It’s not safe to go in there yet.” But as soon as the tech was out of sight, I went in.

  “Hey there,” I said, gently reaching my hand to Claret. He was wobbly on his feet, and making gentle snorting sounds when he breathed. Small rectangles of fur had been shaven off his neck and face where they’d injected the contrast dye. He put his nose in my hand, and I kissed his face, which smelled of alcohol and iodine. “You’re coming home tomorrow,” I whispered.

  Claret turned away from me and started shuddering more forcefully. I poked my head out of his stall and called for the tech. Though he’d warned me not to go into the stall, neither of us mentioned it when he returned. “He needs his blanket,” I said. And without questioning me, he left to find it.

  In the meantime, I began vigorously rubbing Claret’s body all over, trying to generate some warmth. Even after we put his blanket on, I didn’t stop warming him. I would be strong for him. I would touch him back to me. And as his shivering slowly abated, I knew he would be okay.

  Despite the high dose of steroids prescribed to Claret after his hospital stay, the headshaking persisted. So I stopped his medication and called one last doctor, a flamboyant woman who was reputed to be very smart, if a bit kooky, and who didn’t bother with the niceties of polite conversation. She took one look at him and said, “He’s catabolic. Something in him is breaking down.”

  “Catabolic?” I asked. “Don’t you want to see him under saddle?”

  She waved her hand to dismiss me. “I don’t need to see him under saddle. I see him right here, in front of me.”

  After more of an examination, she told me she believed he had an inflammatory problem, that it would take a lot of tests and trial and error to figure it out, but she would figure it out. I thanked her, but I was finished with trial and error. Instead, I drove home that day planning out Claret’s retirement and wondering how many times a year I’d be able to visit him if I sent him to Florida. I cried openly, even at traffic lights, without caring who was looking. I was losing him, this creature who had changed my life, who had taught me the kind of courage that can only come from love.

  But when I got home, I realized something: I wasn’t ready to give up. I thought about how many times I’d run away, how no matter what happened on the streets, I kept running, unwilling to give up my search for something better than what I had. I thought about all the things I’d tried when I panicked, how many therapists I went careening away from, how many books I’d opened and closed, how many exercises I’d attempted, how many strangers I’d reached for. There had been an answer—I knew that—I just had to figure out what the question was: what can panic teach me?

  Why should Claret be any different? For him, the question was simple: how can I help him heal? The way I trusted myself with my own life, I would have to trust myself with his. So I sat down at my computer and started researching inflammation in horses. I researched allergies. I researched headshaking, which, according to every vet I’d spoken to and everything I read, was one of the most difficult conditions to treat in horses. I spent hours printing out articles, taking notes, making phone calls, and then I made a plan. I ordered a bunch of supplements—including MSM, chondroitin, glucosamine, and spirulina—from a well-established company, and I started Claret on a new regimen.

  About a week later, Jane called me. “I just had the most perfect ride on your boy.” The next day, I rode him, and he didn’t shake his head once. In fact, he felt more fluid in his body than I could remember him ever feeling. “Do you think it’s the supplements?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. But you better knock wood, just in case.”

  That day Jane and I gave him a shower in the wash stall, his first since our time at Laura’s. I talked to him, touching him steadily and feeding him carrots while Jane gently showered him off. “You can do this,” I told him. I was talking to him calmly but firmly, the way I’d talked to that child part of myself, who, like Claret, was once afraid of the shower, who was once afraid of her own shadow, and I could feel him responding
, lowering his head, relaxing. In between carrots, Claret turned and licked the side of my face.

  The next day, I gave him a shower by myself. And over time, he began to enjoy his time in the wash stall. He took jelly beans and carrots from my hand, and he licked me, and I talked to him, and we played with the water: I’d arc a gentle spray in front of his face, and he’d poke his mouth in and out while I laughed.

  I think Jane and I knocked on every plank of wood in that barn over the next weeks, as Claret moved around the ring like a new horse. People who’d been watching him for months suddenly didn’t recognize him. “Who’s that?” they asked, and one woman remarked about how transformed he was. “I bet you could sell him for a lot now.”

  I shrugged. It didn’t matter to me if Claret was fancy or not; it mattered only that he was mine, and that he was happy. “I wouldn’t sell him for anything,” I told her and smiled. And we trotted on.

  FIFTY-NINE

  As we move deeper into the woods, I feel Claret’s back and neck start to relax. I reach forward and run my hand along his coppery mane, and he exhales a long breath. The morning light cuts through the grand old pines in glorious shafts, while the sound of our moving is a steady sound, and the shadows around us are deep. I like to pretend we’re in a secret forest, that each nook has its own story, its own particular magic. Listen, I want to say, it’s all around us. But Jane, who is beside me on her horse, is already listening. With each step, we are departing and arriving at once: there to our left is a marsh; now the reeds are thinning out, segueing into ferns; now we are entering another cool pocket of air left over from last night; now we are warm again.

  On a straightaway, we pick up a trot, and everything comes faster: an outcropping of massive rocks to our right, cardinals and jays and finches darting between branches, a small stand of dead trees poking up from the silty ground, all the little bits of life in this particular second of their trajectory. In the distance something moves, and I imagine it’s Pan, the half-man half-goat Greek god of the wild, slipping rhythmically between the trees. A musical and virile god, he was often seen dancing with the woodland nymphs. But he was also responsible for arousing sudden irrational fear in those who passed through his forests, and thus the word panic was born. If he emerged, I would turn to him now and say, Thank you. I am of these woods.