Susannah and I walked into the kitchen, where my mother stood at the counter pounding chicken fillets—an apron tied over her pink silk blouse. She employed a maid to clean up after her and serve but insisted on doing the cooking herself, disliking American shortcuts. Claude, her Australian cattle dog, sat at her feet, staring intently up at the meat. Susannah always said my mother seemed as if she should have fancy, little dogs. But my mother would laugh this off, saying that the thick mottled creatures she preferred did far better on trail rides than the average bichon frise or Cavalier King Charles spaniel.
“Susannah,” my mother said now. “Would you like to spend the night? You can come with us early, to see Catherine ride. I’m sure she told you, it’s a very important event.” She cut a small piece of chicken and dropped it into Claude’s mouth. He swallowed it without chewing, barely registering the morsel before resuming his concentrated begging stance.
Susannah and I sat down at the kitchen table and poured wine from the bottle my mother had opened.
“Sure,” Susannah said. “I love to watch Catherine win.” When we were younger, we’d both ridden in Short Stirrup classes, but she had long since given up horse shows in favor of field hockey and lacrosse.
My father opened the door to the kitchen, which my mother always kept closed—hating to have cooking odors permeate the house. In his usual armor of coat and tie, he bustled in with a newspaper under his arm. He almost never made an appearance before dinner was served, and Susannah put her wine down, startled. In contrast to his youthful wife, my father’s breath always seemed to labor slightly. Standing next to her, he looked gray and meaty, a stern and coarse laborer beside a sleek and lenient aristocrat.
My mother waved her mallet in his direction—a vague sort of greeting—and then went back to her work. He placed the local paper on the table in front of me.
“Look,” he said, tapping his forefinger on a black-and-white picture of Douglas Butterfield. “Isn’t that your friend’s father?”
Susannah leaned forward. “He’s so handsome,” she said. And he was, broad shouldered and beautifully tailored. Susannah pointed at his boyish shock of hair, curling unbecomingly to the left. The text below the photograph explained that clear-cutting would begin in a few days.
“Ha,” my father said, as if he had proved irrevocably the flimsiness of my beliefs, my friends, myself. “So much for your hero,” he said.
“He’s not my hero.” My voice equaled his in disdain and topped it in venom.
“Right,” my father said, for all he knew devastating all my deepest-held illusions. He didn’t care a whit for the real weight this development carried—the other promises that could tumble in its wake, the effect that would have on the river basins and Boston Harbor, on the winter sky: clear, star filled, and—only for the moment—impervious to mushroom clouds.
THAT NIGHT, I LEFT my wine in the kitchen, untouched. Late the next day, I thought perhaps I would never have wine again, or any other mind-altering substance. Because it was so much better, winning every class. It made me feel invincible, not in the faux and fleeting way of coke or alcohol but as if I could conjure a very real power from somewhere inside myself.
And something new had developed between Pippin and me. In the old days, on Bloom, the horse had been like a part of myself. She had understood me so well—responded to me so innately that I’d barely needed to communicate commands. With Pippin there was something different. Instead of his becoming me, I myself was erased, the mechanics of what needed to be done so intrinsic that my mind became immaterial. Courses lay bare and obvious before us. My seat became a streamlined melding into Pippin’s high-strung and gorgeous lines.
We trotted into the ring, my post unthinking. From somewhere in another world, the voice over the speaker, announcing: Catherine Morrow on Corner of the Sky. The polite silence of the audience. The sweet smell of hay, manure, dry dust. Spotlights the color of termite-ridden rafters. And then a gallop, the most wonderful speed of my own making. A soar and post that seemed completely divorced from my muscles—Pippin’s sinew, Pippin’s movement, and yet I could feel it in my heart and marrow, owning it just the same. Clearing every jump by miles, my body effortlessly achieving the posture that riding instructors had been shouting at me my entire life—heels down, hands up, eyes forward. Natural and unthinking as breath.
And then the applause. The subsequent and lesser performance of my opponents. Followed by the best part: returning to the ring, my heart pounding and my brain divided into foggy pixels, until my name was called, and I could ease Pippin forward to accept our roses.
•••
ON THE WAY HOME, Susannah and I reclined together—legs crossed over each other’s—in the backseat. The multicolored championship ribbon hung from the rearview mirror, my trophy clanking in the way back. My mother at the wheel, we could see the back of her slender neck flushed pink with pride and satisfaction. “It’s only January,” she kept saying. Muttering the words again and again. So that I could see her thoughts clearly as if they’d been screened on the back of her head: Catherine earning enough points to qualify by early summer. Catherine finishing in the top ten at Regional Finals, so that DC and Harrisburg would hardly matter.
This new incarnation—Pippin and me no longer horse and girl but centaur. It was unbeatable: functioning not in concert but as a single creature.
“You’re going to Madison Square Garden,” Susannah said. “You’re going to be on television.”
I imagined the greater hush, the larger pounding. Winning, just by virtue of being there. All my father’s ideas about me proved wrong or invalid. Worthy, finally, of an attention bestowed. Impervious and consumed by focus and intent.
In the dark, leaf-shadowed backseat, I watched Susannah’s face. I imagined journeying with her, just the two of us, along dirt roads lined by tropical forest. In that moment, the idea of the trip to Venezuela felt ominous and unappealing. Already, Susannah had collected enough money for plane tickets from other students at Waverly. But we never discussed the venture in financial terms. What did money mean to us? An endless and preexisting net, somewhere far below, while we walked the tightrope wire of our lives.
Susannah loved the idea of profit, the way it lent savvy to our wayward intentions. But when we spoke about Venezuela, it wasn’t the money or the drugs but the rainforest and the Mayan ruins, the birds and the green Carribean.
Still. That night after the horse show, I crawled into bed—the rhythm of Pippin’s stride still undulating beneath me. I retraced every step and jump in my head. Like a math problem, the spots still open for improvement. The future and all its possibility.
Excellence. Championship. No unauthorized adventure could have been more exhilarating, and there was nothing in the world I wanted more.
12
OVER THE BREAK, we boarded Pippin at a stable in Stockbridge so I could train mornings in its indoor ring. The goal of making Nationals had captured my mother’s imagination far more than college admissions, and she woke me up every day at seven, café au lait in one hand and my riding boots in the other. But the day after my championship, she let me sleep late and forgo training, allowing Pippin and me to rest. So it was well past noon when I found Skye hiding in our barn. As I entered the tack room she bounded out from behind the hay bales like jumping out of a cake at a bachelor party, her hands raised high over her head.
“Skye,” I said. I wore my wool woodsman coat, and my ears burned with cold from the short walk. Skye had on nothing but jeans and a long-sleeved Indian print T-shirt that seemed to actually fit her. I tried to remember if it belonged to me.
“You must be freezing,” I said.
She burst out laughing. “Is that all you’re going to say?” she asked. “Aren’t you surprised?”
I sat down on a hay bale. My head felt groggy from the long sleep and my own triumph. Over the past weeks, Skye had receded in the face of the familiar: Susannah. Bloom. The snowy trek between my parents’ house
and the barn.
She walked over and sat down next to me. A barn cat she had clearly befriended jumped into her lap, purring. Skye stroked it with one cold, unmittened hand and placed the other over my warm leather glove. “You aren’t happy to see me.” A statement, calm, no hint of rebuke. Too confident to believe such a thing could possibly be true.
“No,” I said. “I am.”
Not a lie, exactly. It only seemed that she didn’t belong here—more parallel universes colliding. I closed my fingers around hers and asked if she wanted my coat.
“Let’s go back to the house,” I said, as she shrugged into my too-narrow shoulders and too-short sleeves. “You can warm up and meet my mom.”
“No,” Skye said, as I stood up. “You can’t tell them I’m here.”
I heard the sound of Susannah’s car crackling up the driveway—the ’72 Beetle she had no business driving in the snow—and felt a churning mixture of curiosity and dread. Susannah’s father arrived in town this afternoon; our dinner was tonight. Though I wasn’t yet sure of Skye’s circumstances, I couldn’t quite picture her joining us.
Bloom whinnied from her stall and pawed at the door, impatient for her sugar cube. “Susannah’s coming,” I told Skye. “We’re going for a ride.”
“Fine,” Skye said. “I’ll go, too.”
It was the first I’d heard of Skye riding. An instant rule broken: someone my mother hadn’t seen ride going out on one of her horses. But I didn’t have any notion of how to tell her no. So I grabbed a down vest off a hook. I zipped it to my chin as Susannah walked into the barn. At the sight of Skye, her face rearranged itself from placid to perturbed.
“Skye,” she said, less as a greeting than an accusation of me. “Did you know she was coming?”
“Well, hello to you too,” Skye said.
THE THREE OF US rode four miles of dirt roads, out to the old-growth forest. I put Skye on Petunia, my sister Beatrice’s ancient pony, and her head bobbed beside our shoulders. Petunia was stubborn and sleepy—irritated at being brought out of retirement on such a chilly day. Skye had to give her periodic kicks to make her keep up, close enough so that she could tell us her story.
“They say a good man can’t get elected,” Skye said, digging her heels into the pony’s side. “But I can’t believe it’s true. My father was a good man when he first took office. He just hasn’t fought hard enough to stay good.”
I listened to her with my new wry cynicism, the result of seeing Skye’s father through her eyes. And I realized that my ability to wholly believe—in anything—had been permanently tempered. I remembered the sky on the day I’d met Senator Butterfield, opening up in clean and looming safety. I’d understood that the senator had already proved untrustworthy. The world becoming dangerous again came as no surprise—but still, somehow, as a grave disappointment.
“He’s very down right now,” Skye said. Our horses walked off the road, under a canopy of oak, beech, birch, and maple. “The weird thing is, nobody loves the outdoors more than he does. He would weep to see these trees come down. Do you know how many acres of land he’s bought on the Cape, just to turn around and hand them back to the Conservation Trust?”
“I read about that,” Susannah said. “Wasn’t that after a lot of flack for adding on to that huge house?”
Skye stopped short, and Petunia stepped back a few steps.
“That’s not true,” Skye said. “He didn’t make those promises in any hollow kind of way. He meant every word. He cares about the environment. He cares about poor people. He gives money to Greenpeace. To the ACLU. He supports all of that in the Senate. He cares about keeping us safe.”
We walked on quietly for a while, horse hooves cracking into the snow as we left the path to wend through the trees, breaking our own trail.
“Anyway,” Skye said. “He’s wrong about this. He knows he’s wrong. He feels like he’s up against a wall.”
“He’s just barely back in office,” Susannah said, “and he turns around and breaks one of his major campaign promises.”
“Well,” I said, trying to sound light and worldly. “That’s politics.”
When Skye told us her plans for the next day, Susannah didn’t mince words. “You’re crazy,” she said. But the derisive sentence was spoken in a reverent tone, and I saw that she could not help feeling the tiniest bit impressed. And I felt a remote twinge of pride, at my ownership.
“Somebody has to do something,” Skye said. “I’m not trying to hurt him. I’m trying to save him. And also the trees.”
When we returned to the road, Petunia broke into a fat-bellied gallop, tearing back toward the barn. Susannah and I watched the pony’s unaccustomed and awkward pace, while Skye clung to the pommel of the saddle, her long legs seesawing on either ungainly side.
“So what are you going to do with her,” Susannah asked, “when you come to dinner with us?”
I remembered dinner with Susannah’s dad and brother. Much as I wanted to be there for Susannah, the thought of leaving Skye alone in my barn made me panic. I couldn’t trust her not to frighten a horse, or start a fire, or fall to a sudden paroxysm of virtue and expose me as her accessory. It seemed imperative to stay within running distance. “I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe I should join you guys tomorrow night instead. Stay with Skye this one time.”
Susannah turned her head, her eyes narrowed toward Skye, who had let Petunia stop abruptly to graze on dandelion spoores that peeked out of the snow by the side of the road.
“I don’t have to,” I said quickly, though I could tell the damage was done. “If you really need me.”
“No, it’s fine,” Susannah said, in the flat, shut-down tone I’d heard her use often with others but seldom with me. “It’s totally fine. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
She gave her horse a quick, gentle kick and trotted ahead—her measured post the graceful antithesis of Skye’s awkward retreat.
AFTER SUSANNAH LEFT, I told my mother I’d be eating at home after all. “The Twinings need some family time,” I lied, as my mother carefully chopped long sprigs of fennel.
We had just sat down to dinner when Mrs. Butterfield phoned.
“I’m sorry,” the maid apologized, calling me from the table. “But it’s Mrs. Douglas Butterfield. She says it’s very important.”
My mother followed me into the kitchen, Claude click-clacking loyally at her feet. I pressed my ear tightly to the receiver to keep her from hearing.
“Hello, Catherine,” Mrs. Butterfield said, as if she phoned every day. “How are you enjoying your holiday?”
“Fine, thank you,” I said. And then, inanely, “I won the championship ribbon at Fox Hill Farms.”
For some reason, this disclosure upset the adults. My mother frowned. Even before Mrs. Butterfield spoke, I could hear her vocal cords tightening. With the non sequitur, I had managed to tip my hand.
“Catherine,” she said. “I wonder if you’ve heard from Skye today?”
“I haven’t,” I said. “I got a postcard from her last week, of the Lincoln Memorial.”
“Because she told us she was spending the night at Eleanor’s house, but when we tried to reach her there they said they hadn’t seen her.”
“Are you sure?” I said. “That’s not like Skye.”
“No,” said Mrs. Butterfield. “That’s why we’re so very concerned.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “But maybe it’s just a misunderstanding?”
“No,” she said again. I could hear her mother’s agitation, simmering beneath her polite presentation. “I drove her there myself. I watched her walk around to the back door. And then when I called tonight, Eleanor said they’d never had plans.”
I was amazed that Skye wouldn’t have filled Eleanor in on what she was doing. And that Eleanor wouldn’t have thought to cover for her.
Mrs. Butterfield paused for a moment, and said, “Eleanor thought you might know where she was.”
A distinctly accusatory stress on
that personal pronoun. I wondered what else Eleanor had told her. Obviously incriminating enough to assuage the Butterfields’ fears of kidnappers.
“We’re getting ready to call the police,” Mrs. Butterfield said. “But if she’s just being rebellious, if she’s just being a teenager and it’s another situation like Chanticleer, we’d rather not get any kind of officials involved.”
Of course, I knew that Skye sat snug and unharmed in our barn, camped out in my sleeping bag with a pile of books, a flashlight, and my warmest knit hat. Still I bristled, that they would take time to worry about officials, or publicity, when Skye’s safety might be compromised. I pictured the headline: SENATOR BUTTERFIELD’S ONLY CHILD MISSING. At the same time, I felt sorry for them. My deepest nature was obedient, and I would have liked to tell Mrs. Butterfield that Skye hid—safe but chilly—in the trophy room of my mother’s barn. But my obedience had already been pledged elsewhere. Even if Skye’s life had been at stake, I wouldn’t have divulged her whereabouts.
“I’m sorry, Mrs. Butterfield,” I said. The niceties we’d been taught to use with adults made lying ridiculously easy. “I promise I’ll call you the very second I hear from her, if I do.”
Gossip of the Starlings Page 12