Dark Horses

by Susan Mihalic

  She looked startled. This wasn’t the behavior she expected of me, and maybe my body wasn’t what she expected, either. When was the last time Mama had seen me naked? When was the last time she’d seen me at all?

  I dropped the dress over my head. It fell down the length of my body.

  “A good color,” Ulla said.

  Mama recovered. “Come here.” She adjusted the skirt.

  “It’s too much dress for her,” Ulla said softly.

  “Because it’s meant for someone twice my age,” I told her. What did Mama hope to accomplish by making me look provocative—and saying she was doing it for Daddy? They were both crazy.

  She shook her head as I tried on each dress, a strapless pink princess gown, the black lace sheath, a black chiffon off-the-shoulder cocktail dress. I looked like a kid playing dress-up.

  She studied me. “Not any of the black ones. Have the shoe department bring up something dressy. Call lingerie, too. She needs a bra.”

  Ulla carried away the rejects, and I was alone with Mama.

  I didn’t take off the black chiffon because there was nothing left to try on, and I wasn’t going to stand there nearly naked. I twirled. The chiffon floated away from my legs and drifted back into place. Very Ginger Rogers. I liked those old musicals.

  Mama’s eyes met mine in the mirror and flitted away. She studied the roses on the table. “Did you really accuse Sass Stewart of sucking some baseball player’s dick?”

  “I did, but there’s more.”

  “John told me.”

  John. Instantly I had a sense of the intimacy between them.

  “Mama… Daddy will find out. Wouldn’t it be better if you told him?”

  “I don’t care what’s best for your father.”

  “I meant better for you.”

  Frown lines appeared between her eyebrows despite whatever had been injected there. “I’m tired of other people deciding what’s best for me. Your father’s done it for so long I wasn’t sure I could make my own decisions anymore. He takes small bites, but before you realize it, he’s eaten you alive.” She paused. “You get to make a lot of decisions, but this isn’t one of them.”

  “What decisions do I get to make?” I asked, incredulous.

  “You chose him. That was a big decision.”

  “When did I do that?”

  “You choose him every day in a hundred little ways.”

  “It isn’t a choice when you’re too young to understand.” My voice was like dust.

  “You’re old enough to understand now. You were old enough to understand when he killed Bailey. You still chose him.”

  Bailey had been Mama’s attempt at buying my love. He was the best thing she’d ever done—half springer, half golden, they’d said at the shelter, with soulful gold eyes and silky toffee-colored fur.

  I ignored her attempt to leverage Bailey’s death against me. “You could make him stop,” I whispered.

  She looked at me as if she didn’t know me, as if I didn’t know her, and snorted softly. “Like I said, it’s all about you.”

  * * *

  THE RIDE HOME was long and painful. Her driving was less erratic, which verified she had indeed been drinking when she’d picked me up, but it had a fixed quality, both hands on the steering wheel, eyes on the road, like I wasn’t there.

  Tightness and pressure had settled in my forehead and the back of my neck by the time she let me out in front of the house with my books and shopping bags and drove the Jag around to the garage.

  As I closed the door, Daddy called to me from his study. I could not catch a break.

  The study, his domain, even smelled like him, leather and bourbon and citrus and horses. Trophies, including my Middleton cup, gleamed on the shelves. His medals shone like pirate’s treasure on a cushion of dark blue velvet under a glass case. The case was also home to a special leather-bound edition of The Book on Eventing, Daddy’s bestselling memoir, open to a photo spread of him on Byron—dressage, cross-country, stadium jumping—culminating naturally with Daddy in gold-medal position on the Olympic podium. When I was little, I’d defaced that photo in a regular copy of the book, tearing out the page and cutting my head out of a school photo and pasting it over Daddy’s. I still had the page tucked away in a desk drawer. One day, I’d stand on that podium.

  Daddy sat behind his big rosewood desk, his smile only slightly less bright than his megawatt victory smile. “Your new blog post is racking up comments.”

  My new post wasn’t mine any more than my Facebook and Instagram and YouTube accounts were. My sponsors wanted me to have a social media presence, but I didn’t even know the passwords. Daddy posted as me. The voice he’d developed to fit my image even sounded like me, more or less, and since I didn’t have to write anything myself, I limited my objections. I thought Love and hugs, Roan at the end of every post, be it blog, Facebook, or Instagram, was over the top, but he said it made me sound friendly and outgoing.

  “Did you have a good time with your mother?”

  “I got a dress and some other things.”

  “I’m glad you enjoyed yourself.”

  He knew shopping, not to mention spending time with Mama, was anything but enjoyable for me, but it was a harmless pretense compared to some others.

  “Supper’s on in about five minutes,” he said.

  I took everything up to my room, left the shopping bags on my bed, hung the gold-and-white Collier’s dress bag in the closet—and then reached into the far back corner, put my hand inside an old riding boot, and closed my fingers around the neck of a bottle.

  It had been in my closet since July and was nearly full. If I really had a problem, it would have been empty. I uncapped it, and the familiar aroma of bourbon drifted up. It smelled like Daddy. I put the bottle to my lips and sipped, barely wetting my tongue.

  Tasted like Daddy, too.

  With that thought, I took a regular-sized drink.

  I savored the sweetness and warmth for a moment before capping the bottle and returning it to the boot. I made myself presentable for supper, starting with brushing my teeth. My parents were usually so awash in bourbon themselves that I doubted they’d have smelled it on me, but there was a difference between being careless and taking risks. I was a risk-taker, like Daddy. I understood the chances I took. Mama had been careless, and she’d been caught.

  They were already seated, Mama at the foot of the table, Daddy at the head. Mama’s usual disengagement had been replaced by irritation. Daddy seemed mellow, a pleasant façade while it lasted.

  Gertrude came through the kitchen door with a platter of something savory and fragrant—lamb tenderloin, my favorite. She gave me a covert wink.

  My second wink today.

  She served Mama first, then Daddy, then me. She set the platter on the sideboard and brought the side dishes around.

  “Will there be anything else, Mrs. Montgomery?”

  Mama dismissed her with a wave.

  Gertrude was unfazed. “Good night. I’ll see you in the morning.”

  “Good night,” I said.

  Mama picked at her food, using her fork to move it around but rarely raising a bite to her lips. Tonight she might have been helped along by nerves. We had that in common. Nervousness killed my appetite.

  I hadn’t eaten since breakfast, though. I’d counted on grabbing a snack before afternoon lessons.

  My knife scraped against the plate as it sliced through the tender meat.

  “God, Roan, you weren’t actually raised in a barn.” Mama bared her teeth in a smile. “Stop cramming food in your mouth.”

  I put down my fork, swallowed the food that was in my mouth, and blotted my lips with my napkin.

  “Some of us,” Daddy said, “don’t weigh ourselves in ounces. It’s possible to enjoy a meal. Try it sometime. Vogue’s not calling.”

  He’d gone for Mama’s most vulnerable spot. Being thin and beautiful and rich didn’t compensate for her sham modeling career.

&
nbsp; “I gave up any chance I ever had at happiness for you.” She was looking at me. “He didn’t want me. He wanted you.” Her lips curved. “He still wants you.”

  I stared down at my plate. She made it sound like bad things were all there was to Daddy and me, but it wasn’t all bad; he wasn’t all bad—was he?

  “Kit,” Daddy said.

  “You think it’s a secret?”

  Not a secret, but the thing we never talked about. I wanted her to make him stop, not ruin everything. Just fix the broken parts.

  “I’ve been disposable since she was born. You got what you wanted. The hell with me.”

  Disappointment and relief and a peculiar hurt tugged against one another inside me.

  “That’s right. I want a wife who spends half her life unconscious.”

  I folded my napkin. “May I be excused?”

  “No,” Mama said. “We’ll sit here like a family.”

  I appealed silently to Daddy. He replied with a nod. I stood up and picked up my plate.

  Mama grabbed my wrist as I started past her. “I said no.”

  “Let her go.” Daddy’s tone—clipped, steely—made me go cold, and I was the one he was trying to protect.

  She released me. White marks from her fingers striped my wrist. She rose and pushed past me. “I’m so goddamned sick of both of you, I could slit my fucking throat.”

  * * *

  DADDY REMAINED IN his chair, working on his drink while I cleared the table. Mama’s venom coursed through me, but no matter what she said or how awful she was, I deserved worse.

  He left to do his evening walk-through. I went upstairs and began putting away the things Mama had bought me. Bras, the fitting of which had been excruciatingly embarrassing. Red satin pumps with heels so high and skinny that they pitched me forward. Cosmetics. I wore makeup when I was doing a commercial or a photo shoot, but I disliked the feel of it, as if my face had been dipped in plastic. I dumped it in a drawer in my bathroom.

  I changed into my nightgown before settling down at my desk to concentrate on blue-eyed parents and brown-eyed children. In today’s review, Mr. Hanlon had more or less told us what the exam would cover, so I skimmed my notes and had turned my attention to the conjugation of irregular French verbs when a knock came at my door and Daddy stuck his head in.

  “Just want to say good night.” He hesitated. “Your mother doesn’t mean everything she says.”

  For all his hardness, he did possess a glimmer of empathy.

  “She means it,” I said.

  He lingered. “Maybe Wednesday night you can give me a sneak peek at what was in those shopping bags.”

  “Clothes. Nothing special.”

  “I’ll be the judge of that.”

  Not all bad—but far from all good.

  “I’d better get back to studying.”

  “Good night, darlin’,” he said. “Love you.”

  And then, so help me God, he winked.

  - five -

  THE NEXT MORNING, Chelsea waited by my locker. “Guess what.”

  “You’re staying in Accelerated Studies?”

  “Yeah, I did okay on the test. But this is even better. Sass and Annabelle got suspended.”

  So that’s what it took to get suspended. Good to know where the line between discipline and privilege lay: no dick pics of the headmaster.

  “For how long?”

  “Only until Monday, but they won’t be allowed to make up their midterms. They’re getting big fat zeroes on four tests.”

  I put my books away and closed my locker door. “How do you know?”

  “It’s all over school.”

  “Is the reason they were suspended all over school, too?”

  “Yeah, because of that drawing.” She faltered. “Look, don’t worry. Nobody believes it. Your mom wouldn’t do that. Your dad’s hot.”

  I cringed at her assessment of Daddy.

  “Sass just knows how to get to you. She always has.”

  True enough. We’d argued over Barbies at a sleepover at Chelsea’s back in fifth grade. Well, Chelsea and I had been in fifth. Sass had been in sixth, but she and Chelsea were neighbors, so Mrs. Yost made Chelsea invite her.

  Chelsea blinked at me. “Are you wearing makeup?”

  “Mascara. I have to get to French. What do you have now?”

  “Spanish.”

  “Good luck.”

  I breezed through my French test and was on my way to biology when I saw Will Howard coming down the hall with Rico and Wedge, his fellow drug users and former teammates. Rico spotted me and nudged Will and said something I couldn’t hear.

  “Knock it off,” Will said. “Y’all go ahead. I’ll catch up.”

  Rico looked sufficiently chastened. Will stopped in front of me. He might be a burnout, but he was a cute one. His eyes were a deep true cobalt fringed by dark lashes.

  “Hey. How’s it going?”

  “Okay,” I said. “Thanks for what you said yesterday.”

  He smiled. His teeth were straight and white. “Sass is a piece of work.”

  A non-fellatio-performing piece of work. That would have been more entertaining than what I said. “I’m going to biology. You?”

  “Trig.”

  “Is it hard?” What kind of idiotic question was that? I was good at math.

  “Practical. You have to know math to build things.”

  He built things? Oh—Howard Construction, the family business.

  “Like biology for me,” I said. “We’ve been studying genetics. It’s what we do at the farm. The breeding program. With the horses.”

  “Sounds interesting.”

  “No, it doesn’t. It is, but it doesn’t sound interesting.”

  “I’m interested,” he said.

  Since when? I almost asked, but he was saying, “Good luck on your test. Not that you need it. Slam dunk, right?”

  “Probably.”

  He smiled again. “See you later.”

  I needed the entire ninety minutes to complete my exam, triple-checking my answers to make up for the fact that Will Howard had distracted me. Interested in genetics—or interested in me? He’d never spoken to me until today. Yesterday’s bon mot, “No shit,” had been directed at Sass.

  At lunchtime I took my tray and my history notebook to an unoccupied corner table near a janitorial closet. On a later lunch shift, the custodians in fact sat there, but at eleven-thirty, it was mine. I took my position in gunslinger’s corner, my back to the wall, and surveyed the cafeteria.

  Harold sat with some kids from his church. I’d sat with them before, but except for Harold, the church clique was as closed as any other. Chelsea was on a different shift. So was Will, who probably ate with Rico and Wedge. I wouldn’t fit in with them, either. What drugs did they use? Not meth, I hoped. It would be a shame if Will’s pretty white teeth fell out.

  I ate the icing off my cake while I reviewed my notes. When I looked up, John Dashwood was getting in line for lunch. Most teachers skipped ahead of the students, but Mr. Dashwood never did. He chatted with the ninth-grader in front of him as they moved down the line—and then, tray in hand, he made straight for my sanctuary.

  Fight or flight? Fleeing would give credence to the gossip. Freeze? Tonic immobility was a valid biological response.

  He put his tray down across from mine and smiled. “Roan.” He pulled out his chair. “How’s exam week going for you?”

  “Fine. How’s it going for you?”

  It was a smart-ass remark said in a smart-ass way, and it would have meant big trouble if I’d said it to Daddy.

  He poked at his spaghetti with his fork. “Suspensions are never a happy occasion. Parents get upset.”

  I understood he meant parents got upset with him, not their children.

  “Sorry,” I said. I wasn’t.

  “You don’t owe anyone an apology.”

  Behind the ugly aviator-frame glasses and the roadkill toupee—which, granted, was hard to see p
ast—he seemed marginally less ridiculous.

  “What happens now?” I asked.

  “That depends on the board of trustees. This isn’t the exemplary behavior expected of a headmaster.”

  He’d lose his job. He’d have to leave Sheridan. Would he take Mama with him? I envisioned Mr. Dashwood as my stepfather, the three of us eating at a cheap table in a cheap apartment.

  “What happens to you and Mama? What does that depend on?”

  His eyebrows almost vanished under his artificially low hairline. “I have a wife.”

  “You could leave her.”

  “No, I couldn’t. This time she may leave me, but I’m not leaving her.”

  This time?

  “You’ve done this before.” My voice was low and furious. “You don’t care about Mama.”

  “I won’t make excuses for what I’ve done. I’m sorry it’s made things difficult for you.”

  “Then you shouldn’t have done it.” I pushed back from the table and rose so quickly that my chair started to tip. I grabbed it before it hit the floor. The last thing I wanted was to draw attention to me and my lunch companion. He’d sat with me to demonstrate he had nothing to feel guilty about. He was crazy if he thought I’d let him use me.

  “You shouldn’t have done it.” I swiped my notebook from the table. “And you deserve whatever happens.”

  * * *

  AFTER SCHOOL, GERTRUDE picked me up. The back of her Subaru was filled with bulging canvas grocery bags—green for us, blue for her and Eddie—and her hair had been trimmed. Tuesdays were for errands.

  “Hey, sugar. I told your daddy we need to run by the florist. We have a decorating emergency. Your mother thought I was ordering the centerpieces, and I thought she was, and neither of us did.”

  Exactly like Mama to say she’d do something and not follow through. When she should have been ordering flowers, she’d probably been screwing Mr. Dashwood.

  The florist was behind the square in a squat brick building. Inside, coolers of flowers lined the walls. I examined blown-glass angels and porcelain hearts on display tables while Gertrude went to the counter.

  She returned after a few minutes. “We didn’t order early enough, and now they’re slammed. Help me pick out some flowers. I’ll try to do something with them.”