Dark Horses

by Susan Mihalic

  “Thanks, but I’m staying at the house.”

  “By yourself?” She started to shake her head. “I don’t…” Her eyes landed on Will, and the head shaking stopped. “Oh. Not by yourself.”

  She appealed to Eddie, but he held up his hands in immediate surrender.

  She turned her version of a stern expression on me. “Can I talk to you?” Without waiting for an answer, she stepped outside on the porch. I followed her. The sunset was graying into dusk.

  “You know your daddy wouldn’t want Will spending the night.”

  “It isn’t his decision.”

  “Sugar, please don’t put me in this position.”

  “It isn’t your decision, either,” I said gently. “We can argue about it, but it won’t change anything.”

  Her thoughts were as plain as if they’d been printed on her face: What had happened to the obedient girl who’d never defy her father?

  She broke eye contact. “Do you have condoms?”

  Will kept a supply in his glove compartment. We wouldn’t need them, but there was no way Gertrude would believe that, so I nodded.

  “I detected some resistance,” Will said when we left.

  I glanced at him. “Nothing significant.”

  It was early for bed, but we’d been functioning on only a few hours of sleep, so we went upstairs to my room. I snagged last night’s T-shirt and sweatpants from my unmade bed and went into my bathroom to change.

  When I emerged, he’d changed into a T-shirt and sweats, too.

  “Bathroom’s all yours,” I said. “And I hope you don’t have the wrong idea.”

  “About what?”

  “Sex. It’s not… on the menu.”

  “Didn’t think it was. Can I use your toothpaste?”

  I got under the covers, reassured, and when he joined me, I didn’t hesitate to move close to him and rest my cheek on his shoulder. His arms went around me.

  The chirping of tree frogs and crickets through the open window drowned out the memory of the ventilator—gasp, puff—and the faint scent of horse replaced the antiseptic hospital odor, and, finally warm, I sank into sleep.

  The floorboard in the hall creaked, and my father said my name.

  I convulsed with fear, my whole body taut, my skin crackling, my pulse crashing like cymbals in my ears—but there were no footsteps in the hall. I heard only the gentle sound of Will’s breathing next to me.

  * * *

  TWO DAYS LATER, a basket of Confections skin-care products arrived with a note conveying thoughts and prayers from Elise and Tanner but reminding me we were working with a time constraint. If I wanted to proceed with the contract, was there a guardian who could sign it?

  The next morning after my dressage lesson, I asked Eddie, “Do you know whether I have a legal guardian?”

  “You have two. Gertrude and me. You didn’t know?”

  My first thought was That son of a bitch. He’d played me when he’d threatened to fire them. He’d never intended to get rid of them; it was just a threat to keep me in line. But my second thought was more momentous: Their guardianship meant that even if my father died, I could stay at Rosemont. The farm and the horses wouldn’t be sold. My third thought was a more muted relief: It wasn’t Mama. The custody agreement had been irrevocable. All sales are final.

  “Didn’t he tell you?” Eddie said.

  “I’m sure he did. I just forgot.”

  As if.

  I told Eddie about the Confections offer. “He’d have signed the contract at Bluegrass if they’d put it in front of him.” Or, value to the team be damned, he might have been too pissed by my perceived flirtation with Tanner. I squeezed a spongeful of water over Vigo’s head. He snorted, splattering me with water and slobber.

  “What do you want to do?” Eddie asked.

  Every athlete out there wanted to be the face of something—sneakers, cameras, sports drinks. I wasn’t philosophically opposed to selling lotion, but since Eddie had asked, I told him.

  “All I’ve ever wanted to do is ride… but Daddy says endorsements add value to me as a prospect.”

  He started coiling up the hose in the wash rack. “He’s right.”

  My father had managed my career capably. Rejecting good advice simply because it came from him would be self-defeating.

  “Okay,” I said. “I’ll do it.”

  Diva came home that afternoon, her off foreleg wrapped from knee to hoof in a thickly padded gel cast. Glenn had ordered months of stall rest for her, which promised to be miserable for everyone.

  He stood outside her stall with me after she was settled. “A tear in the suspensory ligament could be career-ending, and even if it isn’t, knowing this mare? She’ll reinjure that leg. You may have to put her down after all.”

  “I can if I have to, but I want to give her a chance.”

  “Fair enough.”

  After he left, I searched Diva’s eyes for a glint of acknowledgment. We shared a secret. We’d saved each other.

  She pulled one of her ugliest faces, ears flat, nostrils flared, teeth bared. She looked like an alien.

  At least she was consistent.

  * * *

  I STUDIED FOR finals out of habit, but my longing for the semester to end swarmed through my brain like a cloud of gnats. Will studied more than I did, his concentration aided by weed, but the edible candies his parents supplied tasted strange and made me dull. We hid them in the same riding boot where I stowed my bourbon. Self-medicating with a secret stash didn’t bode well for my determination not to be like my mother, but I wasn’t drinking at all—much—and I only ate half a candy sometimes to help me sleep.

  Every day, Vic forwarded get-well emails from fans. Former competitors reminisced about my father’s generosity when he won and grace on the rare occasions he lost. Students from his clinics sent messages describing how he’d transformed their riding, their relationships with their horses, their lives.

  Mine, too.

  He had a lot of visitors—Will’s parents, Mrs. Kenyon, Frank, Jamie, Mateo, everyone who worked at Rosemont. A few times, Chelsea came with Will and sat with me. She didn’t try to fill the silence like she usually did. I appreciated the lack of chatter.

  I had enough of it inside my head. It got louder during the quiet hours I spent alone with my father, and something in its tenor prompted me to return to the images on his phone again and again, until I understood.

  It was repugnant and self-centered, and it had led him—and me—to do terrible things, but the man who’d made these photos loved his daughter.

  It was hard to understand. Harder to accept.

  * * *

  NIGHT BROUGHT MY best and worst times.

  The best was the walk-through, when the immaculate barns and happy horses—plus Diva—gave me a sense of peace. But even my best time wasn’t perfect. The walk-through connected me not just to my father but also to what was good in him, which wasn’t the high-minded connection it might have seemed. The good in him had kept me off balance and made me believe things could be different.

  I tried to find my own good. I tried to love the girl who’d been complicit, to hold her softly, and to find peace with the hard truth about myself: I’d rather be complicit than be a victim. What my father and I had done had been abhorrent, and though I knew he was to blame, I wouldn’t render myself powerless by embracing victimhood or even survivorship. My father had done everything he could to take away my power, and he hadn’t succeeded. I wasn’t about to give it away. What came after survival? There had to be something else.

  My absolute worst time was when the nightmares came. The floorboard creaked, Jasper fell away beneath me, my neck was broken. Sometimes my twitching and whimpering woke Will, who woke me. We’d go downstairs and find an old movie and watch Bette Davis or Humphrey Bogart until both of us fell asleep on the sofa, or we’d stay in bed, whispering together like someone might overhear us. The movies were a distraction and some of what we whispered was ugly an
d dark, but the distraction and the darkness alike broadened and deepened what was between us.

  “You know, it’s a different world for girls now,” Will said one night out of nowhere. I could tell he’d been working up the courage to say something.

  “Oh?” I said cautiously.

  “A lot of athletes have spoken out, girls who were abused by coaches, team doctors, judges. It’s not a secret women have to keep to their graves. It has nothing to do with them, what happened to them.”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “You ever think about doing that? Coming forward about what your father did?”

  “I’ll think about it,” I said, but I wouldn’t. I’d spent a lot of hours alone in the hospital room with my father, and now that I had free access to the internet, I’d conducted a lot of searches. The athletes who’d spoken out as part of Me Too had done so not only to seek justice for themselves but also to protect others who might be hurt by the same abusers. My father wasn’t a threat to anyone anymore, and I was the only person he’d hurt. He’d never been interested in other girls, only me. Maybe I should start my own movement: Only Me. I’d found my own path to justice, and the only person I needed to protect was myself.

  * * *

  THE DAY AFTER school ended, Will began working for his parents. He picked me up at the hospital at five, texting me from downstairs rather than coming up. When I joined him in the truck, he was grimy with concrete dust and sweat.

  The hours I had spent at school I now spent shadowing Eddie, learning as much as I could from him. After lunch, he or Gertrude gave me a lift to the hospital, often staying with me an hour or two.

  “He’d be proud of you,” Eddie said one afternoon. “Picking up and carrying on. I mean, he will be proud, when he wakes up.”

  “If he wakes up.”

  Eddie grunted. “You’re like him. You insist on seeing the worst. That’s how both of you come at everything, always taking the ballbuster head-on. Have some hope.”

  “Hope leads to disappointment. I hoped he wouldn’t kill Bailey.”

  “Bailey?” Eddie frowned, puzzled. “He couldn’t keep a dog with that temperament, and he couldn’t give him away. It was a liability issue.”

  The gap between what other people knew and what I knew was unbridgeable. I couldn’t blame Eddie for what he didn’t know. Gertrude might have been uneasy about some of the things she’d overheard and seen—her intuition had been accurate—but Eddie had witnessed Daddy’s professionalism and affection for me day after day at the barn and at shows, and those things had been genuine, too.

  There was a rap on the doorframe.

  “We have some good news,” Dr. Lopez said.

  * * *

  SCANS PERFORMED THAT morning revealed that the swelling in my father’s brain was subsiding; the neurologist would begin lowering the high doses of barbiturates and opioids keeping him unconscious.

  For days, I detected no difference, but the doctors said he had definitive sleep-wake cycles. Then the changes became obvious. He’d frown or grimace, and compared to the stillness of the coma, it was impossible for me not to interpret it as emotion or pain rather than muscle contraction. Once, when a nursing assistant dropped a tray of metal instruments right outside his room, his eyes opened, but his gaze was vacant, and his eyes drifted shut again.

  That night, I had a new nightmare. Police officers and attorneys pelted me with accusations. I tried to defend myself by telling them what he’d done, but my voice was air.

  I woke up freezing and sweating and shaking, but for once I hadn’t woken Will. I contorted my way out from under his arm and went downstairs. I took a fresh bottle of bourbon from the liquor cabinet into the study and curled up in the chair behind the desk.

  I took a shot. Option one: Full consciousness. My father would wake up, know things, communicate. There was virtually no chance he’d remember the accident, but if he did, if he told, I had my own story to tell. My voice wasn’t just air. Nor would it ever be again.

  Here’s to Me Too, I thought. Or Only Me. Whatever, it merited its own shot.

  Option two, shot three: Minimal consciousness. Breathe on his own, open his eyes, and sometimes have the ability to recognize objects or commands, the equivalent of a dog with middling intelligence.

  Option three, shot four: Persistent vegetative state. Breathe on his own, open his eyes, but lack any cognitive function.

  Option four, shot five: Death. That looked less and less likely—and it wasn’t even what I wanted.

  I’d told Will what had happened between my father and me was private, and I’d meant that. I didn’t need the whole world to know what he’d done. I only needed my father to know. I needed him to live with full knowledge of who he’d been, what he’d lost, and who he was now. I needed him to be shattered by the same fear and pain and despair that had shattered me.

  * * *

  WEANING HIM FROM the ventilator was the next milestone. Dr. Lopez and an ICU nurse stood by when the respiratory therapist disconnected it for the first time. I hovered near the foot of the bed, holding my own breath.

  My father’s diaphragm expanded, allowing his lungs to fill with air. He could breathe on his own.

  His time off the ventilator was increased every day, and in less than a week the tube that ran down his throat was removed and the ventilator was rolled away.

  Free of the machine, he began to look more like himself. His hair was growing back. The surgical staples had been removed; without them, the scars looked vulnerable. He’d lost muscle tone and weight, but every day he showed improvement. He opened his eyes again, and then often. He didn’t focus on anyone or anything, but he could track the general direction of movement and sound.

  One afternoon, his eyes rested on me. They’d lit on me before in passing, but this was different.

  “Daddy?”

  He smiled, not a reflexive grimace, but a gentle curving of his mouth. Then he croaked, “Hey, darlin’.”

  * * *

  THE FIRST THING he understood was that he was paralyzed. Dr. Lopez broke the news to him with practiced sympathy. He tried to bear it with stoicism, clinging to the pride that had always run through him like blood, but in this new existence he’d woken up to, pride failed him, and he cried.

  Not once had I seen my father cry. I thought I would throw up. I swallowed the hot spit flooding my mouth and pulled some tissues from the box on the table beside the bed and blotted his tears.

  “It’s going to be okay, Daddy.”

  Where had that come from?

  He sobbed harder. I struggled to hang on to the curried chicken salad I’d had for lunch.

  “Can’t—can’t—”

  The monitors beeped so rapidly that the sounds harmonized in a long, high-pitched whine.

  Dr. Lopez administered a sedative. It took effect almost immediately, and my father’s sobs dwindled into small, broken sounds.

  “Advances are made every day in spinal cord regeneration research,” Dr. Lopez said.

  My father’s eyes were already heavy-lidded, but he looked up at me with an expression of defeat and fear and cynicism. Only the cynicism was familiar. He’d never benefit from today’s research, and he knew it.

  Over the next few days, a combination of drugs and depression kept him quiet. He roused enough to greet Gertrude and Eddie by name, but in a hoarse, halting voice, he requested no other visitors. His speech was punctuated by breaths in unnatural places and long pauses while he searched for words, failed to find them, and frequently lost his train of thought.

  Doctors and therapists gave him simple commands: Close your eyes, stick out your tongue, look at me. They asked questions meant to evaluate his mental state and administered tests of memory and organization. He took little interest in his performance, at times not even acknowledging the person attempting to interact with him.

  I sat on the periphery of the busyness generated by medical personnel circulating in and out of his room. Now and then he gave me th
e same fleeting but oddly sweet smile he’d given me when he’d first regained consciousness, but mostly I caught him watching me with a sad, baffled expression.

  Diva had literally bashed his head in. He’d nearly died. He couldn’t possibly remember what I’d done.

  * * *

  THE SPEECH PATHOLOGISTS worked with him every day. One of them was Harold Moon’s sister, Kelly.

  “Do you remember what happened?” she asked him one day.

  “Yes.” His eyes shifted to me. “Hurt.”

  A chill slid from my tailbone to the top of my head.

  “Do you remember how you were hurt?” Kelly asked.

  “Hurt. Why…” He squeezed his eyes shut and wrinkled his nose, casting about for a word that eluded him.

  “You were hurt by one of the horses,” I said. “Do you remember?”

  “I hurt.”

  “Does he hurt now?” I whispered to Kelly. The neurologist had said the nerves branching out from his spinal cord were going haywire. He couldn’t feel external stimuli, but he could feel nerve pain.

  “Are you in pain?” she asked.

  “No.” He scowled and looked directly at me. “Why are you here?”

  It was the most complex sentence he’d uttered since he’d been awake—and it revealed complex thought.

  I answered with caution. “Of course I’m going to be here, Daddy.”

  A single tear ran down his cheek. “Why, darlin’?” Then he began crying so hard that he started to gag.

  “Can you speak?” Kelly asked.

  He kept gagging. It sounded like he was gargling with mucus. Kelly rang for the nurse and began pushing on his chest to help him expel the phlegm.

  First one nurse came and then another, who paged Dr. Lopez. With all the people and equipment, there was no room for me. I waited outside the glass and watched while they tried to prevent my father from choking to death.