The Ghost Horse

by Joe Layden

  “Couldn’t do that,” Tim said. “He’d have killed me.”

  So the boy grabbed a suitcase out of his closet, stuffed it with some clothes, and ran out the back door. He patted his brothers on the head before leaving, said good-bye to his mother, left them all crying in his wake. He couldn’t have known, as he ran across the lawn and out to the open road, his chest heaving, his thumb extended, that he’d never see his mother again.

  Chapter Two

  I was born on a warm spring morning.

  Thank God it was warm—I couldn’t imagine leaving my mother’s nice warm tummy and entering into the world on a cold, dreary day. I was lucky. Some horses are born early and open their eyes to snow and wind whistling outside their stable. My barn was engulfed in sunshine by the time I took my first steps, and I enjoyed my first meal to the songs of the birds singing outside the window. In the meantime, my mom cleaned my ruffled coat and nickered softly, “Welcome to the world.”

  —Lisa Ann Calley

  “One of a Dozen”

  Some people merely claim to have had a lifelong love affair with horses, while others actually have the scars to prove it. Horses, after all, are not like most other animals, and certainly not pets in the conventional sense of the term. They are big and strong and willful; they can be loyal or unreliable, prickly or affectionate. They are as unpredictable as they are majestic, their beauty stemming as much from inner mystery as it does from pure aesthetic. Spend enough time around horses, the true horseman will tell you, and eventually you’ll get your heart broken; maybe something else, as well.

  Carol Calley has a picture of her daughter on the back of a pony for the very first time. The little girl is perhaps four years old—maybe even younger—wearing a wide smile and a look of utter fearlessness. Inasmuch as it’s possible for a child that young to express anything beyond basic approval or disapproval about her circumstances, Lisa Calley appears to be something of a natural. That image would only grow stronger, more vivid, as the years went on.

  “Lisa loved horses, lived for horses,” her mother would later explain. “She loved children, too, but she could never have any of her own. I think she always looked at her horses as being like her babies.”

  Frank and Carol Calley raised their two children in Central New York, first in the Finger Lakes resort town of Skaneatles, and later in Camillus. Frank was a hardworking and resourceful small business owner, while Carol was a stay-at-home mom. As mothers and daughters sometimes do, Carol and Lisa bonded deeply through common interests, in their case a fondness for horses. Within a few years of sitting on her first pony, Lisa was taking equestrian lessons, entering show-jumping competitions, and taking care of her own animals. There was a barn in the back of the house with stalls and a walking ring, where Lisa would spend every available moment.

  “She was a joy,” Carol said of her daughter. “I know, every parent says that about their kids, but we really were blessed. Both of our kids were exceptionally kind and gentle. I was closer to my daughter simply because of the horses. That became our thing, something for us to do together. I enjoyed it, but Lisa absolutely lived for it. She was never happier than when she was out in the barn working with her horses.”

  Even as a little girl, Lisa felt almost preternaturally comfortable around the animals. The normal and even healthy sense of trepidation and caution a typical child would experience was simply unknown to her. She felt a kinship to her horses, never feared them or worried that something might go wrong. It wasn’t that she didn’t respect the animals’ strength or willfulness; she just saw these things as traits to be admired. They were part of what made the horses beautiful.

  Accidents happen, even to the best and most experienced of horsemen. You can’t live your life in fear, or beat yourself up after the fact. Carol Calley has reminded herself of this fact many times over the years, often with her daughter’s voice in her head.

  Lisa was eleven years old when it happened. She and her mother were finishing a typical day, leading the horses back into the barn, prepping another cycle of grooming and feeding and watering. Carol didn’t see exactly what transpired, for Lisa was a short distance in front of her. She heard a commotion, saw movement ahead of her. Then everything stopped. When Carol reached her daughter, Lisa was on her feet, holding the reins of a quarterhorse named Misty, one of her favorites. The animal seemed agitated, but under control; Lisa was oddly quiet, a bit disoriented.

  “What happened?” Carol asked.

  Lisa squinted, gave the horse a gentle pat.

  “He bucked.”

  There was little at the scene to suggest that Lisa had been seriously hurt, but something in the girl’s demeanor—a lack of energy, a pensiveness—concerned Carol. Her mother’s instinct kicked in.

  “Honey, are you okay?”

  Lisa stared blankly.

  “I’m kind of groggy.”

  Later they would learn the details of the accident, or as many of the details as Lisa could recall. While entering the barn, Lisa had decided to jump aboard Misty. That, of course, violated protocol (not to mention parental rules). Lisa was always told to walk the horses through the barn and never to ride alone. Usually, if not always, she adhered to the guidelines. This time, though, she had decided to hop aboard Misty, who was wearing only a halter, for the final leg of the journey.

  “She was kind of a bold person,” Carol recalled with a smile. “Not in a disrespectful sort of way, but in a courageous way. She wasn’t afraid of very much, even when she should have been. Jumping on that horse was a silly thing to do, but Lisa had been riding almost since she could walk—she never thought about getting hurt. She was always carefree and happy, maybe even a little reckless. If she felt like doing something, she’d do it. I’m not sure where that came from. Not from me, I know that. I always think of the consequences.”

  The horse rebelled instantly and tossed the little girl into a beam. Lisa, who was not wearing a helmet at the time, struck her head. By the time her mother arrived, though, she seemed to have weathered the incident without serious injury, if any injury at all.

  She was tired, a little queasy … but nothing more. There were no cuts or broken bones, not even a bump or bruise. They finished their chores, closed up the barn, and went back into the house.

  “At first she seemed okay,” Carol said. “But after a little while she started complaining of a headache and said she felt like she was going to throw up. Then she got really sleepy.”

  The telltale signs of a concussion were not lost on Lisa’s parents; the fact that she seemed to be only mildly impaired did not provide enough comfort to prevent them from taking her to a local hospital near Skaneatles. Emergency room physicians dutifully examined the little girl, taking X-rays and checking off each potential box in descending order of diagnostic concern.

  They found nothing.

  Meanwhile, Lisa grew more lethargic and nauseous. Eventually one of the doctors suggested to the Calleys that Lisa be examined by a specialist. As this was a small, lightly staffed community facility, they did not have a neurosurgeon or neurologist on site at the time. They suggested Lisa be transported by ambulance to St. Joseph’s Hopsital, a much larger health center located roughly thirty miles away, in Syracuse.

  “Thank God for that,” Carol recalled. “If we’d waited, or just gone home, I don’t know what might have happened.”

  By the time the family arrived at St. Joe’s, Lisa’s X-rays and CAT scans had already been transmitted. A neurosurgeon was waiting for them, with a surgical suite prepared. Lisa had sustained a serious hematoma to the skull, which was rapidly filling with fluid and putting pressure on her brain. By the time they wheeled her into surgery, the lump had expanded to the size of a lemon.

  “She could have died in her home, or in the barn,” Carol said. “She could have died on the way to the hospital. We had no idea at the time just how serious it was.”

  Fighter that she was (a designation she would prove repeatedly in the coming years
), Lisa pulled through the surgery without incident and recovered in fairly short order. Had it been left up to Frank Calley, Misty would have been destroyed (humanely or otherwise) before Lisa even came home from the hospital. Lisa wouldn’t stand for it. At first she begged her father not to harm the horse; then she took a firmer stand, pointing out that the accident had been her responsibility, and that it had resulted from at least some small amount of carelessness.

  Don’t blame the horse for the owner’s mistake.

  Frank ultimately relented. He would harbor nothing but disdain for Misty the rest of her days, but the love he felt for his daughter took precedence. If Lisa considered the horse to be a part of the family, then that’s the way it would be.

  Eventually, Mom and I were introduced to all the other mares and foals at the farm. At first nobody was too social, we were all still busy getting to know the most important part of our young lives: our mothers. Within the week, however, things had changed. All the babies smelled and sorted each other and began to pick up an “order.” We sorted each other into groups: those of us that are the “real thing” … and everyone else. (Knowing which group you belong to is something you just know by instinct—if you’ve got “it,” life can be an easy street; otherwise, you have to work hard and hope whoever holds your future can see you for who you are.)

  I’ll tell you right now: I am the “real thing,” but I still get chased out of the group by all the bullies. They make me mad and I fight back. I don’t need them; I’ve got my mom.

  —Lisa Ann Calley

  “One of a Dozen”

  Things were fine for a while, until Lisa began experiencing seizures that doctors attributed to the injury she had suffered. The damage, they suggested, had been more extensive than originally suspected. It was hard to tell exactly what had happened. The brain was mysterious, the neurologists explained. Maybe the seizures would subside as Lisa grew older; maybe not. There was no way of knowing.

  Regardless of the obstacles thrown her way, Lisa remained devoted to her horses; she rode as much as possible, but an escalation in the number and severity of her seizures precluded any sort of future as a competitive equestrian. In time she was placed on Dilantin, an antiseizure medication. Although the drug helped some, it had side effects (fatigue and drowsiness being the most notable) and those factors, combined with the ever-present threat of more seizures, made life a daily grind for Lisa. Her parents worried about her passing out and falling off a horse, or getting kicked in the head. They worried about her driving a car or even crossing a street on foot.

  They worried.

  “Lisa was a remarkable girl,” recalled Frank Calley. “She had a hard life, but she never lost her spirit. She never stopped smiling.”

  Nor did she ever relinquish, or even discourage, the nurturing instinct that seemed to dominate her personality. Interesting that someone who was not physically capable of bearing children of her own was so widely regarded as having the characteristics of a great mother. She was a rescuer, the kind of person who would find a bird with a broken wing on the front lawn and nurse it back to health. She saw potential where others saw failure. She saw innate goodness where it wasn’t necessarily obvious. She overlooked flaws and weaknesses and remained the eternal optimist, sometimes to her own detriment.

  There was a marriage that didn’t work out. He was a family friend, a nice enough man most of the time, according to Carol Calley, until he began drinking heavily and the inevitable problems and abuses began to surface. Lisa tolerated it for a while, hoped things would get better, but the cumulative weight of her seizure disorder and the daily trauma at home proved too much to bear.

  As if that wasn’t enough, in the early 1990s Lisa was diagnosed with cervical cancer. Her mother would always wonder about the possibility that the long-term use of Dilantin had triggered the disease, perhaps throwing a genetic switch that otherwise might always have remained in the “off” position. But what choice was there at the time? For her part, Lisa never saw the point of second-guessing. A waste of time and energy. Better to just get on with the business of life. Cut out the bad stuff, take whatever medication was available, and hope for the best.

  So that’s what she did, beating back the cancer with a combination of surgery (separate procedures, a week apart) and chemotherapy. Less than a year after receiving the initial diagnosis, Lisa was declared cancer-free. Not yet thirty years old, but wise enough to know for sure that life is nothing if not precious and short, she decided to make some changes. She left her husband, quit her job as a dental hygienist, and went to work in the one place where she always suspected she’d feel at home:

  The racetrack.

  “She wanted to get away from what was going on in her life,” Carol explained. “She needed a change. It wasn’t easy, and I don’t recall thinking it was the best thing for her at the time, but she’d certainly earned the right to be happy.”

  She started where virtually everyone starts when they arrive at a track for the first time: at the very bottom of some minor league facility, in this case Finger Lakes Racetrack. Newcomers to the backstretch get the shittiest jobs, in the most literal sense of the term. They muck out stalls, change feed buckets, wash and groom the least expensive and slowest of racehorses. Lisa didn’t mind. She was content to be around animals. They were less complicated than people, less demanding and generally more appreciative of the things you did for them, rewarding even the smallest of gestures with a tilt of the head or a lick on the back of the hand.

  Lisa wanted nothing more out of life at that time than to learn how to become a trainer of thoroughbred racehorses. She spent endless hours there, trying to be one of the boys in a world not known for its gender equity. She was a pretty young woman, tall and athletic, but she disguised her attractiveness with baggy jeans tugged into her work boots, blond hair hidden beneath a hooded sweatshirt. She fought against her natural inclination to smile and talk, and to be friendly with everyone who crossed her path. It wasn’t easy.

  “She was an extraordinary person,” said John Tebbutt, the Finger Lakes trainer who got to know Lisa shortly after she arrived on the backstretch. “She worked in the same barn as I did. I had horses on one side and she went to work for a trainer on the other side. I liked her right from the start. She was kind to the horses, had a sweet personality, and she worked her butt off.”

  Not long after we came inside, the humans made their way into each stall to get acquainted with their new pupils. I wasn’t up to anyone fussing with me, so I kicked at the handler and was left alone. A short while later, a man came in. We wrestled, he won, and I spent the afternoon tied in the corner. The other horses accepted the humans and went along with the program of being saddled and bridled, then introduced to a rider and so on and so forth.

  I, however, had something ingrained in me—by pedigree, perhaps—that told me not to trust humans.

  —Lisa Ann Calley

  “One of a Dozen”

  Chapter Three

  The boy stood on the side of the highway, watching the trucks and cars roll by, unsure of everything, certain of nothing, except that he had to get away, put as much distance as possible between himself and the son of a bitch who had taken hold of his family. You don’t break a bottle over your stepfather’s head and expect him to welcome you back with open arms. Some things can’t be corrected or forgiven. Some things you don’t want to correct. But there are limited options for a fifteen-year-old boy, especially one who looks to be about twelve and has only a few dollars in his pocket. He would rely on the generosity of strangers simply because there was no other choice; and anyway, could they hurt him any more than he’d been hurt in his own home?

  But where would he go?

  There was only one reasonable plan, it seemed. He would head south to California, where his sister would be happy to put him up for a while, until he got a handle on things. She would sympathize, right? She didn’t like the new guy, either, never understood what their mother saw in him, or
why she had followed him all over the country. She’d find out that Timmy had whacked him over the head with a milk bottle and give the kid a high five. With Cheryl, at least, he’d have a roof over his head and a place to sleep—a place where no one would get all liquored up and then berate him and tell him he was worthless and knock him around simply for having the temerity to stand up for himself.

  A few days later, the boy showed up on the doorstep of his big sister’s apartment. She gave him a hug, welcomed him in, gave him something to eat, and the two of them commiserated about the direction their lives had taken. At the time, Cheryl wanted nothing more than to help her little brother, but reality has a way of interfering with good intentions. The truth of the matter was this: Cheryl was in no position, financially or emotionally, to serve as a surrogate parent to Tim. Practically speaking, their living arrangement was doomed from the outset.

  “Keep in mind, he’s fifteen years old, and I’m only twenty-one,” Cheryl recalled. “I’ve already got two kids of my own, and no one to help me raise them. I’m all alone in California, I don’t really even know anyone, and I’ve got hardly any money. I’m an East Coast girl who only came out west because my mother invited me, and now she’s gone. I’m in a strange world with two little kids, trying to take care of them and support them … and all of a sudden along comes my brother Timmy.”

  Cheryl laughed.

  “It didn’t last very long at all. Mainly because he was driving me crazy.”

  At some point—a few weeks, maybe a month, according to Tim—brother and sister agreed that Tim would have to find another place to live. Since he was too young to get a real job and had no friends or family in the area, Tim decided he had only one viable option:

  He would track down his father.

  “Sounds crazy, I know,” Tim said. “But what else was I going to do? I knew my dad was somewhere in New England, still riding, or at least working at a track somewhere. He didn’t know how to do anything else. How hard could it be to find him? There aren’t that many racetracks in New England. I figured I’d start at Suffolk Downs and work my way north until he turned up. I had family back there anyway. My uncle worked at Suffolk, and I had a grandfather who was working at a restaurant in Rhode Island, or so I heard. It’s not like I had a real plan or anything. I just figured my father would be somewhere in New England, so I took a shot.”