Such Happiness as This

by Laina Villeneuve

  She walked the full length of Clam Beach, stopping at a huge redwood stump she’d had her eye on for some time. She rubbed her gloved hand across it. Even with more of the stump freed by the latest storm, she knew that she could not roll it without help, and she had no one to ask. It would have to be cut into pieces to work it, and she’d hate to make the choice of how to cut it up out on the beach before she could get a look at it from all sides.

  Hard Work.

  The stone she’d warmed in her palm that morning had given her a good feeling for the day, but this work was beyond her. Maybe if she hitched it to a horse. She turned and scanned the beach. A few walkers stayed close to the waves on the more firmly-packed sand. There were no horses on the beach today. Not like the one she had seen galloping effortlessly along the shore months before which had reminded her of her childhood promise to herself. It had prompted her to visit the bulletin board at the barn she frequented for manure for her compost, to look for a horse to lease.

  She’d been in the fourth grade when she convinced her parents to let her take riding lessons. Saturdays, they would drop her at the barn in the morning, and she’d spend the entire day with her beloved animals. Most of the riders at the barn were around the same age, and they all laughed at the old ladies.

  Old. Robyn laughed at herself. More than a few years into her forties, many of the women she remembered were probably years younger. She saw herself in them now when she brushed down Taj, returning to riding after too many years away. As a youngster, she had promised herself that she would always have a horse. She would never lose sight of something that grounded her so well.

  Yet she’d sold her childhood horse when she went away to college and forgot all about riding while she served in the coast guard. No horses at sea. But then she’d seen the horse and rider on the beach and remembered the unbridled joy she had felt at that breakneck gallop, as if she could outrun any problem.

  Could Taj help her outrun the problem she found herself in now? She twisted the band on her left ring finger, wondering what Barb thought of when she looked at its mate on her hand. Two female figures curved, arms above their heads to grasp a garnet. Barb had found them at the North Country Fair, and they were perfect.

  They had been for eight years. Most of those years…Some of them? She was so tired of living unhappily ever after. When had being with Barb become such hard work? More importantly, when had she begun to look at it as work she was not capable of handling?

  She looked out to the horizon where gray met gray, the line between water and air obscured by the low-hanging clouds and mist. Her answer was not out here in the cold. It wasn’t in the warmth of the barn either. Taj helped with her friendly nicker and the way she butted at her pockets for hidden carrots. The mare had raised her spirits considerably, but now she could see how far she had fallen. The cold gray had never affected her. It had always felt invigorating, inviting hard work to warm her.

  But lately it had invited the darkest of solutions into her thoughts. It would be so easy to crawl away from the cold and just sleep, sleep past all the fights and worse, the silence that hung about them.

  She looked back at the stump. Something beautiful waited to be born from it, but it was going to take a hell of a lot of work.

  But not today. She slung her adz over her shoulder. On some large hunks of wood she used the ax-like blade to clean sandy grit away so she could saw the wood into manageable pieces to carry off the beach. With this stump, she couldn’t see enough of it to know where to start. “Don’t go anywhere,” she said, rubbing the sandy surface again. “I’ll figure out a way to get you home.”

  Speaking to a piece of wood throughout the process of finding it through finishing it wasn’t unusual for her. But these words brought her pause realizing that she was trying to figure out a way to get herself back home too.

  Chapter Four

  Discovery

  Robyn turned on her heel, quickly shifting her trajectory from the stalls to the covered arena to avoid interrupting the women standing by her stall. She’d recognized Kristine and saw that the sobbing woman she had her arm around was Taj’s owner, Eleanor. Her presence surprised Robyn since she had not seen the woman since she’d signed the lease months ago.

  She sat down on the bleachers and watched the riding lesson in the ring, a young girl on a fat, furry pony struggling to maneuver the stubborn animal into figure eights at a trot. When she was only eleven, the barn where Robyn had ridden would have put her on this pony to get it behaving again. She spent most of her weekends riding the lesson ponies. Her slight build allowed her to ride even the smallest of them and her strength, both physical and mental, kept them from believing they could get away with anything. In those days, she resembled her Japanese grandmother.

  No one would match that little girl who never could find jodhpurs to fit snugly with who she was now, her Caucasian genetic majority having kicked in at puberty to stretch and broaden out her frame. She wasn’t self-conscious about how the fabric now fit around her thighs and rear. Still strong, she knew she was sturdy, not skinny, and that suited her fine considering the labor-intense work she had chosen.

  She wouldn’t say she breezed through basic training in the coast guard, but she had no trouble compared to others in her group. In fact, she had excelled. She was granted any mission she wanted, as it was well understood she threw herself into her rescues a hundred and fifty percent. When she had announced her retirement two years ago, her superior officer initially refused to accept it, arguing that she had a lot of good years of active duty left. Perhaps her current melancholy was directly proportional to the plunge in physical day-to-day exertion.

  Her mind returned to the stump she wanted to turn. Since it didn’t feel right to interrupt Eleanor and Kristine, she pulled her cell from her pocket and scrolled to a number she hadn’t dialed in a while.

  “I cannot believe you are calling,” Isabel said. Robyn couldn’t help but smile, convinced she’d never heard her childhood friend answer the phone with “Hello.” “I was just texting you.”

  “I don’t believe you,” Robyn said. They hadn’t talked in at least three months.

  “I know, right? But it is true.”

  “What were you texting me?”

  “You know, how I am the worst friend ever. I never visit. I never call. I lost it all when I accepted your call, though, so do not ask me to send it.”

  “I’m the terrible friend,” Robyn said. “You’ve got a family to take care of. How are the kids?”

  “They are know-it-all nine-year-olds. They do not need me anymore. What is with you, mija? You do not sound like you.”

  Robyn didn’t answer immediately, her voice constricted by her friend’s ability to read her from hundreds of miles away. She cleared her throat and answered that she had to keep it down because of the lesson she was watching. They reminisced about the problem ponies they’d ridden as children, and Robyn told her about Taj.

  “This is amazing!” her friend said. “I am so jealous! I cannot remember the last time I went riding.”

  “So fly down and go riding with me,” Robyn said. “I’m sure I could borrow a horse, so we could go out.”

  Isabel took so long to answer that Robyn checked her cell to make sure she hadn’t lost connection.

  “Are you sure you are okay, mija?” she finally asked.

  “I’m sure. I just don’t want to tell you my ulterior motive which includes some heavy lifting.” She smiled as Isabel’s laughter boomed. She could hear her friends’ twins shushing her from the other room.

  After Robyn explained the stump retrieval she was planning, Isabel’s tone changed. “No sé. If you want help like that, maybe I should just send Craig to help you.”

  “Don’t you dare,” Robyn answered. Though she liked him fine, the stump wasn’t the real reason she suddenly longed to see her friend.

  “I will call you tonight after I get permission from the family, bueno?”

  “Hai, mat
ane,” Robyn replied, tapping back to her obaachan’s Japanese to tell Isabel she’d see her soon. She signed off and snuck back toward her stall, relieved to find Bean in the cross-ties, and the women gone. She strode to Taj’s stall and pulled her out.

  Kristine greeted her warmly when they emerged.

  “No Caemon today?”

  She swung around as if looking for her shadow and then laughed. “He’s with his grandparents for the afternoon, and I’m taking advantage. I don’t get Bean out as much as he needs it.”

  “Hard to get in a ride when you’ve got young ones at home,” she acknowledged, remembering that Isabel sold her last horse shortly after she’d had the twins. She whisked a stiff brush along Taj’s coat.

  “I pick him up from preschool when I’m finished with my afternoon class. That’s when I used to get my evening ride in. I feel guilty having Bean sit in his stall so much, but I sure don’t want to give it up.”

  “I just talked to a friend of mine who did that when she had twins nine years ago. She really misses it.”

  They fell silent as they moved in and out of their tack sheds to saddle up. Robyn’s thoughts turned back to how Kristine seemed to be comforting Eleanor when she arrived. She wasn’t one to pry, but she couldn’t put it out of her mind. Kristine’s response to the horse the day they’d met made it clear she knew the story behind Eleanor’s leasing Taj. As Robyn unsnapped her mare from the crossties, Kristine glanced at the bay. She looked sad again, piquing Robyn’s curiosity. The look had to be because of Penelope, whoever she was.

  “You used to ride together?” She worried about pressing what was clearly a delicate subject, yet her mind still spun through scenarios of what had happened to Penelope.

  Kristine’s gaze snapped away from Taj to Robyn, and she nodded. “Sorry. We rode a lot when my in-laws could watch Caemon for us. Last year my mother-in-law came out of remission and it got too hard for them to keep up, so I couldn’t get out at all. Then Penelope volunteered to play with Caemon while I got in a quick trail ride. They had such a good time together, and we got to do what we like best, didn’t we?” She patted her mount. She swallowed hard a couple of times. Robyn didn’t know whether to step away from the layers of sadness Kristine had exposed. Before she could make a decision, Kristine spoke again. “Do you want to join me and Bean on the trail?”

  Robyn briefly wondered whether she should decline, if Kristine really needed the time alone with her emotional chaos. She still got the impression that Kristine was a straight shooter and would not have invited her if she didn’t want the company, so she accepted.

  They exited the rear of the barn and mounted. Robyn’s belly felt tight with anticipation. She had yet to explore the trails near the stable, limiting all of her riding to the arena as she retrained her muscles and got to know her horse. Taj knew the routine and fell in behind Bean. Within minutes, the redwood forest swallowed them, hoofbeats muted by the soft forest floor.

  Sunlight streamed through the canopy of the majestic trees. They had entered a cathedral. A sudden desire to confess her sins overcame Robyn, though the military was the only religion offered by her family when she was young.

  If Isabel did come to visit, she’d soon discover the catch in Robyn’s voice that had nothing to do with sitting in the covered arena and everything to do with a poem she’d found in the papers scattered on Barb’s desk. Robyn had been hunting for Barb’s paycheck so that she could deposit it for her. They’d been arguing about why Barb wouldn’t simply walk down to payroll and set up automatic banking when the poem caught her eye. Nearly another month had passed, inviting Robyn to not only think about whether Barb would remember to deal with her check herself but also whether she’d tucked the poem away.

  She watched Kristine’s back, her posture easy, shoulders swaying to the cadence of her mount’s gait. It wasn’t her place to invite grief back into the woman’s window of freedom.

  She tried to relax into her horse’s movements and enjoy the trail, listening for any other life in the forest. Taj, however didn’t invite too much relaxation, every muscle taut underneath her, head high and ears pivoting on high alert for the unexpected.

  Robyn thought about how relationships were the same. The beginning of a relationship awakened her senses. Those were the careful days of really paying attention to learn the other. Inevitably relationships slipped into the comfortable, relaxed place where partners didn’t worry so much about every little thing. Once their life together had become familiar, she had stopped paying such close attention. When was it that she had relaxed to the point that she could be so easily unseated, thrown so unexpectedly?

  The poem on Barb’s desk had certainly unseated her. She could only remember the opening lines, but they were enough.

  Make yourself at home

  take off

  your clothes.

  Whoever had written it fully explored the Freudian slip in painful poetic form. Who was she fooling. This was a conversation with her own subconscious, so she should be honest with herself and acknowledge that Barb’s friend Daniel was surely its author.

  Daniel with the nightmare wife and marriage. Did they commiserate, Barb comparing her own relationship to his? Did they both demonize their wives, listing unfavorable attributes? What kind of comfort did they offer each other?

  As suddenly as the forest had swallowed them, it spat them back out into a clearing.

  “Clear-cut,” Kristine said unnecessarily, pulling Bean up. “I don’t get how they are allowed to leave it trashed like this.”

  Robyn sat stunned, her gaze searching through the wreckage the loggers had left behind, the tractor tracks that gouged the muddy hillside littered with broken branches stripped from the trunks. The clearing let in too much light. Unchecked by the feathered branches of the redwoods, the sunlight reflecting off a solid mass of clouds made her feel like they were sitting under a spotlight. Robyn’s heart hurt.

  “I didn’t know they were cut like this; so close. Naïve of me.” In more ways than one she realized, thinking that her relationship had been stable, immune to such damage. She turned her gaze to Kristine whose face mirrored Robyn’s pain.

  “Taj’s owner, Penelope, is in a coma.”

  The words sucked Robyn’s breath away.

  “I know her mother, Eleanor, didn’t tell you. I thought you should know and I asked her if she’d told you. She said she wanted to but couldn’t bring herself to say the words.”

  “How long?”

  “Almost six months.”

  “That explains the lease.” Robyn closed her eyes, picturing the family holding onto the horse and the hope that their daughter would recover to ride once again. Kristine opened her mouth like she was going to say more but shut it again and reined Bean back toward the trees.

  “Kristine,” Robyn said. She stopped. “Was the horse involved?”

  Kristine looked away before nodding. “Penelope had taken her down to the beach. Some beachcombers found Taj pacing by the tributary and found Penelope in the water. They were able to resuscitate her, but…” She shook her head.

  “She never regained consciousness.” Robyn couldn’t understand how she could have missed the details of the accident. Where had she been six months ago? So far down the hole that she had stopped registering what had been central to her professional life. Not that she wished to be in the rescue team’s position. Those were the hardest for her, arriving on the scene to panicked faces so hopeful to see help arrive. If they’d found her, there would have been so many unknowns—how long she’d been unconscious, how long she’d been in the water. But it was already too late. The extended coma confirmed that Penelope had never had a chance.

  Kristine met her eye. “But I know this horse. Whatever happened, it was a freak accident. I wouldn’t want you to think that she’s dangerous, but I think you have a right to know. I told Eleanor as much.”

  Robyn’s eyebrows pulled down in concern. “That’s terrible. But thank you for telling me. I don
’t feel differently about Taj.”

  “I didn’t think you would.” She smiled warmly. “I’m so glad you joined me today. And happy that Taj has you.” She checked her watch, sighed deeply and inclined her head in the direction they’d come.

  “Back the same way?” Robyn asked.

  “Back to responsibility,” Kristine quipped.

  The information about Penelope should have occupied her thinking, but Kristine’s final words had guided her thoughts back to Barb and the poem and her responsibility to confront the wreckage in her own life.

  Chapter Five

  Loss

  Isabel and Robyn worked around each other in the kitchen clearing and washing the dishes as if they did it all the time. After a final wipe-down of the counter, Isabel stretched with a loud moan. “I might be broken.”

  “Good thing I fired up the hot tub when we got home then.”

  “You owe me after the workout getting that stump off the beach. Too bad Barb could not stay,” she added.

  “Yeah,” Robyn said without feeling. She kept her attention on the towel she held in her hands.

  Isabel wound her thick black hair into a knot, studying Robyn. The way she squinted, Robyn knew she suspected something, but she let quiet settle between them as she had all weekend. Her heart rate spiked, knowing she was running out of time to voice what she had to. Isabel’s flight back to Spokane, Washington, left in the afternoon, and Robyn knew she wouldn’t be able to confess to her friend right before shoving her on a plane. Every lull in the conversation, Robyn had inwardly rehearsed the words she needed to say, but she had yet to work up the courage to deliver them.

  “I do not feel like I got to see her at all this weekend,” Isabel prompted.

  “John Prine is at the Van Duzer Theatre tonight. She said he had a crazy list of demands.”

  Isabel raised her eyebrows, encouraging Robyn to elaborate, and when she didn’t comply, her visage shifted into her disappointed Frida Kahlo glare.