Horse

by Talley English

  “What now?” she said.

  “Stay in the car. I’ll be right back,” Susanna said.

  “I’m not staying in the car,” Teagan said and got out.

  “I’ll only be a minute. I’m dropping something off for your dad.”

  “I want to see Dad,” Teagan said.

  “He’s not here. He just has a mailbox here.”

  This was fascinating information to Teagan. The idea that her mother had to send mail to her father, that he didn’t get mail at the house anymore, was strange.

  “When is he coming back?” Teagan asked and immediately regretted it.

  Susanna started walking toward the dull, brown building. Teagan caught up with her and didn’t say anything more. They walked into the empty hallway, lined with blue metal lockers. Susanna didn’t have to read the board listing names and offices. She pulled open a door, and Teagan followed her up a flight of metal steps and into another hallway. This one had fewer lockers, and more posters and projects on the walls, made by students. Susanna opened another door, and Teagan followed her into a strange, short hallway that had a door on either side. Next to one of the doors was a plaque that said ROBERT FRENCH, and under it was a narrow metal mailbox. Susanna fed the long envelope into it, then she stood in front of the door, as if waiting. Teagan looked at her mother, who didn’t speak.

  “Is this Dad’s?” Teagan asked. She had never been to her father’s office.

  Susanna reached out and turned the knob, then let it go and knocked, many rapping knocks. She turned the knob and opened the door. The room was small and had one narrow window across from the desk. Robert was in a swivel chair in front of his computer. He stood up and looked at Susanna.

  “Dad.” Teagan hugged him.

  “Teagan,” Robert said. His hug was weak.

  “I didn’t know you were here,” Susanna said.

  “I didn’t know you were coming. What do you need?” he said.

  “I dropped the papers in your box,” she said. They stood looking at each other. Susanna walked to the narrow coat closet and opened it. A woman was standing there. She was skinny and wore a purple jacket and matching skirt. Her hair was brown, not as dark as Susanna’s, and cut short.

  “You are pitiful,” Susanna said to the woman and shut the closet door again. She yanked Teagan’s arm and dragged her to the stairwell, and they ran down the stairs.

  Teagan stared at her mother in the car. She was afraid that her mother would explode at any minute and have a wreck. “It’s okay, Mom, it’s okay,” she said and couldn’t stop herself.

  When they reached the house Susanna went directly to her own bedroom, and Teagan went to hers. She fell asleep and woke up in the night, still in her clothes, on top of the bedcover.

  Wait

  By the time she was where she wanted to be, it was a letdown that it had taken all that effort to stand in front of a door in a quiet parking lot. Teagan found herself feeling guilty at how easy it was to get the people who trusted her to believe her. She’d told her mother that she wanted to meet Grace at the library, which was a lie, because Teagan hadn’t told Grace anything about meeting at the library.

  Susanna didn’t seem to think it was odd, so she dropped Teagan off without asking when she wanted to be picked up. Teagan said that she would probably spend the night at Grace’s house since it was a Friday.

  “Do you want me to wait here until you find her?” Susanna asked.

  “No, I’m sure she’s inside,” Teagan said. She walked into the building, waited a few minutes, and walked out again. Her mother’s car was gone.

  It took longer to walk to his building than she’d planned. She worried that someone might recognize her, so she kept her head down and let her hair fall over her ears, and at intersections she pretended to be interested in the contents of her bag. She had wanted to go to the place her father worked and look for something. She wasn’t sure what. She felt she was doing that, lately, looking for something and not finding it. She would walk to the barn, stand in the field, stare at the mountains, none of which felt different from lying on her bed, starring at the brass handles of the drawers in her dresser.

  She stood near a door that she guessed was on the same side as her father’s office. It had one window above the handle, with thick glass etched with a crisscross pattern. Teagan’s feet felt hot from walking and she was thirsty. There wasn’t anyone around, and people walking on the sidewalk did not look at her, so she crossed her arms and stood. She wasn’t sure why. Maybe she was waiting for her father, but she wasn’t sure he was even in the building. A man in khakis and a blue button-down shirt smiled at her. The only person who paused was a short, fat woman who reminded Teagan of her middle school social studies teacher, who held the door open for her, but Teagan shook her head. “I’m just waiting,” she said. After the woman walked away, Teagan tried the door. It was locked. She looked at the sky and decided she’d been there too long.

  Another woman came around the corner of the building on a different sidewalk. Although she’d only seen her once, and briefly, and in a closet, Teagan knew it was her. She wanted to walk away, or pretend to have lost something, but she simply stood. The woman stopped in front of her.

  “Are you waiting for someone?” she asked. Her voice was low and toneless.

  Teagan stared at her. The woman wore the same purple clothes. Her hair was short and brown. She was thin in the way Teagan thought people who tried hard to be thin were thin. Teagan wanted to maybe punch her, but she didn’t know how to punch. She wanted to dirty that light purple suit, but she didn’t want to touch it. She wanted to make the woman afraid of her, but she didn’t know how.

  “Do you know someone who works here?” she asked Teagan.

  Teagan realized that the woman knew who she was. She knew Teagan, but Teagan wasn’t supposed to know about her. Teagan walked past the woman toward the street. Her legs felt restrained. She felt like she was walking through deep grass, having to push her way through. She didn’t look back. At the library she called Grace’s house collect. She asked Grace to ask her mom if she could spend the night. Leta didn’t notice anything out of place. Grace and Teagan made up the foldout couch in the family room and watched a movie. Teagan kept going to the kitchen to drink glasses of milk. Grace didn’t even ask her why. Finally, Teagan admitted to Grace what had happened.

  “What was the point of that?” Grace asked.

  “I don’t know,” Teagan said.

  “Did you see your dad?” Grace asked.

  “No,” Teagan said.

  “So you just stood on a sidewalk?” Grace asked.

  “Pretty much,” Teagan said. She got up from the creaky foldout couch bed.

  “For how long?” Grace said, fast-forwarding through the credits of the next movie.

  “More milk,” Teagan said.

  “You’re going to get sick,” Grace said.

  Sometime after they had finally fallen asleep, Teagan woke up with stomach cramps. She crawled over Grace’s legs to get to the edge of the bed and walked bent over to the bathroom. The milk came out of her mouth and her nose. She washed her face and then brushed her teeth with a trembling hand. She crawled back into bed, kneeing Grace in the leg by accident.

  “What’s going on?” Grace sat up.

  “I’m sick,” Teagan said.

  “Are you okay?” Grace found Teagan’s arm in the dark.

  “I puked.”

  “You did?”

  “Yes.”

  Grace sat there, her hand on Teagan’s arm. She yawned. “Do you need anything?”

  “No,” Teagan said.

  “Do you want some more milk?” Grace asked, smiling.

  “I’m going to throw up on your pillow next,” Teagan said.

  “I told you,” Grace said, scrunching her pillow more comfortably
under her head.

  Blind

  Zep recovered enough to be let out into his field, which was relatively flat. Teagan was surprised to find him standing alone near the barn, his cheeks swollen and his jaw lumpy, like it was broken. She heard the wheels of a car crunch the gravel on the other side of the barn and heard Charlie yell for her.

  “What?” she yelled back.

  “C’mere,” he yelled.

  She rounded the side of the barn.

  Charlie leaned over to the passenger-side window. “Tell Mom I’m going to Chris’s, okay?”

  “Charlie, come help me with Zep,” Teagan said.

  “You take care of your own horse,” he said.

  “I need your help. Come help me.”

  He looked at her and grudgingly threw the car into park. “I can give you one minute.”

  He helped her urge the horse into the barn. They had to stand on either side of him and push.

  “What do you think happened?” Charlie said.

  “I don’t know. You go. I’m going to tell Mom.”

  “You sure?” Charlie said.

  Teagan was already turning and running to the house. When Charlie walked in the door, she was screaming at her mother, accusing her of not taking care of Zephyr. Teagan picked up a coffee mug and threw it at the wall. It broke. Charlie grabbed Teagan’s arm and yelled at her. Susanna ordered them to separate, which was her word for ending a fight. Susanna told Teagan to sit down, but Teagan pushed past Charlie and ran for the barn. Susanna said, “Don’t,” when Charlie started to go after his sister.

  By the time she walked back in the house, Teagan was ready to apologize to her mother. When she went to look for her, she found Charlie, who hadn’t gone over to his friend’s house. He stood up from the couch, where he’d sat frowning at the TV. He started to say something, but Teagan turned her back on him and went to find her mother. Susanna was in the basement sorting laundry. Teagan hovered in the doorway.

  “You didn’t say where you were going,” Susanna said, noticing her. She continued to toss clothes into one basket and another. Teagan thought this was a strange thing to say. In her mind, there was only one place for her to go. “Mom, I’m sorry,” she said.

  Susanna dropped a shirt and looked up. “What you don’t realize is that I’m doing the best I can.”

  “I do realize. I know,” Teagan said.

  It seemed like the conversation was at an end, but it was Susanna’s turn to get angry. “I’m only one person. I can’t stop horses from acting like horses,” she said, her voice rising.

  “I know that,” Teagan said.

  “I can’t stop them kicking each other. Do you want me to sleep in the field?” Susanna was yelling now. She balled a shirt and threw it in the basket.

  “No. Mom. I said I was sorry.”

  “Just because things don’t go the way you want them to. I do everything for you, Teagan. Everything. What else do you want from me?” Susanna glared at her daughter and threw her hands in the air in a strange, uncontrolled gesture.

  Teagan retreated. “I don’t want anything,” she said from her distance.

  Footsteps came down the stairs.

  “You think I haven’t done everything for that animal? The money I’ve spent on him? Walking him around day after day? You think I have all the time in the world to nurse a horse, take care of cats and dogs, and a house, and a farm, and two children? You think it’s easy?” Susanna screamed.

  “No. I don’t think anything,” Teagan said.

  Charlie was yelling for them to stop. He held an arm in front of Teagan and with the other gestured to his mother to calm down.

  “Charlie, do not tell me what to do,” Susanna said, turning on him.

  Charlie gave Teagan’s shoulder a shove and in a low voice ordered her to go.

  “That’s right. Go feel sorry for yourself. Don’t worry about me,” Susanna yelled after her.

  Teagan ran out of the house.

  Remember

  I remember the news from the vet was that Zephyr was blind. Zep hadn’t avoided a kick to the face from Duchess because he never saw the blow coming. I couldn’t argue with my mother when she said she could not care for a blind, lame horse. She told me not to be there when the horse was put down, but I wouldn’t hear of it, so we gathered in the cold, in the late afternoon. Jason Brill, our neighbor, led our slow, limping Appaloosa up the ramp onto the horse trailer, and stood outside the door, holding the rope. The vet, in an efficient manner, prepared the hypodermic needles and administered the shots. After some minutes, the horse’s legs buckled, and the trailer rocked when he fell. I sat down on the ground. My mother wailed. My brother held her in his arms.

  TWO

  Hunting Hill

  Julie, who was pale with strawberry blond hair (she admitted she dyed it), held out an opened one-pound bag of M&M’s. Teagan took it and poured a mound into her hand. She gave back the bag before funneling the candy into her mouth and crunching the pieces into a chocolate froth.

  “This will be the food drawer,” Julie said, twisting a rubber band over the bag and putting it away. Julie had interesting things. She had a plastic three-drawer tower, with a plastic frame. The top drawer was now the “food drawer,” the middle held pens and markers and a compass and other school supplies. The bottom drawer held Julie’s hair clips, extra bottles of shampoo, lotion and tampons, and other bathroom stuff. Teagan had never seen a tower of drawers like that. She thought drawers had to be wooden and part of bulky dressers, or built into kitchens, beneath counters.

  Julie had a shoe rack, a hook that fit over the door of the closet, and several rectangular Tupperwares that didn’t look as though they had ever held leftovers. She stowed groups of things in these and stacked them on her side of the long, shallow closet. Teagan sat cross-legged on her twin bed and watched Julie organize. She had made some effort with her own things, more than she ever had at home. Her new collared shirts hung from hangers, and the khaki pants were folded on a shelf provided in the closet. Her jeans and T-shirts were folded, too, in stacks on the closet floor. Her hairbrush was on the ledge of the small window in the bathroom, and her toothbrush stood upright in a built-in toothbrush holder. Her shampoo bottle stood just outside the shower door, so it wouldn’t be in Julie’s way when she showered. Teagan’s schoolbooks were stacked on the provided desk, and her other books were stacked within reach under her bed. She’d even run the cord of her new desk lamp behind the desk to keep it out of the way. It was her way of being polite to her roommate, a formality, like shaking hands.

  She hoped Julie didn’t expect these standards to last, though. They would have to relax once the year got going. Teagan couldn’t be bothered to pick up every book off the floor, or sort and fold her clothes on a daily basis. She expected Julie felt this way, too. Her neat, putting-things-away routine was rudimentary politeness. Teagan expected the room would feel more lived in as the days passed. A few books and some clothes and shoes tossed on the floor would help them settle in.

  She was only a little suspicious of Julie’s plastic boxes, stacked and with tight-fitting lids. Julie seemed more of a girl-girl than Teagan. She even had a velvet pouch of earrings, gold hoops, no less. (Gold-plated hoops.) And she had makeup. Teagan spotted the tubes and small, flat containers, lipstick and mascara and eye shadow, going into the boxes. She was glad she’d moved in ahead of Julie, so she didn’t have to reveal her lack of earrings and makeup. Teagan could claim one girl item, a bottle of floral-scented perfume, although she wasn’t sure when she would wear it. She got it out to show Julie and let her try it. It let Julie know that Teagan understood something about being a girl, even if she didn’t have mascara, not even one color of eye shadow, and had never owned a tube of lipstick.

  * * *

  —

  Susanna and Charlie had gone. Teagan was to call when she wa
s ready for a weekend at home. Susanna would come pick her up. She felt relaxed, removed from the turmoil of her house, the unsettling absence of her father, her brother’s interminable silence, her mother’s sad face and pretense that life was going on as usual. There wasn’t anything usual left at Blue View Farm. The atmosphere in the house was morbid. It was as if the three of them were marching in a long funeral procession, and the coffin was never lowered into the ground, or maybe there wasn’t a coffin at all. No one had died. Teagan knew that her father was alive, somewhere. But it was as if he had slipped through a portal. He was living a different life, in a different place, at the same time that Teagan and Charlie and Susanna were living their same life, an old life, the one Robert had simply disappeared from. She understood that her father’s leaving had something to do with a woman, who they all knew existed, but who he tried to pretend didn’t. But it was all backward and turned around. Robert and the woman were real, somewhere, and it was as if Teagan had ceased to exist. Teagan and Charlie and Susanna, and the thing they had called their life, had evaporated, faded like the milk bowl of clouds that sat in the hollow of the field some winter mornings, before the light and heat found them and made them rise up.

  There was no point telling any of this to Julie. It was all unimportant to the life Teagan would live here at the school. An uncomplicated, scheduled existence that included classes, her room, and roommate. These things encompassed Teagan, and she could trace the shape of her life.

  After finishing up their room, Teagan and Julie decided there was no reason to wait any longer for supper, which started at five-thirty. Julie wondered if she needed to wear a collared shirt into the dining hall, but Teagan argued that it was Sunday, and there wasn’t a dress code except for going to class. Julie hesitated and fingered some shirts before settling on wearing the T-shirt she had on. It had small horizontal stripes in two colors of blue, and Teagan thought how her mother would consider that kind of T-shirt “nice.” Teagan wore a soft, faded yellow one with HOBOKEN written on it, although she didn’t know where Hoboken was and she’d found the shirt at a thrift store. They stopped in open doorways to learn the names of other girls on the hall and collected a tall, freckled redhead named Sarah. Sarah asked Teagan if she was from New Jersey, and Teagan said no and didn’t ask why Sarah had thought so. Julie said that she was from Oklahoma. Sarah was from Delaware.