Horse

by Talley English

They walked past the barn, and Teagan blew a kiss to Ian, who was out of sight in his stall inside. They paused at the fence line they were not supposed to cross, looking conspicuous. They didn’t see anyone nearby, so they climbed over, walking the path they’d stumbled along in the dark.

  The small group stopped together in the field. Hunting Hill was an obvious rise above them. There was nothing built there, no marker to designate it, but it had a look of having been used. The grass was short and the weedy plants were sparse. On the far side was a small, bushy tree.

  “That’s the Hawthorn,” Sarah said.

  Julie and Teagan looked at her.

  “Biology class. Mrs. Wade told us. It was a gift to the school.”

  “That’s got to be it, then,” Julie said.

  “That is it,” Teagan said.

  “Wait, do you already know where it is?” Julie said.

  “Teagan has been communing with Miss Guinevere behind our backs. She wants Miss Guinevere to be her ghost mother,” Sarah explained.

  Teagan shrugged.

  “What’s this about?” Julie said.

  “Ask Teagan,” Sarah said.

  “She’d be better than my real parents,” Teagan said.

  Julie and Sarah didn’t say anything.

  “C’mon,” Teagan said, and she started running up the hill, and they all ran, the way horses sometimes will gallop up a hill for no apparent reason, except that they can.

  Teagan crossed the summit at a run and slowed to a trot near the Hawthorn. Sarah and Julie pulled up beside her. Julie pushed her hair out of her face. Teagan began walking around the little tree.

  “Here it is,” she said.

  Sarah put her hand over her mouth.

  “Are you shitting us?” Julie said.

  “No, it’s right here. Come look,” Teagan said. She knelt down and reached under the tree. The thorns on the branches caught her skin. “Ouch,” she said.

  Sarah half-screamed and jumped back, and Julie laughed at Sarah.

  “This tree has thorns,” Teagan said.

  “Did Miss Guinevere get you?” Julie said.

  “Julie, really, shut up,” Teagan said.

  For once, Julie did not retort.

  Teagan brushed leaves and standing water off the raised letters of the square stone plaque set in the ground. “Can you see?” she asked. And she read the words aloud for them anyway.

  HERE LIES MISS GUINEVERE

  DIED 1866

  HER GHOST HAUNTS HUNTING HILL

  “I didn’t think we would find it,” Sarah said.

  “Well, we did. So now let’s go,” Julie said.

  “She’s real. She’s right here,” Teagan said.

  “Teagan, if you start acting any creepier, I’m changing roommates,” Julie said.

  “Did you all think she would really be here?” Teagan said.

  Sarah said suddenly, “Teagan, you touched the grave.”

  “So what?”

  “Now you’re cursed,” Sarah said.

  “Isn’t that what she wanted?” Julie said.

  “What do you mean?” Teagan said.

  “If you touch the grave, you’re cursed. That hand is going to get mangled somehow,” Sarah said.

  “That’s not true. That’s just a thing to make people not mess with her grave.”

  “You messed with it,” Julie said.

  “The curse isn’t real,” Teagan said. “It’s just so people will leave her alone.”

  “Teagan knows,” Sarah said.

  “Miss Guinevere has adopted Teagan,” Julie said.

  “You guys are stupid. Let’s go,” Teagan said. She walked away, but she felt that if she looked behind her, she would see Miss Guinevere standing by the Hawthorn in her long skirt. Teagan had summoned the ghost and the ghost had arrived. Teagan did not look back. Julie trotted to catch up with her, and she linked an arm around Teagan’s.

  “I’m so sorry you’re going to lose your hand,” she said.

  Late at Night

  Julie said Teagan couldn’t do her homework at night in their room anymore. The light and the rustling kept Julie awake. She told Teagan to get her work done during the day. Teagan felt she couldn’t concentrate in study hall. She couldn’t think with other people thinking around her. She tried to explain this to Julie, but finally she just made Julie agree not to tell on her when she snuck into the common room to do her homework. After everyone had gone to bed, and the only light was a slim yellow bar under Ms. Ganski’s door at the end of the hall, Teagan walked the hallway softly, closed the common room door behind her, and turned on a lamp in the furthest corner. If Ms. Ganski walked in, Teagan was prepared to pretend it was the first time she’d stayed up late to do her homework.

  After several nights, when Ms. Ganski did not discover her, Teagan began to rely on the quiet of the half-dark common room, even if she still found it difficult to concentrate on her work. She urged her tired brain to read, to memorize, to string sentences together in some semblance of an argument. Her essays often had the same comment from her teachers, “What are you trying to say?”

  Because she was so tired, and failing at her work, and alone, Teagan summoned Miss Guinevere to sit with her, to keep her company, to silently praise her for trying, at least, to be a student. Teagan imagined that Miss Guinevere knew that she spent so many nights alone in the common room, and so she joined Teagan in her walk down the dark hallway, keeping anyone from finding her out. She imagined Miss Guinevere stayed with her while she surrounded herself with books, and barely read them, while she reviewed her notes, even though she seemed to forget them by morning. Miss Guinevere had been alone, too, away from her family, and she had not been treated well, and she had died strangely.

  Teagan sympathized with her, and she created the person of Miss Guinevere in her mind, a young woman who appreciated Teagan’s sympathy, who looked out for Teagan and saw that she came to no harm, because Miss Guinevere wanted to protect Teagan, as she had not been protected. Teagan made up the story without meaning to. It simply wrote itself in her mind over sleepless nights, bit by bit, until Teagan and the ghost were both in the room, near the lamp in the furthest corner.

  And Teagan wasn’t afraid, because she knew she was half-dreaming, and she also knew that whoever Miss Guinevere had been, she was not bad. So, when Teagan could no longer keep her eyes from closing, and she was afraid of falling asleep on the floor and being found out in the morning, she would gather her books and pages, and as she closed herself into the safety of her room, just before she shut the door, she would whisper good night.

  Wedding

  The basement classrooms were all science labs, with big black tables with little sinks and faucets in one corner of each, and cabinets along the walls, full of beakers and trays of glass tubes, dissection kits, and bottles of chemicals. The room had a chemical smell. Teagan sat at one of the big tables with Sarah. She tried to remember not to lean her arms on the table. It always seemed a little sticky. The tables were wiped down at the end of class, but there still seemed to be layers of various substances on their surfaces. The bell rang and Mrs. Wade started her lecture on the respiratory, digestive, and circulatory systems.

  “When we consider the internal workings of the body, there is one necessary thing that we might not always think of. Can anyone guess?” Mrs. Wade asked, pacing in front of the class.

  No one raised a hand to answer oxygen or blood. These were obvious.

  “Blood can’t circulate without compression. Compression is essential.”

  Teagan thought about blood pushed through stringy veins and bigger arteries. She wrote down the words she heard Mrs. Wade say: alveoli, peristalsis, ileum, coronary, atrium. The words sounded like places to Teagan, parts of a large and complicated house, and she had to memorize the sequence of the ro
oms, the organization of the doors; it seemed endless. When the bell rang her hand felt stiff from so much writing, and the verbal dissection of the body made her feel nauseous. She was glad to leave.

  At break the pump house post office opened. Teagan opened her mailbox and found three hand-addressed envelopes inside. On the first two she recognized handwriting from Charlie and Grace. The third envelope had her address printed evenly in the middle of the envelope, but it had no return address. She didn’t have time to read any of them, so she shoved the letters in her backpack.

  * * *

  —

  In French class she repeated the verb to be, chanting with her classmates:

  Être:

  je suis / nous sommes

  tu es / vous êtes

  elle est / il est / elles sont / ils sont

  * * *

  —

  Teagan was thinking about the letters in her bag.

  “How would we introduce ourselves to someone? Teagan,” Miss Thomas asked.

  Teagan was unfocused. She looked blankly at Miss Thomas for a moment.

  “My name is,” Miss Thomas prompted.

  “Je m’appelle Teagan.”

  “And how would we say, ‘I’m pleased to meet you’?” Miss Thomas smiled impatiently.

  “I don’t remember,” Teagan said.

  Miss Thomas turned away. “Cierra?”

  “Enchanté,” Cierra answered.

  “Very good. Très bien,” Miss Thomas said.

  Très bien, very good, thought Teagan. She wasn’t very good. She hadn’t looked at her French book last night. Miss Thomas didn’t call on Teagan again. When the bell rang, Teagan picked up her bag without looking at anyone and headed for the library.

  It was a pretty library, with a winding staircase. She wondered why she didn’t come more often. She walked up the stairs and into a long room with yellowish light coming through tall windows. She chose an empty table and sat down, pulling the letters from her bag.

  Dear Teagan,

  I hope you are enjoying your new school. I’m proud of you for making the transition. Work hard and keep your nose clean.

  Love,

  Charlie

  It surprised her. Then again, she thought, she’d never read a letter from her brother. He sounded more parental, less friendly, than she’d hoped. Maybe he was more of a grown-up than she’d realized. Maybe he was feeling alone at their old school. She missed him and suddenly realized that she hadn’t just left Grace behind; she’d left Charlie, too. She wondered how he was and felt selfish. It was harder, after Charlie’s short letter, to open the one from Grace. She and Grace had never had to write letters to keep in touch before, but she could still hear Grace’s voice in the words she wrote. Grace mentioned something about goals for the new year, which was funny, but Teagan’s attention was already straying toward the third letter. She studied the handwriting. A woman’s, she thought. She opened the cream envelope and pulled out a stiff, embossed card.

  It took her a moment to understand that it was a wedding invitation. She’d never seen one before. Robert French was getting married to the woman she had seen in a closet, who wore a purple suit. Teagan guessed that the purple-suited woman had addressed the envelope. She dropped the card onto the table. She couldn’t believe that her father had not addressed the envelope himself. The least he could do was to address it himself. Teagan didn’t like that purple-woman had written her name.

  Her next thought was clear; she wouldn’t go to the wedding. There was no way she would go. She needed to tell someone. She needed to tell Charlie that she wasn’t going to go so that he wouldn’t go either. Or maybe they would go and rescue her father. Wasn’t there a moment in a wedding where someone in the audience was allowed to object? She’d seen it in a movie. She would stand up. She would object. And Charlie would try to pull her back into her seat, and her father would turn and look at her. She wouldn’t be able to stop herself, so she wouldn’t go at all. She picked up the envelope and a smaller card fell out. It read “The favor of your reply is requested.” She ripped it in half.

  Attend

  “There’s no way I’m going. Don’t go, Charlie. Don’t do it. He doesn’t want us.”

  “He’s our father,” Charlie said. There was a quiver in his voice.

  “Charlie, if I go, I’ll stop the wedding. I can’t sit there. Don’t go. Please, Charlie.”

  Invitation

  Teagan wasn’t sure what she wanted, but Susanna said that she wanted to be with Teagan for the weekend of the wedding. If Teagan had had time to figure out her thoughts, she would have come to the conclusion, as she did much later, that she would have preferred not to mark the occasion at all. Then again, when she knew she would see her mother, she was glad.

  Hunting Hill’s guesthouse was decorated in exactly coordinating shades of yellow, green, and pink. It made Teagan feel as if the only thing out of place was her. She hadn’t realized that the school had a guesthouse until her mother explained that she was staying there, and then suddenly, on a hill Teagan had surely seen before and walked past several times, was a small pale yellow house with a shingled roof and a white door. It even had a name, the Stirrup Cup, which referred to a silver cup offered up to riders on horseback before a foxhunt.

  When she mentioned this to Julie—that her mother was coming up for the weekend because her father was getting remarried, and that there was a guesthouse on campus called the Stirrup Cup and her mother would be staying there—Julie gave her a blank look and then said, “What the heck is a stirrup cup? You horse people are weird.” As a rule, Teagan would never tell Julie that she was right about anything, but this time she admitted to herself that Julie was right about two things: Teagan was a horse person, and horse people were a little bit weird. She was beginning to see this.

  Susanna arrived and called Teagan’s dorm to say that she had. Teagan heard the soft shuffling of feet outside her door and opened it to find Ms. Ganski taping a note to the door. Ms. Ganski smiled and handed the note to Teagan without saying anything.

  Teagan went into the bathroom. She splashed her face with water and, just because, she brushed her teeth. She laced up her clean blue Tretorn sneakers and briefly checked the pocket of her coat. The invitation was in there. She walked to the guesthouse. Inside the house, Teagan stood in the living room, or sitting room, which looked as if it were cleaned every day and no one ever sat in it. She looked at the brightly flowered couch, curtains, and rug, the rose stems of the lamps, and the green interior of a little bowl that sat on a yellow side table. It all made her feel sleepy and hungry. She went up the staircase, which she was now able to recognize as old, having been in a number of old buildings since living on Hunting Hill campus. The stairs seemed too small, narrow, and steep. Upstairs was a balcony hallway, and old, unevenly fitted white doors had little black numbers painted on them. She knocked on door six. Susanna opened it and pulled her daughter into a hug. Everything in the room was blue, yellow, and white. Teagan sat on the yellow striped bedcover and watched her mother unpack her few things and line up some toiletries on the top of the dresser. Teagan thought it was strange that the room had a sink under a mirror. She’d never seen a sink in a bedroom before, but it kind of made sense.

  “How are you?” Susanna said, hanging up a skirt in the narrowest closet Teagan had ever seen.

  “Fine.”

  “Really?” Susanna said, now fishing out a tube of lipstick from her purse.

  “Yes. How are you?” Teagan said.

  “Well, it’s surprising, isn’t it?”

  Teagan didn’t know what to say. She thought that if she were her mother, she would be at the wedding right now, ripping flowers from their vases or throwing dead birds at the purple woman. She didn’t know where the dead bird image came from; maybe they were doves. Her mother’s I’m-in-control vo
ice made Teagan want to lose control. How could her mother be so calm? How could she not be crazy with anger? Seeing her mother in the perfectly decorated room felt surreal. She felt as if her life had frozen since she’d come to school.

  “I have a puppy,” Susanna said.

  Teagan listened to the words. She didn’t say, “We have a puppy.”

  “I brought a picture. It’s a black Lab. I shouldn’t have, but I did,” Susanna said. She produced a color photograph of Barker looking, Teagan thought, suspiciously at a black blob on the kitchen floor.

  “I went to a horse show that Hope was riding in, and a woman brought these puppies. I held this one in my lap for about an hour. It was a bad idea, but there you go,” Susanna said.

  Charlie shouldn’t get to have a puppy without her, Teagan thought. “What’s the name?”

  “Max.”

  “Oh.”

  “Charlie named him,” Susanna said. She sat down on the bed beside Teagan. Teagan didn’t want her that close. Her mother’s “made-up” smell was familiar, a mixture of perfume and waxy cosmetics.

  “Do you want to see the invitation?”

  “You have it?” Susanna said, unable to hide her shock.

  Teagan rummaged through her coat on the bed for a minute. She pulled out the cream envelope. Her mother took it and slid out the card without hesitation, with practiced fingers that had opened a hundred such pieces of mail over a lifetime of invitations. The ripped halves of the reply card fell onto the bed. Teagan snatched them up and crumpled them in her hand.

  Susanna looked over the words on the invitation. “How do you feel about this?” she asked Teagan. It was as if someone had told her to say it.

  There was still time to go to the wedding. “I want to burn it,” Teagan said.

  Susanna looked at her daughter. Teagan could see her struggle.

  “A cleansing,” Teagan said. She didn’t know where she got the words from. Then she remembered. In Sunday school, they’d written down what they were giving up for Lent on strips of paper and then burned them in the sink. The fire and smoke had made Teagan realize that church was something real, something that had secret power in rituals.