Horse

by Talley English

  “All right,” Susanna said. She was smiling with the corners of her mouth turned down, a look Teagan reflected in her own face. “We need matches.”

  There were no matches anywhere in the clean, prim bedroom. Teagan hunted through the pink and green sitting room, opening drawers that didn’t even have a layer of dust to be disturbed. She circled the room. Didn’t anyone in this house ever need to light anything on fire? A plain white door set into the white wall caught her attention. She went toward it and it opened onto a galley kitchen. Bingo. She opened drawers of mismatched knives and serving spoons, and finally found little books of matches, the kind the girls who smoked seemed always able to produce when someone asked for a light. She climbed the stairs with one concealed in her hand, although no one was there to see. In the room her mother was timidly opening the drawers of a little dressing table.

  “Got them,” Teagan said.

  Susanna looked up. “You found—?” she said.

  Teagan was worried for minute that her mother would back out, say they shouldn’t.

  “We’d better put it in the sink,” Susanna said, and she lifted the card and envelope from the impeccably made bed and dropped them in the white porcelain sink.

  Teagan handed her the matchbook.

  “Do you want to say anything?” Susanna said.

  “It’s not a voodoo doll,” Teagan said.

  Susanna laughed. The first match was a dud. The second lit. Susanna lifted the card and held a corner of it to the flame. It caught and she dropped it into the sink.

  While it blackened and curled, Teagan felt mollified. Then the smoke alarm went off. In the small room the noise was immense. Teagan clamped her hands to her ears and her mother did, too. They looked around the room and Teagan pointed at the round wart of the alarm casing over the doorframe. She shoved the blue silk–covered chair over toward the door and Susanna stood up on it, Teagan holding on to the back of the chair and on to her mother’s leg to steady them both. After a minute Susanna got the plastic cover free and pulled the hanging battery from the wires. The beeping stopped.

  There was a knock on the door. Teagan and Susanna looked at each other.

  “Answer it,” Susanna said.

  Teagan pulled open the door as far as it could go, with the chair blocking it. A small blond woman wearing yellow glasses frames slipped inside.

  “I’m next door. I heard— Is everything all right?”

  “There’s no fire,” Susanna said.

  All three of them looked at the smoldering ashes in the sink.

  Teagan steadied her mother as she descended from the chair. In plain language Susanna explained that her ex-husband was getting remarried and that she and her daughter had decided to burn the wedding invitation, as if this was what one did. Teagan stayed quiet.

  The blond woman, as if trying to convince herself that she didn’t need to call the police, explained that the house had caught on fire once; that fire was a problem in old wooden houses.

  “We’re done burning,” Susanna said.

  The woman looked flustered and on her way out offered that, if they needed anything, she’d be happy to call the school for them. Susanna assured her that they did not need anything at all. Teagan smiled and gave a little wave to the blond woman, who, looking worried, closed the door.

  Image

  It didn’t matter. Teagan walked into the bathroom and splashed water on her face. The towel was soft against her eyes. She wanted to sleep. She couldn’t sleep. Teagan leaned her head against the cool of the painted cinder-block wall. She looked at the opposite wall, and the collage that she and Julie had spent about a week’s worth of afternoons making. They’d found all kinds of pictures in magazines and carefully cut them out and arranged them and taped them to the wall, overlapping images of models and cities and the interiors of fancy restaurants, jewelry and clothes, makeup and shoes, coats and purses, landscapes of Italy and Arizona, beaches and cute dogs, sunglasses and horses, all favorite things, or things they liked or secretly admired and wanted; as if the collage was an amalgamation of what successful adulthood might look like, or feel like, or be like; it was what Teagan thought she was supposed to want. In her sleepy, irritated mood, she suddenly hated the collage.

  What she wanted to do was rip it down, and especially all of the smiling faces, the languid landscapes. In her sleep deprivation, the images seemed to move a little in front of Teagan’s eyes, to shift. Teagan wanted to suppress those flickering motions; like a cat, she wanted to pounce. She placed both of her hands flat against the large area of thin, glossy magazine clippings, and then she curled her fingers, making claws, and the paper under them ripped a little, and then she swiped down, and the tearing sound was extremely satisfying. She ripped more and more, the cutouts settling around her feet.

  Teagan didn’t notice Julie right away; her roommate was standing, looking surprised, in the bathroom doorway. When Teagan noticed her, Julie turned to face her. Teagan was breathing heavily, as if the ripping of the collage had been tough physical work. When Julie said, “Teagan, what the hell?” Teagan simply brushed past her and crawled into her own bed, pulling up the covers. She could feel Julie standing over her. She could sense Julie’s anger almost like heat.

  “What the hell was that for? I worked on that for a long time. So did you,” Julie said.

  Teagan curled tighter in her blankets.

  After a moment, Julie went back to her own bed, but Teagan knew that the damage was done. Even if, after a while, Julie stopped being mad, there was no repairing the collage, and even as she tried to keep her crying to herself, muffled in her pillow, Teagan knew that they wouldn’t make another one.

  Reinterred

  Teagan walked to the Hawthorn after supper, without trying to hide from anyone. Students and teachers must have seen her go, but no one stopped her. She wondered if they thought she was so strange that they were no longer going to bother her. She was failing in her classes. Julie wasn’t ignoring her, entirely, but she didn’t have time for Teagan either. Teagan seemed to have slipped into a different version of Hunting Hill, one where she no longer existed. She went to class, she went to meals, she went to her dorm, but none of it seemed very real to her anymore, and she was so tired all the time. She was too tired to talk to anyone, and she was too tired to explain why she hadn’t done her homework.

  The ghost of Miss Guinevere was annoying her. She didn’t want a ghost for a friend anymore. She felt the ghost was pestering her, telling her what to do, telling her to do all the homework she was behind in, telling her to be a better Hunting Hill girl, even though Teagan felt that she could not be a better Hunting Hill girl. She simply could not. So, she walked to the Hawthorn. She climbed the actual Hunting Hill behind the barns, and she stood at Miss Guinevere’s grave again.

  “Go away,” she said. “I don’t need you. I want you to leave me alone.”

  Teagan walked away. As she passed the barns she saw that the side door was open. She went inside and along Ian’s hallway. The horses were munching their evening feed. There were sounds of eating and a sweet smell of grain, and a warmth from every stall containing a horse. She went to Ian’s stall and unlocked it and slid the door open. He turned to her and nosed her and smelled her, but he was also interested in his food, and he kept eating. She stroked his sleek neck and pressed her face against it and breathed in. He was real. The horse was real and Teagan felt real when she was with him. She also knew that she wasn’t supposed to be in the barn in the evening, so she kissed his nose and slid the door shut.

  Funeral

  The dream I had, when I woke up feeling so scared. Mourners gathered in a graveyard, and I was in the coffin. I looked up and saw the faces looking down. My parents were there. Charlie was. Grace was. They were surprised I’d died so young. I wasn’t dead, but I couldn’t move and I couldn’t speak. Couldn’t they see that my eyes were op
en? They were burying me alive. A minister began the funeral. I was running out of time. There was no time. I wanted to tell them they were making a mistake. I couldn’t believe they were going through with it, and I had no way to stop it.

  Lesson

  She was glad to see Ian. He did everything she told him to do and seemed happy to do it. She tacked quickly, because she wanted a few minutes to ride by herself before the lesson started. She rode along the fence line, trotting at an easy pace, absentmindedly gripping a lock of Ian’s dark mane. She heard a shout behind her and knew what it meant. She turned Ian and trotted to where the lesson was assembled. Miss Jessie was standing on the ground in front of the other riders on their horses. Teagan was glad Miss Jessie couldn’t hear her thoughts. She didn’t like Miss Jessie. Today she had the girls trot in two-point position (which was jumping position) in both directions, then they took turns going over a low cavalletti, and Miss Jessie called out her critique of each girl’s performance. Teagan felt removed from everything. She didn’t care about the exercise, the jump, the other girls, Miss Jessie’s instructions or her comments. Teagan let Ian do what he wanted. He was as bored as she was. When it was her turn, Teagan pointed Ian in the general direction of the jump. Her muscles did all the things they knew to do. She could have been watching herself. She had a feeling of detachment. Ian seemed to obligingly do what he knew to do, which was to trot, jump, trot, and then fall into his lazy walk, which, because he was a big horse, looked purposeful, even though Teagan could feel he was hardly making an effort.

  Miss Jessie turned to the group. “Girls, that was a perfect example. Teagan, come do that again and I want everyone to watch,” Miss Jessie said.

  Teagan was uninterested. Ian was uninterested. They both knew what to do and did it. “Beautiful,” Miss Jessie called out and signaled the next rider to move forward. She approached Teagan’s horse’s side at the end of the lesson and praised them both for their work.

  “Thank you,” Teagan said, and when she was sure Miss Jessie was finished with them, she loosened Ian’s reins completely and let him walk at his own pace. She hitched up her leg and reached down and loosened his girth while he walked. After she’d rinsed him off and wiped him down, she led him to his paddock. He began to graze the sparse grass, and Teagan walked up the hill.

  Psychologist (Vampire)

  It was a betrayal that her mother had set up the appointment. Ms. Ganski informed her that on Thursday afternoon she would be driven into town. Teagan waited for the Hunting Hill van in front of her dorm. She was furious, but had no one and no thing to take it out on. A shriveled old white man sat behind the wheel. Teagan sat in the back on a bench and didn’t pretend that she would talk, to him or to anyone. In town she walked into a gray stone building with a black shingled roof. It had once been a house, and she was tired of old houses. She had to fill out a long questionnaire and she made up the answers. Finally she was ushered into an office that had a large shiny wooden desk and two leather armchairs with brass buttons seeming to bolt them into shape.

  The furniture wasn’t so strange, but the man himself was. He was a vampire. His dark gray flannel suit had a thin white stripe to it, and he wore a black silk tie. His face was pale and sharply featured. And his hair was in a pompadour. She’d only seen Elvis with hair like that. The vampire’s dark hair had a single wide white stripe running down the middle of it, like he wore a skunk curled sleeping or dead on his head. The only thing that confused her was that it was daylight, and she didn’t think that vampires could be out in the daylight. Maybe he’d treated the windows with something.

  He offered her a scone. She thought about this for a minute. Why a scone? Was he going to have a scone? No, he wasn’t, he was only offering her one. It was obviously poisoned, or it would knock her out, so he could drink her blood. Why had her mother sent her to a vampire? To Teagan, this seemed to signal that her mother was out of touch. How could she not recognize a vampire when she saw one? The vampire walked around to the front of his dark, shiny desk, which Teagan knew was hiding a coffin, and he perched there and twisted his long, gray fingers together. “Do you believe in God?” he asked.

  Teagan thought about this. “Yes,” she said.

  “Then pray to God for comfort,” he said.

  She thought, Don’t tell me what to do.

  Hide

  It was the most childish thing Teagan could remember doing. She walked to the barn and went into Ian’s stall. No one came down the hall. Ian kept turning away from his hay and nosing her to make sure, again, that she wasn’t hiding an apple or a carrot from him. He didn’t seem to know why else she would be there, and her presence in his stall seemed to bother him. She wished she could communicate to him to play along, but she wasn’t sure what the ruse was. She finally realized that she needed to be seeming to do something, even though there was nothing she needed to do. Ian was groomed, fed, turned out, and brought back in by Shirley, who would normally tack the horse before lessons, but Teagan had bargained with her, promising not to be late to her lessons if she would let Teagan tack up. It had always been part of her routine and she was just used to it. Shirley seemed to understand.

  Her brushes, unused, were in her trunk in the tack room. Teagan could grab some brushes and then pretend she needed to groom Ian, and then she would come up with a reason why. She left the stall, walked down the hall to the tack room, and ran into her father.

  “I’ve been looking for you.”

  “Hi,” she said.

  “Your roommate said you might be down here.” He was frowning.

  “I had to do some stuff,” she said.

  “I was going to take you to lunch,” Robert said.

  “Ian wants to see you,” Teagan said, hearing herself talking like a little girl.

  Robert relaxed. “He does?” he said, in a voice that was meant to entertain her.

  “Down here,” Teagan said.

  The hall seemed long. They didn’t talk. Teagan pulled back the door and stood to the side, watching her father and the horse together. Ian didn’t seem to show any specific sign of affection, although he did nose Robert’s shirt and let Robert stroke his long face, and he didn’t let anyone but Teagan handle him like that as far as she knew. She was glad that there wasn’t a happy reunion between her father and Ian, just familiarity.

  “He’s a good horse,” Robert said.

  “He is,” Teagan said.

  Robert slid the door of the stall shut. “How about lunch?”

  Teagan looked at her hands. “Dad, I have a lot of stuff I have to do.”

  There was a silence, during which Teagan could hear Ian chewing hay.

  “I came here to see you,” Robert said.

  “Sorry,” Teagan said.

  “Okay.” Robert walked down the concrete hallway, his hands balled in fists.

  Teagan slid into Ian’s stall and sat there. Ian looked at her, chewing hay.

  Another Visit with the Vampire

  He seemed to be wearing the same gray flannel suit with the white stripe and the black silk tie. Teagan guessed that he slept in his clothes, in the coffin behind the desk. As always, he had slightly inclined his head with its dark roll of hair with the white skunk stripe and offered a scone, but Teagan had immediately put up her hand and said, “No, thank you.” The vampire must have read somewhere that humans really love scones and will eat them at any point in the day. She never expected him to eat a scone, because they were not blood scones, and she didn’t know if vampires could eat baked goods. She had the idea that maybe it was the same scone, proffered day after day, for months or years, unless someone actually took the scone, but she couldn’t imagine that anyone would. Through the session, Teagan tried to say as little as possible. The things she did say, she tried to make sound uninteresting, and to contain as little information as possible. The vampire perched in front of his desk. Teagan thought he
did this to guard his coffin. She looked at his gray, unlined, undead face.

  Then the vampire said, “How is your relationship with your parents?”

  It was a good question, one she had to think about, and one that would require self-analysis to answer, and she was not about to put that much effort into it. She cast around for a one-word response that would appear to have substance to it, and she said, “Complicated.” The moment she said it she knew it was the wrong word to have chosen. She had veered too close to actual feeling.

  “Complicated in what way?” the vampire asked.

  He had countered well. She thought about her next move. She would relay fact, with no emotion attached. “They’re divorced. They live in different places,” she said.

  “And that’s hard for you?” the vampire asked.

  What kind of a question is that? she wondered. How could it not be hard for her? But maybe he meant that it was unimportant? No, he’s out of touch, she thought. He has lost his connection with human lives, and he’s pretending to understand that her beating heart means more than circulating blood; that it means she experiences emotion, even though she was doing her best not to.

  “I’m okay,” Teagan said.

  “It seems that you are here because you’re not feeling okay,” the vampire said.

  Teagan thought, I’m here because my mother is making me take these appointments. She decided that the question did not deserve an answer. She considered offering him the scone.

  “How are you feeling about your parents?” the vampire asked.