Flying Changes (8 page)

I scootch closer, aiming the flashlight at it from various angles. It’s a tiny hoof.

“Oh!” I say, clapping my hand to my mouth in delight when I realize that the patch of white above it is a sock.

Another contraction, and a gush of liquid. The leg comes further out, and another appears, slightly behind the first. This one is sockless. I have to remember to breathe, gazing in wonder as the foal reveals itself by inches.

Another contraction, but this time the legs don’t move. When this happens again, it suddenly occurs to me that I haven’t seen the head. I shuffle forward to get a better look at the legs.

I gasp, horrified. They’re hind legs, and with the foal this far descended, the umbilical cord is almost certainly compressed. In a normal presentation, the head would already be out and the foal could start breathing. But in this case, the foal’s head is buried deep in Maisie’s abdomen. I have approximately two minutes to get it out.

Whimpering, I scrabble through the kit for the Purell. I squirt generous amounts onto my hands, rubbing them furiously. Then I tear open one of the packets of sterilized gloves.

I make the sign of the cross and glance at the ceiling. Then I take a deep breath and grasp a tiny foot in each hand. They’re too slick for me to get a good grip, so I
reach behind me for a towel. I rub them hard—so hard one of the feet objects, and I cry out with relief because it means the foal is alive.

“Okay, okay,” I say as much to comfort myself as Maisie.

I climb to my feet and stand with my knees bent, grasping the foal’s feet and waiting for another contraction.

When it starts, I pull with all my might. The foal descends by almost a foot, but then lodges, remaining in the birth canal.

“Oh no,” I say, my face contorting. “Oh no. Come on, Maisie,” I urge. “Just one more. Come on, Maisie!”

It feels like an eternity. I’m watching her so closely that I forget to blink. I sniff and wipe my nose on my shoulder, holding the feet, waiting.

When I see her abdomen tighten, I heave with all my might. The body moves, sliding toward me, but once again stops. I keep pulling, clenching my teeth and growling with the effort even as my feet slide out from under me. Since it’s now or never time, I stick my left leg out and brace it against the wall—still grasping the tiny hooves, still pulling with everything I’ve got.

The foal slips out and lies there, a black mass, completely limp. I crawl to its head on my hands and knees, desperately swiping the amnion away from its nose and face.

“Come on, baby,” I plead. “Come on!”

I reach for the towel, rubbing the foal’s head and body roughly.

“Come on, baby. Don’t do this to me! Breathe! Breathe, dammit!”

The foal suddenly comes to life, lifting its head and sucking a great lungful of air.

“Yes!” I shout. “Oops, sorry Maisie,” I continue, addressing the concerned mare, who has lifted her head and is looking behind her to see what’s going on. “Here,” I say, grasping the foal by the rib cage. I hold its wet fuzzy self close to my chest and turn it around, being careful not to pull or step on the umbilical cord.

“Here’s your baby, Maisie. Look—”

Maisie snorts and rumbles in recognition, nuzzling and licking her baby. The foal—a black filly with one rear sock and a perfect diamond of a star—squeals a high-pitched greeting.

I watch long enough to realize that not only are they both just fine, but any further involvement on my part would be interference. And then I retreat to a corner of the stall and sit on a feed sack, crying like a baby and watching one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen.

“Eva!” I burst through the back door of our house already shouting her name. “Eva! Are you up yet?”

She and Mutti appear in the doorway of the kitchen at the same moment, a study in contrast. Mutti is dressed and neat, her hair pulled into its usual bun of solid steel. Not a strand is out of place. Eva is wearing baggy pink pajama bottoms and a cropped T-shirt that displays plenty of belly. Her eyes are puffy and she’s barefoot.

“What?” she says, rubbing her eyes. She squints at me, looking me up and down. “Geez, Mom, did you even brush your hair? You look like a sea—”

“Get dressed! There’s something I want to show you!” I say, too excited to be offended. Besides, I probably do look like a sea hag.

“What?” says Eva, still suspicious, still scowling.

“Just get dressed!”

“I wanna know why!”

“Maisie had her baby. It’s a perfect, beautiful filly!”

Eva squeals and stamps her feet. Then she turns and disappears into the hallway.

“So, everything went fine then,” says Mutti, passing
me on her way to the coffee machine, which is full and steaming.

“Actually it was a breech birth,” I say.

Mutti’s head jerks around. “What happened? Is everybody okay?”

“They’re fine. Fortunately both legs presented, so when I realized that the foal was backward—not headless—I got to work and pulled her out. It took me a second to get her going, but she was up and nursing in half an hour.”

Mutti keeps looking at me. Then she turns back to her coffee. “Well, good for you,” she says, nodding proudly.

A blur of denim and pink fleece streaks through the kitchen, thumping on thick Nike soles. It stops by the door.

“Mom! Come on! What’s keeping you?” says my daughter, pulling the back door open. Her expression is of pure excitement.

“Wait, Eva,” says Mutti. “Annemarie, do you want a cup of coffee to take with you?” she says, opening the cupboard and reaching for my stainless steel travel mug.

“No, she doesn’t!” squeaks Eva. She dances with desperation, like a child who needs to use the washroom. “There’s no time for that!”

I burst out laughing, shrug at Mutti, and limp to the door, through which my daughter has already disappeared. By the time I’m stepping out onto the back porch, her car door is slamming shut.

“Oh my God!” Eva whispers as she stares through the bars of Maisie’s stall. “Look at her! She’s gorgeous! And so fuzzy!”

The filly is lying in the straw behind Maisie. She gazes back at us, her chocolate eyes shining. Then she unfolds her impossibly long legs and clambers to her feet, peering at us from under the safety of her mother’s belly.

“Isn’t she just?” I say. Prompted by who-knows-what, I put my arm around Eva’s shoulder. She reaches up and squeezes my fingers.

Maisie observes us, her eyes cheerful and inquisitive. With her ordeal behind her, she is bemused, calm, and pleased as punch with what she’s done. And the baby is perfection itself, in a fuzzy daddy-long-legs kind of way. Her mane and forelock are cashmere fluff, her tail a fat pipe cleaner that alternates between standing on end and twirling furiously. Her muzzle is tiny, her face angular, her eyes fringed with long lashes.

Eva suddenly looks strange. “Are you
sure
it’s a girl? Because, uh, isn’t that a…” she says, pointing.

“That’s the umbilical cord, honey.”

“Oh.”

From outside the barn, there’s the crunching of tires on gravel. A moment later a car door slams shut.

“And I’ll bet that’s the vet,” I say.

A man wearing a cowboy hat appears in the doorway of the barn, carrying a kit. “Good morning, ladies,” he says. “I hear there’s been a blessed event.”

“Indeed there has,” I say.

He comes up beside us and sets his kit on the floor. “Annemarie, I presume?”

“Yes.”

“I’ve heard all about you,” he says, winking. “Walter Pennington.”

“How do you do,” I say, blushing and taking his hand.

“Don’t worry, it’s all good,” he says, noting my discomfort. “And congratulations, you handled this situation like a pro.”

“Well, you know,” I say, feeling suddenly bashful. “I did what I needed to.”

“You saved her life is what you did,” he says. “Possibly the mare’s, too. If you’d called me instead, it would have taken me at least half an hour to get out here.”

I call the Hutchisons—Maisie’s adoptive family—on my cell phone while Walter checks the new baby. He allows Eva to act as maternity nurse—tying off the filly’s long umbilical cord with dental floss, dipping the stump in iodine, and fitting her with a tiny pink halter. He listens to her heart and lungs, and then lets Eva do the same, telling her what to listen for. However, when Walter kicks through the straw and locates the placenta, Eva allows as to how he can have the honor of disposing of it.

Not long after, the patter of feet on concrete announces the arrival of the Hutchisons, whose three daughters race into the barn amid excited squeals.

“Everything looks perfect with these two,” Walter says, coming into the aisle as the girls barrel past. He reaches out and grabs an arm. “Whoa there. Slow down. You don’t want to make the mother anxious.”

The girls collect themselves with obvious effort.

Walter turns to me. “You said there was another horse you wanted me to look at?”

“Yeah, he’s a real mess. I got him last night. He’s out back, because I wanted to keep him as far as possible from the other horses until you’d run a Coggins and so on,” I say.

I turn to tell Eva that we’re leaving, but she’s otherwise occupied, kneeling in the straw and introducing the Hutchison girls to the filly. She’s also regaling the entire family with vivid details of the birth and how brilliantly I handled it. I can tell how this is going to go down in our family’s mythology: it’s already taking on the proportions of a full-fledged fish tale.

I hurry from the barn, leading Walter to the northeast pasture.

He stops and whistles as Squire comes into sight. “Oh my-my-my-my-my-my-my,” he says. He sets his kit on the ground and ducks between the boards of the fence.

“Should I have called last night?”

He shakes his head. “No. A few hours either way won’t have made a difference. Fact is, someone should have called me a year ago. It never ceases to amaze me what people are capable of.”

Mutti was right, of course. Squire’s distended belly is due to parasites, and despite how large it is he’s seriously undernourished. He also has one of the worst cases of thrush Walter has ever seen, along with ulcers on all four legs.

He’s fast with his feet, and more than willing to use them. Walter is clearly an expert at dodging hooves, but Squire eventually makes contact with an audible crack.

“Shoot!” Walter leaps backward, clutching his arm.

“You okay?” I ask, tightening my grip on Squire’s halter.

He flexes his fingers, bends his elbow. “Seem to be,” he says, grimacing.

“Do you want me to twitch him?”

“Yeah. I guess you’d better. There’s one in the second compartment.”

I dig the twitch out and catch a portion of Squire’s upper lip in its looped cord. Squire peers resentfully up at me as Walter finishes treating the wounds on his back legs.

“We’re just trying to help you, you know,” I say, stroking his forelock with my free hand. I smooth it and lift it off to the side, revealing a long scar on his forehead. It’s at least six inches long, healed over, but bald and a raw pink.

“Walter, come look at this.”

Walter wipes his hands on his pants and comes around. “What is it?”

“His face. Check this out.”

When he gets out of range of Squire’s back legs, I release the twitch.

“Oh my-my-my-my-my-my-my,” says Walter again, and I think two things: first, that if I were his wife that phrase would drive me bonkers; and second, whether he says it because he doesn’t want to swear (the kick would have elicited at least a “shit” from me). And then I try to remember if I’ve sworn in front of him.

When Squire has been wormed, washed, twitched, injected, slathered in ointment, bandaged, had his ears flushed and teeth floated and been generally insulted in a million different ways, we leave him feeling slightly better about life through a simple bribe of bran mash. He has Bella to thank for that.

Walter packs up to leave, and I return to the quarantine barn. I am halfway down the aisle, moving silently
on soft-soled shoes, when I hear Eva segue from how wonderful-marvelous-beautiful the filly is to how wonderful-marvelous-beautiful her new baby half brother is. Of course, she doesn’t say “half.” She just calls him her brother.

I do an about-face and go see Bella.

On the evening of the next day, Eva and I are in the kitchen making tabbouleh, one of the dishes I have managed to master since she became a vegetarian.

She’s being sweet. Too sweet. She’s planning something, that much is sure.

“Mom,” she says, looking studiously at the parsley under her knife.
Chop, chop.
Pause. Quick glance up, and then back down.

“Yes?” I say, bracing myself.

“I’m sorry about the other day.”
Chop. Chop.

I stare at my own cutting board and the tomatoes upon it, waiting. Here it comes—

“If you let me ride at Strafford, I’ll let you get my tattoo removed.”

“What?” I laugh out loud. “You’ll
let
me? For your information, getting a tattoo lasered off costs thousands of dollars.”

We’re silent for a moment, chopping our respective vegetables.

I glance up at her. “Really?”

She smiles, sweetness personified. “Sure.”

“Huh,” I say, pondering. Another pause. “Eva, what do you want to do with your life?”

“I want to ride.”

“I know. I meant later, as a career.”

“So do I.”

“You don’t want to be a vet anymore?”

“No. I want to compete.”

“Are you sure? You know the money’s not very good, right? I mean, when you consider how much it costs to campaign even just one horse, a fifty-thousand-dollar purse starts to sound a whole lot less—”

“I know. I figured I’d take students in the off-season. I kind of thought I might do it here,” she says, throwing me a shy look.

Another pause, as I teeter on the precipice, both arms spread and wondering whether I have the courage to just let myself fall. I take a deep breath and lean into the void—

“Eva?”

“Yes, Mom?”

“I know it’s probably too late for me to do anything about getting you a horse in time for Strafford, but I’ll see what I can do, okay?”

“What?” She looks stricken.

“You heard me.”

She stares at me for a long time, waiting for the punch line. When it doesn’t come, she slams her knife down and bounds across the kitchen, nearly knocking me down with the force of her embrace. “Mom! Are you serious?” she shrieks, taking my shoulders in both hands and searching my face with her eyes.

When I nod, she whoops, and dances an impromptu flamenco with one arm thrust in the air. “You’re the best! What made you change your mind? No, never mind—I don’t want to know!”

The obvious subtext being that she doesn’t want me to reconsider.

She spins me around, plants a sloppy kiss on my cheek, and disappears into the hallway.

“Don’t forget, young lady—you owe me a tattoo!” I shout after her.

She crashes up the stairs and slams her door with such force the glasses rattle in the cabinet behind me.

Mutti sails into the kitchen. She stops, glances at the bubbling bulgur and abandoned cutting board and assumes the worst. This is understandable, because amazingly Eva sounds exactly the same in the throes of great happiness as she does when on the rampage—which is to say three times her body weight.

“What now?” sighs Mutti.

“I just told Eva that I’ll see what I can do about entering her in Strafford.”

Mutti stares at me for a moment, and then takes her place behind Eva’s parsley. She picks up the knife and begins chopping, lightning quick.

“And what are you going to do about a horse?” she says finally.

“I don’t know yet.”

Mutti doesn’t answer. I consider telling her about the phone call, but decide I’m not ready to leap off that particular precipice yet.

When the table is laid with hummus, pita, and tabbouleh, I go to the bottom of the stairs and call Eva.

I hover by the kitchen doorway, listening. After a few seconds, her door squeaks open, and shortly thereafter she thumps into the kitchen.

“Hey, Ma,” she says cheerfully.

The phone rings. I look expectantly at Eva. She
breezes right past and comes to a stop by her backpack, which hangs from a hook by the door.

I look at Mutti, who raises an eyebrow. I shrug and answer the phone.

“Hello?”

“Hello, Mrs. Zimmer. It’s Luis. Is Eva there?”

“We’re just sitting down to dinner, but you can talk for a couple of minutes.” I turn toward Eva and hold out the telephone. “Eva, it’s Luis.”

“I’m not home,” says Eva, rummaging around in the backpack’s outer compartment.

My eyes spring open. I clap my hand over the mouthpiece of the phone.

“I can’t tell him you’re not here,” I hiss. “He heard you! What’s the matter with you?”

“Nothing. I just don’t want to talk to him,” she says. She extracts a cherry-flavored ChapStick and applies it to her lips in a single round sweep. Afterward, she smacks her lips.

“Eva! He knows you’re here.”

“Yeah, well, now I’m not,” she says, grabbing her jacket and exiting. The screen door slams behind her.

I blink in horror first at Mutti, then at the phone in my hand. Mutti spins to look out the kitchen window as I bring the phone reluctantly back to my ear.

I clear my throat. “Uh…” I say.

“It’s okay, Mrs. Zimmer. I heard.”

“I’m so sorry, Luis. I have no idea what’s going on.”

“It’s okay,” he repeats gloomily.

Wait a minute. He’s not surprised. Why is he not surprised?

“Luis? What’s going on? Did you two have a fight?”

“No.”

“Then what’s going on?”

“I have no idea.”

“Well, something must have happened!”