The $60,000 Dog: My Life With Animals (12 page)

“Wow,” said Jenny.

Rose bent into a small bow atop Oh Gosh! “Good story, huh?” she said.

“Great story,” said Jenny. “The is-land.”

“You like?” said Rose. “I’ve been told I have a way with words.”

We all nodded then, fast and hard.

“South, North, nearly, the story, the symbols … they’re kind of clever,” Rose said. “I sometimes think I should write about my life. She turned to me. “What do you think, Slater?” she said. She’d seen me scribbling in my notebooks.

I opened my mouth, but nothing came out. “So,” I finally said, “so you were gonna go Olympic?”

“Is that what I said?” Rose asked, narrowing her eyes on me.

“Yes,” I said, my heart skittering around. “You could have gone Olympic.” And then, suddenly, I found what words I wanted. “You could have, Rose,” I said. “Maybe you didn’t want to, but you could have. I can see that. I can tell; you’re
that
good. I bet you always have been.”

Suddenly, something swerved in Rose’s face, a subcutaneous shadow. “Is that what you see?” she said softly. She touched her face then, pressed the bone beneath the eye, as though trying to sense something about herself. Then she gestured widely. “Girls,” she announced, “don’t believe a word I say.”

We heard her say that. We heard the wind teasing the trees, the squirrels bothering the bark, their nails tap tapping the thick skin of the oaks as they scampered.

“Come on,” said Jenny. “No fair.”

“I’m not here to be fair,” said Rose. “I’m here to teach.”

“Teachers tell the truth,” said Em, who, at eleven and three-quarters, was the youngest in our group.

“That’s right, Emily,” Rose said, gently now. “They do. So let’s get back on track. Let’s stop with the stories. Cleverness is a distraction.”

And then, Rose pushed with her seat and Oh Gosh! began his high, hard walking again.

“Back to falling,” Rose said. “Here’s how it happens.”

Theresa raised her hand.

“Yes, ma’am?” said Rose.

“So, you’re going to show us how … right now?” said Theresa.

“How what?” said Rose.

“How to fall,” said Theresa.

“Right now,” said Rose

And then Rose pushed Oh Gosh! back into a slow trot. “But as long as I’m demonstrating this for you,” said Rose as she posted past us, her voice rising and falling with her body, “I’m gonna go full force. Because I’m only gonna show this once. This isn’t the sort of thing you do every day,” she said, and now she had Oh Gosh! extended into a canter, so in order to speak to us she had to shout as she streaked by, and still, her voice seemed like glass, smooth and unbroken, her sound and her skin separate, one on the run, one standing, terribly tethered. And as the horse kept cantering, she reached up with one hand, unsnapped her hat, and tossed it to us like we were bridesmaids catching a bouquet.

Except we weren’t. And the hat, it sailed well over our heads. We heard it thunk down somewhere deep in the distance of the field behind us.

“That’s against the rules,” yelled Aggy.

“You’re right,” Rose yelled back, because she was clear across the field now. “But I’m at a point in my life where I make the rules, so I can break them.”

Rose slowed Oh Gosh! down now, brought him back to where we were, still mounted on our horses in a line, Oh Gosh! trotting a tight tiny circle in front of us. “I’m doing this just to show you how possible it is to be totally head-safe on a horse, if you’ve got your technique correct. The hat’s gravy,” Rose said, squeezing with her legs so Oh Gosh! cracked into a canter again, and she streamed, yelling backwards, “What’s essential is your know-how.”

I heard her cluck, then, and Oh Gosh! stretched into a still faster canter, and then, somehow, at some point hard to define, he crossed the line into a full-fledged gallop, the pounding sound, the blur of her body passing, faster and faster they went, circling, Rose urging him on, high up on his neck like a jockey, flicking her whip just enough to tease him into terror, he flew, that horse, and we sat there, stone silent, overtaken, our own fear rising now, because she was going to do this, somehow, without a hat. She’d said she would but when? When? When? They kept circling, and just when it seemed there could be no more speed they acquired yet one more measure of it, the gelding’s legs almost entirely off the ground, and then she did it, pitched off, curled up, arm out, she didn’t fall first; she flew first, pushing herself off the horse so she soared for some number of feet, she was
flying
, I swear, I saw a person fly without wings, and then she went down, landing without a sound in the plushest part of the grass fifty, one hundred feet from where we were, Rose going down in the deepest blades and bachelors buttons at the other end of the meadow, in a field so thick with growth we couldn’t see her, and Oh Gosh! raced on until he realized he’d lost her, and then he slowed, slowed, slowly stopped, stood still, his head cocked, confused.

“Rose,” Emily called.

No answer. “Rose!” she called again, louder now.

Again, no answer.

“Holy shit,” said Jenny.

We kept staring at the place we’d seen her fall, who knew how many yards from us, from where we were, in that high meadow grass. We kept waiting, like when you see a person go under water, waiting for them to come up, and if they don’t, and if you love them, you also don’t come up, for a long, long time.

Without speaking, almost as if driven by a singular force, we each and every one of us dismounted. We knew,
knew
, a person doesn’t fall off a galloping horse, no hard hat even, and be okay. Be even alive. And as one, a single line of girls, we left our horses standing still, reins slack, stirrups down, we left our horses standing there and moved across the meadow to where we’d seen her soar and then sink, and then we were there, in those high green and golden grasses, which we parted—no Rose—and then again—no Rose—and then again, increasingly frantic, parting the grasses over and over to finally find, down at the cooler base of the blades, not Rose, but just one lone black boot.

Now, this was starting to seem … what? Without talking, again, as one mind, we moved forward, parting the waist-high water of meadow
again
, only no Rose, no Rose, no Rose, and it wasn’t until we started making sound, real sound, screaming “Rose! Rose! Rose!” that we heard her relaxed, velvety chuckle, and we whipped our heads around. “Rose? Rose?”

Again, that chuckle. Jenny was holding the single black boot by its rim. Rose was sitting on a rotting log at the edge of the field, eating an apple. At first, all I could think was, “Where did she get that apple?” And then she stood up and stretched in a casual way and said, “See how fine I am? Where’s Oh Gosh!?” At which point Jenny hurled the black boot at her and Rose caught it, expertly. “Don’t be crabby,” Rose said.

“You scared the
fuck
out of us,” said Jenny, her voice low and serious in a way I didn’t know she could sound.

Scared. Scared the fuck. The fuck. Scared.
And finally the extraneous curse word dropped away and the core word remained, repeating in my head:
scared.
I kept saying that word to myself and at the same time hearing it was already in the past tense. The
ed
of its ending was a footfall, an underline. The past tense. And it was at that moment I realized I hadn’t really felt afraid, until now.
My
fear was in the present tense, even as for the other girls it moved into the background as Rose explained her trick, explained it was a well-practiced move, aiming herself for the softest spot in a field she knew as well as the palm of her hand, having lived by it all her life, protecting her head with the bushels of hay she’d laid down, and her own arm, of course. As for the boot, well, she’d slid it off and crept to the log, under the cover of the tall grasses, her form diminished by distance.

The girls began to laugh. Far, far away from us, we saw all our abandoned horses, still in tack, lazily munching the meadow. Rose had made her point. You could survive almost any speed, almost any situation, with enough practice and finesse.

We brought our horses back to the barn, untacked, ate lunch, lay down in our bunks to rest. “Oh my god,” the girls kept saying. They whispered words like “talent,” “incredible,” “outstanding.” Jenny, leaning over her top bunk and talking to Theresa on the bottom, was explaining that great riding was like any great art, which was frequently accomplished through superior insanity, Van Gogh’s severed ear a case in point. Aggy, more cynical, said, “I think she’d bite off a horse’s ear before she’d whack off her own, if she went totally crazy,” and Theresa said, “Kids, she already
is
totally crazy, which contributes to her genius.” For the first time, I felt separated from those girls. I wasn’t impressed. I may have been enraged. In my head, I got the point. But in my heart, I kept seeing that single black boot, the shock of her absence, how the space where she should have been seemed to pulse, even ooze, with sunlight. I kept hearing her throaty, undulating chuckle, the rich, velvet creep of it on me. In me. I kept seeing how she popped up where she should not have been, at the edge of a field, on a soft rotting log, and that’s what kept going through my mind, this phrase:
Where she should not have been. Where she should not have been.

I knew what was coming next. Next, we’d all have to learn to fall, at the speed appropriate for our skill level. And all the girls would learn to do it, because that’s the way they were. Except for me. I knew I’d flat-out refuse, in flat-out fear, but also because of other things. Stubbornness. Anger, maybe. Maybe even rage. All mixed up with wanting.

I was right. The next day, and the day after that too, the girls minus me, going after genius, or simply trying to please, the girls went down to the ground, stood, shook, the dust flying from their clothes, their hats, their hair. A giddiness rippled through the camp. At night, in the cabin, the horse stories changed. They were no longer about death, but about situations survived. For the first time in a long time I thought of the Callahans’ fire, two, three years behind me now, something not survived. The sound of the sirens at night. The smell of char. Six children clawing at the windows. Six children and their father falling deeply into death. Every once in a while, after all their deaths, I’d caught sight of Mrs. Callahan walking through town, totally alone now, her coat blowing open, her devastated face drained. Over the years, the mother of those six seemed to grow paler in skin while her hair turned preternaturally dark, her lips more vivid. Eventually, we stopped seeing her. She must have moved, maybe to Florida, my mother had said. Or to Texas.

“What’s up, Lauren,” Aggy finally said to me one night, late.

“Yeah,” said the others. “What’s wrong? You used to always talk.” I could hear them rustling up on their elbows, looking towards me in the dark.

“You’ll get it after a while,” said Theresa. “I mean, we’ve been riding for years.”

“Yeah,” said Jenny. “You’ll get the falling trick. And as soon as you do, you’ll go intermediate. Personally, I wish someone had taught that to me way back when I was just a beginner.”

“You’ll get it,” the other girls said.

“I know,” I said. But I didn’t. I didn’t know much. I didn’t know why I’d dreamt about an angel with buzzing wings, or why air, which you needed to live, fanned fires that killed you to a crisp, or why I kept seeing that single black boot in the space where she should have been but wasn’t. I didn’t know why I was affected one way, everyone else another. I didn’t know then that some people are just that much more likely to see in a shared story darkness, where others see stars. I didn’t know that, nature or nurture, some bodies, some brains, are prone to feeling unsteady about their unsteadiness, a kind of tinnitus of the soul. For a long time, much later on, in my therapy-believing stage, I blamed my mother for all my fears, and then I blamed my brain, and now I don’t have time to blame anyone or anything, because my mandate is just to manage. But it’s taken me a long, long time to land here, where I am right now, typing these words, in the house where I live with my own daughter who is close to the age I was when I first fell for horses but couldn’t fall off them and went through all that a person does, all that tumbling otherwise referred to as growing up, and looking around, and if you are lucky finding in the world a single soft spot where you can rest your head, no joke, no punches pulled, a place you maybe first see from the sky, or on some speeding being, and gradually get to, despite the constant fog, touching down on the ground—no joke.

“I don’t know,” I said again, and I really didn’t. I had no way of knowing it would be years before I’d learn touchdown my way, my style, in the house I have here, with my husband and my soulmate son and my so-special-to-me daughter who loves horses with me.

Outside, in Westminster, right now, next to the country house where we spend our weekends, and where we will soon move to full time, is a field we will seed with alfalfa and timothy. The moon tosses some meager light on the moss-padded stones that are centuries old and, piled high, define the borders of what we own. The dogs are in for the night because there are coyotes in the woods. “Are there bears?” Clara asks me, and I tell her what I know. “I don’t know,” I say. And touch her head.

The fields, the meager light of the moon, the timothy and alfalfa, how I lost my mother and left my childhood home—left the Golden Ghetto when I was still a child, and for forever—how I landed here—all that is a whole other story, a part of this story perhaps, but not now. Not here. Next.

Here. 1974. The summer after the snow storms that covered the whole East Coast, knocked out people and power. “Do it Slater, do it,” Rose kept saying, but I didn’t. Rose knew my fear, smelled my stubbornness, and her nose twitched. Sleep got difficult, each drop down interrupted—snapped in half—I sitting up, holding tight to my sheet in the night. I didn’t do it Tuesday; I didn’t do it Wednesday. August came in a blast of black flies. The fields turned tawny in the August heat, and the vernal pools shriveled. The nights were dense, intense. Fireflies and falling stars. I kept clutching—a reasonable response, in my opinion.