Funerals for Horses (retail) Read online

  Then she disappeared, leaving us alone in a new world of retrospect. Simon breathed deeply when she left, as though he’d never breathed before.

  “DeeDee thinks this is all pretty funny,” he said.

  “Well, she did warn us. Hey, Simon, is it supposed to be so dark in here?”

  Simon held my face and stared into my eyes as though he might see some obvious evidence of my breakdown in vision.

  “You okay, Ella?”

  “Yeah, but we can’t stay here, Simon. Not even if she said we could, and she won’t.”

  “I know. Hey, look at this.” He rolled his neck around as if to stretch out kinks. “Have you ever seen anything so clean? There’s no dust in here. You think she dusts in here every day?”

  I walked the walls of the room, staring at close range like an old blind woman. I saw a teenage girl’s shelf of books, a bed with a ruffled spread, a locked diary on the nightstand. On the dresser I peered at a snow globe with Heidi inside, and a picture of my mother at about Simon’s age, which I held in my hands.

  “Wow, look at this, Simon. She was so beautiful.” I felt his comforting presence at my shoulder. “I never saw her look this pretty. Did you?” Her hair clung to her skull in tight ringlets, her dark lashes curled like a doll’s from her blue eyes. She wore a tight polka-dot dress.

  “Yeah, a while ago, maybe. When you were little. She’d get all dolled up and Dad would take her dancing.”

  Something moved inside me. I knew then why my father fell in love with her, which had always been hard to fathom, watching her vegetate on the couch in her old housedresses, and curlers that never seemed to turn into a hairdo.

  And then, knowing why someone would love her, I worried that she might not be okay.

  “Where do you think she is, Simon? Do you think she’s happy?” Simon wouldn’t, or couldn’t, answer.

  Just then Grandma Sterling appeared in the doorway, startling me, and the framed photo sailed out of my hands and landed on the braided rug. I rushed to redeem myself by picking it up, and kicked it out of my reach.

  Grandma Sterling scooped it up and returned it to its rightful place on the dresser.

  Simon grabbed hold of my wrist and pulled me downstairs and out the front door.

  “Simon, dear,” she called out as we trotted down her front steps.

  Simon whirled as if sensing a gun held to his back. “Thank you for the ice cream, Grandma Sterling, but we can’t stay”

  “Before you go, dear...”

  This is it, I thought. She’ll say some little nice thing, now that she knows we’re not staying long. Pleased to meet you. Come again. At least, tell my daughter I love her, which we could not have done.

  “Did your mother die?”

  Later I would learn to guard against hope, but this one last time I had let a flagging sense of trust in the rightness of things pull me in.

  My brother Simon only said, “What?”

  “Did your mother die that time?”

  “Uh, no. No, ma’am, she didn’t.”

  “Oh. I just wondered.”

  Then the click of her door, no kinder than its owner.

  “Why did she say that, Simon?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe the cancer surgery. Or because Dad tried to call.”

  “Oh, yeah.”

  We sat in the car together, and Simon leaned on the steering wheel and cried.

  “We could go to Mrs. Hurley’s,” I said.

  “We hardly know her.”

  “But she said if we were ever in Columbus we had to come see her. We can be in Columbus just as easy as Reading.”

  “I think she meant like in a year or two.”

  “But she didn’t say in a year or two. Don’t cry, Simon. I think Grandma Sterling liked you.”

  Simon laughed bitterly, but not as loud as DeeDee.

  THE MOON DOESN'T SAY

  Something propels me upward through a thick crust of unconsciousness, cracking the surface to allow a scrap of light to bleed through. A hand, behind my neck, a touch of warm metal at my lips, then cool water. I try to take it in, gurgle and cough, spill it down my chin and neck, but even there it is appreciated.

  Now I lose another couple of days.

  When I get one back again, it’s fairly useless to me. I’m lying on a couch in a modest cabin, in a long, clean white shirt, with a sheet thrown over me. A noisy swamp cooler works against odds to keep the air livable. The room is decorated in bones. Cattle, coyote, rabbit, god only knows what. Feathers. Native American pottery.

  My feet lie propped and bandaged. They feel too heavy. I don’t move them, so I won’t have to know what I’ve done.

  My first visitor is about three years old, a towhead, with a baby bottle of something amber, juice maybe, dangling from his mouth. He runs up to the couch surrounded by hound dogs whose whole bodies wag with the action of their tails.

  I hear a sucking sound as he pulls the bottle free, and a squeak of air rushing into the flattened nipple.

  He seems startled to see me look back.

  “Are you dead?” he asks.

  “Apparently not.”

  “Mom said you might be dead.”

  “Looks like it got better.”

  “Right,” he says, and runs away, the dogs running with him.

  I decide on a little nap; or rather, it decides on me.

  When I wake up, a woman sits on the edge of the couch with me. Kathy, so she says. Her golden-brown hair is gathered up onto her head, with just the right amount falling away again. She is younger than me. She hands me a cup that I assume contains water, but it’s warm chicken broth. I drink it all at once and feel better.

  “Thank you. How did I get here?”

  “You walked. Rick found you in the front yard. You were delirious with fever. You probably don’t remember.”

  I don’t, but it doesn’t seem necessary to say I don’t. I’m sure the blankness on my face says it all. She is a stranger to me, yet I’m an old friend of the family by now. I’ve been with them for days.

  She sits with me for a while, which I like, though I can’t seem to say so, and tells me my fever was a hundred and four when I arrived. She and Rick wrapped me in wet sheets, and the doctor came and shot me full of antibiotics. He said my feet were so infected that in another three or four days he might not have been able to save them.

  I try to thank her for finding me in time to save my feet. I can’t very well follow Simon without them. She says I found her. Whatever. I want to ask how Simon’s feet are holding up, and who will find Simon in time to save them, but I think she has enough trouble just saving me, so I ask where we are.

  She says we’re on the edge of Death Valley, fifteen miles from the nearest town.

  I say I have money, I’ll pay her back for the doctor, and she says we’ll work that out when I’m better, that I should get some sleep, and in the process of doing so, I lose another day or two.

  Long before my feet are ready to bear me, I decide to test the water, and I hobble out back to sit with Rick, my host, on rickety lawn chairs in the cool desert night. As soon as I take my first step I know it’s a mistake, but I finish the job anyway.

  “Mighta been too soon,” he says, pointing to the clean dressing soaking through with blood.

  “Guess so,” I say.

  He’s a bearded young man, twenty-five maybe, with thin brown hair cascading down the back of his collar, and an easy smile, which he gives away for free. We sit silent for a while, not so much out of awkwardness as respect. A yellow hunter’s moon hangs gigantic over a nearby mountain, washing the barrel cactus and prickly pears in a pearly, translucent light. Somewhere in the distance coyotes yip and bark in shrill voices, and the dogs’ hackles rise.

  I roll up my sleeves two turns, which I normally would not do, because he and his wife have seen the scars anyway.

  “You know,” Rick says, “you really can’t walk across Death Valley barefoot. Or just about any other way. Temperature can g
et up to one thirty-five by day. You wouldn’t make it, even starting out in good shape. You couldn’t carry that much water.”

  “I’ll be out of your hair as soon as I can,” I say.

  “You’re not bothering us any. Stay till you’re ready to move on. But let me drive you to Vegas. You can get a bus from there, hitchhike, whatever you need to do.”

  “If you’ll let me buy the gas.”

  “It’s not that far,” he says. He tells me a few old Death Valley ghost stories. Predictable ones, punctuated by yawns. Then he excuses himself and goes in for the night.

  I don’t bother to tell him that I damaged my feet so badly walking out here, I wouldn’t dare walk in again. I’d rather spend the night out in real life, anyway. I gaze up at the man in the moon and wonder if Simon tried to walk across Death Valley. I wonder if anybody found Simon, put a hand behind his neck and poured water into his mouth. But the moon doesn’t say what it knows.

  Its light floods my eyes, bigger than life, and I realize the tunnel is gone completely, and I cry. Because Simon would be so proud if he were here, that I came through so well. Then I realize he’d be proud of me for crying, and I cry harder.

  How do you stop crying, Simon?

  THEN:

  Mrs. Hurley died in Las Vegas, a little over a year after Simon and I found her again. We were there. The trip was an eighty-seventh birthday present, her own special request. The night before she passed away, she gave us an enormous handful of money that she’d won at the crap tables.

  She said it was because she never would have won it without Simon to blow on her dice. I think she knew she’d have no need of it where she was going, and although she seemed ready enough to move on, it must have troubled her to leave us to our own devices.

  The last thing she said to me was this: “Take care of that brother of yours.” My mouth fell open. Simon needed no care that I could see, and surely I’m no caregiver. Her voice fell a little thin then, but I heard her loud and clear, though it took me a while to sort out what I heard. “I always worry about the ones say everything’s okay.” I’m still not sure I completely understand.

  Simon tried to give the money back to Mrs. Hurley’s daughter when she flew out to make the arrangements, but she wouldn’t hear of it.

  “If she gave it to you,” she said, “she wanted you to have it.”

  We drove back to Columbus for our things, and for the funeral. Simon swears I attended, but I remember nothing to this day.

  I know I’m leaving out a chunk of history, the whole year we lived with Mrs. Hurley, but at this point in time I remembered not one day of it, so I feel it does not rightfully belong here.

  We moved to L.A., where Simon got a job as a gardener. By then he’d had experience. Simon was a good gardener. Plants couldn’t wait to grow for Simon. He inspired them.

  Simon found us a furnished room to rent in a private house less than two miles from Griffith Park. He enrolled me in school but I rarely attended.

  He dropped me at school every morning on his way to work, and from there I usually walked to a stable at the edge of the park and stood in a corral with the horses. They accepted me immediately. Unlike people, they don’t judge much by your outsides. They knew I was one of them.

  Problem was, when one of the employees came around to ask what I was doing there, I was pretty caught up in being a horse, and I spooked. I felt my eyes widen, showing white all the way around, as I pictured it, and I flew straight up and came down dancing. And the other horses, they followed my lead. I considered that a high compliment, that they would stampede on my say-so.

  Nobody else seemed to like it.

  The man—I think his name was Frank—hauled me out of there and asked who I belonged to, but by then I’d forgotten. By then I thought I belonged to the earth and the sky, and the sharp, pushing blades of grass that grew for me.

  Simon came and found me in time, and from then on they’d call him to come get me. Since he couldn’t be reached at work, and he didn’t come home until six, and since it caused a great stampede to scare me in any way, I found plenty of time to pursue equine grace.

  Standing in that paddock, shuffling in the green grass, the blue sky looked a mile wide, and I had to squint against the open brightness of the world. But as soon as Simon packed me in the car to go home, the world narrowed and drew in, going to gray at the edges.

  By the time we got back to our room, I had to stand a foot away and squint into his face as he talked to me, to follow his lips. Sometimes my hearing went a little flat, too.

  “We’re taking you to a doctor,” he said one day, and I eventually conceded, though I felt it might be cheaper and more direct to allow me to stand out with the horses.

  Simon bought me a health insurance policy, which required physical exams, and he stood close to me and held my hand during the eye exam, and talked to me about horses, and the harmonica Mrs. Hurley had given him, that used to belong to her freeman grandfather, and the tattoo of the rose I saw on her left shoulder. I’d forgotten all that. He even made me laugh, reminding me what she’d said when I saw it. “Never really know somebody, do you, child?” with a high-pitched giggle she usually reserved for evenings after a few slugs of apricot brandy.

  I was diagnosed as having twenty-twenty vision.

  Then Simon waited awhile to take me to the doctor, so it wouldn’t appear shady.

  In the evenings Simon and I would walk up to Griffith Park Observatory, or drive up if it had been a long day. Simon liked to look down at the lights of the city, and up at the lights of the stars, preferably both on the same night. He said it gave him a sense of perspective, how everything is relative to everything else. He said it reminded him that the world was so much bigger than just the part we’d already lived.

  We’d stand in line to look through the telescope, sometimes twice in one night, at Mars, or the moon, and the astronomer would tell us which craters we could see, or the name of a mountain range. I think he liked us.

  Simon told him he wanted to be an astronomer, but I didn’t know yet that he meant it. We’d stay after, when the viewing time was over, and Virgil—that was the astronomer’s name— would show us pictures in his books of the planets.

  Maybe he took a liking to us because Simon told him we were on our own, that he, Simon, was my legal guardian and worked as a gardener to support us both.

  At first I thought I might have ruined things by telling Virgil what I thought about the man in the moon. I said I knew exactly how he felt, floating up there in space, the only life on his barren planet, seen by a billion people who never believed he was real. Virgil thought about it awhile, then told me that just about every human being on earth must have felt that way at one time or another.

  Still, I think it was Virgil who talked Simon into taking me down to County Mental Health. Not in a mean way. I think Simon asked him what to do, and that was his best answer.

  Two things might have happened to cause Simon to ask for that advice. The first was the test results. I had an eye exam, and a brain scan, neurological testing, the whole nine yards. I was fine. Textbook normal. That concerned him, I think, because he might have wanted them to find some simple, obvious condition that could be treated with a drug or whatever.

  Then, upset by this news, he came to me one night and asked me to promise never to do what our sister DeeDee did.

  “Sure, Simon,” I said, “no problem.” I was always glad to do anything to help Simon out. “What did she do?”

  About two weeks later he got me an appointment at Mental Health. He took the day off work to wait in the big, bare outer office with me, stiff on folding metal chairs, staring down at our feet and the checkered linoleum.

  “Look,” he said, “they’re going to let you talk to a lady. Her name is Miss Rose. I want you to tell her everything that might help. Anything you can think of that’s important.”

  “Okay, sure, Simon. How do I know what’s important?”

  “Well, just w
hatever bothers you, or what goes through your head. Just be real honest with her, okay? So she can help you.”

  Miss Rose wore a gray suit with a straight skirt, and a little teddy bear pin on her lapel. Her hair was thick and wild, like mine, only drawn back in a barrette and not given its freedom.

  Her face was kind, but worn down.

  She led me into a room with a narrow table and two metal folding chairs. I wasn’t afraid, as far as I could tell.

  “My name is Wilhelmina,” she said, “but call me Willie. I like it much better. I hate the name Wilhelmina. What about you? Do you like the name Ella?”

  I shrugged with genuine curiosity. I watched her face, looking for things to like about her, and doing well so far. “I never really thought about it. I mean, it’s my name, right? Like it or not.”

  “How old are you, Ella?” I knew that Simon had told the lady at the desk, who had written it down on the same chart Willie held on her lap, so I concluded that she was attempting to put me at ease, which I already was. I debated how long I should humor her.

  “I’ll be thirteen next month.”

  “Your brother Simon brought you here, I see. Was it his idea, or yours?”

  “Well, he thought of it, but I don’t mind.”

  “Good,” she said. “That’s important.”

  My eyes drifted out her window to a solid wall of ivy that I knew in my head was a freeway embankment, but which I found strangely beautiful in that contrast, that frame. I’d been focusing strongly on green since my days in pasture seeing through the eyes of a horse. Just gazing out the window brought light into my field of vision.

  “May I say some things?” I said. I knew it might take a while her way, and I wanted to tell her everything Simon would want me to say.

  “Yes, of course, Ella—you can say anything you like.”

  “I can think of three things.” I decided that sitting on a metal chair with my hands on my knees felt confining. “Can I sit on the windowsill?”

  “Wherever you’re comfortable, Ella.”