“Did you ever have a horse?” Daphne asked.
Eddie laughed. “I’ve never even touched a horse.”
She might have told him about going to day camp last summer and how there were two days in which they were put on horses and a counselor led them around, but she didn’t want to distract him, so she just said, “Oh.”
“So by the time this story starts, Whistler had been Mary’s horse for a long time. Her children were grown, though Sarah still worked with her parents. One day a storm came up and blew a gate open. They’d been meaning to fix that gate for a while, the latch wasn’t right, but they hadn’t gotten around to it and now Nutmeg was gone. Mary didn’t know how long ago it had happened, but Nutmeg was a sweet horse and she was old by now and she probably hadn’t gone far, so Mary saddled up Whistler in the rain and went out to look for her. Whistler was about eight years old then. Mary didn’t even have to whistle for her anymore. Whenever she went out to the paddock, Whistler came to her. She remembered thinking, Oh, Whistler would never run off.
“It was still raining, but it wasn’t bad. She had a slicker on. Mary’s husband and daughter had taken the truck into Sheridan to get some things from the hardware store and the feed store and the grocery. She didn’t leave them a note because the drive there and back with all the errands took half the day. Mary would be backbefore they got home. She put an apple and a couple of carrots in her pocket, got an extra bridle, and she and Whistler rode off to find Nutmeg.”
“I don’t have a good feeling about this,” Daphne said.
Eddie’s hand was on her head, on her hat. “I wasn’t sure this would be a great story to tell you. Do you want me to stop?”
“No,” she said. “Don’t stop.”
“Okay, but if you change your mind, you tell me. We can stop. I can tell you the other part when we’re back home, or I can tell you when you’re grown up.”
“Tell me.”
Eddie repositioned his shoulders. The left one was definitely wrong. He hadn’t thought about it because his ankle took precedence over everything else in his body, but still, he could feel it. “Mary went up the hill where the sheep liked to graze, but Nutmeg wasn’t there. She decided to go farther up, up to where it turned rocky, because there was a place with a good view from which she’d be able to spot the horse, but when she got there, she looked all around and didn’t see her. Part of the problem was the rain, which was coming down harder now. She couldn’t see much of anything. She decided to keep going up, though Nutmeg could as easily have gone down to the lower pasture. She had to look, she had to start somewhere. Mary and Whistler went farther and farther, and even though Mary was sure she’d been over every square inch of this land, she didn’t remember it. Nothing looked familiar. She rode out another mile or so and was starting to thinkthis was stupid and she should go home and wait for her husband and daughter to come back and help her, when a bolt of lightning made Whistler rear up and Mary fell.”
Daphne dug her face into Eddie’s arm. “I don’t like this part.”
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” he said. “I thought this might be too scary.”
“Does she live?”
“She lives,” Eddie said.
“And the horses?”
“Everybody lives,” Eddie said, because the creation of narrative tension was not his objective. He only meant to take her mind off the fact that they were trapped in the freezing car. He meant to take his own mind off of that as well.
“Okay,” Daphne said, taking in a deep breath. “Go ahead. I’m ready now.”
“You’re a champion.”
“Tell me what happens.”
He told her it was a hard fall. Maybe Mary lost consciousness, but only for a minute or two. When she opened her eyes, the rain seemed to be about the same, and the light, not that there was much light with all the clouds, but the light was the same. Her ankle had gotten twisted in the stirrup. She knew it was broken, and so was her wrist. Never put your arm out when you’re falling off a horse, but how can you stop yourself? Based on how much it hurt to breathe, she guessed she’d cracked a rib or two. She tried to sit up, but it was too much, so she lay back down in the grass. Shelifted her head and looked around in the rain for Whistler, but the horse wasn’t there.
“Whistler isn’t there?” Now Daphne was scared, because Mary was alone and badly hurt. She wouldn’t tell Eddie to stop the story, but she sort of wished he’d never started.
The lightning had spooked the horse. Wherever Whistler was, she was probably still running. Mary put her head back down in the grass. Now there were two horses gone. She was still thinking about what had happened in terms of the horses. After another twenty minutes or so she began to understand what had happened to her. She was badly hurt and alone in a place where no one in her family normally went. She had no way to get herself out of there.
Eddie hadn’t thought this through. Not only was the story too scary, it was too close to home. But this was what he had started and now there was no way out but through.
The rain came and came. May was a month more tied to winter than spring. Water seeped beneath Mary’s slicker and spread up the back of her flannel shirt and then around to the front until she was so wet she might as well not have been wearing a slicker at all. She opened her mouth to drink what she could. There was nothing else for her to do but wait. The rest of the day passed and no one came. At night she thought about wolves and the sheep. She would have said she didn’t sleep at all, but when she opened her eyes, the rain had stopped and the sky was full of stars, so many stars it almost looked white in places.
“The way the stars looked before we went off the road,” Daphne said.
“Like that,” Eddie said, “and maybe even more because Mary was fifty miles from town and that town was small. There was no other light where she was. She looked at the stars. For all the pain she was in, she loved the stars.”
“She lay there and loved the stars?”
“There was nothing else to do.”
“Then what happened?”
