“This is going to be the hard part,” Susan said when she saw the horse.
Mary couldn’t stand the thought of leaving Marty. Was that a terrible thing to say? Her best friend, her father, her own son, but the dog had never left her side. “I don’t know about this,” Mary said. “I’m not sure I want to leave.”
“It’s okay,” her father said. “You’ll be back later.”
“We’ll still be here,” Jeffrey said. “You won’t believe how fast it goes. Might as well be a minute.”
“You’ll look after everyone?” she asked her son.
“No,” he said. “We’ll look after you.”
They couldn’t help her on to the horse. Somehow that was part of the deal. They didn’t explain it and she didn’t ask them why because it was clear. She whistled again and the horse came to her, leaning down to sniff her pockets. Marty gave a low growl and Mary petted his head. Then she remembered the two carrots and the apple she’d brought for Nutmeg. All this time she’d had a little food in her pocket and she’d forgotten. She gave one of the carrots to Whistler. She had come back, after all.
Then Whistler lay down on the ground. For a horse it was an unheralded act of generosity. The fire had gone out, and her friend and her father and her son were standing together in front of the trees. She had tried so many times to teach the horse to do this as a trick, but horses weren’t interested in lying down unless something was wrong. Then she remembered, of course, that everything was wrong. She had to get herself on top of the horse with her broken ankle, her broken wrist and ribs, all of it on the right side. She would have to do it or she would have to die there, though dying there wouldn’t be the worst thing. Marty went over to her father, and her father picked him up and held the dog in his arms.
When Mary rolled onto her left side, the pain exploded, turning her vision green. She lay there in the sea of it, panting. “I can’t do this,” she said.
“Sure you can,” Susan said. “Take your time.” Susan had pink cheeks and a thick brown braid. She’d barely been more than a girl when she died.
“We’ve all done this,” Jeffrey said. “You’ll make it through.”
She hadn’t thought about that, but of course it was true. They had already died. All of them had faced the hardest thing and gone forward. And so Mary Carter dragged herself on top of the horse, enduring something so otherworldly that she would never be able to tell anyone about it. When Whistler stood again, she held to the saddle horn with her left hand, dug her left foot into the stirrup, letting her right foot hang. Whistler standing was not an easy thing, not for either of them. She didn’t know if she cried from the pain or from the wonder of it all, or if she cried because she was losing the people and the dog she had already lost. They waved to her, the three of them, and Marty barked as the horse picked her way down the hill towards home.
By the time he had finished, Daphne was crying too hard to say anything, but she knew now why Eddie had told her the story. They weren’t going to die.
3
Leda was lying in the bed beside me, staring at the ceiling, tears soaking the pillow beneath her head. “You thought I knew that story?”
“I don’t know. I thought you knew some of it? When I was nine, I thought you knew everything I knew. I thought we transferred information telepathically.”
“I didn’t get that one.”
“I’m not even sure how accurate my memory is. I mean, it’s been a long time, and it was fairly traumatic. And there’s no way Eddie was just giving me a recap of a book proposal he’d read. He must have made parts of it up when he told it to me. Recovered childhood memories, don’t you deal with this in your business all the time?”
Leda nodded. “Absolutely. So what part are you sure about?”
I rolled over on my side to face her. “The horse. I’m positive about the horse.”
“Tell me.”
“Did the dead people show up? Did the dog show up? There’s no evidence. Mary Carter had a broken ankle and broken wrist, two broken ribs and a collapsed lung. There could have been an infection setting in, she probably had a fever, dehydration. She went through a terrible fall out there, and no doubt things got worse as the days went on. Did she see things she didn’t reallysee? The further away she got from the actual event, the less she wanted to write about it, so maybe she wasn’t sure, or maybe she didn’t want to deal with a bunch of readers questioning her memories.”
“This was pre-internet.”
“I’m sure they still had imaginative ways of destroying people back then.”
“Or maybe Marywassure about what happened,” Leda said, “but as time went on, she came to think of it as private.”
I nodded. “I like that answer better, but either way, we’ll never know. The only thing anyone can be sure of was that the horse came back to get her, then brought her back to the ranch. Whistler was real.”
After breakfast and a long shower, after the walk to the trainstation and the train ride to Bronxville and the walk back to the house, I convinced myself that I should have called my mother by now, but there simply hadn’t been time. This was Sunday, and Jonathan and I had only gone to the Met last Thursday. But of course there had been free hours here and there, and in those hours I did not reach for the phone. I hadn’t even turned my phone on. When I did, I saw I had four missed calls from my husband, who never left messages. I had a tendency to turn off my phone, and Jonathan never left messages: two habits that were a source of irritation for both of us.
“Where have you been?” he said in lieu of hello.
If I was out of touch for longer than the length of a movie, then the answer to any question regarding my whereabouts was always going to be: At Leda’s. Jonathan knew that, no matterhow many times he acted like he didn’t. “At Leda’s,” I said. “Are you okay?”
“We’ve been going through papers,” Jonathan said, “which include love letters, camp letters, insurance policies, electric bill stubs, report cards, dress patterns. Would you have thought of dress patterns?”
