“So if it wasn’t part of the costume, what was it for?”
“At the time, I think what I thought was that my mother, she sort of . . . She had all these pamphlets and tracts lying around that she had collected. Religious tracts, Catholic prayer cards, but also things about Atlantis, Mayan religion, the, what is it, ‘transmigration of souls.’ All kinds of nonsense like that. It felt to me like that thing”—she pointed vaguely at the skull—“came out of all that religious mystical crap.”
“You mean, like, it was almost kind of a, something she prayed to? An idol?”
“Not, I don’t know, I mean, I was ten years old, I guess I thought—”
“You thought she was worshipping a horse god.”
“I don’t know if I went quite that far in my thinking.”
“But now?”
“Now I don’t think about it.”
“Yeah, I know.”
“You don’t approve. You think I should just keep dredging it all up all the time.”
“Not all the time. Just, like, every ten years or so.”
My lame attempt to lighten the moment failed. She was looking at the skull straight on, and I saw that it was simply hateful to her.
“Mom,” I said. “Forget it.”
She made a Gallic noise of my grandmother’s for which there is no good onomatopoeia, so I suppose harrumph will have to do. If she were a woman of my generation, she might have said As if.
“I understand,” I said.
“Oh? Okay.”
“That sounded patronizing.”
“You want to know what I think now?”
She surprised me by grabbing the skull, swooping it off the table, and shoving it toward me, snout first. I jumped back, knocking over a kitchen chair. It’s possible that I may have screamed.
“She wasn’t worshipping the Skinless Horse with this thing. She was trying to ward it off.”
“Whoa,” I said. “Mom.” I picked up the chair I had knocked over. “You scared me.”
“Right,” my mother said.
*
On the fir floor in the upstairs hall at the edge of the Chinese runner, my grandfather noticed a drop that looked like blood. It took the print of his finger and left a taste of salt on his tongue. In the doorway to the upstairs bathroom, a droplet had starred the wooden transition strip between fir and tile. In the bathroom across the grid of black and white tile, four asterisks pointed like the handle of the Dipper to a blood Arcturus in the space between the toilet and the bathtub. My grandfather’s heart lurched. He turned to confront the bathtub.
It appeared to be empty, clean, and dry, but he forced himself to stare at it long and hard. He felt that if it contained my grandmother’s body steeped in a tea of her lifeblood and Baltimore tap water, he could not trust his eyes to report nor brain to comprehend the fact. Shock could be a kind of plate armor. He gave horror, pain, and loss all the time they needed to pierce it. But there was nothing, only the shine on white porcelain and her flask of Emeraude bath oil, its note of benzoin a lingering sting in the air.
My grandfather went to the toilet and lifted the seat. On the underside of the left-hand branch of its U, at the tip, he found a comma, a little fish of blood. He folded some toilet paper, dipped the paper in the bowl, and wiped away the little fish. He ran some water on a washcloth and wiped away the stains on the floor. Then he stared down at the crossword-puzzle tile. Ruminating, only half aware that he was also taking a long-deferred piss, he considered clues and hints. He ransacked his store of experience of my grandmother and her behavior. He penciled in a few possibilities:
My grandmother had been attacked, in or just outside the bathroom, and carried off by some intruder. She had suffered internal injuries or fought back and bloodied her assailant. In the absence of other physical evidence, this did not seem a likely scenario, yet even after he had searched the house from cellar to attic, finding no sign of intrusion, he could not shake the feeling that there had been someone in the house.
My grandmother had injured herself, accidentally or on purpose. She was not accident-prone, but she had gone through periods during which she bit her cuticles or scratched her shins with her fingernails until she bled. On one occasion she had plucked her eyebrows clean, and though this produced no blood, it had struck him at the time as a kind of self-injury or, better, self-vandalism.
She had been surprised by the onset of menstruation or by a flow that was unusually heavy. If she was menstruating, and in particular if more heavily than usual, this might have triggered some kind of psychological disturbance to explain both her absence from the house and the presence in her sewing room of a horse skull with paperweights for eyes. It had long been apparent to him, though at a level of consciousness too low for observation and plotting of data, that there was some kind of association between his wife’s monthly cycle and the ebb and flood of her sanity.
Following on this third possibility, he caught the flickering of a fourth at the horizon of his thoughts, but like a lightning strike, it was gone by the time he looked its way. In the meantime, in some other part of his mind, my grandfather’s pessimism and the brute-force denial that he deployed in place of optimism contended over the question of whether he was making a mountain of a molehill here. Big deal, a few drops of blood, a hastily improvised and unhappily conceived horse costume, an absence that was not usual but hardly unheard of, especially when my grandmother had a show to do that night . . .
He shook off this line of thinking and its appeal to his reptile-brain optimism. Something was wrong, felt wrong. He had known it as soon as he’d seen the bagpipe records on the console. In general, my grandmother in the grip of a mood was inclined to hole up, shut down, or curl inward. But sometimes the woman would just bolt. Taking off that night when the police picked her up, ill-shod, ill-dressed, booking along the sidewalk with a forward cant and her arms held fixed at her sides, conversing with invisibilities of pain, presenting like a classic urban nutcase, flying her Night Witch hair like the flag of madness.
My grandfather went back into my mother’s bedroom. She was sitting up, rocking back and forth at the edge of her bed, holding the carved horse that, working in the driveway one evening long after dark, he had inadvertently painted blue instead of black. He had been annoyed by the fuckup; naturally, that one turned out to be the favorite, the one on which she bestowed the power of flight. The girl was a labyrinth to him; only by chance and error did he ever stumble blindly into her heart.
Her face was puffy and she wore a stoical expression. The rocking reminded him of the little girl he had met for the first time on a bench in the cold outside Ahavas Sholom. Defiantly serving out the inhumane term of a punishment she had imposed on herself, confusing obedience with rebellion and vindication with endurance.
“Come,” he told her. “Put your costume on. We’ll find your friends and you’ll go with them.”
My mother shook her head.
“I have to go out,” he said. He decided to lie to her. “Your mother’s up at the studio, she forgot the book she’s going to read tonight. I need to take it to her.”
“I’ll come with you.”
“Eh, you know, Pat’ll be working the desk tonight, you know how he is about kids hanging around.”
“I’ll wait in the car.”
“You don’t want to go trick-or-treating?”
“No.”
“Okay, listen. I tell you what. Your behavior, recently, your manners. Your schoolwork. I’ve been meaning to tell you. They’ve really been very good.”