The Blessings of the Animals_A Novel

CHAPTER Fifteen

OVER THE NEXT WEEKS I MOVED IN A FRENZY THAT KEPT me from feeling much of anything except heartbreak for Gabriella. How did I offer her hope when I felt none myself? “Why marry?” she asked. “Why risk it?” Because, I wanted to tell her, when you got it right, it was the most liberating, inspiring state of being on the planet—a true partner in your corner, a mate who witnessed every aspect of your life. But the flip side was so stabbingly evident: when you got it wrong, it was at best anesthetizing, at worst a splintering kick to the teeth.
Vijay e-mailed. He was back in the States but unable to come to Dayton. He was working on a three-part pandemic flu story for his TV show. “Haraka haraka haina baraka,” Vijay wrote at the end of one of his e-mails. He didn’t translate it, which was unlike him. I didn’t ask. I assumed it was in his parents’ native language.
I dismantled my shed to free my tractor. I had three potential adopters out to meet Zeppelin the pony. I did the Humane Society paperwork on the removed horses and cats, logging long hours into the night, downloading photos, preparing evidence. Aurora marveled at the casework, “You did all this yesterday? Are you sleeping ever? Are you taking cocaine?”
Olive came over often. Her expansive nature and dramatic stories fed us. I liked letting her feed us literally as well, cooking us spaghetti and meatballs and leaving Bobby’s kitchen a train wreck. Her spaghetti was not nearly as good as Mimi’s or Bobby’s, but it passed for “real food” in Gabby’s eyes, letting me off the hook for just a bit longer.
When Gabby went down to the barn one day, I found out Zayna hadn’t been at the party, but my relief was short-lived when Olive said, “But Nick and I had dinner with them last night.”
“Them?”
“Bobby and Zayna.”
Olive made a face, but the words clawed open my chest. I knew Bobby was her brother. I knew Olive loved me, but it ripped my heart out to picture them all being nice to one another.
If someone had hurt Olive the way Bobby had hurt us, that someone would be dead to me.
And Nick! Sweet Nick—how hard would it have been for him to tell Olive, “I’m not okay with this. I don’t really want to pretend to like Bobby right now.”
Was I being a baby? Was there no loyalty? Did it not matter to them what Bobby had done?
Olive might call Bobby a bastard and Zayna a slut, but the bottom line was she’d sit and laugh with them in a restaurant. I wanted to choke on the spaghetti I’d pushed around my plate.
I headed for the barn after Olive left. I leaned on Moonshot’s fence—I’d given up on the electric tape and never bothered to turn it on anymore. Muriel stood beside me, butting her head against my leg.
I thought of what Gabby had said: You look like you’re praying.
So I practiced the form of prayer I’d practiced all my life, being in the presence of animals. I soaked Moonshot’s feet again. As I got his hooves settled in the buckets, I watched in awe as Muriel scaled the paddock fence as nimbly as a child. She and Moonshot snuffed each other’s breath, then she pulled mouthfuls from his hay pile, nibbling her sideways chews.
I brushed Moonshot’s matted coat. I’d put off trying to comb his tail, wary of those back legs, but now I eyed that gnarled mess—it looked like three or four bird nests knotted together. I pulled the tail to the side, out of range of those hooves, and began loosening the tangles, pulling out straw, clumps of dirt, and manure. To my surprise, Moonshot didn’t just tolerate this attention but seemed to enjoy it. He stopped eating, eyes half closed, ears drooped to the sides.
I massaged his tail’s dock—the portion with the bone and muscle—and his lower lip relaxed. He began to snap his front teeth together while bobbing his head, the equivalent of a dog involuntarily thumping his leg when you get just the right spot.
I tried to be in the moment, just as Moonshot was. I emptied my mind of Gabby’s bleakness, Zayna’s betrayal, Bobby’s cowardice. I just combed this horse’s tail.
The water in the buckets cooled. When I stopped finger-combing Moonshot’s tail, he moved his hind end abruptly toward me, knocking over both buckets, startling all three of us—Muriel springing to her cloven hooves and climbing out of the paddock.
After a rush of adrenaline, I recognized he was saying, “Don’t stop.” So I moved the buckets and combed his tail for twenty more minutes, soothing us both. He tried to get me to continue again, but I patted his rump and said, “That’s all for now, handsome.”
I exited his paddock, feeling calmer and centered. Feeling fine.
I SAW MY FIRST ATTORNEY AND HATED THE ENTIRE EXPERIENCE. I sat in the lobby, repeating, People do this every day, to calm myself, but I felt I should have had a giant red D emblazoned on my forehead. The attorney herself was too slick for my taste, whippet thin, with a face taut from plastic surgery. She wanted to take Bobby for all he was worth, the restaurant, all of it, even though I told her I only wanted to protect Gabriella and keep the farm. When the attorney tapped some figures into a calculator and told me the monstrous spousal support Bobby could owe me “for five years or more, and that’s before we even talk about child support,” I glazed over, wrote a few notes, and knew I would never return.
EACH TIME I SOAKED MOONSHOT, I WAS ABLE TO HANDLE him a little more. Whenever he grew agitated with my other ministrations, I returned to his tail. Over the course of two weeks, with nearly a bottle and a half of ShowSheen, a wide-toothed plastic comb, and my fingernails, I could run my fingers through the elastic black hairs with no knots or tangles stopping me.
BOBBY AND I WENT THROUGH A BRIEF SPATE OF E-MAILS AS he continued to call Gabriella seven to ten times a day (I checked; she never answered or responded, to his or to Tyler’s messages).
When I called Bobby on the “If I hadn’t done this, I’d be dead” statement, he wrote that “Keeping this secret was killing me. A good day was a day when I didn’t think about killing myself.” I’d suspected he’d been depressed, but the idea that he’d been suicidal and never shared it with me, his wife, supposedly his closest friend, brought me to my knees. Literally.
DAVY FOUND ME SITTING ON THE FLOOR OF MY OFFICE AFTER I read that e-mail. He’d come over to accompany me to Gabriella’s choir concert that evening. I’d heard him knock but couldn’t pull myself together. He came in, cursing as Muriel tried to squeeze past him. When he found me, I saw sympathy in his eyes, but only for a second before he turned tough. “Get off the floor.”
He pulled me, roughly, when I didn’t stand on my own. “Get the f*ck up off the floor.”
Once I was on my feet, he said, “No man puts my sister on the floor. You hear me? You wanna cry, you can cry in a chair. On the couch. In your bed. But not on the floor.”
The thing was, I wasn’t crying. I’d been too stunned, too leveled to cry. When I nodded, he kissed my forehead, then held me at arm’s length. “Let’s get you dolled up. You look like shit.”
As he supervised my makeup and hair and selected clothes from my closet, he asked, “Bobby’s gonna be there, right?”
I shrugged. “I told him about it—but who knows.”
“He better not bring that little slut with him.”
Slut made me wince. I thought Zayna had proven herself terribly misguided and much more shallow than I’d originally thought her, but I didn’t blame her the way I blamed Bobby. I could see her line of reasoning and understood it: this seductive, sad man—of course she wanted to try to save him, to lift him up, to be the reason for his smile. It was an instinct old as time—I will be the one. I will love him the way he needs to be loved.
Turns out Bobby did attend the concert, but with his mother, not the slut. My parents attended, too. Fortunately, Davy and I were late. The auditorium was crowded enough that we all ended up far away from one another, and no one had to worry about logistics.
Two soft, hymnlike songs in a row made me close my eyes. When I did, I pictured the farm. Pictured Moonshot. Could feel that clean, luxurious tail under my fingers.
Afterward, I expected to feel gleeful when Gabby came to me first with a big hug, but instead I felt wretched to realize: this is her life, forever dividing her affections, doling out her love. We’d failed her.
ONE AFTERNOON—AFTER ZEPPELIN HAD BEEN HAULED away by a family with an eleven-year-old girl who would worship him—I filled groundhog holes way out in the back pasture (which is a chore that does indeed need to be done, but perhaps not with such daily diligence as I’d been doing it lately). After I’d emptied the wheelbarrow of gravel, I returned to the barn to find a horse—a fetching gray mare I recognized as one of my dad’s old event horses, Caroline’s Cantata—dozing in the goat’s stall. One of my parents was here.
Their trailer stood by the scrunched-necked St. Francis. An aroma startled me as I went into the house—lemon roast chicken. One of Bobby’s recipes. The aroma ambushed me with the image of Bobby rubbing butter over the chicken’s skin and putting half a lemon into the chicken’s cavity while we talked over the day in the kitchen.
I walked into that buttery-lemon smell and found my mother in Bobby’s kitchen.
“Hello!” She smiled too brightly, not making eye contact, and spoke quickly. “I was in the mood to cook and thought I’d bring you girls a nice meal. I hope you don’t mind. I brought Cantata and hoped you and Biscuit would join us for a trail ride in this lovely weather.”
Was it lovely? I hadn’t noticed as I shoveled gravel from the wheelbarrow. I tried to think of an excuse. Why didn’t I want to? “I need to go back to the clinic this evening. I’m sorry.”
My mother’s frown bruised me, a frown of sorrow, not of judgment.
To divert her, I asked, “Is this the chicken Bobby always made?”
Mom nodded. “He told me how to do it once, when I asked.” She said it absently, looking inside one of the stacked ovens. Then she turned, took a deep breath, and said in a rush, “I’m afraid you kids are going to wreck this. Things are being set into motion that can’t be undone.”
Oh. That’s why she came. “It’s already wrecked, Mom. No ‘going to’ about it.”
“Have you tried talking to him? I mean sitting down and really talking?”
My sleep deprivation and hunger made me vicious. “To say what? Look, not everybody forgives a cheating spouse, okay? Some people have more self-respect than that!” Oh, shut up. Shut up. Why couldn’t I stop myself? I knew what this felt like!
Mom flinched but didn’t look as offended as I thought she deserved to be. “It takes great self-respect to forgive,” she said.
“You forgave too much. I’m not you, Mom. I can’t do it.”
She watched my lips move as if she were deaf and trying to lip-read. She spoke slowly, as if figuring out a puzzle. “You think I forgave too much?”
I nodded, feeling sick. Shut up. Just shut up. I wasn’t mad at her. I needed to eat.
“What are you talking about?”
I fought the urge to run from the room. “Well, you know. That year . . . that year, Davy and I figured it out. We knew.”
Mom watched me for a moment. “What exactly did you and Davy think you figured out?”
Why had I opened my poisonous, hateful mouth? Here was my mother sweetly cooking for me, and how did I repay her? “You know, that Dad was . . .” It seemed callous to say he was “cheating on you” or “sleeping around.” I scrambled for the words. Mom waited, her face open, as if she honestly didn’t know what I was struggling to say. “That he was . . . unfaithful.”
“Oh, no.” A horrible sound came from her mouth, and her face drained of color. “No, no, no. You thought that? All these years?”
She put a hand out for the tiled island as if she needed support. Her face was anguished. “No, Camden. It was me.”
What the hell was that supposed to mean?
“I was the one who was unfaithful,” she said. “I’m the one who had the affair.”
The lemon smell intensified. A whirring sound filled my head as events, snippets of conversations, and snapshots realigned themselves in my head.
Oh.
“I didn’t forgive anything. He forgave it all, Camden. All. Oh, I hate that you thought badly of him. Davy, too? This is really what you thought? All this time?”
I wanted to ask so many things, but our family had never been much for divulging. We stood several minutes, facing each other.
I knew my mother was never more comfortable than when on a horse.
“Do you still want to ride?” I asked.