The Blessings of the Animals_A Novel

CHAPTER Twenty

IF MY LIFE HAD BEEN A MOVIE, THIS WAS THE MOMENT Bobby would have dropped to his knees and said, “I made a horrible mistake. I want you back.”
This was no movie. There was no going back, but our history counted for something.
Muriel put her front hooves on his shoulder and nibbled his hair. He shook his head, face pale and grim. Poor man always went to pieces when someone was hurt, so it surprised me when he was able to joke, “Goat’s out.”
The worst pain came with the paramedics.
Damn, but it hurt when they moved me. Bobby hovered, murmuring, “Oh, Cam.” When I moaned, he held my hand. I clung to it and had a strange, vulnerable flash of giving birth.
He squeezed my hand.
In front of my daughter and soon-to-be ex-husband, I told the medics from the backboard, “I haven’t eaten anything but one bite of calamari in probably three days, and not much for a couple weeks before that. I passed out from the back of that horse. Something popped when I hit the ground.”
They began to scold me for not wearing a helmet, but Gabby set them straight.
They carried me the jolting, excruciating way to the driveway but then had to leave me there for about five minutes while they chased Muriel out of the ambulance.
They started IV fluids. I’d performed that procedure thousands of times myself and was grateful at how quickly I felt their effect. I listened to Bobby answer questions about insurance, my allergies, and history. I hated to picture Gabriella trying to navigate all of this alone.
At least there was no blood, so he could be helpful. Once, when Gabby was eight, she’d shut her fingers in the car door. Bobby had dropped to his knees, muttering what sounded like prayers in Italian while I wrapped her hand with ice and towels. “It’s a long way from your heart,” I told the brave, gasping Gabby, examining her fingers once the bleeding stopped. “You’ll live.” Gabby, who’d never gone into full-fledged tears over the injury, giggled and sniffed, but Bobby’d been pale and shaken all day.
One EMT reminded me that I’d need ID at the hospital.
“Bobby?” I asked, “could you go get my purse?”
“Sure. Where is it?”
“In the microwave.”
“Uh . . . okay.” I heard him ask Gabby as he stepped out of the ambulance, “Did she hit her head? Are you positive she had on that helmet?”
Gabby laughed. “I know that sounds alarming, but her purse actually is in the microwave.”
“Why?”
“Long story.” Then Gabby’s voice hardened, “Maybe if you still lived here, you’d know it.”
I closed my eyes. This was not my problem. The paramedic started some painkiller in my IV, so I quite willingly floated away.
TURNS OUT I HAD TWO BROKEN RIBS.
Not cracked, mind you, but broken, and slightly overlapping at the broken places.
I wished I’d had Gerald there to purr with me when they did the traction necessary to make the ends meet up again. I called on every colorful combination of the worst profanity I’d ever heard Bobby’s family deliver.
Mimi showed up with Olive, followed shortly by my parents and the Davids. Helen and Hank, too. Then Aurora. My heart lifted when Tyler came with different clothes for Gabby to change into. She was still in her suit, her filthy hose in tatters.
Mimi patted my hand, humming. She kept saying, “It will all turn out fine.”
Vijay strode into the room, looking only at me. “Oh, Cam.” He took my hand, pushed back my dusty hair, and kissed my forehead.
Bobby stood. Vijay nodded to him but kept hold of my hand. He let go only when Gabby crossed to hug him and when my father came to shake his hand.
Fortunately, a couple of nurses and a PA recognized Vijay from his TV show and made a fuss, deflecting the tension. “Are you here for a story?” a nurse asked, looking gleeful.
“No, I’m here for a friend.” He looked at Bobby. “But there is quite a story here, isn’t there?”
Before anyone could speak, my own doctor returned.
“Okay,” I said, wanting to simply get out of here. “What do you do for broken ribs?”
“Nothing,” my doctor said. “You rest. You take it easy. You heal.”
I looked up at my assembled posse. Vijay nodded. Gabby snorted. Helen arched an eyebrow. Davy put his hands on his hips. My mother pursed her lips.
“Don’t say it,” I begged.
Aurora shook her head. “Damn, but you like to do things the hard way.”
EVERY TIME VIJAY LEFT THE ROOM—TO ANSWER A CALL, to talk to a doctor, to get me ice cream from the cafeteria—Bobby would take my hand. Were these guys going to plant flags next?
At one point, while we waited for “care and feeding” instructions—Vijay had gone to try to use his influence to speed things up—I found myself in the exam room with just Mimi, Bobby, Gabriella, and Tyler.
“Where’d you get that three-legged cat?” Bobby asked.
Gabriella’s face lit up. “He came back?”
I smiled at Gabby. “He kept me company today.”
Mimi snorted. “That’s what you need like a goddamn hole in the head, a three-legged cat.”
Bobby leaned close, intimate, in my space. “Cam. You can’t collect every stray in need.”
Is that what I did? Or what he did?
Mimi rubbed his arm. “You should move back in, Bobby. It’s the right thing to do.”
No, no, no. I couldn’t collect every stray in need. I saw his need now. It was a need that I’d never fill, that Zayna couldn’t fill. That a million puppies wouldn’t fill.
Bobby didn’t know how to love me unless I needed him.
“I could do that,” Bobby said, looking back down at me. “For a while. To help.”
Mimi beamed. I knew she believed “for a while” would become forever.
I closed my eyes. Why couldn’t these painkillers knock me out?
“Could you all give us a minute?” Bobby asked.
Mimi and Tyler left quickly, but Gabriella stared at us for a moment before walking out.
“You’re going to need help,” Bobby said. His voice was kind.
I kept my voice kind as well. “You don’t get to help me, sweetie. Not anymore.” I returned to that prayerful calm of Gerald’s purring. “I can’t go from you packing your car and leaving to allowing you to care for me while I’m injured. The leap from A to B is too big. It asks me to act like A never happened. I can’t make that leap. I . . . I’m really surprised that you can.”
Bobby nodded, and when Vijay returned with the discharge nurse, Bobby quietly left.
ONCE HOME, THE INJURY GAVE ME THE PERMISSION I hadn’t given myself to just unravel. I slept, usually at ten- to twelve-hour stretches at a time. I’d wake up with Gerald cuddled up to me. When I was awake, he’d work himself under my hands; the “self-petting cat,” I came to call him.
I ran my hands over his shoulder, where the new coat growth pleased my fingertips like velvet. We’d done a good job on that surgery.
Gerald hadn’t stressed himself out pretending he still had all four legs, acting maniacally like his amputation had never happened. He’d acknowledged that he’d lost something and then set about learning how to move on without it.
Vijay stayed at the farm for three days before he had to return to New York. When he presented saag from his mother, I ate every last bite.
“Did you ask Bobby?” Vijay asked. “About working to fix things?”
I nodded.
“What did he say?”
I shook my head.
Instead of saying, “I told you so,” or railing at Bobby, Vijay just said, “I’m sorry.” He knew what I needed, he knew how much it hurt. Even if it was the right thing, he knew how horrifically it hurt.
My mother did laundry, helped me wash, and kept the pantry stocked.
The Davids came over daily, Davy on his way to school each morning. Big David stopped by on his way home from the bakery, bringing scones and watering plants.
Olive and Nick brought dinner and movies.
Hank made more mac ’n’ cheese and called from work each day to entertain me.
Aurora handled Animal Kind on her own without complaint, and even though I knew the schedule had to slam her, she still found time to visit me almost daily.
Gabriella and Helen took care of the feeding and stalls.
Gabriella came in one evening odd and aloof. I was desperate for conversation, but she was monosyllabic in her responses. She sat on the couch, distractedly petting Max. “The crew okay?” I asked. I missed Moonshot.
She nodded.
I waited, and when she offered nothing else, I said, “You wanna eat with me?”
“I ate already.” She looked only at Max. “Dad brought me some veal marsala.”
Before I could think of a response, she said, with a defensive edge, “I invited him.”
“You two could have eaten in the house, you know. He’s allowed inside.” It didn’t trouble me so much that she’d invited him but that she hadn’t told me, that neither of them had included me.
“Is he?” she said, her voice icy.
Keep breathing. “Gabriella, anytime you want to see your father, he’s welcome here.”
Her face contorted as she fought not to cry. “Why did you say no?” she wailed.
When I looked confused, she said, “At the hospital! He was going to move back in!”
Oh.
“You said no! We could’ve all gone back to normal.”
I breathed as deeply as my ribs allowed. “Gabby, when your dad said he’d stay here, he meant temporarily, to help out while I recover.”
“How do you know? If he were here, who knows what would happen?”
How much should I tell her? Would it help her? Hurt her? I felt like I walked a tightrope. “Did your dad tell you that he and I met for a talk the morning I fell?”
She shook her head.
I told her about our conversation. I tried to speak neutrally, just reporting the facts. I didn’t tell her Zayna had been there.
My daughter studied my face. “Really? You would’ve let him come back and tried to fix it?”
I nodded. “I think we could have, but to be fair to your dad, I’m not sure that would’ve been right, for any of us. When you said we could go back to ‘normal’ . . . well, now that I’ve had some time to look at it, I don’t think our normal was very healthy.”
We were quiet a long time. I stroked Gerald, and Gabby stroked Max.
“I wasn’t trying to be mean,” I said. “I just don’t think it’s good for me to accept help from him. Remember how you told me to have some self-respect?”
She groaned and pulled her hair over her face. “I’m sorry!”
“No, no, no, you were right. I wouldn’t feel good about myself letting him stay here. Okay?”
He would come here and do barn chores, sure. That was easy. He wasn’t capable of or willing to do the harder work, the work that mattered.
After a long silence, Gabby asked, “Is it even possible? Marriage?”
I laughed, then winced at the pain.
“No, Mom, I’m serious. In Philosophy we just read this ridiculous Plato myth about how for every person there’s a missing other half and you’re never a complete person until you find it. That’s just . . . bullshit. No one person is going to fulfill every single one of your needs. When did everyone start believing this crap? They stand there and say those vows that they’ll cherish each other until they die. And nobody does. Nobody can.”
“Some people can,” I said. “Some people do.”
“Like who?”
“Well, like your uncle Davids.”
“They’re not dead, Mom,” she said, as if I were a moron.
Oh, so by Gabby’s standards, Mimi and Frank had had a successful marriage just because one of them was now buried?
“I’m never getting married,” Gabby said.
I smiled. I used to say that.
“I’m glad you’re not like women who think they’re not complete until they get married,” I said. “That’s why I used to hate it when you talked about your wedding all the time. But why say never? Don’t you think that’s a lonely way to live?”
Gabby gently pulled on Max’s ears. “You think Aurora’s lonely?” she challenged.
She’d caught me. Gabby had once wondered aloud to me if Aurora was lonely and I’d used the “teachable moment” to talk about how Aurora—one of the busiest, most accomplished and interesting women I knew—was content, complete, and unwilling to settle for a man who didn’t enrich her life.
I laughed, then gasped at the pain the laughter produced in my ribs. “No. No, but remember Aurora has never claimed she wants to be single forever. She dates. She’s just not willing to be with any ol’ guy just to be with someone.”
Gabriella shrugged. “Maybe I’ll be like Aurora.”
“Maybe you will. Or maybe someday you’ll find a strong, competent partner—maybe Tyler, maybe someone you haven’t met yet—and you’re going to want to spend your life with him.”
She kept her eyes on Max’s ears. “Maybe.”
“It was good to see Tyler at the hospital with you,” I said. “Are you guys going out again?”
She shot me a look. “We’re friends, okay?”
“Just friends?”
She didn’t answer.
She kept looking at Max, holding his muzzle in her hands, stroking his face with her thumbs. “I miss Dad. I miss us. All of us together, the way we used to be.” Then she said quickly, “I know, I know, you said the way we used to be wasn’t all that hot, but it was . . . it was easier.”
Those words set off a new pulsing ache in my broken ribs.