“It stings,” she says. “My hands are burning.”
“Then one day Omar wakes me up by shaking my feet,” says Carla. “He’s sitting on the bed, pale and rigid. I ask him what’s wrong but he doesn’t answer. It must be five, six in the morning, because there’s hardly any light. ‘Omar,’ I say, ‘Omar, what’s wrong?’ ‘The horses,’ he says. I swear to you, Amanda, the way he said it was terrifying. Every once in a while Omar could say some harsh things, but they never sounded the way those two words did. Sometimes he says ugly things about David. How he doesn’t seem like a normal boy. That having David in the house makes him uncomfortable. He never wants to sit at the table with him. He hardly talks to him at all. Sometimes, we used to wake up at night and David wasn’t in his room or anywhere else in the house, and that drove Omar crazy. I think it scared him. We never slept well, because we were intent on any sound. The first few times it happened, we went out looking for him. Omar went ahead with the flashlight and I held on to his shirt from behind. I focused on listening for any noises and on always staying close to him. One time before we left, Omar got a knife out and brought it with us, and I didn’t say anything, Amanda. What can I tell you, it can get very dark in the country. Later, Omar started locking David in his room. He shuts him in before we go to bed and unlocks the door in the morning, before he leaves. There were times when David would bang on the door. He never calls for Omar. He pounds on the door and says my name—he doesn’t call me Mom anymore, only Carla. So that day, Omar was sitting on the edge of the bed, and when I managed to wake up and realize something strange was happening, I leaned toward the door to see what he was staring at. The door to David’s room was open. ‘The horses,’ said Omar. ‘What’s wrong with the horses?’ I asked.”
“They’re stinging a lot, Mommy.” Nina shows me her hands, sits down next to me. She hugs me.
I take her hands and plant a kiss on each one. She turns her palms up, to show me. Carla takes out a bag of little cookies and puts a handful into Nina’s palms.
“This will cure anything,” she says.
And Nina happily closes her hands and runs off toward the well, shouting her own name.
“And the horses?” I ask.
“They weren’t there,” says Carla.
“What do you mean they weren’t there?”
“I asked Omar the same thing, and he said he’d heard a noise in the shed, that’s what had woken him up. He saw David’s door was open though he clearly remembered having locked it, and he got up to see what was happening. The front door was open too, and outside there was already a little light. He went out just like that, Omar told me, no flashlight and no knife. He looked at the fields, took a few steps away from the house, and for a second he didn’t realize what it was that seemed so strange to him. He was half asleep. The horses weren’t there. None of the horses. There was only a little foal, one that had been born four months before. It was standing alone in the middle of the pasture, and Omar says that already then, from the house, he was certain that the animal was frozen in fear. He approached it slowly. The foal didn’t move. Omar looked to either side, looked toward the stream, toward the street, there was neither hide nor hair of the horses. He put the palm of his hand on the foal’s forehead, he talked to it and nudged it a little, just to test the waters. But the foal didn’t move. It stayed there until morning, when the police inspector and his two assistants came, and it was still there when they left. I saw it from the window. I swear to you, Amanda, I couldn’t get up the courage to go out. But are you okay?”
“Yes, why?”
“You’re pale.”
“Did Omar know about the ducks? About Mr. Geser’s dog?”
“He knew something. I’d decided not to tell him anything, but he saw the mounds of earth from the buried ducks, and he asked. When all that happened with the woman in the green house and the days of fever, he never asked questions. I think Omar suspected something and preferred not to know. Who knows, maybe he just wasn’t interested. He was more concerned about the loss of his precious borrowed stallion. But you’re pale, Amanda, your lips are white.”
“I’m fine. Maybe something’s not sitting right with me. I’ve been a little nervous,” I say, thinking about yesterday’s argument, and Carla looks at me out of the corner of her eye but doesn’t say anything.
We sit in silence a moment. I want to ask about the horses, but Carla is watching Nina now and I tell myself it’s better to wait. Nina is going back from the trees to the well. She’s holding up the apron of her dress and using it as a basket, and when she gets to the well she kneels down with her dramatic affectations of a princess, and she starts lining up pinecones on the ground.
“I really like her,” says Carla. “Nina.”
I smile, but I can sense there is something more behind her words.