“It’s gonna rain any fucking minute,” Nell muttered to Mo, and only then did Mo notice the clouds had grown darker. “Let’s get this over with.”
The younger campers dismounted, and soon after, the older ones cantered out to the arena alone. Helen led the procession, sitting up straight as she’d been taught in many years of lessons, jumping her horse, Dandelion, with seeming ease over the haystacks and hurdles. The other girls followed behind with slumped postures. Parents leaned against the fence with rapt attention. Someone’s digital camera flash illuminated the arena from the crowd.
“No flashes, please!” Nell strained in the parents’ direction.
Sheera, looking over to her father, slacked on Micah’s reins. The girls in the barn were squealing from the excitement of having just shown off what they’d been working on for the past four weeks—one of their first instances of an adrenaline rush; Mo remembered the feeling well—and pulled at their shorts, at the bottoms of their shirts, asking to go see their parents. “Not until it’s over,” Mo repeated while keeping her gaze on Sheera and Micah. Nell, at the edge of the barn, was grimacing at the clouds.
When the thunder clapped, deafening and explosive, like it was retaliating against its daylong silence, Micah let out a yelp and reared onto his hind legs. Sheera fell off her horse with her legs in the air and landed helmet first on the dusty ground, her body following like a rag doll. Mo didn’t wait for the audience’s collective gasp to rush onto the field where Sheera lay motionless; her fiftysomething father jumped over the fence and ran at full speed toward them, his hat falling behind him. The rain began to pour in violent sloshes.
Mo heard herself yell that someone should call for an ambulance.
Someone else yelled from outside the arena that it was on its way, and Mo realized that her call for help was minutes later than anyone else’s.
Mo and the father knelt over Sheera while the rain soaked their bodies and made pools around them. The girl, her eyes closed, made no sounds. By the time the paramedics came, Nell and the other counselors had cleared the area of horses and children. Some parents, unable to be managed, still stood around like this was part of the show.
In the ambulance, Sheera remained unconscious. Her father asked Mo to take his hand, and they each joined their remaining hands with Sheera’s. The red lights and sirens circled around them as their ambulance sped down an empty country road.
“Oh Father, the source of all health and healing, please fill our hearts with faith, oh Lord, and heal our Sheera according to your will,” Sheera’s father said. Mo quickly looked up to see the man’s eyes closed tight and shut her own again. “Please stay with her, and give her the strength she needs to wake again. In Jesus’s name we pray. Amen.”
“Amen,” Mo said.
—
Mo woke up on a hard plastic chair under fluorescent lighting that gave no hints as to what time it was. Her pulse was erratic and all encompassing, like it could break through the skin of her throat.
Sheera’s father was in the room with his daughter. No one had come out to give any updates. Sheera’s father shouldn’t leave her side, after all, and no doctor or nurse had any responsibility, really, to relay messages back to Mo. She was not family or even a close friend. She was a foreigner to these people and to this place.
A quiet American hospital on a Sunday night in rural Connecticut. Mo had not had many moments in life when she looked around and thought, How did I end up here?
She looked at her watch. It was only eight P.M.; the horse expo, Mo remembered, had been at one. She’d fallen asleep in the middle of the day, exhausted by a trauma that wasn’t even hers. Then she realized that it was hers, that she was responsible for the well-being of these girls and that being at the hospital at all was, in itself, a failure.
She walked up to the reception window and asked if she could use the desk phone.
“There’s a pay phone down the hall,” the woman at the desk said without looking up.
Mo searched her pockets, realizing she had nothing on her. “I was so frantic when I left…” There was a quick, sharp feeling of fear and desolation. The overhead lights buzzed and reflected off the shining linoleum floors—clean, sterile, lifeless.
“Please?” Mo asked the nurse, who looked up and around and, seeing there was no one else there but a man anxiously pacing the waiting room, rolled her eyes, sighed deeply, and pushed the phone across the desk.
“Press nine to dial out.”
“Camp Marigold, this is Nan,” the camp secretary said on the other end of the line.
“Nan, it’s Mo.”
“I’m so glad you’re calling, dear. How is she?”
“I don’t know. No one’s come out yet. I’m just sitting here waiting.”
“Shit,” Nan said. “We’re praying with all our might over here.” It was odd how religious Americans were. “Do you need anything?” she asked. “Should someone come and pick you up?”
“No, I’m going to stay,” Mo said. Her voice shook. “Could you do me one favor? Could someone go fetch Nell and get her on the line?”
Nell sounded breathless when she came on several minutes later. “What’s going on?”
Mo explained the situation again. “I just feel so tired,” she said. “Everything in my body feels like it’s working on overload.”
“Of course it is,” Nell said. “This is terrifying.”
“I hate that I can’t do anything.”
“Just try to breathe, love. It’s out of our hands.”
She imagined Nell in her hoodie and shorts on the other end of the line, twirling the phone cord around her finger, her mouth close to the receiver.
“I will,” Mo said.
“Call the office first thing in the morning, okay?”
“Sleep tight,” Mo said in a quiet, tender tone that surprised her. “I’ll see you soon.”
—
Jack arrived at the hospital in the morning and, in his authoritative way, gleaned the important information about Sheera from the on-call doctor. She had woken up as soon as they’d put her in the hospital bed, confused and crying, complaining of a terrible headache. She’d thrown up once in the middle of the night. But the CT scan showed no signs of bleeding or permanent damage. These were just symptoms of a moderate concussion, and she should be feeling like herself after a few days of rest.
Jack took Mo back to camp in his two-door sedan, which smelled like body odor and cut grass. He drove fast; she rolled down her window and watched the woods and the green farmland blur by.
When they arrived at Marigold, Mo noticed neon yellow caution tape around the fence of the horse arena. DO NOT ENTER, it read.
“Is that really necessary?” she asked.
“Unfortunately, yes,” Jack kept his eyes ahead of him. “It’s just temporary. Just to show our concern to the parents and donors.”
“What will the horses do?” Mo asked.
“I’ve talked to Nell and Rachel,” he said. “The three of you can still ride them as normal to give them some fresh air and exercise. Just no campers for the time being.”