I grab socks, boots, and a sweatshirt from my closet and meet Dad on the porch. He’s smoking a cigarette, which I haven’t seen him do since I was tiny, and he stubs it against the railing before tossing it in the bushes. “Helps me wake up,” he says. “Don’t tell Mom.”
I pantomime zipping my mouth and follow him out to his car. The air is peculiarly cool tonight, and Dad drives with the windows down. No one’s out on the road, and we pull up to Matt’s barn within a handful of minutes.
Dad gets his bag out of the trunk and leads the way up to the foaling stable, a special double stall a hundred yards past the main barn where the Kincaids keep the pregnant mare. The lights are on, and the door’s slid back. Dad knocks lightly against the frame. “Hey, Raymond.”
“Patrick,” Mr. Kincaid says, standing up beside the mare, who’s lying on her side. “Natalie, good to see you.”
“You too,” I say. It’s half true. Raymond’s way less awkward than Joyce, but as kind as he’s always been to me, the way he used to flip out on Matt at games and practices has always made me cautious around him.
Dad moves into the warmth of the stall and crouches in the hay near the mare’s back legs. Normally it’s best to keep observers away when a horse is in labor—they’re nervous and restless enough as it is—but horses don’t respond to Dad the same way they respond to other people. “How long ago did the hooves pass through?” he asks as he puts on gloves.
“’Bout twenty minutes,” Raymond says. “I called you soon as she lay down and the alarm went off. She’s been struggling on her own this time.”
Dad gives a gentle tug on the foal’s hooves, but he doesn’t have to do much. The mare is groaning and snorting against the hay, and her foal’s legs are passing quickly through her. “Good girl,” Dad says gently. “Good mama, good job, keep pushing.”
The mare snorts again fiercely as Dad pulls on the upper portion of the foal’s back legs, leaning back against the stall wall. Her sounds become more worried, sharp.
“Is she okay?” I ask from the doorway.
“Mama’s fine,” Dad coos. “She just wants this damn thing out, don’t you?”
I come a few steps closer, torn between repulsion and amazement as the slimy, knobby bundle of fluff strains through the mare’s body onto the hay. Within ten minutes, all four legs are through and the foal’s head slides clear, plopping softly against the hay, bleating. “You got a nice little colt, Raymond,” Dad says.
The mare is curling around herself, licking the filmy amniotic sac first from her baby’s back haunch then up toward its mane, and I inch closer, steadying myself against an old support column. The foal’s four legs stick out in four different directions, and it turns its head in toward its mother, nuzzling against her neck as she licks him beneath the soft glow of the lamplight. She’s a horse and she knows how to love her child.
She can’t help it. It wasn’t a decision. No one explained her pregnancy to her, but when she sees the foal, she knows: You are mine, and I am yours.
“Just gonna make sure she passes the rest of the placenta,” Dad says.
But the mare’s licking and nuzzling has slowed. She looks exhausted, and suddenly her head drops to the ground, a low whine wheezing through her nostrils.
That’s when I see the blood pooling in the hay. “Dad,” I say.
“Damn,” he says under his breath. “Nat, honey, go wait outside.”
“Is she okay?”
His eyes flick up to mine. “Outside, baby,” he says.
“Dad.”
Raymond hurries back to Dad’s side, kneeling in the hay.
“Now,” Dad says.
I turn and leave the foaling stable, but I can still hear their voices from out here. The sound travels with the lamplight out along the grass, and I know it’s just a horse, but it’s also a mother, and I’m breathing fast, trembling.
I take off through the field. When I get to the edge I turn and keep walking. In the distance I can see the rental property, a trashed mobile home on a long gravel driveway. The Kincaids—my version of them—have had renters before, but none had stayed long. There’d always been something strange about the house. Everyone could feel it.
I break into a run toward it now, begging the world to change for me. “Grandmother, help me,” I say as I run. I’m nearly there when my stomach drops and I hear the crackle of tires on gravel behind me. I turn to see headlights cutting toward me and run off into the grass as the truck goes chugging past, stopping in front of the house.
Only it’s not quite the same house it was a minute ago. Solid glass replaces cracked windowpanes. The overgrown yard is still filled with weeds and clover, but it’s cut short, the vines hacked off where they were trying to grow up the vinyl siding. Beau gets out of the truck and squints through the darkness at me. “Natalie Cleary?”