He opened the fridge, pulled out a gallon jug of milk, and thunked it on the counter.
“He told me once he regretted the way he’d wasted his life—running from his responsibilities, living like none of it would catch up to him. Funny thing, what he said really sank in. So I quit doing what I was doing. I left that job, that town. The whole shebang. So I could start over.”
I’d calmed down and was feeling a little sheepish about our earlier spat. My prickliness. This was a good person, standing in front of me. Someone with an expansive, flesh-and-blood heart.
“Talk about brave,” I said.
“For once in my life.” He opened a couple of the upper cabinets, banging cupboard doors open and closed, finally pulling out a small blue box.
“How is he . . . the guy?” I asked.
“Still hanging in there, I think. I hope. We haven’t spoken in a while.” He peered inside the box. “Anyway, I found Doro’s ad, hopped on a bus, and came to Bonny. Partly to get away from the temptations of the workplace. Partly to try and do something that mattered with my life.” He grinned and held up the blue box. “Pectin. Laila uses it to make jam. We put it in the milk, so the foal can digest it more easily.”
“Do you mind if I come over? To see her?” I asked.
“I don’t know. We’re friends now?” His eyes were soft, a strand of hair had fallen across them and I wondered what it would be like to brush it away. To touch him.
“I think so. What about you?”
He appraised me, then smiled. “Grab another milk. I’m parked out back.”
I followed Koa to a ramshackle shed just behind his cabin. A lantern hung on a nail beside the rotted wood door, pooling light around us.
“You put her out here?” I asked.
“She shits wherever she happens to be standing. I wasn’t going to keep her in my house.”
Inside the shed, Koa clicked on a single bare bulb. He’d rigged up a temporary stall for the foal with sheets of plywood and an odd door wedged between a variety of lawn equipment. The floor was layered with mounds of grass clippings. He unhooked a series of bungee cords and pulled aside one of the boards, just far enough to slip inside, but the foal barely took notice of him. She was standing at the far wall, her head buried in a bucket that hung on a nail.
“She took to the bucket right away. Doesn’t even miss the bottle.”
“She’s a fighter, isn’t she?” The foal’s bony, mottled rump shone in the light as she slurped up the milk, and I pulled up some distant memory of a favorite childhood book. “She’s a roan.”
He shot me a surprised look.
“Thank you, Misty of Chincoteague and Black Beauty,” I said. “I knew you’d come in handy one day.”
Koa went to work, scooping the piles of manure out and tossing them over the barricade into the wheelbarrow. Bits of dried grass eddied into the air. I moved closer to the plywood wall.
“What about the snakebite? Is she going to be okay?”
Koa bent over his work. “I’m still giving her antibiotics, and the swelling’s already started to go down. She’s going to be fine.”
The foal wobbled around Koa and nosed over the plywood. Her head was too big for her body, and with the two lengths of hose sticking out of each nostril, she looked like some kind of alien creature. I stuck my hand out, and she nuzzled it in greeting.
Koa tossed another forkful into the wheelbarrow. “Why don’t you take out the hose while I’m dealing with this?”
“Sure.”
“Just go slow on the tape so you don’t pull her skin. You okay to do this?”
“Of course.”
We changed places, slipping past each other through the narrow opening. I could feel the heat of his body, caught a whiff of his warm perspiration as he brushed past me. That sweet jasmine-y smell that hung around him. I tried not to smile. He went outside, and I regarded the foal.
“Hey, girl,” I said.
Right then a jangling noise pierced the air. Shit. Oh, shit, my phone. I’d forgotten I even had it. I felt in my pockets, but it abruptly went silent again. Probably a bad connection. I eased closer to the foal and put out my hand.
My phone rang again. This time, the foal jerked back, clattering against the back wall and upsetting the milk pail. My hand brushed my back pocket, but before I could pull the phone out, a blur of long legs and flapping tail blew past me. I whirled to see the filly break the plywood barrier and trot out of the shed into the night.
KITTEN
—FROM CHAPTER 9
“Where do you think Cappie’s gone?”
Kitten had finally tired of playing in the waves and come back to settle herself on the blanket Fay had spread on the hard-packed sand. Fay stubbed out the cigarette she’d been smoking, while Kitten helped herself to chicken salad.
“To heaven, of course,” said Fay.
“Christian heaven or Guale heaven?” asked Kitten.
“God takes all children to his heaven, the only heaven, no matter what the color of their skin. So that’s where Cappie’s gone.”
“Cappie can’t be a ghost, can she?” Kitten persisted.
For no apparent reason, Fay’s insides quivered. She didn’t believe in ghosts, never had, but somehow the thought of Cappie’s spirit, floating anywhere nearby, filled her with disgust. “Of course not. Why would you say such a thing?”
“The Guale believe the dead become ghosts if they’re murdered.”
Ashley, Frances. Kitten. New York: Drake, Richards and Weems, 1976. Print.
Chapter Nineteen
An image of Ursula from The Little Mermaid flashed on the screen of my phone.
Frances. Shit.
I sent the call to voice mail, then bear-crawled over the collapsed boards, tripping over the scattered tools and bags of organic soil. When I finally stumbled out of the shed, I found the foal in the yard, prancing in figure eights like a drunken, knock-kneed baby.
Koa pushed the empty wheelbarrow around the corner. It clanked, once out of his hands, then over on its side. “What the hell?” he said. He didn’t wait for an answer, just sprang at the foal. She skittered away from him, her hooves tangling and then untangling. Then she melted into the darkness.
He whirled toward me with a questioning look.
“My phone rang. She freaked out.”
We crashed through the woods—Koa holding the lantern aloft and gliding through the scrub, and me pulling up the rear, catching branches in my face and chanting a frenzied curse/prayer against the snakes.