Learning to Fall Read online

  “Dad! The syringe!”

  Dad paused, and I reached up to hand it to him. He held it in his teeth, poised, as if carrying a machete through rough waters. Cervantes started pulling back. I worried he’d pull too hard. Every horse person had heard this kind of horror story. Never tie a horse in a way that won’t give when the horse pulls back. Without give, the horse can jerk back so hard it might break his neck.

  Seraphim bucked and reared, as if unaware of her injury. Dad squeezed between Cervantes and her, wiping away the lather on her neck. Cervantes’s fear escalated. He pawed at the floor, pushing his rear toward the ramp, scooting his hind legs under to get more leverage on his halter. Millions of years of instinct weren’t easy to override, and if one horse panicked, the rest could too. Evolution had given herbivores one main mechanism to protect themselves and their herds from predators: agility and speed. In fight-or-flight situations, it was almost always flight. Seraphim, one of his herd mates, was panicked. Cervantes had to escape.

  Cervantes twisted his body to the left, straining against his tie, trying to step backward out of the trailer. I moved closer to his head, trying to grab his halter.

  “Keep him calm!” Dad yelled, but I didn’t know how. I pushed on Cervantes’s side. He resisted me, stepping another foot out of the trailer. The more I pushed, the more he leaned all of his fourteen hundred pounds against me. I did the only thing I could do: I nudged his flank, the most sensitive area between his belly and hind leg. His skin twitched, sending a ripple from haunches to front, and he moved over to the right. Almost as soon as he did, he took two quick steps back, pushing me to the edge of the ramp. The trailer continued to pitch violently, throwing me off balance.

  “Dad!”

  “I can’t get at her. She won’t hold still!”

  “I’ll move Cervantes out.”

  “Stick with the plan. I’ve got this.”

  But I was already running to grab a lead rope from the storage compartment.

  “There, there, Cervantes,” I spoke in a calm, soothing voice, balancing myself as the trailer rocked. Horses tended to pick up on your energy, and mine was as out of whack as it could get. Not much horse whispering I could do now.

  “If I just keep repeating these words over and over, maybe we’ll calm down, huh buddy?” I attached the lead rope to Cervantes’s halter, then unhooked him from the trailer. He sensed freedom: he lunged back, stepping off the side of the ramp, knocking me back onto the hard asphalt of the freeway shoulder. The sudden pain seared my spine. My head hit and bounced. Spots blurred my vision. Cervantes pulled backward, my hand tightening on the lead rope instinctively. My shoulder felt like it would tear out of its socket, my hand burning, my finger twisting in an impossible direction, but I held on. I checked the back of my head with my free hand. No blood, thank God.

  I managed to get up to my hands and knees, clutching the rope in between my raw fingers. My only thought was to keep him off the freeway.

  All of a sudden, the rope jerked me up. Cervantes stood on hind legs, rearing, about to come straight down on top of me.

  Cervantes’s hooves struck the asphalt inches from my chest. I ducked and rolled, and let go of the rope. I gaped at the huge mass of animal flesh above me, the darkening blue behind him outlining his gray body, the blood on his coat bright and unreal. For a split second our eyes met, and I thought maybe he’d stay. Then he turned and galloped like a wild stallion, hooves pounding past me, silver tail flying through the air.

  “No!” I screamed. But he ran onto the highway.

  Tires squealed, metal crashed.

  I sat up, wanting to run after him, but all I saw was a flash of white as he disappeared.

  I rushed back into the trailer. Dad had unhooked the stall divider to grab Seraphim’s head. She reared.

  “Shut the doors!” Dad yelled.

  I grabbed one of the open doors, prying the metal hook loose. A thud resounded inside the trailer. Seraphim galloped past me, a copper smear. The syringe fell from her neck to my feet.

  “Sera!” I ran along the shoulder after her, but knew there was no way I could catch up, so I turned back.

  At the entrance to the trailer I stopped. Dad lay on the ground, Jett looming, a dark shadow in the back. Seraphim must have come down on him, just as Cervantes had almost done to me.

  “Dad!” I threw myself next to him. The smell of blood, shavings, and manure gagged me as I knelt on the black rubber mat, my throat closing up. Dad stared up at the ceiling as he wheezed for air.

  “Daddy . . .” I cradled his head in my arms. His eyes locked with mine, his hand reached toward me. He gulped at the air, his breath rattling in his lungs, an eerie gargling sound in his throat.

  “Don’t talk.” I placed my hand on his cheek, touching that stubble I had wanted to touch just hours before.

  “Brynn . . .” He gasped another breath.

  I dabbed at the trickle of blood from the corner of his mouth, sticky and hot on my fingers, wiping it off on my jeans, looking for the cloth he always carried. “It’s going to be all right,” I said, the only words I could think of.

  Dad’s fingers squeezed around mine. He drank the air in jagged gasps.

  “Oh, Daddy, hold on—” I moved to stand, to get my phone, but his fingers closed tighter around mine.

  “Don’t go . . .” His eyes met mine. “Please . . .”

  I squatted again as a car pulled up behind us.

  “Promise me, if anything happens, you must take care of the horses, the ranch . . .” He was whispering now, and I could barely understand him, the trailer now still, no longer rocking from the traffic, the headlights splitting the darkness.

  “Let me get help—” I tried to stand, but his words stopped me.

  “You have to do this—for Mom—for everything we’ve built . . .”

  His hand loosened from around my fingers.

  I squeezed my eyes shut, wanting everything to go back to normal. For his rough hands to slap me on the back as he laughed at the way a horse frolicked in pasture; for his harsh look to remind me that I’d forgotten to put away the saddle; for his arm around my shoulders when I rode a great round.

  “Promise me . . .”

  And I would have promised him anything at that moment. The words rushed out, “Yes, Daddy. Yes. But you have to help me. I can’t do it alone.”

  His breath stopped, then started again. And that’s when I knew I was losing him. I began CPR, but couldn’t remember how many breaths I should be giving to how many pumps on his chest. I managed to do a slow breath, followed by three pumps. His eyes glazed over, the blood at his mouth as black as Jett’s coat.

  “No, Daddy,” I whispered, tears dripping onto his face as I rocked his limp body in my arms. “No!”

  But he didn’t respond.

  I heard his last breath escape him, like his soul leaving.

  It slipped right through my hands.

  Dr. Ian Finlay—Uncle Ian to me—a family friend and equine vet, drove up with Derek to get me from the hospital. I spent the night tossing and turning on the unfamiliar pillows and sheets of the motel room, visions of Dad’s calloused fingers clutching mine, me screaming, Seraphim running, the needle at my feet.

  I buried my head, pushing the pillow over my head, trying to block the visions out, trying to forget Uncle Ian’s words, “Cervantes—he didn’t make it, Lassie.”

  Cervantes hadn’t made it. Dad’s horse. His new prospect. His soon-to-be superstar. “No one else was hurt,” Uncle Ian said, holding me to him.

  I’d stared at him, not comprehending.

  “This is good news, ay? Good news . . . no one else was hurt . . .”

  His Scottish burr had trailed off as he held me by my shoulders, his hooded eyes staring deep into mine. The neon motel sign reflected off his glasses, reminding me of the ambulance siren.

  The next morning, I tried to block it all, refusing to talk about any of it. Maybe after I got home I’d think of a way to handle it.
/>
  Uncle Ian drove us home while Derek stayed in Oregon, helping with the search for Seraphim. She’d managed to jump a fence farther up along the highway, and they hadn’t been able to track her yet. Uncle Ian and I barely exchanged two words on the drive back to the Bay Area. He respected my space and I respected his in return. He and Dad had been best friends for years. I knew he was coping with his own grief.

  But what I dreaded most was seeing Mom.

  I wasn’t sure how I would face her. My eyes blurred at the thought of her. The police had notified her of the accident the night before, but I hadn’t been able to speak to her on the phone. My voice had seized up. This was her biggest nightmare, and now it had come true. As we got closer to home, I pulled at the bits of skin on my cuticles, digging deeper and deeper, until they bled.

  Uncle Ian turned into our circular drive, which led around a meticulously planned rock garden full of native grasses and flowers, one Aunt Julia, Uncle Ian’s wife, had helped design when my parents had first built the house. Built of California cedar and accented with masonry, the house was set back about two hundred feet from the road that lead toward Devon Creek.

  Uncle Ian shut off the engine. Silence filled the pickup cab, louder than the radio that had just been on. The keys jangled, then his hand rested on my knee. He gave it a squeeze, then moved to open the door. I was thankful for that small amount of physical contact. I felt empty and alone. What would I tell Mom? How could I ever tell her I hadn’t double-checked the latch? Dad would still be alive if it hadn’t been for my carelessness.

  As I stepped into the sun, the sound of the waterfall, cascading through the rock garden into the small koi pond, greeted me—a sound that normally served to soothe me and remind me I was home. But today I trudged up the stone steps, toward the smoky-glass front door, as if headed to an inquisition.

  The house blended with the valley, contemporary, yet natural, both inside and out. It was older now, but still had grace. Mom sat on the worn sage-colored couch in the living room, bent over, her head in her lap. Although it was midafternoon, inside it was dim and she looked minute with the large vaulted ceiling looming above her. Subira, our twelve-year-old Irish Setter, lay at Mom’s feet. The tip of her tail and brow lifted up at me in greeting, but she showed no other signs of affection, almost as if she understood what had happened and was already in mourning.

  Aunt Julia greeted us. “Brynn, dear.” She came forward and kissed my cheek, embracing me, her nose red, her eyes puffy. “I’m so, so truly sorry.”

  I squeezed my eyes shut, holding my tears in. Once I’d regained control I looked at Mom. I forced myself to move as softly as I could across the pine floor, afraid that she would startle, like a wild horse. I stopped at the sheepskin rug in front of the couch and fell to my knees, wrapping my arms around her.

  Mom looked up, her eyes red-rimmed, the tears accentuating the lines around her eyes. The fatigue had been replaced by a pain that seemed to run as deep as her soul.

  “Brynn. Oh God, Brynn.” She moaned, gasping as if in pain. “God, no! Brynn, bring him back, Brynn!” She sobbed, her arms around me in a fierce grip, her pain squeezing my heart like a fist. I wished I could turn back the clock. I wished I had checked the latch. I wished I could make Dad come back. But I couldn’t do any of those things. The only thing I knew, right then, was that I would never live a day and not feel this pain. I would never forgive myself as long as I lived.

  “Good news!”

  Sheriff Malcolm’s voice resounded in my ear. My heart skipped a beat, and I wondered for a moment whether he would tell me it was all a mistake—that Dad was alive and well, and on his way home.

  “A local dairy farmer found your horse, ma’am,” he said. “The ol’ guy saw the eleven o’clock news story last night. He spotted him in his field! Whatcha make of that?”

  Two days since the accident. All I remembered of Sheriff Malcolm was his peppermint breath, his tan-colored shirt with the coffee stain near the front pocket, and the missing button near his belt as he questioned me that night. Now I stood in the kitchen, staring out at the milky gray landscape that concealed the barn and valley below. I held the phone in one hand, gripping the windowsill with the other. His voice didn’t belong here. Dad belonged here. We should be planning the day together, schooling the horses, showing together, celebrating his and Cervantes’s win.

  “Sure as the mornin’ sun, I tell you, ol’ guy was eatin’ his eggs, looked out his kitchen window, and there he was.”

  “She . . . ,” I said, under my breath. “Seraphim.” But he didn’t hear me, rambling on.

  I wondered what the dairy farmer had thought, seeing a remarkable mare—a show jumper—standing in cow manure, her chestnut hair masking the rust-colored blood, eating hay right alongside his heifers.

  I spent the day wandering through the empty rooms of the house, waiting for Derek to come home with Jett and Seraphim. I checked on Mom but she’d stayed in bed all afternoon, sleeping fitfully. I was glad that Uncle Ian had left a sedative for her. Derek told me they had to tranquilize Seraphim to get her into the trailer, but that Jett never panicked.

  He told me they’d found the latch on the back door broken off. “They said it snapped. Too much rust,” Derek had said quietly on the phone. I didn’t respond, not believing. I should have checked the latch and I didn’t. I got caught up in other things. How could I ever make a good vet? How could anyone ever trust me again?

  “Brynn, latches break. Horses freak out. It’s just the nature of working with them . . .” I didn’t even listen to the rest.

  In the sitting room I ran my finger along the spines of Dad’s books. I picked up and flipped through the last horse magazine he’d read, but Dad’s sweater, the one he’d tossed across the back of his favorite chair just the night before we’d left for Spruce Meadows, beckoned me. I sat, curling my toes into the worn leather of the chair, and even though the fog had burned off and outside the temperature had reached into the seventies, I laid the sweater over my shoulders, the wool scratchy around my neck. It smelled of leather and sweat and hay. I imagined Dad walking in and wrapping his arms around me, telling me everything would be all right.

  The sound of a diesel truck startled me from an uncomfortable dream. I’d dozed off and now the walnut clock chimed eight. I glanced out the window. The sun hung low above the Pacific. The truck and trailer crawled to a stop in front of the barn.

  “Come here,” Derek said as I practically ran toward him. We hugged for a long time. His fleece would have probably absorbed many tears, if I had cried—but I didn’t. Empty, I breathed against the terrible tightness pressing down on my chest.

  “I’m going to miss him so much,” I managed to choke out.

  “Me too, B. Me too.”

  Derek was the closest thing I had to a brother. He’d been working for my dad since he was eighteen, when I’d met him at a Southern California horse show. Derek’s father was in the Air Force, and Derek had lived a nomadic life, moving every couple of years, sometimes more frequently. His father, who had never accepted his son as gay, expected Derek to attend West Point. Problem was, Derek wanted to be a horse trainer. Derek had lost his family, but he’d gained another one in ours.

  I breathed in Derek’s familiar scent, citrus mixed with a tinge of patchouli. Then I pulled away from him, rubbing my face with my palms, composing myself. “How’s Bill?”

  “Good. He’ll be here for the funeral, of course. Wants to know if there’s anything he can do.”

  “Right . . .” As if anyone could do anything. I walked around to the back of the trailer.

  I stopped. Frozen.

  The trailer doors loomed toward me.

  “Derek—” I nearly doubled over as I grabbed onto his thick arm.

  “You head on up to the house,” Derek said, holding me.

  I walked back on rubber legs, but not fast enough. I stooped near the pink and purple hydrangea, grasping at my knees as I doubled over, dry-heaving before m
y stomach settled.

  Saturday, 11:00 a.m. Six days since Dad’s death. The day of the Queen Elizabeth II Cup at Spruce Meadows. The day Dad was supposed to have been winning on Cervantes. From the podium, I looked out at the wooden pews of the small white stucco Catholic church, minutes up the road from our house. I was chosen to give the eulogy, God knows why. Shouldn’t it have been someone else? Someone with more experience at this sort of thing?

  I tugged at the mid-length hem of the simple gabardine black dress I’d rushed to buy yesterday. Black looked terrible on me, washing out my pale eyes and complexion, but I had nothing else that was appropriate, my closet full of sweatshirts and polos and jeans. I hated wearing dresses. They showed off my bony knees and my twig-like legs. I wore my hair in a simple bun, which hung low at the nape of my neck. I lifted my hand to play with the gold horseshoe pendant at my throat. Dad had given it to me on my sixteenth birthday.

  Mom sat in the front pew, in a black pantsuit, a string of pearls adorning her neck, the bones of her clavicles prominent, her eyes red-rimmed and puffy. The two of us, drifting in a daze like lost souls, waiting for someone or something to step in to take charge. I stared at all the expectant faces and wished I was anywhere but here.

  “Dear friends . . .” My throat constricted, and only a grunt of sorts reached the small microphone positioned close to my mouth. I clutched the podium, steadying myself as the smell of incense, mothballs, and perfume hit me.

  Derek gestured for me to continue. Then Uncle Ian stood and walked toward me.

  He covered the microphone. “You okay, Lassie?” I stared at his plaid tie, his shock of white-gray hair. “I got this. You go on and grab a seat.”