Chapter 3
The first thing came at nine the next morning, and it came by air.
Nikki stood in the cottage doorway with her coat half on and said, “There’s a man on the phone from Houston.”
“What?”
“A surgeon. From Houston. He says he’s landing at Martin State at one and he’d like to see you this afternoon, and he asked me — this is the part I enjoyed — he asked me whether the road could take a Suburban.”
Mila was sitting up on the couch with her legs under the horse blanket. She had been awake since four. She had gotten herself to the bathroom twice in the night, both times on her hands and knees part of the way, and she had decided that no one on earth was ever going to know that.
“Tell him no,” she said.
“I told him no forty minutes ago. He called back.” Nikki held out the receiver on its long curly cord, which was, in fact, hilarious. “You tell him. He’s not hearing it from the help.”
The surgeon was courteous and sure of himself and used her first name a great deal.
He had reviewed the imaging. He wanted to be clear that he was not suggesting there was anything wrong; he was suggesting there was a better version of the next six months available to her, and that it would be a shame not to take it.
“Who’s paying you to be here?” Mila said.
A small pause. “Mr. Shepard asked me to consult.”
“Then Mr. Shepard can have the consult.” She was very calm. Her voice was coming back and it turned out calm was still in it. “Thank you for flying up. Go home.”
* * *
After that it was a parade.
The flowers came Tuesday, an arrangement so large that Nikki carried it in sideways and then stood holding it with a look of pure anthropological wonder.
Mila had them put in the barn office where the girls could enjoy them, which was not spite.
It was simply that a woman who cannot stand up has no use for three hundred dollars of eucalyptus.
A nurse-aide arrived Wednesday morning in a company car.
Nobody had told her the job was not agreed to.
She was pleasant and competent and entirely blameless, and Mila sent her away with an apology and a hundred dollars of Nikki’s cash for the drive, and then sat in the chair by the stove shaking with fury for twenty minutes, because he had done it anyway.
She had said no in the hospital and he had done it anyway.
Thursday it was the car. A driver at the end of the lane with the engine running and a note, available all day, every day, for as long as she needed it, no obligation.
The driver sat out there for six hours. Mila watched him through the window and felt something she could not name, which turned out on inspection to be pity.
Friday there was a letter, in his handwriting, which she did not open and did not throw away.
She thought about that afterward, on and off, for weeks.
She could have burned it in the stove. It would have taken a second and the stove was right there.
Instead she put it in the drawer of the little table by the bed, under the manual for the woodstove, and she knew what that meant and did it anyway.
Everything he sent, she sent back. The one thing he wrote, she kept.
She was not going to examine that. There was not enough of her to go around.
Saturday there was an offer.
That one came through Christina, who arrived unannounced with more clementines and delivered it standing up, like a woman reading a statement she disagreed with.
“He wants you to know that anything you want is yours. His words. The house, the Delaware place, money, all of it, signed over, today, no lawyers, no conditions, and he’ll tell them to stop fighting you on anything before there’s anything to fight about.
” Christina put the clementines on the table.
“He wanted me to say it so it wasn’t him saying it. ”
“Why?”
“Because he thinks you won’t take a call.” Christina looked at her. “Will you take a call?”
“No.”
“Right.” Christina sat down. “Mila, I don’t know what happened.”
“I know you don’t.”
“He won’t tell me. He said it’s yours to tell and he’s not going to be the one to tell it.” She frowned. “Which, frankly, isn’t like him. My brother loves a version of events.”
Mila said nothing, and let the silence go on long enough to become an answer, and Christina, to her credit, took it.
* * *
On the ninth day she got as far as the barn.
It took her most of the morning to decide to do it and about ten minutes to do it, gate to post to trough to the big sliding door, and she stood in the doorway afterward with her forearms on the walker and her lungs on fire and the whole warm smell of it coming at her: hay, ammonia, liniment, dust in a light beam.
Heads came over doors all the way down the aisle to see who it was.
She had not thought it would hit her like that. She had to stand there a while.
Nikki came down the aisle with a bucket. “Well, look at this.”
“Don’t.”
“I’m not doing anything.”
“You’re standing there being moved.”
“I’m carrying a bucket,” Nikki said, and carried it past, and Mila heard her stop a few stalls down and blow her nose.
She worked her way up the aisle. She knew most of them. She put her hand on a gray gelding’s nose and let a chestnut lip at her sleeve and got all the way to the end, and then she was standing in front of the second-to-last stall on the left, which had a rubber mat swept clean and no horse in it.
That stall was the mare’s.
“Nik.”
“Mm.”
“Where’s Ivy?”
The bucket noise stopped. It stopped for slightly too long, and Mila stood there with one hand on the empty door and felt the whole barn change temperature.
“She’s not here,” Nikki said.
“I can see that.”
“She went out in October. The day after.” Nikki came up the aisle, and her face was doing something careful, which was the worst thing Nikki’s face had ever done in fifteen years. “They trailered her out that morning. It wasn’t my call and I wasn’t asked.”
“Out where?”
“I don’t know.”
“Nikki.”
“I don’t know, Mila.” She said it fast and she meant it and something under it was still crooked. “I got a truck in my yard at six in the morning and a driver who wouldn’t say two words, and by seven she was gone, and when I called the house nobody would talk to me about it.”
Mila looked at the swept mat.
A horse that comes off a wall at speed and puts her rider in a coma. She knew what happened to those. Everybody who has ever been around a barn knows what happens to those, and the kindest version of it happens fast, and no one tells the rider until the rider is up.
“Okay,” she said.
“Mila —”
“I said okay.”
She went back up the aisle past all the heads over all the doors, and she did not stop to touch any of them, and it took her fourteen minutes to get back to the cottage instead of ten.
* * *
The rule about the lane held.
Nikki turned him around twice the first week.
The second time Mila watched from the window: the truck stopping short of the gate, Nikki walking down with a hay net still over her shoulder, the two of them standing in the cold for a full minute.
Then Jason getting back in. Then the truck backing all the way down the lane rather than turning in the yard, which was a small courtesy he did not have to pay and which annoyed her more than anything else that week.
“What did he say?” Mila asked.
“He asked if you were eating.”
“And?”
“I said yes.” Nikki hung the hay net on the hook by the door. “I didn’t tell him about the stairs.”
There were no stairs in the cottage. It took Mila a second, and then she understood that Nikki meant the three shallow steps up from the yard to the door, which Mila had gone up on Wednesday with both hands on the frame, and which had taken a long time and had not been dignified.
“Don’t tell him anything,” Mila said.
“I’m not telling him anything. I’m telling him yes and no.” Nikki picked up her gloves. “You want to know what I think?”
“Not especially.”
“He looks like hell and he’s not pretending not to, and both of those are new.” Nikki pulled the door. “That’s all. I still don’t know what he did, and I’ll break his legs whenever you say the word.”
* * *
By the second week the valley had it.
Not the substance of it — nobody had the substance of it except three people and one of them was a horse. But the shape of it was everywhere, because the shape was the only part that mattered to anyone: the Shepard woman came out of the hospital and did not go home.
It reached her in pieces, which is how it always reaches you.
A hunt club newsletter with a get-well line in it and a sentence about the family’s difficult fall.
A woman at the feed store asking Nikki, kindly, whether it was true that Mila was staying out at the farm “for the quiet.” Two phone calls from people who had not called once in six weeks and now wanted to know if she needed anything at all, anything, just say the word.
On the Thursday somebody from a Baltimore magazine left a message on Nikki’s landline about the foundation.
Mila lay awake that night listening to the wind in the gutter and understood that she had about a month before this stopped being a rumor and became a story, and that when it did, she would not be a woman with a life.
She would be a wife in a headline, and everything true about her would be flattened into the one paragraph.
She had spent six years standing at a podium making other people’s stories sound right.
She knew how that sausage was made.
* * *
Roger Dunham called on a Monday, on the landline, which meant he had asked somebody for the number.
“My dear girl,” he said.
Roger had called her that since she was thirty and it had never once bothered her, which told you something about Roger.
He had chaired the Shepard Foundation board for twenty-two years.
He had a voice built for a room, and on a telephone it came down to something warmer and slower, like a man leaning on a fence.